Be the sand, not the stone

The fastest way to get stuff done and make an impact is to stop worrying about getting credit. If you’re chasing credit, you’re chasing the short-term gains, not the long-term gains.

Be the facilitator, the guy everyone knows they can rely on, the guy who always shows up and kills the game. Don’t worry about the bright lights. Do good work and be indispensable and you will be great.

This is what it is to be the sand. Be the essential element that holds all the blocks in place and keeps everyone around you strong and feeling good. Everyone notices the stones in the walkway, not the sand brushed around every stone which is essential to hold everything in place.

When you focus on being essential to everyone around you, everyone becomes a little more vested in your interests, and by helping those around you, you raise your own stock.

Worry about value, not attention.

If you want life to pass you by

Life gets shorter when you’re not doing your work. The days pass and you have no idea what you did. Days turn into months and years, and in a moment, you’re on your deathbed feeling like life has passed by. You spent your time and all you’ve done is pay off some debt.

Find meaningful work and do that. Stack hours and days full of productive work and experiences. and you’ll add life to your days (and you’ll probably add days to your life as a result, as well.)

Get up! The day isn’t over!

Things break, we get bad news, and things never go according to plan. But don’t mistake a break in your routine or plans as an indication that you can’t still have a productive day. It’s easy to think that it’s time to pack it in and that you’ll get after it again tomorrow.

What?! There are still five hours left in the day TODAY. Get after it. Everyone falls down, but can you get back up?

It’s not the fun stuff that takes you to the promised land

To steal a term from American Football, “you win by building the trenches.” What that means is that the exciting players who make diving catches, or 50 yard runs, or crushing blocks are rarely the way to build a team for success.

You have to build the boring, often-overlooked, and not-well-understood offensive and defensive lines to have a dominant and consistent team.

It’s the same with honing your skills or building your business. That data backup and recovery process is essential. The cleaning of your gear. The good cases for your equipment. The more efficient bookkeeping software.

This stuff isn’t the fun tools you use to make your artwork, photography, or films, but it’s the foundation that ensures you can keep using the fun tools and keep building your business into the future.

The same goes for skill acquisition. It’s the sharpening of the tools and the hours of practice, not the gallery show when everybody is gushing about your work, that is most important.

Grind away and focus on the boring stuff–especially if everyone else seems to ignore it–because it will become your greatest advantage in business, art, and life.

Remaining calm in the storm

Focusing on the end result makes every setback a catastrophe. When you focus on the process, you are free to adjust and let the good and bad things flow through you and your work.

If the work is good, the desired result will usually come to pass. But, no amount of over-stressing will make it more likely that you will achieve your desired end.

Use your demons like a tool

Take your inner demons and seize the battles you’ve been presented with across your life and use every difficult obstacle that comes from this day onward and apply them to transform yourself into something incredible.

Don’t divert away crises by floundering in self-pity, self-doubt, and complaining. Use them like opportunities to level up and get more robust and more resilient (or even to become anti-fragile!)

In the face of trouble, you have the option to rise up or to allow the events to defeat you. Make a choice that is desirable for you.

How to make a life

There is a famous quote, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” We always have something to give.

If we don’t have time or money to give, we can give our kindness, our well-wishes, our genuine excitement for the good happening to others.

We can live a life free of jealousy that rots our relationships away like cancer. We can live a life full of courtesy and thoughtfulness toward others.

In this way, you can, by your continuous actions and example to others, make a life by living in a way that is as giving as possible.

You give your kindness, your effort, your kudos, and your happiness to everyone around you for no reason other than to enrich their life with little moments of happiness and sparks of joy.

In doing this, you will make a wonderful life.

Creativity is not scary

The finished artwork is called “art” not “creativity.”

Creativity is the process, not the finished work. Don’t be scared of creativity, it’s a process that has no end. The end doesn’t matter unless you’re worried about the art. If you care about being creative, you just have to do creative stuff and let the end sort itself out.

If you’re creating for long enough (it can take years) you will get some amazing stuff. Creativity is the process, the process, the process.

Be creative! It’s awesome.

It’s not as difficult as you think

We pump up everything to be more than it is. We all seem to do it to EVERYTHING. Talking to that girl seems like a life or death situation, that job interview is the highest pressure you’ve ever dealt with, the class presentation we be soul-crushing if we somehow flop. We create scenarios that terrify us. Why?

It’s never that difficult. NEVER.

We make it eternally more difficult by making it seem bigger and harder than it is.

Relax. Breathe. When you’re relaxed, you’re able to think and react faster and more intelligently. You will produce a better first impression and a much better-finished product if you stop caring so much about how well something goes.

