Broken focus and empty attention tanks

I was thinking about attention and distraction. It’s what I hate about email. Imagine working on something intently and with a great deal of focus. Then you take a break and check your email for five minutes. No harm, right? It’s just five minutes!

Then you go and start another part of your work and try to focus intently. But this time you seem to have lost your ability to focus. Your attention is on something else. There was an email that came through and somebody needs you to do something, but you don’t have the time.

Now you have to contend with a stressor that you would not have had if you hadn’t looked at email. Not only is this pressure decreasing the capacity for your brain to focus, but your attention is being stolen from the new task you’ve started.

Long, uninterrupted blocks of focused work are like gold. Shut out the world, the music, the emails, the noise, the stuff that stops you from diving deep into what you’re working on.

A calm mind

When stress builds to the ever-present pressure that squeezes you like an anaconda it can feel like you’re suffocating. There’s no switch to just flip the stress off.

You don’t start climbing Mt. Everest and figure you’ll just “figure it out” along the way. The training and improvement needs to be made in a season of peace and calm.

The same for the stressful seasons in life. Training yourself and taking time to practice catching when you lose your cool strengthen the resolve and mettle you have.

Because, as the old saying goes, when you bear your hardships with a calm mind, you rob misfortune of its strength and burden.

There is little that is a heavier burden than the stress of unmet potential or regret for past inaction. So train yourself to be resilient and anti-fragile in the peaceful seasons in your life.

Don’t be the worst (and fake compounding talent)

Don’t even be mediocre. When a company needs a service, they want the best. You can’t hire 10 mediocre talents and mash them together to get the best. The best is one and carries an immense value with it.

If you can be the best, you can charge the premium. And companies will pay for you.

If you’re mediocre, you’re interchangeable. Spend all your time, energy, and extra money working, practicing, and learning to become the best that you can be.

Mediocrity doesn’t compound together and make greatness. Thus, one extraordinary talent is worth far more than a dozen mediocre middlemen.

Be a go-getter

I don’t know if you can train yourself to be more driven. Of course, if you’re not driven, you probably don’t care about not being driven. You just want your food and a place to sleep.

It usually doesn’t matter if you win or lose. What matters is that you have the un-ending ambition of getting up after failures or setbacks and driving right into the thick of things again.

Failure stinks, but it’s shameful when you see a man who doesn’t get back up after being knocked down.

I don’t know if you can make yourself a go-getter, or teach yourself ambition and drive, but find a way to do it. It’s a better way.

Let the line out a little

Don’t let the entire day get derailed by a setback. Also, don’t stop yourself from reacting and spiraling a little. Consider it “strategic spiraling” like letting out a fishing line instead of reeling in a fish so hard that you snap your pole.

Embrace the delay and immediately cross off an hour in your schedule. The setback has occurred, the day will not be as you once wished, but it can still be a good day.

By giving away some time when a setback occurs you allow yourself to purge it from your system and take some control over the time that you’re losing. It’s you that has decided that this next hour will be thrown away venting or fixing the setback or getting back on track, etc…

So throw the hour away and reset from there. No sense wasting an entire day when wasting an hour will do just as well.

Just checking in

Hi. It’s me again. Goodbye.

Pacing and sprinting

You empty the tank when you sprint. But you also only sprint to exhaustion for 10-20 seconds max. When the sprint is a five or six-day block of time, you must pace yourself.

This is one of the most valuable reasons for tracking your time and perceived effort day after day. You can see yourself start the week and have incredible Monday-Wednesday efforts, but then it slips on Thursday, gets worse on Friday, and by Saturday it’s all over for your productivity.

If you contain yourself on those first three days and slow down–especially when you think you don’t need to–you will have the mental and physical reserves in the tank for later in your sprint.

Track your work and pace yourself. It’s worth it.

Eat the frog?

They say to eat the frog. That means do the thing you dread the most before doing the easy work. Eat the frog and get it out of the way.

