…if I don’t take a hammer to the stone.
The most awesome ideas and the best-laid plans are irrelevant if I don’t work and build them up into something. So what if you’re book smart? So what if you can come up with ideas and rhetoric that sounds great if you can’t make anything but sound?
The big ideas will never manifest themselves unless you start by pounding the small things and getting to work.
When a comedian flops on stage they call it a bomb. “Hey, did you see Jack McFunny telling those jokes? He totally bombed tonight. Brutal.”
But what happens when you have a public fail like that?
The key question is, how seriously do you take it? If you take it very seriously, every failure is an end-of-the-world scenario. It’s devastating.
But if you’re hustling, you pound through. You keep going because in the time it takes to fail, you’ve already shifted your energy and focus to the next thing.
Nothing is a catastrophe and never look backward.
Seizing the moment and pressing forward is playing with tempo.
Playing with tempo is taking steps forward and building momentum.
The opposite of playing with tempo is constantly allowing yourself to be distracted and taken away from projects.
When you can’t establish momentum and roll through a project, you will have to re-introduce yourself to a project and learn the intricacies of every project over and over again.
It’s a complete waste of time and energy suck.
So whenever possible, play with tempo and move forward. No defensive or scared moves without a very good reason. Play with tempo.
It was Booker T. Washington that said “Cast down your bucket wherever you are.” He meant to stop waiting for the perfect moment before acting.
Stop waiting for the perfect light, the perfect mood, the perfect motivation, the perfect studio, the perfect equipment. Use what you have where you have it and start now. Today. Right away.
Don’t worry about the technical quality, mood, or how you feel about it. Just start doing it right now.
Wars are waged, pandemics ravage, economies crash, and governments are toppled. Yet still, life goes on. Meals are prepared, people are working, babies are made, entertainment events take place.
Some may be pressed under the crush of information and unease of what is to come. The damage will be inflicted on that man, though.
When you can keep it normal even when it’s not normal, you prepare yourself for a much brighter future. If you can stand when others are crippled, you build a better tomorrow.
It’s hard to be normal when things aren’t normal. Being comfortable with what’s uncomfortable and being willing to sacrifice will help your resolve and lead you to success.
If you’re spending lots of time on plan b, you’re taking away time from plan A.
Plan b sounds good and safe. Safe is, ironically, the most unsafe way to go when the goal is greatness. You neuter plan A when you focus on plan B.
Which do you work on?
Fortuna Favet Fortibus, or “Future favors the brave.”
Sometimes versatility isn’t so great. I want a good bagel, a really good bagel and it only has to be good at tasting good.
My bagel doesn’t need to be a motor vehicle jack and also a hair conditioner. That would be pretty versatile, but pretty bad at all three things.
Be great at one thing, then branch out.
When you unplug a light, you can plug it back in and everything still works.
The same applies to you and me. If we never unplug, our light will burnout. If we unplug, we don’t burnout, and as soon as we plug back in we’ll fire right back up.
Unplug and schedule times to unplug. Kill the stress cycle and don’t tell yourself something is wrong if you need to unplug. Regular unplugging is a good thing.
A year is a long time and it’s always scared me to think I could have a bad year. An entire year!? Yes. To be specific, it’s been a rough 15 months. Re-assessing and reorganizing and working on becoming a better father, husband, business person, creative mind, and well rounded in everything I do.
But for creativity and work, it’s been a long, hard, slow year. Getting a creative idea to spring from me is like trying to catch a chicken on steroids. Lots of energy expended, but not much is happening.
I saw a photo of a tree that had been cut down and in the cross-section of the rings, there were several rings that were completely rotten. Perfectly circling the tree about halfway from the outside to the core. Several rotten rings.
Even this tree had a few rotten years and still kept growing and ended up pretty majestic.
You put in the work and regardless of the outcome, you put it in and you get up and put it in again tomorrow.
The family member, brother, child, wife, husband, friend, workmate, whoever stands by your side may rely on you, or they may just see how you work and change their own life.
In that way, doing your duty may lift even some whom you expect not.
When you lift up those around you, you all come home together in some way or another and a bond is formed.
Do your work for you or for those around you or for the glory of God. Do your work and don’t be a disappointment.
My wife gave birth to our newest child on 11/29/2020. A little girl. My oldest daughter has long wanted a sister and the wait is finally over.
It’s a happy week for my family, but now the recovery and clean-up process will stretch over the next couple of weeks until things settle back down to normal.
I’m embracing the different atmosphere and life-changing moment as an opportunity to change some stuff that I haven’t quite been able to shake up. Find the good in the weird or difficult bits, too.
The temptation is to spread ourselves thin. Cover all the bases and you appeal to more people. Add tons of services to your business or add 100 food options to your menu and you’ll appeal to more people. Right?
Wrong. Specificity is where greatness is to be found.
A mile wide, but an inch deep means you’re OK at lots of different things, but ultimately, forgettable.
A mile deep but an inch wide means you’re awesome at something and people know you’re special.
Steve Jobs became special but he didn’t need to know five different languages, know how to give a haircut, tailor his own suit, build an addition onto his house, or be a professional gamer. He was focused on his business and in his field.
