The way of life that makes you more successful

The best of the best are the best because they consistently worked to get there. They did not have intense spurts where they were awesome followed by long droughts of bad productivity and no self-discipline.

You are a high performer because you apply consistent action, not intense effort occasionally.

Find a way to apply consistent pressure, consistent habits, and consistent efforts in everything that you do.

Relax the intensity and focus on ease of entry. Make it easy to go to the gym, to keep up with email, to have 30 minutes set aside each day for that really important task.

30 minutes each day is much better than cramming and panicking for the last 5 hours before the paper is due.

Consistent action rather than intense effort.

You don’t need to say everything

It takes discipline to NOT speak. Resist the urge to say the extra stuff. Silence, covering, and shadow all allow the person looking and listening to fill in the details. This is a much more engaging way to learn and you’ll actually remember the conclusion you come to rather than the ones that are shouted at you.

Effective teaching and effective information sharing means sharing less information.

Take a break without quitting

I took a few more days off of writing blog posts. One problem that I’ve always had in my business and personal art projects is that I get to a point where I want to take a break and instead of a short break of a few days, I take massive sabbaticals.

Right now, I’m still struggling with another website I run and a YouTube channel. I intended to take two weeks off back in August of 2019 as I was beginning to feel burned out and I have made nearly no videos for that channel for two years. The further I get from the date of making videos, the more difficult it seems to get the ball rolling again no matter how badly I think I need to be making videos for that channel.

It makes it stressful and scary to even think about taking a break from anything. I have little confidence that I will take a break and get back to whatever I had been doing. Restarting something is very hard for me.

So here’s hoping that I get back to writing daily blog posts, making multiple videos each week, get back to sketching faces every day, and in general doing more personal art projects again.

The number one rule about making art

The number one rule about making artwork is to start making artwork.

The number one rule about photography is to start shooting photos.

The number one rule about writing is to start writing.

Start, start, start. Nothing happens if we don’t start. We must begin. Without a beginning, there is no middle or end.

Refine, adjust, and make it perfect and lovely in subsequent passes as you play with your creation. But please, by all means necessary, START.

“Joe Rogan got COVID this week and he told the world that he’s taking Ivermectin, however, the media has told us that Ivermectin is a horse-dewormer not fit for humans. But Rogan doesn’t seem concerned, his statement to the media was that he’s in stable condition and the medicine has reined in all of his symptoms. In fact, he’s never felt more spurred on to get back in the saddle with the hope that his podcast will jockey for the top spot for years to come.”

Lots of bad jokes

I did not expect that deliberately trying to write jokes would be as hard as it is. I’m usually pretty quick with one-liners in a conversation, but coming up with jokes is difficult. I know I should just flood tons of jokes from my brain and splat them onto the paper and just pick out the ones that are actually funny, but seeing cringe-worthy or un-funny lines makes me mad at myself. It’s hard to be funny when you’re mad at yourself.

So expect lots of bad jokes. Maybe it will be like photography. 1 in every 100 is really good. So I should nail about three jokes a year. Hopefully, my writing will tighten up and my wit will become a little more creative over the next year, at least.

“In driving class I was told to back my car into anything. But then they asked me to back into a driveway during the test.”

— Joke #1

Dopamine and distractibility

The endless scroll, the “doom-scrolling” that some call it, is a chase for dopamine. What is right there beneath my thumb that will tickle my mind and allow me to stare at my screen in a near-drugged-stooper?

The addiction we have to background noise and distraction seems innocent enough, but the problems it will introduce into your life aren’t seen until they are too heavy to be lifted off easily.

Take multi-tasking for an example. Multi-tasking has been going on probably forever, but we have a newfound addiction to multi-tasking in our modern times.

Most people don’t multitask because they are good at doing more than one thing at a time. We multitask because we are distracted and crave something else to do after minutes or seconds of focus on a single task. The chase for dopamine has trained our minds to be impatient and unable to lock our focus on one thing at a time.

We crave being distracted. There is a discomfort if we lock in on one thing for too long. That's my theory, at least.

“I started working on a joke for this post, but I got distracted watching people walk around my neighborhood.”

— Supposed to be a joke.

How to waste your life

We all know our time is limited. Therefore is it not a great crime to waste it away?

Your life is lots of little bits of time all smashed together. If you waste it away, you’re not just wasting time, you’re wasting life.

“I want to practice writing jokes. I like the way they help you think about words, concepts, and paradigms differently. I think I will start writing a joke each day and adding it to the end of each blog post in italics. Just like this little bit of text, except it will be shorter. And hopefully funny. Hopefully.”

— This will be a joke soon

It’s not courage if you’re not scared

Maybe I’m just making excuses for not being impervious to fear, but I have a theory that being scared is fine. What is not fine is being so scared that you don’t do anything or that you’re too afraid to start. That’s a big problem.

Being cautious or tentative about something just means you’re alive. Everything we will do has some kind of consequence and we all hate the unknown.

However, the more you summon the courage to face the unknown, the easier becomes. Exercise the "courage-muscle", it comes in handy.

Maybe you’re not tired

Maybe you're not tired because you didn’t get enough sleep or because you worked too hard.

