It’s a classic bit of advice, but it’s true concerning opinions you hold and conflicts throughout your life: You must never remain neutral.
Some people are foolish enough to think they can play both sides of the fence, but you’re not as clever as you think and they don’t respect you as much as you think they do.
Never remain neutral. You must take a side. If you don’t pick a side, the winner will never respect you (and probably take advantage of your cowardice) and the loser will despise you.
Just wait. Waiting is the hardest part, but if you can hold your tongue and wait, you may be surprised at how good things could be if you could wait. We’re all impatient people, so when you have the opportunity to exercise your patience, do it. Because the best is always yet to come. You just have to wait until it gets here.
I was happy for your freedom.
And heartbroken you went free.
I’m happy you don’t have a horrible label that will be stuck with you for life.
I’m heartbroken that the victims will carry their baggage for life.
I’m happy you will see your son grow up.
I’m heartbroken that they might never have the peace that you now get to enjoy.
This conflict of sadness and happiness at once. It does not feel good. I wish the best for you and I hope that the worst happens to you all at the same time. I have no idea what that is, but I wish it would happen.
When something sad or tragic strikes, I have 24 hours to be sad before normal life must resume. So life will go on.
I’m watching you. I don’t want to see you suffer. I want mercy to be shown.
But I also want you to be crushed. I want justice to be served and closure to come to the victims.
I hate that you have no remorse and the lies you tell.
I love you because I have known you for a long time.
No matter the outcome, it will be a catastrophe for us all.
You know it’s going to be uncomfortable. But the only way through is straight ahead. You can complain or you can sit down and do the work. When the hard work is ahead, get going now.
You can do work, but are you doing meaningful work? The trap with menial “make-work” tasks is that they make you feel productive, but they don’t move you forward.
These tasks gum up your to-do list and sap your energy that you need for the vital and important things on your to-do list.
Get them out of the way. Move them to the end of your day of work. Trust that you will get the important things done and have an extra hour or two at the end of the day to get this annoying/junk work done.
Get it out of the way and focus on the work that moves your life in the direction you wish to go. Don’t let the other stuff gunk up your days and drain your energy.
Whether it’s stretching your limbs, stretching your physical limits by running further or lifting more weight, or even stretching your mental resilience by forcing yourself to do a task you wish to avoid or even waiting an hour after you start feeling hungry just to force yourself to cope with being hungry.
Stretching hurts, but practically all stretching ends up making you tougher, stronger, and more resilient.
“Usefulness” is usually pigeon-holed as “doing stuff that makes us money so we can live a more comfortable life.”
But the best ideas come when we play and intentionally spend time doing stuff or building stuff that doesn’t serve some obvious purpose.
Don’t feel guilty taking the time to play a little. Explore ideas, play with words, feel every side of ideas and concepts in your mind. Don’t mindlessly cast stuff away because you can’t see how it helps you pay the bills.
Good moves are usually pretty obvious, but great moves take some thought and willingness to be creative and loose.
So don’t worry about everything being useful, because what you think is useful, is enough to get you by, but not enough to be truly great.
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.
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.)
“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.