Garbage trucks are built for hauling trash, they’re specific. Airplanes are specific, too. Each is built for something specific and they’d fail spectacularly if you tried to use them for both collecting garbage and flying in the sky.
Focus and be specific and you’ll be more effective.
Don’t be too vague with the thing you’re working on right now. Be specific and pay attention to details.
When you’re planning for the future, be vague and flexible.
Planning details for the future is like trying to pick which cloud your rocket to the moon will fly through. You don’t even know what will be there and it’s a shot in the dark.
You over-commit and you create a very rigid, very breakable system that will not have the vital agility that projects need.
Specific and details at the moment, but vague generalities (leaving room for creativity and maneuvering!) for future plans.
It's an exercise in futility to share something profound every day. Especially when you’re young like me. How much can I possibly know before I run out of things to share?
More importantly, how cringe-worthy is it to share thoughts that will always come across as long-winded or esoteric? Sometimes you have to be cool and relaxed.
I don’t know if you can practice being cool. I want to practice sharing more day-to-day stuff (I’m terrible at sharing life even on regular social media, too!) but I’m not sure it’s something you can become good at if you don’t have the inborn ability.
I suspect that with practice and a solid plan, you can train yourself to have the instincts needed to see something and share it.
Nothing profound today, just some rambling about being better and cooler on social media. It’s not curing cancer, it’s having fun with people online.
We think that the worst thing is to be a “failure” or to crash and burn.
The worst that can happen is really to be successful and not remain sober. I don’t mean drinking.
Well, I do mean drinking, but drinking and other stuff that makes you a crazy madman as well.
Things like inflated self-importance, arrogance, pride, wastefulness, as well as abuse of substances drugs, alcohol, sex, etc…
There is a quote by James Basford that states “It requires a strong constitution to withstand repeated attacks of prosperity.”
Hide yourself away when you become successful and resist the urge to puff out your peacock feathers and strut. Don’t just love the steak, hate the sizzle.
The sizzle is the opposite of our sobriety.
Sometimes I let negative comments upset me. Not to the point where my day is ruined, but I will feel some kind of sting from the remark for a moment.
People have been making negative remarks since the world began. Cain hated Abel and Julius Caesar was assassinated, George Washington had people who couldn’t stand him, and people probably said plenty of negative things about Helen Keller.
The people making negative comments will end up dead, and so will you. The world is a much bigger place than either you or me or that guy who is making nasty comments.
Instead of stressing, condition yourself to start looking at the world as a place where you’re connected to your past and building for the future. Those petty comments in the here and now will be forgotten by next week, but your work, if it’s worthy, will stand the test of time.
Don’t save time. Spend time.
I very often spend so much time and effort being stressed out about how little time I have left in a day that I waste it by not doing the next thing on my list. I reshuffle the board to avoid doing anything that seems too difficult or isn’t high enough priority.
What happens is I leave medium-to-difficult high priority tasks on my to-do list for months without getting to them. I also miss out on low-level tasks (like keeping up with email) for days at a time.
I think it all stems from a desire to use all my time as efficiently as possible. I see that it’s already 2 pm and I start looking for ways to cut things from my to-do list instead of just plowing ahead.
Plow ahead and spend the time you’ve been given! It’s going to disappear whether you like it or not, so spend it making yourself better and doing your work!
The dilemma faced by turkeys
One of my favorite authors of all time, Nassim Taleb makes some funny observations about the turkey with regard to how humans plan for the future. Taleb does not believe in rigid plans that are inherently fragile and prone to being shattered–along with your motivation and ability to follow them.
Part of the problem with planning for the future is that we don’t know what the future is and there is the easy danger of assuming that because things have always been one way, that will continue. Consider that for nearly a century prior to 9/11 planes had not been used as human-flown missiles to destroy skyscrapers, but that all changed on September 11th, 2001.
“Consider a turkey that is fed every day... Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”
It was all going well. Until it wasn’t.
If you prepare for anything, prepared for being flexible and agile.
The turkey is a burden-bound bird with little consideration for the future.
I was planning to write about something else, but when I’d finished the blog post it seemed dumb and trivial so I deleted it. I now have no blog post for today.
I’m in this weird mental rut, though. I’m happy I went with my gut feel and dumped the post. But I also wonder if I’m being too much of a perfectionist and need to loosen up a bit.
I should probably stop using up energy on stupid issues like this.
Sidenote: yesterday's blog post was about just doing it and not worrying about what will happen. Here I am today breaking that rule. It's easy to talk and hard to do what you know you should do.
Stop worrying about being sure you will win or do a great job. Start doing and maybe the great job will happen.
How many opportunities do we all leave on the table because we don’t have the confidence and we convince ourselves that we can’t do it?
Too many.
Only the narrow-minded fool will hate you for paste mistakes when your present successes far and away trump them. Don’t worry about the mistakes as long as it’s not your final project. (never stop working!)
When you start even if you don’t have your precious confidence, that attitude that drives you to start will drive you to start again if you fail. Apply what you learned in that failure and keep going.
Also, don’t worry about whether you win or lose. We all win some and lose some, but we absolutely control the effort we put in and how we recover from the setbacks. Get going.