Are we willing to make changes when we continue losing? Sure, it’s comfortable and easy to slink down and be lazy and avoid change. Change is scary and totally unknown.
But ask yourself, are you so comfortable with losing that you aren’t willing to change? Or do you hate losing (or not succeeding) so much that you’re willing to keep changing until something sticks?
We think everybody else is much better than they are and we think we’re much worse than we are.
Part of maturing confidence, but also humility, but not too much humility. Be a kind savage. Don’t be timid in the name of kindness while you give away your family’s future. You’re better, tougher, and more talented than you think you are. You just are.
I’m doing a workout program that consists of three increasingly difficult weeks of workout sessions, followed by a “recovery” week. The recovery week is a few light workouts and rest days.
You would think that the third week–when the workouts are longest and highest intensity–are the most difficult, but that's not the case.
The most difficult week is the first week back after the recovery week. Everything feels more difficult despite your body having that extra rest.
This is comparable to doing my work. When I get going, difficult work becomes easy/ If I slack or take too much time off, even the easy is made difficult.
Rest is good, but not too much rest. Use your life up, you’re not getting extra days by letting life pass by.
When we’re busy, we aren’t getting important stuff done. We’re doing 50 different small tasks that are akin to treading water while the day goes by.
When we don’t set aside big blocks of hours at a time to sit and do our work, we get no deep knowledge work done. We might be able to check small tasks off of a to-do list, but we can’t sit and think and build the structure of our next project.
When we break our work hours apart with noncognitively-demanding, logistical, or office-administrative type tasks, we don’t create new value, we simply tread water.
We pay the bills, but we’re not building that new company.
If you can do tasks while having background distractions, you’re not performing deep knowledge work and generating new value. Stacks of small, rapid tasks or working with distractions is fragmented attention.
We must practice setting aside time, canceling distractions, and focusing for an hour at a time. Through this, you will realize a mode of working that you never before realized you’re capable of.
It’s important to start small and concern yourself with making something. Don’t worry about what you make, but set out with the intention of creating something and making it.
Getting better at making things happens naturally as you refine your skills, pursue more knowledge, and build more interest. When you start creating, you get the bug, and the bug makes you desire to create more.
You don’t get bit by this bug unless you start creating. So don’t start big with something that takes forever–that you probably won’t complete, and don’t let perfectionism cause you to waste time and stress you out.
Make something small that you know is imperfect and give yourself room to grow. Be better than yesterday and you’ve done well. You’ve also set yourself up to continue creating and getting better at what you do.
Imagine getting into your car and driving to a store. But you didn’t pick a store, you don’t have a map, and there are no roads to follow.
You’d drive around until your car got stuck in the mud or ran out of gas.
That’s you or me when we don’t build a to-do list or a schedule for our daily work. Without a plan, most people aimlessly wander.
As well, on a greater scale, we wander when we fail to find purpose in life. Aimlessly wandering is no way to live a life. (Aimlessly wandering every now and then is good for creativity, though!)
Happiness is a virtue. It takes work to be happy. It’s counter-intuitive to think that happiness is not the easy way out.
It’s easier to be miserable and comfortable than to be happy and productive.
To drown ourselves in entertainment and distraction while accomplishing nothing is comfortable and sad, but very easy to do.
Getting up, working hard, pursuing a dream, solving problems, and taking risks is hard work, but brings great happiness and a sense of fulfillment.
When we do nothing and stand still, we slide backward into the sad/comfortable mode. When we take action and spring forward, we enter the happy/working mode.
Make the effort to be happy. It’s worth it.
When the mouth speaks, it’s like letting loose water that cannot be brought back again. Likewise, when you attack or condemn others without considering that you may be in the wrong, you swing an axe at people you once loved or knew.
But suddenly you realize with horror that you didn’t have all the information and you prematurely condemned them or belittled them with no good reason.
You seek reconciliation and maybe extend an olive branch. It’s easy for us to say, “Let’s just forget what I said, let’s move on.” The axe indeed forgets, but the tree will always remember.
Try to be kind, even when you’re sure that the other person is wrong. No need to always swing an axe.
Welp, I’m feeling a bit under the weather again. I have had a flu-like head cold for three days. It’s been just enough to make it very difficult to focus on work, but it hasn’t completely knocked me out of commission.
I feel good enough every day that I’m sure that tomorrow will finally be the day I feel better. I’ll know tomorrow, or maybe I’ll start dreaming about the next day.
No complaining. Work will continue as soon as possible and this several-day delay should serve as a fresh reminder not to take health for granted.
Make the choice and go. The inability to commit to a choice, regardless of whether it’s a good or bad decision, will trap you. You get stuck in the middle of the road where you get squished like a bug. When the decisions get difficult, don’t fret and hesitate. That’s guaranteed to be the worst. Make a decision and adjust once you get feedback.
You only have a limited number of good days in your life. Days when you’re healthy and full of energy. Eventually, even before you die, you will get old and slow down. So don’t waste days. Don’t take too much time off. Don’t mindlessly consume “content” because you can’t resist the dopamine drip of modern micro-content and social media.
Lock in, focus, secure the future for yourself and your family to the best of your ability. Use the resources you have wisely. Pleasure in the moment is fleeting. Get better every day.
Keep stealing ideas and making them your own. There is no need to re-invent the wheel just because somebody has already done what you want to do.
The process and the changes you make will create an entirely new finished product.
Your voice, the stroke of your pen, or brush, your eye peering through the camera, or your direction all transform the idea you steal.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.