Maybe you’re tired because you didn’t plan out your day and you don’t have a clear purpose for the day. Or maybe you’re tired because the work you’re doing isn’t exciting to you.

Find a purpose in your work, something that transcends the work itself, and find direction on a daily basis to keep yourself engaged and full of energy.

Once the direction is gone, it’s time to go to sleep.

It’s up to you

Nobody is coming to bail you out, to pay your bills, to pay off your debts, or to give you the magic elixir that makes everything easy. Life is hard even when it’s going well, so get ready for it and get after it. It’s all up to you. What can you do, what can you deliver, what impact can you make?

Life gets a lot easier when you take that to heart. The good news is that you are probably more capable than you realize. People are usually confident in areas where they shouldn’t be, yet they lack confidence in the things that they are good at. Be sure of what you do and cheer yourself on, nobody else is going to do it for you.

Intention, intention, intention

Is it procrastination or what you intended to do? When it’s not what you intended to do, it’s wasted time at best.

When we think of being sober, we think of kicking drugs or alcohol, but being sober is the self-discipline to act with intent. Wallowing in thoughtless self-pleasure of all types, one could argue, is the opposite of being sober.

Don’t binge the junk food, choose a time when you will eat it and how much you’ll eat. That’s intentionality and soberness.

Pay close attention to your decisions and how you act. Every little moment is important.

Don’t replace one addiction with another. If you waste time on social media, choose how much time you will spend and then set a timer and get back to work (or whatever you intended on doing after your session on social media) right away.

Make plans and do what you intended on doing. Don’t allow yourself to be swallowed by a moment. That spreads into letting days, weeks, and months slip away while you look around wondering what happened.

Make plans and be intentional. It will change your life.

P.S. I took a few days off of writing these posts. I was starting to feel sick and figured that a few days off might do me some good

The daily checklist

Every day I make a 45-second video and I ask and answer these three questions:

1. What have you accomplished since yesterday’s video?

2. What do you plan on accomplishing today?

3. What distractions or obstacles prevented you from completing everything yesterday?

It’s a great way to set the stage for the day and know that you’ll be checking in on yourself tomorrow.

A little TLC goes a long way

Things will always wear out and break down, but focusing just a little effort on cleaning your things, put them away in cases, and keeping them safely aside. It only takes moments, but it’s something that many of us overlook.

Keeping the car washed and oiled will keep it running and looking nice for years longer than somebody who doesn’t do either one of those things.

Should I run from pain?

Adversity brings strength. When you feel pain, it’s almost always because you’re getting stronger or you’re learning. In the fog of war, it’s usually hard to see what you’re learning or how you’re being strengthened so be careful not to brush off all pain as a “stupid inconvenience” because it’s not immediately clear how you can learn from it.

When you're going through hell, sometimes it can be beneficial to stop and figure out why you got there so you don't have to keep running through it.

Don’t run from the scary things or the pain. When you run from pain, you wear the pain in your life in all you do.

When you're scared of defeat, you're scared of victory

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Don’t save the best for last

I used to know somebody who would save the food they liked most on their dinner plate for last. They ate the stuff they didn’t enjoy first.

Never made sense to me. I will derive maximum enjoyment from the food I like most if I eat it first and I can eat all of it without worrying about getting full. The other stuff gets fit in around what I’ve already eaten.

The same is pretty much the case with work. You might think putting off important tasks is better because you can build momentum and roll through those tasks.

But it’s a dangerous game. Will power is a limited resource and it wanes. You might get to the early afternoon and be ready to start the important work, but your willpower is at zero so you spend the afternoon procrastinating.

Eat the good food and do the important work first!

Ask the question

Don’t give the answer. It’s too easy and nobody learns anything. Sure, it’s annoying when ALL you ever do is ask a question in response to being asked a question, but save this tactic for situations where you really care about the person and want them to learn.

When you discover the answer, it lives within you. When you’re fed the answer, it comes out of you with the rest of whatever you ate.

Do all the little things

Every project you do is a block of little tasks. Do lots of little tasks well and life becomes easy.

We look at blocks of work and think it’s too much so we procrastinate and get nothing done. We want an easy solution and instant results. There is no such thing. There is no getting around the work.

There is no quick solution to anything. Plant the tree today and stop stressing about not planting it 20 years ago.

Line up small tasks and start knocking them down. One at a time. Time is leaving you, either way, you might as well use it to do something productive. In three months, all the little tasks will have made massive differences.

The courage to begin

You can only keep examining the data, write to-do lists, or plan the overall strategy of your company so many times before it’s a complete waste. Usually once is enough for each of those things.

It is the coward’s way out to keep turning to “laying the groundwork” or doing “planning” instead of jumping in and doing the real work that matters.

You must have the courage to begin and if you don’t have it, you must pretend like you have it and blind yourself to what scares you.

The coward dies every time he fails because of his cowardice, but the brave man dies only once.

Just because something is scary, difficult, or not fun is no reason for you not to do it if it’s the right thing to do. This is the work that matters. The work that will change your life.

Spoiler Alert: It never happens

The thing we worry about never happens. It just doesn’t. What happens is unexpected stuff that is far more damaging and it’s made more damaging because we’re worried, paralyzed, or stockpiling resources against a boogeyman.