I say, learn to be fearless when thinking about how nasty the frog tastes. That makes eating the frog easier today and easier every day until the frog’s entire family and town are devoured by you.

Run to the stuff that you’re afraid of. Don’t settle for being afraid. Run toward it and strip it of its fear-inducing sorcery. The more you run toward what you’re afraid of, the easier it gets to run the next time.

That’s not only eating the frog but learning to stop dreading eating that frog.

Let nothing fill you with fear or horror. Face it all and consume it. Destroy it. Strip it of all power. This will make you fast and effective in everything.

Making life easy is hard

If you want to be successful, learn to love the parts of the process that you hate.

Doing this facilitates everything. It virtually guarantees success. If you can find a way to love the gritty stuff, the stuff you’re scared of, and the stuff that you hated before, your work will flow and it will spill forth from you with ease, beauty, and rapidity.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. So find a way to make working hard a little easier. Learn to love what you hate.

Make life easy and business easy by finding a way to love the stuff you hate.

Dense blocks of work

You can get lots done by working 12 hours a day while spreading yourself across multiple tasks and having background distractions sucking up attention and cognitive “bandwidth.”

But you can get just as much done by having two blocks of three very dense hours of work without distractions, background noise, or stuff stealing attention from you.

That’s six dense hours of work that allow you to have six free hours, where you’re not quite playing, but barely working as well.

Trim the fat, cut out distractions, no phones or social media, no background podcasts or music. Just a pure focus on work. A meditative experience.

Note: It’s very difficult at first, but like any workout, the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the better at it you will become.

Wasting potential

Don’t let your potential go to waste because you aren’t confident enough to start working. Don’t worry if you don’t feel ready. If you doubt yourself, that’s usually a sign that you’re much better than you realize. It’s the overconfident people who stink.

People who are half as talented as you are building businesses, generating value, and doing what you wish you could. You’re stuck waiting to feel ready.

If you don’t feel ready, you’re more ready than you think. Every day is one day you’ll never get back and you’re as young today as you’ll ever be. Seize the opportunity, don’t waste time, and don’t wait until you’re ready. You’re probably ready right now.

Everything ends one day

Your youth, your earning years, phases of life, raising your kids, and eventually your own life. It all ends at some point.

Don’t take it for granted and do your utmost to enjoy the journey. Wouldn’t it be awful to arrive at the end of your journey only to realize you spent the entire thing worrying about what came next every day? Stroll through life and find gratefulness.

No-scroll writing

Write so the reader doesn’t have to scroll, can read it and understand it a year later, and put the important stuff in the first line.

When writing a recipe or directions, don’t say “add the flour now.” Instead, reiterate how much flour is to be added so the reader doesn’t have to scroll back to the top and see how much is to be added. “Add 2 cups of flour now.”

When arranging a meeting, don’t say, “we can meet up next Saturday.” Say, “we can meet up next Saturday, April 10th.” Now the information is not hooked to that one single day in time and there is much less opportunity of somebody misinterpreting your message.

Finally, condense everything in a single line and put that first to save your reader’s time. Respect the user and the user will respect you.

No ideas today

I’m in a rush. I have nothing at the top of my mind to write about, but I don’t want to fall down the slippery slope of missing a day for a dumb reason and then losing a habit that I’ve managed to keep going for almost four years. So here I am, just checking in. Walking into the gym and turning right around and going home. At least I still went to the gym.

Tomorrow should render better ideas and thoughts to write about.

All the good ideas are gone

You might think that everything that can be invented is invented. The limitation is not in what there is, but in what you can see. We like to view ourselves as somewhat exceptional, but many generations have probably thought the same.

Imagine trying to explain the internet to Julius Caesar or any citizen of the Roman Empire. They would not have been able to comprehend the basic terms of what you meant.

Next time you think there are no good business ideas, no ideas for your next portrait, or art project, remember that the limitation is within you, not the world around you.

