An army of donkeys led by a lion can defeat an army of lions led by a donkey.
The tools you have in your toolbox are useless if you don’t wield them wisely.
Be a good leader to the people around you, and be a good leader of the gifts, skills, and qualities you personally possess.
The choice is your own. Every setback can be catastrophic or an opportunity. We all have the choice to make. Will we choose wisely?
I’m always slightly late. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I always think I can squeeze one more thing in. But I can’t. Somehow, 32 years into my life, I still have not found a way to convince myself to just get going now. It’s not that bad to be three minutes early.
That small task can wait and if you forgo “one more thing” it’s pleasant and stress-free heading to your appointment or deadline.
You can see people who are doing what you want to be doing. They’re doing it today. They have a bigger business, a bigger following, are more fit, are more well-read, have a better position at work, etc…
You see it and you want to be there. But you can’t. Not today, at least.
There is no shortcut and no get-rich-quick scheme. You have to work diligently and with a laser focus.
We must know and believe that it takes time to get there. We need to have the patience today to start working on the baby steps. The seeds you plant will blossom in a few years. Be patient. Start now.
I decided to transfer my domain name to a different provider and did so without any planning. So the site appears to be down. It isn’t “down” but rather the name that links to the website is simply broken from that connection making the site appear to be down.
I do too much planning on things not important, and way too little planning on things important. Strange.
You have to decide whose side you’re on. If you play both sides, the winner will have no respect for you and the loser will resent that you never stood by his side. Only the immoral or ultra-crafty man can get away with “straddling the fence.”
We don’t remember the mean things our enemies say or do, but we never forget the silence of our friends. Martin Luther King Jr. said something like that a while ago.
It’s so strange that the work that will make the greatest impact in my life and also bring me the greatest sense of accomplishment is so often the work that I want to do the least.
I’m not sure why my brain does that. We’re on the same team! Shouldn’t my brain encourage me to do the valuable stuff instead of the trivial stuff? Or is this mindset merely me descending into a lower creature and craving dopamine now, instead of a payoff later?
Even knowing all that I know about deep and important work, somehow my brain still doesn’t crave doing it. But I’m working on it.
It’s easy to see how and why physical labor is hard work. It physically beats your body down over the course of years. I did manual construction labor for about half a decade and realized fairly quickly that I didn’t like the prospects of being a fifty-year-old guy who had done this work for 35 years and I was able to get out of physical labor by the time I was 20 years old.
I like physical labor. I like the idea of strengthening my body and developing that tough grittiness that only comes from working with your hands. I like the skills you learn and how incredibly useful it is to know how to build a wall, wire a light switch, fix a plumbing valve, and install hardwood flooring. But I don’t like the life that it takes from you.
Knowledge work, on the other hand, is easy to look at and assume that it’s easy to do. You just sit there all day and “work.” That’s what most people think (including those who do knowledge work.)
The difficulty of knowledge work is that it fatigues your mind to the point of physical exhaustion. If you’ve ever spent a day really studying, you probably know what I’m talking about. It also places the knowledge worker in a position of continual mental battles in trying to maintain focus.
With modern technology, any distraction you want is a click away. Just one click and you’ve lost your focus and that flow state in which you are extremely productive. With most physical labor, you can leave your phone in the truck and have many more steps (literally) between you and a distraction.
While physical work is physically taxing, knowledge work takes immense mental focus and strain with the temporary relief from that strain (all the distractions of the internet, social media, Netflix, etc…) dangling just one click away. And the more the knowledge worker gets distracted, the more difficult it becomes to focus.
This modern difficulty of knowledge work is self-inflicted, but social media, etc… are created in such a way to exploit this weakness in the human and most knowledge workers probably don’t even understand how deep the problem they have is.
It’s hard to compare physical and knowledge work, but it’s easy to write off knowledge work as if it’s easy. It’s not. Just because you can’t understand the difficulties, does not mean that the difficulties don’t exist.
For the knowledge worker, my advice is to disconnect as much as possible. Shut off your phone and block all social media and entertainment websites on your computer(s) and sink into the scary, uncomfortableness of having to do deep work. Once you’ve started doing it, you will love it and you’ll feel much more accomplished in the end.
Everyone says the unknown is scary and that uncertainty is treacherous. But what if we think about the unknown as exciting and hopeful? What if we think about the uncertainty as opportunity?
No need to change the world in a day, but a lifetime of doing one good thing a day will turn into a life of much good done. The overarching goal of this year is to find some good and productive thing to do every day. Create before you consume and the volume which you consume, create the same amount.
As we all closed out 2021, we gave it the familiar scornful treatment that we seem to give every year. I can understand the hate toward 2020, that was a strange year, but every year can’t be “the worst year ever.”
My goals are all process-based goals this year. Meaning, I don’t care about the outcomes, just the part that I can take hold of and do something about.
Goals:
Read at least two books each month.
Normalize my sleep schedule for the first time in my life.
Take a photo of my kids every day and get them printed in a book.
Write a story about my kids several times each week.
Produce 12+ videos for my main YouTube channel each month.
Create the new channel project that I’ve been working on.
Create and launch 3x courses to establish additional streams of income.
Buy a gift for a family member or friend every month (or maybe every two weeks.)
Move one day at a time. Relish what you have and what you’re doing. Do a little work for 365 days and you’ll build an empire.
