Every morning I take some time to plan the day and every evening to plan the next day. There is a need for me to manage my work and projects this way because:
1.) My work doesn’t get done on its own.
2.) I can allow my mind to rest knowing the required work is written down.
Planning makes for more efficient work and writing the plan down frees your mind to focus on the task at hand without worrying about forgetting important things that need to be completed later.
Experience is overrated. My unpopular opinion is that when hiring, hire for aptitude and train for skills. Most really amazing things are done by people doing them for the first time. Most job interviews are a waste of time and AI could probably do them just as well according to the statistics.
It doesn’t have to be anything necessarily deep about failure, but I notice that I like thinking about and writing about failure in all forms and in all places. It probably helps ease the sting of failures I’ve had before.
You simply must get comfortable with failing if you ever want to succeed. It takes 70 failures to find one success in nearly everything you will ever do. If you can learn to become comfortable with failure, it will be like unlocking a superhuman ability.
Learn to be okay when failure happens. Understand that it must happen. Learn to recover quickly and never be deterred from trying again.
To make something good, just do it.
To make something great, you must re-do it at least three times.
The secret to making exceptional things is in remaking them.
Art is in what you leave out, not how much you can jamb in.
Separate the processes of creation from improving what you make. You can’t write and refine, photograph and edit, or make anything and clearly analyze it at the same time.
If you try to do this, the editor in you stops the creator.
While you write, don’t remove and while you draw, don’t erase. When you write the first draft, don’t think, let the words flow out. Let nothing interrupt the stream of creative consciousness.
At the start of any great art, the creator’s mind must not be a judge.
You cannot work directly on being more creative. Creativity is not a skill you can work on. Creativity is spontaneous outbursts that arrive in quiet moments after you’ve worked on making your life more interesting and deeper.
Work on the things that make you different and your creativity will reach new heights.
Anything real first begins with the idea in your head. Without imagining some new thing, nothing new will be made. Your imagination is one of the most potent forces in the universe and it’s something you can get better at using.
Your imagination and ability to think creatively will improve all aspects of your life. Your imagination is also one skill that benefits from ignoring outside noise and the “advice” others lay on you.
The best apologies are: Quick, Specific, and Sincere.
Keep it simple and from the heart.
The purpose of a habit is to make tasks automatic. Habits remove self-negotiation, you just get started because it’s a habit. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it.
Work on a new habit every three months and you’ll be a different person in a year or two.
Professionals are simply amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
Professionals finish whereas amateurs fade. Professionals endure the rocky moments and emerge, while amateurs collapse under the pressure or challenge.
It’s not about doing less work, but about working smarter. Working smarter is working just as hard, but taking the time to discover what work is the most valuable.
Focus all of your time and energy on the most valuable work and find ways to systematize, automate, or delegate the other tasks to hired people or machines.
Imagine how much more we could do if we worked 5x harder on the few important things rather than getting bogged down in urgent, but non-essential things like paperwork, logistics, and emailing all day?
Stay on top of what is most valuable to your business and what should be the highest priority and you will see incredible success in whatever you do.
Fear of sharing is the enemy of creativity. Not pressing upload. Not pressing the share button. Not sharing your opinion. It’s so much worse than sharing your work. Yet the trap is that it feels safe to leave our artwork hidden, our voice silenced, and the impact we could have, unrealized.
If you’re scared of the feedback, share your work, and don’t read the comments. Post and ghost.
In all my work I seek to deliver value by enlightening the mind or by eliminating pain points. Today I want to talk about eliminating pain points.
You eliminate pain points by understanding the other person’s point of view and simultaneously eliminating confusion and increasing comfort.
Find the common ground between you and your colleague and build on that to draw them into the information and experience that will enrich their life or work.
Make it easy in all that you do and there will always be a place for you. Making it easy for others is a value that anyone can deliver.
If you can eliminate the pain points of others, you can make even the most complex job easy.
Did you know that you can also fail at what you don’t love? You might take that boring administrative job because it feels safe, but you hate the work and it is unfulfilling. Then one day, you get fired. You failed even at the thing you didn’t love. How crushing.
When you compromise and you still fail, that hurts the most.
The alternative is to do what you love and do it with vigor. If you fail, you fail. But the sting of defeat is tempered by the knowledge of your courage and the passion for doing the work you love.
It is much easier to rebound from that failure.
In a world where you might fail while doing what you love and you might fail while doing what you hate. Start by doing what you love.
Rushing is focusing on the next moment while ignoring this moment. This is why we make so many errors and mistakes when we rush. You’re stressed out by a distraction of choice.
It’s also why we can’t slow down. How can we slow down when we don’t rest on each moment? We have the next moment, the next worry, the next step, or the next problem to deal with instead.
If you hook a fish on your line and rush to reel him in, you put your line under max stress and it breaks. You catch the fish by letting out some line and being patient. Take it moment by moment rather than thinking only of the moment he is finally in your boat.
When we rush, the risk of making an error goes up dramatically. Nobody likes being in a rush, yet we all find ourselves rushing constantly. Why? Why? Why?
I believe the problem lies deep within our subconscious. Too often we’re in a rush simply because we are more uncomfortable slowing down and letting things develop while we stay quietly still. “Better to rush and make mistakes than awkwardly stand there waiting!”
But if we could become comfortable waiting a little bit before we jump to a conclusion or jump to get involved we’d eliminate so many mistakes and so much stress.
Patience and being comfortable while waiting are essential to slowing down and not rushing.
Can we give the other person more time before jumping to a conclusion about them? Can we let the conversation breathe without flooding the airwaves with our words? Can we give the client our price and simply stop talking? How can we become more comfortable slowing down?
I’m not sure I have the answer. I do have some ideas, but I’m running out of time and space in this blog post to explain.
Anxiety and rushing seem to go hand-in-hand and maybe, just maybe, if reduce one, the other would also diminish.
We learn from our failures. The baby learns to walk when she falls down. Unlike the self-doubting creative type, she tries to get back up and doesn’t care about failure. She’s completely forgotten it within a moment or two. Without a few stumbles, she would have never learned to walk.
Without our creative stumbles, we won’t create anything worthwhile. We just have to find a way to forget the failures, but not before we learn a little bit from them.
Keep trying. Don’t let the fear of failure paralyze you.
We probably only learn what exactly our parents did for us when we have children of our own. It’s the stuff that falls between the cracks, the stuff that everyone forgets about, that you realize when you have to go through it.
There is an old saying that goes, “He who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that.” To be able to critically think and examine any issue requires that a person should admit the fact that his opinion may be false, or at least not as precise as it could be.
When you are open to hearing the critiques or anger of other people toward your ideas and opinions, you open yourself to being forced to question and examine what you believe and improve.
A belief that is not grounded in some deep conviction is a belief that will give way to the slightest resistance or argument to the contrary. If an ungrounded belief is actually the truth, but the person who believes it can’t explain it, that is a belief held by faith. In some things faith is understandable, but in many things, we have faith in things that are little more than superstitions.