The things we fear are almost always the very things we should be doing the most. If you’re afraid of it, it’s probably the right decision. The world works that way for some reason.
Within reason, of course. When standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon and you’re afraid to fall, don’t jump. That would just be stupid.
I forgot to write a blog post yesterday. It was a great day and a very busy day. Didn’t get to everything I wanted to do and had to leave a few things until today. It’s bad for the business and makes me look like a flake, but I’ve been wildly inconsistent for the past five weeks because I was sick for the entire month of August, and working double-time to catch up isn’t my strongest suit.
That’s a long, drawn-out way to say that I didn’t even have time to write this post so I’m banging out some words now and letting the river of my mind flow for a couple of minutes before the caffeine kicks in and I grind my face into the ground again today.
Work is good and makes me happy.
Optimism doesn’t come naturally, not as naturally as pessimism and doubt, at least.
If you’re pessimistic, everything is a roadblock. When something does go wrong, you’re quick to pull a “see! I told you so!” and feel validated in your concern. It’s a low-risk life, but one fraught with stress about a million things that never actually happen.
Optimistic people are the ones who build things and see the future as bright and something worth investing in. They believe it deeply enough to invest time, energy, and money into building something for the future.
Problems will arise, but it’s an opportunity to innovate, streamline, and make your project more robust and anti-fragile.
We’d all be a bit better off if we remembered that pessimism is easy but usually destructive. On the other hand, optimism is difficult but will usually help us to be very productive.
Don’t let yourself down. There is no shortcut. Work. No matter how many self-help books you read or how much motivation you manage to conjure up for a moment, you must work. Work is the key to everything you wish for the future. You must work. Even if it’s not fun, you still must work.
Set aside blocks of time beforehand that are strictly for work. Those hours are now gone and you might as well get the work done in the time you set aside.
Do your work, admire your work, be happy and satisfied with the work you accomplish. But by all means, get to work.
The innocent child sees adults as faultless superheroes.
Eventually, that innocence is faded into adolescence as the child sees that adults are indeed imperfect.
Next, the adolescent grows into an adult when he forgives the adults for their missteps and imperfections.
Finally, the adult finds a sense of wisdom and peace when he sees his own imperfections and forgives and encourages himself.
If we cannot find it within ourselves to be humble and meek, it will be impossible to pass from the youthful volatility into a more stable peaceful adulthood.
Great, you’ve taken a risk. That’s the safest thing you could have done. After all, taking no risk is the most dangerous way to conduct yourself.
Once you take a risk, find a way to identify the worst risks within the risky project and wipe those out.
Just like that, you take risks, but you eliminate wastefulness and damage that would scare you away from taking risks in the future.
So risk, but once you risk, find ways to eliminate risks within that greater risky project.
Set boundaries and say “no”. The only people who will be angry that you say “no” are the people who gained so much at your expense because you would never say “no”.
The highlights that we see everywhere on TV and social media are not what leads to success. They are the end product. Sports, business, lifestyle, everything. All we see are the highlights.
This is the procrastinator’s dream. Intense action leads to awesome fame and riches! Right? RIGHT!? Wrong.
But it doesn’t. Intense action leads to desperation and pain while you wonder how your life is slipping away.
High performers are the product of consistent action (which naturally leads to moments of intense action) rather than just doing moments of intense action and trying to sustain that–spoiler: you can't sustain that energy.
You think you can cram all that studying and paper writing into the last 30 hours before a paper is due. It’s an awful way to live–even if you get that paper finished.
Consistent action every day feels amazing and is incredibly effective. It naturally leads to the “highlight” moments that you see everywhere.
Start simple, do that simple thing every day for 30 days, and commit to consistently doing that action every single day rather than doing it intensely.
Too much intensity early in a habit-building phase will make it impossible to build better behavior. Let the intensity build naturally. For now, just work on consistency! Every day. Every day. Every day.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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.
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.
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
Every day I make a 45-second video and I ask and answer these three questions:
What have you accomplished since yesterday’s video?
What do you plan on accomplishing today?
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.