The perspective of other people

Imagine spending $35,000 on living room furniture and a 21-year-old kid comes over and comments “You’re living room is awesome! It looks just like an IKEA room.”

Hmmm… The IKEA room probably costs 10% of what you spent, but that IKEA furniture is expensive to this 21-year-old.

So, do you get offended or annoyed? To that kid, the IKEA room might as well be a $50,000 room. It’s high praise, but inexperience means they don’t quite express it perfectly.

If we could train ourselves to consider the perspective of others, life gets a little happier.

The cost of procrastination

The cost of procrastination is the life you could’ve lived. You focused on how you felt in the moment and lost the future, but the future is now and you lost that.

Do something today that you’ll be proud of tomorrow.

Find a way to make it a routine

Do you want to get better at something?

Do you want to be more reliable?

Do you want to get in better shape?

Do you want to consistently build an aspect of your business?

It’s simple and it’s one of the hardest things to do. The answer is to make it a routine. Make it something you spend an hour a day doing, six days a week.

There will be a temptation after eight months, when it seems like a waste of time, to stop doing it. But once you stop doing it, you will realize how hard it is to re-establish that habit and build that area of your life.

30 minutes a day checking email means you never miss a meeting, a phone call, an obligation, or a client’s question.

An hour a day working out hard means you’re going to lose 30-50lbs in 18 months.

45 minutes a day making connections on Facebook and Instagram, means you develop a more personal and outgoing element to your business and brand.

20 minutes a day sketching faces or random objects will mean you develop a skill naturally over the next 12-18 months (and you’ll get really good!)

Make it a routine! It changes everything and you do what you want to do. You just have to stick with it.

Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up

Is it a setback, or an opportunity to get better? Of course, know your limits. But know them because you found them, not because you invented them.

When it's difficult, when everything is failing and when you are sure you need to phone it in and give up. Don’t.

Use the side of your brain that is doubting and ready to give up as motivation to press on and find that limit. The funny thing is, you rarely find the limit because you’re capable of much, much more than you would ever believe. So press on and don’t give up.

The big bad barking dogs

Winston Churchill said that you will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks. Think about what that means for your development as a person. Put in the work and ignore the noise.

Don’t compete with other people

Don’t compete or compare yourself to your peers in life or business. It’s the fastest way to destroy your happiness and motivation to do anything. Don’t do what you do for money, success, or out of a sense of guilt. All three will bring ruin.

Compete with who you were yesterday and provide your audience with a better version of you and your product than it was yesterday. Laser focus on that and it all works itself out.

Fear of the unknown

Are you afraid of the unknown, or are you afraid of your thoughts of the unknown? We get all bent out of shape about things we know next to nothing about. When somebody challenges us, we pretend to know more than we do and we lean on the “well the people in the news said X” or we go with the old line “everybody knows X is true!” and we think this is a good way to reason and argue our point.

The truth is usually that we’re simply scared of what we think the unknown contains and everything else is an excuse. But it’s difficult to be honest with yourself, we’ve all grown up lying about who we are and what we are to almost everybody around us.

If you can be honest with yourself, you can force yourself to confront more fears and become a much stronger and anti-fragile person.

I missed a day (or time)

It’s strange that when I have a heavy week of work or obligations, I can nail every blog post right on time. Don’t miss a day.

But then I have a complete routine, even a boring, day. That’s when I miss my upload time for this blog post.

The funny thing about habits is they’re always sliding toward the lazy way, the way that has you doing no work at all, and the hedonistic way, instead of the self-discipline of getting things done and being a useful and productive person.

Habits must be built and maintained. There is no auto-pilot unless you want to crash and burn out. You must maintain and make yourself do the work and learn to love putting in the effort, no matter how big or small.

Focus on the upside

It’s easy to focus on the downside of something, and sometimes it’s worthy to be concerned. Not every idea is a good idea.

However, we must dare to be great. When the upside is far beyond the downside, even if the downside seems fairly certain, it is usually a good idea to take that risk. Dare to be great.

Even if the idea fails, you succeeded in the attempt.

