Live as if they’re always watching you. It's not the government watching, but the people you care about. (Honestly, maybe the government is, too, but who cares about them.) The people who come after you. They’re always watching and taking notes, whether they realize it or not. You are whom you live as. So live good and do good.
I knew the story stunk
Maybe the story you’re telling stinks, but you can plant flowers along the way and find ways to make it interesting. This can be applied to everything you do.
Respect is earned and compassion cannot be demanded.
Certain social interactions like lending respect, exhibiting compassion, and laughing at humor are all backbones of being a decent human.
For your part, you should do all of these things when it’s appropriate and honest. Don’t laugh at stupid jokes and don’t respect morons.
We can also make it easier for the people around us to respect us, show compassion, respect us, etc… The key is to never ever, ever, ever expect people to respect you, show compassion, or laugh at your jokes.
That makes you funnier, more pitiful, and much more respectable. If you choose to be the punching bag and you won’t have to be the punching bag.
It is better to be out of touch
Does it matter if we lose “touch” with the zeitgeist of the moment? Does it matter if we miss out on current trends, viral tweets, or formative internet culture happening right this moment?
The effort and time required to stay plugged into every angle, element, and aspect of the prevailing moods and trends of the internet landscape is a full-time job.
Maybe we all “lose touch,” not because we can’t be cool anymore, but because we realize there is more value and fulfillment in life when we spend our time working and building something for our future.
Having a working knowledge of memes, internet culture, up-to-the-moment news, and sports probably means a lot of time is being wasted consuming rather than creating.
Russia, Russia, Russia
Russia invaded Ukraine early Thursday morning. As with everything these days, if you don’t adhere to what somebody else believes you get insulted and demeaned as the “other.”
It’s why I stay away from politics. Nobody knows who is right, and everybody hates what you think and assigns extreme motives to what you say.
War is painful. Broken families, lost sons of a generation, and scars on the face of a nation. What can you offer when you’re so far away but compassion and love?
I have my political complaints (of course), but what good are they when the bullets are flying? I hope there is a speedy resolution and peace comes quickly.
Don’t take it for granted
The other night I was driving through town. It was rainy and getting dark. I approached a hill and the wind picked up substantially. Seemingly from nowhere, the weather was bad.
My son was asleep in the passenger seat beside me. As we drove down the road, I saw a telephone pole on the right side that looked like it was being blown around by the wind. As if it wasn’t anchored to the ground at all.
Then the next telephone pole came toppling down right over my car, right over my son next to me.
I hit the gas pedal to speed beneath it before it fell on us and glanced in my rear-view mirror to check on the cars behind me. They had slammed on the brakes in time to avoid trouble. What I saw was the top half of a telephone pole dangling above the road. It was suspended by the power lines. The same lines which had prevented the pole from dropping out of the sky and onto my head.
It was a surreal experience. I didn’t even believe it was real. I had just seen a telephone pole dangling in front of my car and I was sure it was going to hit us, but it didn’t. I had to convince myself I wasn’t going crazy and dial the emergency services.
I was so unsure of what had happened that a few hours later I drove back over to where the spot was just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. Sure enough, they had closed the road down and crews were clearing the mess. I wasn’t crazy after all.
It made me think that this whole life could be over in a moment and in that moment, I would have never even seen it coming. An 800lb wooden pole of death hurtling from the sky above me, a direct hit, and I’d have been a goner. Enjoy every sandwich and reflect on the things I take for granted. Be thankful. I sure am.
Don’t let a desire for greatness trap you
Don’t be fooled that you can’t do the work if you can’t do it perfectly. Greatness is not simply doing the most amazing work in the world.
Greatness is doing pretty good work with incredible consistency or incredible pace.
Greatness is NOT doing incredible work once or twice, it’s doing good work many times.
Don’t let perfection fool you into thinking you will never be great if you’re not perfect.
You’re longing for perfection is robbing you of a chance at building that business, doing what is best for your family, and creating something great.
Nobody remembers your anguish and agony over making everything perfect, there will just be a void where your work could have been.
If you’re content with work that is 90% perfect, they will see an incredible body of work you’ve created over your lifetime. Choose wisely.
We’re all special, nobody is special!
Stop being angry about everything. It tires people out and they don’t care about you or what you have to say.
When everybody wins, nobody really wins. You all just get a shiny medal thing for showing up and playing. That’s not winning, that’s participating.
Along the same lines, when all you do is yell at or berate your employees or colleagues, you never really yell at them and nothing you say will get a rise out of your peers.
They just tune you out and you’re the jerk. You get angrier and angrier, but you’re still droning on and yelling about everything. Nobody cares and you’ve lost their ear.
When everything is the "biggest problem ever" and you scream and yell about everything, nobody listens. The solution is calmness.
Your calmness makes your anger more valuable and people will respond more appropriately to you, and they’ll probably enjoy being around you as well.
Dude, you’re wrong
We all run around and like to think we’re right all the time. We hate to admit we’re wrong. If we could, we’d go our whole life without saying we were wrong about anything important.
Instead of saying “you’re wrong” stop and think “maybe I’m wrong.”
Nothing will make you happier, more grounded, more poised, and more respected than accepting responsibility.
