How to be creative and unexpected

Creativity is not a skill, it’s a mindset. You can change your mind and open yourself to become a bit more creative.

Creativity is about being open and willing to explore ideas and concepts even if things don’t make sense at first glance. Even when you’re sure there is nothing there, you still keep drilling down and exploring.

You can be more creative by being more relaxed, more open to things you never considered before, and more willing to have fun with your project especially when it doesn’t seem to serve the purpose at hand.

We must be willing to be incorrect. Not everything must be concrete and we don’t always have to be right. When you unlock that in your mind and when you really believe that, you will become much more creative.

Background noise and micro-distractions

Filling the quiet spaces of time in the moments between your work are micro-distractions that drain your focus and creative energy. I believe that all external stimuli require some energy to process–whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Minimizing visual and audible distractions will free up energy to focus on the important work.

Phil Mickelson

Phil Mickelson just won the PGA Championship this past weekend. I don’t especially follow golf, but I do know of a couple of the big names.

As Phil approached the 18th, and final hole, the fans swarmed the golf course and cheered and walked with him. Security seemed to completely lose control of the crowd as they surged in support of this guy.

Mickelson won this championship at age 50, becoming the oldest player to win a major tournament in history.

He hasn’t won a major tournament in forever, but the love that these fans showed him was palpable.

This is what happens when you just show up day after day, month after month, and year after year. You don’t have to always win, you don’t have to create the most incredible artwork, you don’t have to have the best arguments, most viral moments, or most beautiful looks.

You have to show up and work hard. That’s it. You do that and you will make an incredible impact for yourself and on others.

Dividing the event from the emotion

We’re not going to escape conflict or stress. But we can change our approach to it and we can practice reacting better.

We must work on dividing the event from the emotion. Step back and observe the event after it’s happened (and maybe after you’ve reacted badly) and look at the event, how it affects you, and how it affects the people or things around you.

When you take the time to simply look at the event, you strip away the emotion and just look at the facts a little out of context.

The moment you realize you can step back and observe the event without emotion, you will realize that you have more control and resilience than you thought.

When you understand how much control you have, you will see that you happen to the things around you instead of being the thing upon which other stuff happens.

This will give you confidence. This will give you better self-control. This will help you have a better instant reaction when things go sideways. This will help you be more content and more resilient under pressure.

Practice dividing the event from the emotion.

The stress of today

Almost always, the stress of today comes directly from the bad decisions or failure to decide in earlier days.

When you put off work today and the decisions you don’t make will bring great stress and pain tomorrow.

The chickens always come home to roost.

The Passion Pipeline

They say that when you wake up in the morning, you have a limited amount of energy that you can direct toward different decisions and projects throughout the day. I’m not talking about physical energy, I’m talking about mental energy.

Every decision you have to make, you drain some of that energy. If you spend much time getting worked up about little decisions, you waste more of your energy reserves. Think about a guy like Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs who wore the same clothing every day. One less decision to make every day.

Now broadly apply that concept to the passions you have in your life.

You only have a limited amount of passion to spread around. Some for your business, some for a hobby, some for your family, some for religion, and so on.

What happens when you allow one hobby to become an obsession? Instead of splitting that passion pipe five ways, maybe the hobby begins to consume 85% of the pipeline pathway and business and religion get choked out. Maybe your family takes a backseat to your business, etc…

I firmly believe that there is a limited amount of passion you can express at any given section of your life and if you allow things to get out of balance, you lose touch with things that would normally be massively important to you. Examine your passions. Is anything out of balance?

Always five minutes late

I do this thing where I think I can cram in one last thing before my next appointment. I’m doing it now with this blog post. I have something to do half past this hour and I’m racing to get this done.

I’ll probably be a couple of minutes late. I’m always a couple of minutes late because I always do this.

Despite knowing it will make me late, I’m still cramming in this blog post writing. I don’t understand it.

The mindset I wish I had about it is that by just getting to the meeting room three minutes early, I’m not losing those three minutes. I’m USING those three minutes to establish a better reputation as the guy that shows up and is punctual. Instead, I’m here writing.

Gotta run.

No goals except progress

One useful trick for better productivity is to avoid setting goals to be completed today or this week or this month. Instead, focus on getting a little bit better than you were yesterday. Maybe that means you do one more task, avoid one more distraction, answer one more email, and so on.

Focus on you, not the task. It’s a cliche, but the best stuff comes when you focus on the journey, not the destination.

Focusing on the journey makes the destination better than you could imagine.

If you start, you have to finish

If you start a job or commit to a contract, you have to finish. But for personal projects or trying to build habits, you only have to start.

We get so caught up worrying about finishing, that we allow that to be a barrier to getting started.

Almost always, getting started is the difficult part, getting finished is pretty easy.

So, unless you’ve signed the contract, don’t worry about finishing. Concern yourself with getting started and the end will take care of itself.

Resilience, toughness, rebounding, getting stronger

When your world is falling apart, or maybe it’s just your project that is not going the way you thought it would, or maybe you’re losing your sports event/game/race, when that stuff is happening the people watching you are on your string.

They give up if you give up. They pull harder if you pull harder. But they also can’t do anything for you. You, and only you, are the one who can rise up and turn it around.

I have tried to make it a general rule in my life that when I least feel like doing something, that’s the cue that I most need to do it. When I am making excuses (even valid ones) about why I shouldn’t get a workout in, or get my reading done, or spend time meditating, etc… at that moment it’s most essential that you go and do that thing.

In this way, when everything is going badly, you can press through and pull yourself and your entire world out of the darkness and into a brand new day.

Never give up and do your work. When you want to sleep in, don’t. Don’t sleep in for the sole reason that you preferred to sleep in rather than get up and do your things.

Use moments when you need to be resilient to make you tougher. Embrace those moments and find a way to love them.

Living fast

It’s what we want to do. It’s cool and it’s a ton of fun.

But the scenery is much different at 60mph than taking a leisurely stroll.

When we spend our energy focused on going fast instead of going far, we miss tons of details and opportunities to make a difference to the people around us.

Focus more on depth than speed and you will both eliminate stress and make a greater impact in everything you do.

The way you begin is the way you’ll go

What you choose to do at the beginning of your day and then again at the beginning of your workday will dictate how good or bad your day of work will go.

There is some ability to recover if you start badly, but never do anything by choice that will cause you to start the day badly.

Shut off the phone, close out the social media, put away the podcasts and YouTube, and use your focus and energy to build momentum and have an awesome day of work and life.

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.