Shut out the distractions and marinate for hours, days, or weeks and the good ideas will come. Start playing and discover what you were once blind to.

End of the month squeeze

There is a terrible squeeze I feel at the end of each week. And then a tighter squeeze at the end of each month. It has happened a lot recently. The past two and a half years have not been friendly to me. My business sense and killer instinct have not been good. I can blame the pandemic, but I could have done a lot differently. I have been far too passive about things that I normally would have gotten after. But I’ve been fighting my way out of the funk and things are getting brighter. It will soon be a new day.

This squeeze happens on weeks when I don't finish everything I wanted to get done. And likewise at the end of the months when I know I could have been more productive and more focused on the important things.

Here I am at the end of March and I feel the squeeze. It’s a gentle compression in my chest. The kind of stress that is not good for you.

When stress is intense but limited to a set interval of time before you rest from that intensity, that stress is good for you and helps you grow.

When stress is slow, dull, and constant. It’s a relentless and deadly stress. It wears you down instead of building you up.

So I must find my way out of this funk and lessen the squeeze that the end of the month brings. I must and I will.

Also, what makes the end of the month any different other than the fact that we count years by stacking twelve chunks of 30 days together? Who cares if it’s the 10th or the 30th? Just get to work.

Writing the same thing over and over

It feels like I’ve been writing the same blog post for the past 2 months. It goes like this: get to work and don’t overthink it.

My blog is an open letter to myself. It’s me exploring ideas that bounce around in my head.

At the moment, I am at a moment of tension in my business. The opportunity is immense. But only if I get after it and put away the distractions.

If I focus on how much success there will be, I get lost and distracted. I start to believe that the work is already done. Problem is, I haven’t yet begun. Making lists and imagining success is not success!

If I focus on doing good work for the next hour and think about just that, I am very productive and then those dreams might eventually be realized.

But those aren’t really the dreams. Right now my biggest dream is to have days that are full of life and aren’t wasted away.

Each day, re-focusing on having productive hour after productive hour is the focus and when I sit down and write, I have the opportunity to remind myself of this thing every day.

Don’t worry about how successful you are

Focus on producing value and the rest will take care of itself. Don’t focus on success, focus on creating value. When you don’t know what the next step is, find a way to create value.

If you create value, value, value. Use your life force to contribute value to society and you will always have a seat at the table. Always.

If you’re scared, be a conman

There is a particular scourge that many creatives face. It’s called imposter syndrome. Instead of rooting for yourself and supporting what you do, you convince yourself that you’re not that good. You tell yourself that you don’t deserve to have even the little bit of success that you do taste.

I’ve found that a good way to combat this roadblock is to embrace it and deem yourself a conman in terms of getting the things you want.

Imposter syndrome tells you that you don’t deserve that higher-paying job. Fine. I don’t deserve it, but I’m going to be a conman and pretend like I do and take the money anyway.

Imposter syndrome tells you that you don’t deserve that big purchase you’re about the make. Fine. I’m going to make the purchase anyway because I am a conman and I will pretend like I deserve to get it and am capable of making it.

When the imposter syndrome creeps in and makes you second-guess yourself fight back. Admit that you don’t deserve it, but be a villain and take it.

Work first

I’ve noticed that the more I get done early in my day, the better I feel about taking breaks later in the day. If I don’t get a strong start to my day, the entire day feels like a slow piston is pressing from behind me compressing with a constant pressure that I’m slowly falling behind.

It’s a recipe for procrastination and feeling pretty terrible in the evening.

That distraction in the morning slows the workflow for the entire day and sucks the joy out of the end of the day.

I’ve adopted a work-first schedule and mindset. My goal is to be doing some productive work task that advances my business within an hour of waking up.

This process does three things,

1. Finish several hours of work done in the morning.

2. Feel great about an afternoon workout and spending time with my kids.

3. Nearly zero pressure in the afternoon and evening as I wrap up the day of work.