It’s bad when there is a greater downside than upside, or the potential for the idea to fail is extremely high. It’s also bad when you avoid entering into anything because any perceived downside is enough to scare you away. Dare to be great and take your shot. If the upside is great, who cares about the downside. Go!

The good thing about the bad stuff

Great, you just pushed yourself to the max in that workout and discovered a physical limitation, or maybe you just received the devastating news that leaves you feeling mentally or emotionally destroyed.

This stuff can feel crushing at the moment, but the more we are exposed to things that come close to breaking us, the more we shed the loose skin.

What is left in us after any big moment or difficult experience in our life (whether we self-impose it, or not) is a core that is more rock solid and less prone to be hurt or damaged in the future.

Next time you feel defeated or crushed, remember that you’re undergoing a process of refinement, and what will be left is something more resilient and tough than you had before.

 
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
— Pema Chödrön
 

There is enough for everybody

There is enough for everybody. Be happy for other people’s successes. Be the best you can be and work on being better than that and you will find your own success.

If you can be a “good” person on top of being good at what you do, you will not fail. You’ll probably be content, too.

Pretend that you can win

You’ll face rejection all through your life. Don’t let the man in the mirror also reject you. Believe in yourself even (especially!) when nobody else does. Go out and live your life as if everything is rigged in your favor.

Delayed-gratification is better gratification

It’s not all about this moment right now. By the time you think about this moment, we’ve moved to the next moment in time. Too many of us spend all of our time focused on the moment, but the only way to make the moment better is to use lots of moments to build for better future moments.

Build the business to provide time/schedule freedom and financial freedom in the future. The moment you need that time or money, it’s too late to do the work you needed to do to get the money.

Delay the gratification. It leads to amazing gratification down the road. It’s better 100% of the time.

Let a little slip

Everyone knows you’re crazy because you freak about all the little details. They all say you need to loosen up.

The problem is, when you let a little slip, you want to let more slip. And the problem with slipping is that it’s easy to keep slipping further away from your standards than it is to work hard to uphold a high level of operations.

So don’t stop obsessing over the details and the little things nobody else seems to understand. Success is in the details and the high level at which you want to operate isn’t attainable for the sloppy operator.

Life is hard when it’s going well

That’s right. Even when things are good, life is still pretty hard. So imagine constantly having to deal with somebody who makes everything a hassle or who interprets every event as some big deal.

Life is hard.

Hard life is harder.

Hard life with someone who adds difficulty is the hardest.

To be persecuted…

If I am ever persecuted for my beliefs, I can only hope there is enough evidence to convict me. The famous John Wooden said something like this a while ago and it feels right.

What do you believe in? Is there anything important enough that you would undergo suffering to hold to it?

Excuses for laziness

I’ve come to hold the opinion that a precise schedule makes you a very fragile person. One aberration in your day, one missed task, one job that takes longer than you planned, and your whole schedule is thrown off.

If you’re already fighting procrastination, you will use any excuse for laziness you can get your hands on. So don’t build a tight schedule if you’re trying to break out of a creative slump.

Build loose blocks of time where you can swim and bounce around in a proverbial pool of ideas and if you spend five hours and only manage to answer one email, fine. Set aside another block of time and try again.

Don’t be a control freak with your time and you’ll get more out of it.

Be the wind in your own sails

Don’t let friends OR enemies be the wind in your sails. When they pick you up, you’ll travel too fast and crash in the end. When they let you down, you’ll grind to a halt and become paralyzed. Be the wind in your sails and learn to self-motivate and self-start. That way they can’t hurt you and it’s up to you to help yourself.

Adversity and the professional

An amateur creates lousy artwork and quits. A professional creates lousy artwork and keeps working. To produce great art is to re-create pretty good art. Don't be in such a rush that you give up great work because works that is OK is in front of you. Keep playing until you find the greatness.

To create anything great, whether artwork, woodwork, athletic achievement, children’s education, or scientific experimentation, you much first do and then have the humility to expect it to go wrong and adjust and make it better and better.

Never give up and never let a bad day, month, or year stop you from pushing forward. The amateur fades, the professional finishes.