The patient approach

When a sculptor is working on his next marble bust, he understands that not every chip of stone he knocks away is the final finishing blow. Each swing of the hammer brings him closer to his goal. Patiently, day after day, he sits and eventually achieves his goal of creating a masterpiece.

If a profitable business or an industry-shifting invention or building an audience on social media is your masterpiece, patiently work.

It’s so difficult to avoid the trap of a bad client, a bad setback, or a bad piece of content you made. Maybe you haven’t made anything that is “bad” but your stuff that isn’t picking up traction as quickly as you would like. Your business isn't growing as fast as you want. Try to remember the sculptor who is chipping away. You’re still chipping away.

Don’t lose motivation and don’t be distraught. Keep working and refine your skills and your process. The breakthrough is coming.

Prove it every day

It’s so easy for each one of us to grow a sense of entitlement as we achieve goals in our life. Got the college degree, check. Got the new car, check. Got married, check. Got my side-hustle profitable, check. Built another business, check.

The list goes on and on.

We start to smell ourselves and believe our own hype. We’re awesome! We’re so good!

That’s the road off a cliff. Instead, imagine how hungry and hard you’d work if you woke up every morning as if you’d accomplished nothing? Chase that next business like it’s the first. Be open to learning from everyone despite your degree. And so on.

When you seize the day, seize it as if you’ve never had the chance to seize it before and as though you will never have this opportunity again.

Don’t over-think it

Note to self: Keep it short and sweet. Don’t over-think it. Go forward. Do, don’t perfect. Respect their time, but respect your time, too. Good enough is good enough, but keep your eye on the prize as well.

Love yourself? Love myself?

Everyone says that we have to love ourselves more. We have to take it easy on ourselves, etc…

What does that mean? Genuinely, what is loving yourself? Without a set of rules or targets at which you aim, how do you know if you love yourself more today than you did last month?

Also, if you identify loving yourself as hedonism, is that what makes the best human beings? Does that allow you to contribute value to society and give satisfaction to you for a job well done?

Or is loving yourself about delaying gratification and enduring now for a better future?

The enduring of difficulty now not only feels great after you’ve done it but gives you a bright future. Maybe loving yourself is about the pursuit of more deserved pleasure and building a future that gives you as much peace as possible as you grow older.

Buy cheap (at first)

Buy the cheap bike, the cheap tool, the cheap camera, the cheap computer. Use that tool and grind it into dust.

When you invest little money at first it allows you to see if you need that tool as much as you thought and also gives you the knowledge of what features and functions you will need when you are ready to invest some money into a better version of that tool.

It goes without saying that it’s a terrible waste to spend $1000 on a piece of tech it turns out you don’t need as much as you thought and also, because you didn’t quite understand it, you bought the wrong version for your needs.

Buy cheap and learn the product/category before you drop big bucks on the one that will be the best for you.

Straight lines

There is an absolute levelness and a perfectly straight line. It’s an objective thing that we can measure.

If we shine a perfect, flat, straight laser line at a wall, we have a straight line. However, if the floor is not level, that straight line is going to look crooked when cast onto the crooked wall. If we didn’t know that the line was objectively straight and the true line, we wouldn’t know which was wrong, the wall or the laser line.

Now, imagine that your point of view is a tilted house. Everything you look at will be a mystery whether it is good or bad, right or wrong. That is, unless you have some touchstone against which you can measure objective reality or truth.

So, I believe that there is an objective reality and an objective truth. If not, we float through life in a crooked house, while never knowing if anything is right or wrong, real or fake, and no way to examine it.

Straight lines are interesting things.

You’re not building a skyscraper

Your life is kind of like a skyscraper. It hurts if someone tips you over. Also, the decisions you make in your foundational years can mess up everything that comes later.

However, most of the time, things find a way to work out. There are very, very few serious decisions. Even stuff we think is serious in the moment usually turns out to be pretty relaxed when we reminisce.

Focus on doing what you do to the best of your ability and do what is morally right.

With that guideline, make small decisions quickly and decisively and everything else will work out well.

Changing or losing

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?

The problem we all have

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.

The first hard week

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.

Fragmented attention

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.

Creating begets more creating

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.

Driving without a map

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!)

It’s hard to be happy

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.

The axe forgets, but the tree remembers

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.

Sick again

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.

Decisiveness

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.

Level up every day

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

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.