But the ego is a heck of a thing. The brain might know I’m wrong and the brain might know I can instantly be in peace by accepting responsibility, but the ego whispers like the devil, and the pride of life consumes what we know will be good.
It’s funny how one part of us knows what to do, but another part of us just refuses to do it. Humans are weird and irrational creatures.
Don’t be afraid of how life will go
Don’t slowly rot away. Use the life you have. You're tougher than you realize. Better to wear out than rust out.
We need to push harder, be more aggressive, be more focused, stop being afraid to ask for what you want, and don’t fear doing things differently.
We jog through life when we should run.
We hesitate when we need to be decisive.
We settle for just-good-enough when we could press harder and be excellent.
We’re scared to take risks and fail in front of family and friends so we walk softly, we take the safe route, and we ridicule those who dare to be great.
Don’t find reasons why you’ll fail when you prepare to take a risk. Focus on the reasons why you might succeed. If failure still comes, then you can deal with it, but not before it happened.
What if you don’t fail? What if you turn out to be great? If your project hasn’t yet failed, why choose to believe in the worst outcome?
Don’t be afraid of how life will go. We have little control over it. However, we have more control over our efforts and the good we do.
Control the scaries
Make something difficult for yourself every day which will be the scariest thing you do all day. Like a hard workout in the morning.
When you control the scariest thing in the day, the unknown scary stuff becomes less of an obstacle. You become more fearless.
If you procrastinate and are afraid of committing or completing and sharing your work, or interacting, or an interview, big test, or meeting, or anything that stings your heart with anxiety, seize the control by giving yourself the scariest thing to do every single day.
When you control the scaries, they are less scary, and so is everything else.
Put the important stuff first
When you speak or email somebody, put the important information first. Try to include the main question or concern in the first thing you write or speak.
Don’t waste people’s time or mental energy wading through an entire backstory just to get to the point.
Present the question or concern upfront and then explain your line of thinking.
Not only do you come across as more confident and sure of yourself, but you respect other people’s time and energy they need to commit.
Important stuff first, explain and add the niceties afterward.
Don’t try to prove that you’re good
Be good and do good. Don’t waste time or energy trying to prove it to everyone else.
Adding purpose to life
Find your gift. Find what you’re good at doing and do that really well. Then give it away. The stuff you do, the stuff you make, and how you do it. Give it away and share it with everyone.
Grace under fire
The challenge is difficult and the unexpected bad news hurts. But we can embrace both bad news and challenges if we learn to control our response.
The response is the only thing that we can control. the circumstances are set and the response is up to you. Do good and do what is right.
No meltdowns when things go wrong. They are a gift to strengthen you and make you better on every challenge or unexpected bump in the future. Use the bad moments to your advantage and get some good thing out of them.
Grace under fire is a beautiful (and useful!) attribute.
It never gets easy
When you begin any new art it’s easy because nobody is looking. There is no pressure from the audience. But it’s also tricky and challenging because nobody cares about you or your work. To breakthrough, you have to be very good and very unique.
When you finally get some attention, it’s easy because radical uniqueness doesn’t matter as much–you just doing something makes it unique! But it’s still complicated and challenging because you have constant pressure to live up to the best thing you’ve ever done. That is the mark to which the audience will hold you.
It never gets easy, but certain things get easier while other things become more difficult. To sustain success beyond the initial seed, you must be flexible, humble, and always looking forward.
Squeeze out the wine
The good stuff usually comes out by adding pressure. Squeeze intensely and relieve the pressure for maximum effectiveness.
It’s all about being intense for a period of time and then relaxing and recovering. The slow and constant squeeze of stress is what kills us. The intense stress followed by intense relaxation is therapeutic.
So squeeze and squeeze hard to get the good stuff to appear. Put yourself under pressure, make deadlines, find ways to hold yourself accountable, find comfort in the uncomfortable, and then set aside time to rest.
Constant lingering stress kills, momentary intense stress strengthens.
Squeeze and release.
Script the weak spots
One of the best time “hacks” I’ve ever been given is to find the times of your day when you often fall off the rails or fall behind your schedule and note them.
Then build a short 15-minutes-at-a-time schedule for the day at those times.
For instance: I eat lunch around 1pm. I go home for that. After I eat, I could sit around with my kids and play with them for two hours and not realize I’d used up most of the afternoon. The solution was to schedule from 1pm-2pm to ensure I could get home and eat, spend some time with my wife and kids, and be back working in a reasonable amount of time.
Find the weak spots in your schedule and script that hour or two and you’ll be delighted that you save days that would have “drifted” away without some structure to help stabilize things.
More risk, more risk, more risk!
The more you can tolerate risk, the greater is your potential reward.
You want to make the million? You’ve got to put more on the line.
You want to go faster, get stronger, and jump higher? You’ve got to push harder and risk injury.
The risk can derail you in the end, but at least you were on track to doing something big.
Be comfortable with people around not understanding the risk you take and being scared of what you venture to do. Then be gracious enough to share the rewards if the risk pays off. Also, be humble if the risks don’t pay off. And try again.
All in
Go all in. When you’re using energy on “Plan B,” you’re probably not spending enough time on “Plan A.”
Plan, commit, jump.