A funny dichotomy is that the more you don’t care about how something turns out, the better you usually end up performing.

Find the workable hours

Instead of assuming you can get eight or ten hours of work done in a day, it’s better to look at your day planner or digital calendar and find the workable chunks of hours.

You might find you only have five hours to work today, or maybe thirteen hours. As soon as you know that you have three hours before lunch, and then after lunch until your 5:30 pm meeting, and then two or three more hours after dinner, you know that you have ten “workable” hours in that day. With that info, you can plan accordingly, work harder and faster for that period, and not be disappointed that you didn’t complete a mountain of work that you did not have the hours to possibly complete.

Make the moments of work count

You can take time off and you must take time off. But when you take time off the young upcoming prospects are going to gain on you. So what do you do?

What you do is make sure you’re doing good work and you are 100% focused on doing that good work when you’re on. Sprint as hard as you can for as long as you can and then rest.

The more you sprint, the more you build working endurance and you’ll be delighted with how much you get done.

If it haunts you, face it

Look at it and run toward it. There is no better way to de-mystify whatever scares you than to approach it and interact with it.

When you learn more about what you’re scared of, you fear it less. This is because incompetence fosters a fear of the unknown–and your imagination is a powerful force for good and bad.

Accounts hacked and accounts lost

Early yesterday morning, my Facebook account was hacked and within an hour, Facebook had disabled the account.

The hacker also managed to take down my Instagram account so the combined loss of both accounts is about 75,000 followers. That’s if Facebook can’t restore the accounts to me in the next 30 days.

It’s possible they restore it, but I’m quickly coming to the painful terms that, that may just not be the case.

Do I expend immense energy trying to complain and force them to restore the accounts, or should I fire off an email every day for the 30 days that the accounts still live and resign myself to the fact that I’ll have to rebuild?

I’ll do minimal work trying to restore the accounts. There is a VERY low likelihood that they will be brought back.

So the next step is to find a way to usefully pivot and make some adjustments I have wanted to make and create fresh accounts and build audiences that are even more excited.

Oh, also, more frequent changing of passwords, stronger passwords, two-factor authentication, and multiple emails and phone number backups.

I guess when you run on a shoestring, every now and then the shoestring snaps.

I’m not happy about this at all, but maybe I can work to flip it into a positive that I can look back on at the end of this year and be OK with how it’s gone.

Life isn’t usually LIVE

You have the chance to edit almost everything you do. Email, text message, slide presentation, photograph, YouTube video, Facebook status, and the DIY craft gift you want to give to your friend.

Other than first impressions, everything can be edited. So vomit out the creativity and stop worrying about the finished product.

The edit, the tweaking, the adjustments, and the refinement, this is where you build your masterpiece.

You don’t know where your project is going? Don’t worry, keep writing and keep shooting and keep making assets that you can edit and adjust to create a final product.

Life isn’t LIVE so stop being paralyzed before you begin. Begin first and edit until the product is awesome.

What we want can keep us from getting it

The story is familiar, yet we’re all blind to it. We want something so bad right now that we don’t do what needs to be done to make it happen over the next six months.

Instead of committing to the fact that it’s going to take months to build, we commiserate or self-destruct when we can’t get it made in a day.

There is something to be said for the man who sees what he wants to build and can harness the burning desire that it needs to get done today and turn that into the endurance sport necessary to churn out the content needed to build and complete the project.

The chickens will come home

Eventually, the good or bad decision you make today will be felt. You’ll eventually have a great business or feel very satisfied with the work you’re doing or you’ll be happy you took (or left) that job way back in March of 2021.

The most successful people I have ever know or seen in my life have been able to consistently sacrifice the current moment for a moment they hope to gain in the future.

When they say to live in the moment, I’m not such a fan. Focus in the moment and focus on the moment, but choose what you do in this moment not simply for some fleeting feeling of how you want to be right this moment.

Nothing to write about today

I have nothing to write about, but I’ve committed to writing a short post every working day before I get started with work.

I want to get on with my other work, but I feel too lazy to think right now. I also have not prepared any blog posts ahead of time.

My fire alarm just started going off. Gotta run.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

Stop planning, start doing.

This is vital.

Take away the speed bumps

If you’re building a product or service it’s most difficult to pop out of your bubble and what you’ve become comfortable with and imagine handing your creation over to somebody who has no idea how to use it.

If the first impression is bad, or uncomfortable, or not clear what the thing does for the user, you’ve probably lost them.

Make it easy for them to use your product or service. Make it easy for them to work with you. Take away the pain points, the tough spots, the moments of stress. Make things familiar and comfortable.

This, too, goes for all customer service and business communications. Be the fixer and let the people you work with remember working with you as a beautiful experience.