What is the thing that you can do with relative ease that other people find very difficult? That’s what you can do. That’s probably what you should do.
Pressures
When we allow the pressure to determine the priority of the tasks we get done, we will never have the time and energy for the important stuff.
The pressure always favors yesterday. Pressure favors the crisis, not the opportunity.
Nearly all great success has less to do with being able to check things off of your to-do list and everything to do with the courage to go after the opportunity.
But we never prioritize or enable ourselves to chase opportunities when we allow pressure to determine the most important tasks.
Jobs for the fallible man
Do we have expectations that can be met by mere men? When we create jobs or tasks, is it possible for the average person to complete the task?
We must take care not to defeat our peers, subordinates, children, or spouse with tasks or expectations that no man can meet.
However, you need to be the one who can look humbly and wisely into what the person has accomplished and determine, based upon that, what is likely they could achieve in the future. We’re generally lousy auditors of ourselves.
While we want tasks and expectations to be reasonable, they must not be without a challenge. The challenge will bring out whatever strength your subject has–if you dare to press him.
It’s all a balancing act. There is a fire in the belly of young people, but if it’s is not well-managed, it will lead to burn-out by early middle age.
How to win the fight
I read about a military commander who explained to his men that in every battle there is a simple formula to victory. You have two sides and both are straining. Both want to give up. Yet, whoever doesn’t give up wins.
That’s life (but without the bullets flying around.)
Self-doubt, distraction, hedonism, laziness, procrastination, and vice all are pushing against you. If you want to achieve your goals, you need to push back and never give up. When you give up, you lose.
Picking for strength
In all that you do, investments, hiring people, new business ventures, etc… pick people and things based on their strength and upside, not some flaw you see in them. You will find a flaw in all things, but not all things have a strength or excellence in a narrow field.
The perfect man or perfect situation doesn’t exist. Take a “well-rounded person”, he is simply one who does not excel in any one specific area. It’s the safe pick, but the pick that ensures mediocrity.
The cost of the mountain top is the valley that comes with it.
Make choices based on strengths and upside. Don’t make choices based on weakness and downside.
Is it better than silence?
I have lots to say, but so much is the words in between the important stuff.
I’m reiterating to myself that I need to tighten up these blog posts. If the words aren’t better than silence, do I need to write them?
Ask more of yourself
Low expectations are backbreaking. Low expectations keep you from getting after it. They keep you from exerting extraordinary force when it is needed and they keep you from giving all you have to achieve the goal you set out to master.
If you demand little from yourself, you will grow very little (and very slowly!)
If you demand more of yourself, you will grow into something truly great. You will build something bigger than you ever imagined. And you will do all of that while working just as hard as the person who asked little of themself.
When you hold yourself to the highest standard with the greatest expectations, you free yourself from self-sabotage and you inspire the support of your helpers and peers.
There is the old biblical saying from the apostle Paul when he says “He who soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he who soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.”
Don’t stop short in your expectations, ask more of yourself and you’ll receive more in the end.
The artist’s shortcut
When I first got into design and photography, I didn’t see the point in practicing hand drawing, sketch work, or much “manual” illustration. My mindset was that there surely had to be some automated preset, some special Photoshop brush, or some feature/function of the program to instantly do all that manual stuff.
It really stunted my growth and development for the first 7-10 years of being a designer.
It’s right there in the name “artist”. This stuff is an art, not a science. It’s not rigid, it’s organic, handmade, and flowing from the human. When you watch an artist work, he uses one resource more than any other–time. He uses his time to painstakingly paint the textures, splatter the edges, apply details, and highlights.
There is no shortcut, there is no one-click solution, and there is no way to replicate the analog nature of what comes from your hand. You have to use your hands to create, not the software. The software may be a tool, but always let it be a tool in your hand.
The artist’s shortcut is not a button click. The artist’s shortcut is recognizing early in life that there is no substitute to sitting and working for hours to create something amazing. You will save years as soon as you realize that.
The long game
What’s the point of self-discipline? It seems to inflict pain on us, but what for?
It’s the long game. It’s the preparation for what comes next week, next month, next year. You’re building the muscles in your mind and your will to be ready to do the difficult and painful thing. If you train yourself to take the easy way out and enjoy immediate gratification, you will be a subject to every vice that walks by.