We’re apparently more busy than ever these days. Yet so many people are not doing fulfilling work. We spend our days wondering how we’re so busy, and yet feel so unaccomplished.
The answer, I believe, lays in the difference between the so-called “deep work” and “shallow work.”
Shallow work is lots of small tasks, often disjointed, that are relatively easy to complete and can usually be done while we are distracted by background noise and also permit us to take frequent “Facebook breaks.” (The brain surgeon cannot pause surgery to scroll Instagram!)
Deep work is the process of shutting out all distractions, technology connections, social media, and background noise. In that stillness, you spend hours or days immersed in your work and you make real value and deliver important work to your community. Stuff that makes real change.
The more we do only shallow work, the more we lose the capacity to do deeper work. We become addicted to the fast-paced, distraction-filled shallow work. As with other addictions, it feels good at the moment but leaves you wondering what exactly happened shortly thereafter.
The more we do deep work, the more we increase our capacity to sit for longer periods of time and be focused on one thing.
Prioritize large, long periods of distraction-free time in a place that is conducive to focus to get more deep work done and make a greater impact in your life, study, and art.
As an artist begins to gain popularity he no longer is the private artist who has the freedom to create with respect to nothing around him.
There must be some artists who can continue to create as if nobody is watching. But, something tells me that it is a very human response to take on a certain burden of pressure when you know the crowds will look at your work.
Salvator Dali, the artist was eventually trapped by Salvator Dali, the celebrity. It’s a very hard thing to create purely and freely when you have the expectation and peering eyes of the crowd.
Be careful of the brand you build and the audience you amass. Success isn’t possible without them (usually) but they can be an artist’s downfall if we’re not able to still be free to create.
So I’ll take the easy/boring way out and leave you with a quote. (I’m in a rush!)
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
–Zig Ziglar
Simplify. Editing down things you love is nearly impossible, but you will never find the success you are seeking without trimming the fat and streamlining your process, your routines, your product itself, and everything.
Right now, I’m working on trimming my morning routine down. It takes me far too long to get from bed to the office. My goal is to wake up and be in a working flow state within a more reasonable amount of time.
Right now, it takes me about three hours to get to work. I’m hoping to trim that time to about half of that. but I’m finding out just how hard editing is.
The other option is to wake up earlier, but in the back of my mind, I’m angling for trimming the time AND waking up a little earlier.
Imagine that you’re sitting in court and they’re saying that you’re guilty of murder. The gallery is full of people who believe you’re a killer. The only problem is, you’re not. You would never do such a thing. Yet, the entire world seems to believe that you are a monster. I think this would be a crushing reality to endure.
But then a single person sitting in the gallery tells you that they believe you and they know that you are innocent. They show support for you with nothing to gain and with immense pressure all around them.
To do what is right is not to follow the masses, but to stand for what is correct and right and good because of its goodness. It’s so difficult, but in standing for what is right, you show the true content of your character.
Talent, potential, and expectations are all nice, but without mental flexibility to control your skills and fulfill your potential, something is always missing.
Sure, you may flash and taste success for limited moments, but sustained success and stability are nearly impossible without the flexibility to be stable.
How is flexibility actually stable, you might ask? Think of it like the ocean, the top can appear calm, while underneath the water is being pierced by animals and forces of all kinds. Yet, the outside that we can see and interact with is mostly calm. The flexible underside allows for the stable top side.
If the ocean was rigid like a stone, it would be initially strong, but if anything pierced it, it would crack and never be the same.
Flexibility will equate to stability and indeed, still waters run deep.
We have to find a way to structure our workday to leave wide open blocks of time where we can enter our “flow state.” The flow state is where you don’t have background noise, family obligations, deadlines, pressures, or distractions to turn your attention from crushing tasks and projects.
In a good flow state, your two hours of work should be what others can get done in six hours. The focus must be locked in and your attention should be on nothing be conquering what has been set in front of you.
Defend the slow state at all costs. Set boundaries, plan your morning, ignore email, turn off your phone, whatever it takes. Defend the peace and focus of your flow state by setting aside time for “deep” work sessions.
“I’m too busy!” that was my go-to whenever I was looking to explain why I couldn’t take on a new project.
What’s interesting is that “being busy” is a luxury of those who aren’t all that busy. When you’re not loaded with tasks and work to do, the little work you are doing (or procrastinating from doing) will expand to fill all the time you have.
Whether you have ten things to do or three things to do, it’s going to take the eight hours you’ve given yourself.
Why not do five things, but limit yourself to a five-hour block of work? Force yourself to focus and streamline the process. Get more done in less time. Then spend your free time doing more work, or reading, or with your kids, or whatever you really want to be doing with yourself.
When we walk into a new situation, it’s best to assume everything is new. Yes, even the obvious stuff. It takes two seconds to confirm most things and it’s usually worth it. If you learn nothing new in every re-confirmation of the obvious, you exercise the muscle and habit of always being fluid and adaptable, and open to creative ideas.
The stuff we know will lead us and guide us in the decisions we make, but they must not be allowed to blind us and close off creative solutions that are overlooked because we’ve locked in on one solution that we “know” is right because of a bunch of preconceived assumptions.
Never underestimate the value of the fluid movement of information that will be presented in every situation we face.