If you train yourself to delay gratification, you prepare yourself to avoid the pitfalls of life while having the toughness to get up after being knocked down.
Start with small things. Force yourself to wait to open that package, just because. Force yourself to get up 15 minutes earlier, just because. Force yourself to go to sleep 30 minutes earlier, just because. Eat no sugar tomorrow, just because. Take a cold shower, run a mile, embrace the uncomfortable task, shut off social media, ignore emails, texts, and notifications. Any of these things is a start.
In the moment, when it’s difficult and you want to quit, remember that you’re playing the long game. If it hurts at the moment, it’s working. Keep going.
Virtue or cowardice?
Those who are obedient always see themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly. I read that somewhere a while ago and it’s an interesting idea.
I have to disagree with the line of thinking that ends with obedience being the mark of cowardice. You may be obedient because you believe it is the morally upright thing to do. You may value the order that comes with obedience. You may see some greater end which you’re willing to sacrifice present comforts/wants to attain.
I do agree with this assessment when falling in line and being obedient is done for selfish ends. “It’s easier to not question the expectations or the narrative so I’ll get in line and shut up.” That is cowardice.
When people who are “obedient” put themselves forward as being virtuous, it’s likely a big flashing light that they’re just a coward.
I think that it's far more likely that the true motive of the obedient person tells the real story. If only we could see the real motives of the people all around us…
Work, work, work
There is no shortcut, no system, no trick. The answer is to work harder. You have to work, work, work, and then work even more when you’re a little tired.
No amount of thinking about a problem will get it done. You have to go and get to work.
Stop waiting until work feels fun. Stop waiting until it feels like the perfect time. Stop waiting until you’re not afraid.
Everything you want requires you to work. Not the kind of work where you show up at 9am and have a boss who tells you what to do. That is kind of work.
However, what I’m specifically referring to is when that work-with-oversight is finished and you come home and have a side project that you know you should be spending time on, but you choose to watch Netflix instead. If you want to take your life to where you want it to go, there is no substitute for working hard and being a self-starter. Work, work, work.
Making life easier
If you can look at yourself and see how the mistake happened, your life will constantly be moving in a direction that makes things easier, less stressful, and much more understandable.
It’s all about the details. The little reach down for the french fry on the floor of your car almost caused you to cross into oncoming traffic. A little mental note to never do that again will prevent future catastrophe.
Taking five minutes before bed to lay out tomorrow’s work will help you feel in control of your day from the jump tomorrow.
Changing the oil you cook with to something with a higher smoke point will help keep that smoke detector from blaring every time you decide to sauté something.
But if we choose to get angry and defensive as if there is nothing we can do to make things better, we choose a more difficult life instead of a more accountable life.
The most scarce resource
It is time. If you cannot manage your time, you will not be able to manage anything else.
Effective time management is a combination of knowing how you spend your time, what you prioritize, and the self-discipline to focus on the block of time you’ve set aside for specific things.
If you know your time, you put yourself in the driver’s seat for much of what you wish to accomplish.
A well-managed business is boring
Nothing exciting happens. Crises are averted before they happen. Everything is orderly and consistent. Things happen the same way all the time. The machines hum along. The people show up on time. The boss pays everybody on time. There isn’t yelling and screaming because someone dropped the ball. Well-run businesses are routine, not dramatic.
The difficult decisions should be about where to steer the company looking forward. Not cleaning up yet another crisis from yesterday.
Routine, not drama. That is the mark of a well-run business.
The other side of perfectionism is procrastination
Stop trying to be so perfect. Nobody cares. You’re not that special and I’m not that special.
After we’re dead and long gone, historians aren’t going to be looking at the windows we caulked and think less of us. They aren’t going to hate you because you didn’t spend an extra day on that little thing that doesn’t matter… because it doesn’t matter.
It only matters because it’s keeping you from getting the job finished. The truth about perfectionism is that it keeps you from being effective. (hint: therefore, it’s far from a perfect process)
Find the time you waste
We all do it. We all waste time. Distractions, tasks that others can do for us, and things that lead to wasted blocks of time.
You don’t get more time than anyone else and it’s practically the only thing out there that you can’t buy more of. It’s also always being spent and there is no way to stop it.
So track your time. Write down and log every hour of your day as you go through the day (not after the fact! memory is not reliable when guesstimating the time we spent doing this or that.)
Find the tasks that you don’t need to do at all.
Find the tasks that you can give to other people.
Find the patterns that lead to time being wasted.
Organize your schedule to best squeeze the juice out of the hours you have.
Better to add work to your hours by better optimization, then try to add hours to your workday (usually done by foregoing sleep or family or other important things.)
What you don’t track and look at, you can’t adjust and get better at. I think it’s a good idea to track your use of time throughout the day.
Working harder at the top
To make things easier for manual laborers, it means more thought-work has gone into the business. To maintain an edge in innovation and forward-looking flexibility, you don’t need to work harder physically, you need to work harder mentally. We must be more thoughtful and willing to explore ideas than do the manual lifting work when the goal is to elevate the company.
Your job at the top is to send the workers to where they can be most effective for the company and are most effective based on their skill set.
It sounds easy, but that's only if you haven't done it before. to save work for the lower level laborers requires immense work at the top level to innovate and install the systems that ensure success for the boots on the ground.
Are you smart enough to be dumb?
As we pass from childhood into full-grown adults, we limit the weird (i.e. interesting) ideas that pass through our brain because of the knowledge we’ve gained.
“Double-U” doesn’t mean “double-me” because we know it’s just the letter “W”. Just one of the fun tricks of the mind that a child may point out because they are unbound by the knowledge and experience that comes with life experience and formal or self-education.
The most brilliant and exciting ideas are almost always outside the bounds of common knowledge and thus would be entirely ruled out by “normal” people.
We need to find a way to suppress our knowledge/experience and allow our minds to float “outside of the box.”
The first step is to set aside time “to be creative” and use that time to relax. Nothing in the world matters. The ideas of convention, the common expectations, the way things work. It matters as much during that time as it does to a 4-year-old. Why can’t you flap your arms fast enough to fly? What happens if I write letters backward instead of forward? What can I do right now that seemingly has no useful impact on my life?
The second step is to embrace failure. Don’t even acknowledge it. If a joke bombs, a piece of artwork looks like trash, or you just spent four hours “being creative” and nothing tangible came of it, so what. Laugh it off.
Creativity (accumulating brilliant ideas) is a cyclical process: you relax into a start of creativity, you see what comes from it, you don’t care how good or bad it is, this allows you to relax even more comfortably the next creative process, this leads to even better creative ideas and brilliant observations.
That process repeats and you get better and better at being creative. But it all begins with our ability or willingness to be stupid again that we might be brilliant.
Imagination
The limits lifted by our imagination are too great to explain in words. Imagination paints a future we can build and dreams to which we can aspire.
Imagination also can be a tool our brain uses to paralyze us and make us fearful.
Imagination is helpful and destructive depending on your spirit. But, in both ways imagination is a liar.
The dreams are rarely THAT good, and the suffering is seldom THAT bad.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. That should prompt us to dive more whole-heartedly into the good dreams and aspirations and leave the worry far behind.
Are facts really that important?
Facts. It’s all about facts. That’s what we say. That’s what we think the real “drop the mic” moment comes from. “I believe in FACTS.”
There is a problem with facts, however. Facts come only after the event has taken place. If you have the facts, you’ve missed the boat.
Before 9/11, the fact was, nobody had used airplanes to do what we witnessed on that terrible day. That was the FACT… until it wasn’t.
Facts are what we obsess over when we become trapped on the inside. The inside of our company, our school project, our artistic masterpiece, our book, our political position, and much of our philosophical ideas.
We fall in love with fact and reason and logic. These are good things–incredibly good and important things!
But. humans are not mere reason-based or fact-based creatures, they are also perceptive. Perception is not quantitative like factual statistics, perception is qualitative.
If somebody in the Defense Department had perceived that a plane could be used as a weapon, we could have better prepared against such an attack–even in the absence of FACTS to back up that concern.
We must take care that we are not so focused on the inside of our project or business that we lose touch with the outside “real” world. We live and operate in the real, outside world and the changes in trend happen in the real world. By the time we have stats on trends, it’s too late to catch them.
The trend is important to see, but if you can spot the change in trend before it fully manifests itself, your business will be booming. It takes perception to spot changes in trend.
Don’t rely strictly on facts, data, and stats. That’s yesterday’s news. Useful to see and compare, but never let them consume you. We must be comfortable enough to allow our perception to steer decisions about the future of our work, company, and life.
“the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.”