Treat it like art and make it amazing

You don’t need a special job where you’re doing expert work and sophisticated things and groundbreaking experiments to feel great about the work you do.

The man in the quarry must cut stones to build the cathedral, but he doesn’t get to see the cathedral being built. So he must cut the stone while dreaming of the cathedral.

You don’t need a special job, you need a special approach to your job if you wish to extract meaning and fulfillment from the work you do.

What you input (your effort, focus, precision, and pride) will help you discover meaning in even the banalest work.

As the saying goes, the wooden wheel is not noble, but to be able to shape it is.

Whatever your craft, treat it as art and make it amazing. From building a hamburger, to filling out insurance forms, and from selling cars, to building developments, you can do your work well. In doing work well, you will find great joy.

Upward momentum

Hey man, it doesn’t all happen at once. You can’t build it all today. But you can try to get 75% of the way 100% of the time. If you do that hour after hour and day after day begins to establish upward momentum. It doesn’t all happen at once, but upward momentum can begin whenever you choose to start. I hope you start now.

Work is better than play

I have this theory that we feel the best when we choose to stretch our body or mind doing something that is difficult to accomplish. I think people are generally more happy when they're working on something useful or worthwhile. Yes, that includes time spent relaxing.

The retort is, of course, that we all hate work and want to go on vacation. I think the problem is the work we’re doing when we’re at “work.” A lack of worthwhile or important work is draining. Any escape from that is nice, but only for a time. Vacation becomes tedious once it becomes aimless.

We seem to be at our best when we’re deeply focused on some challenge and our minds seem to love it, regardless of the challenge.

When we dive into our work, we find joy in it and deep satisfaction.

Willpower

You can learn to have better willpower by exerting your will.

Many of us fall into the trap of waiting for motivation. It never comes. Not if we wait. Motivation comes if we stop waiting and start doing. It takes willpower to begin. You must constrain yourself to pick up your tools and get to work. Then motivation falls out of the sky and keeps you moving.

When you least feel like doing what you should, that’s when it’s most important that you cut against that grain. It develops willpower and discipline which makes getting started and getting that motivation easier next time.

Confidence or competence?

We like the outgoing and expressive guy. He gets the job, the position, the girl, the accolades, the reputation, everything. We value the way people express themselves more than the competence they possess.

But wouldn’t it be better for your company to hire a competent person even if he doesn’t appear as confident on the outside?

Confidence without competence is misguided zeal.

While confidence is nice, competence is essential.

Don't beat yourself up if you're shy. Work on being competent and let the better bosses hire you.

Figure it out

It’s not easy, but you don’t have another option. You must figure it out yourself. The easy and miserable option is to give up and spend your years complaining. But you have no right to complain if you choose to give up.

You have to figure a way or don’t complain. Giving up is miserable, but it’s also your choice.

What you focus on is what you become

If you can, in the face of some piece of terrible news, focus on something positive and find the good in it, you will find happiness that others think is impossible.

Most happy people will tell you that they are happy because of some set of circumstances in their life. “Life is good! We’re doing well financially, the kids are healthy, two cars, good job, nice house, etc…”

Most unhappy people would have the same position. Circumstances dictate how good or bad you feel.

I don’t think that is true, however. I think it is the inability to focus on anything except those bad circumstances that makes you unhappy. And the man with the good circumstances is a couple bad events away from stepping off a ledge.

When happiness level is attached to circumstances, you’re well-being is at the mercy of the material stuffs around you. If tragedy strikes, you’re left out in the cold.

If you get diagnosed with a terrible disease and you focus and worry about that medical condition constantly, you will destroy your life. And probably make it more difficult to recover, too.

Instead, find something joyful in life and focus on that instead (your hobbies, your family, your evening routine, hiking, swimming, anything you enjoy) and don’t allow your focus to be consumed by disease and death. You will be more happy and more healthy.

Train your mind to focus on the best aspect of the worst news. Relentlessly find positives and focus on what calms you. Don’t fixate your attention on bad things. What you focus on is what you ultimately become.

It's very important work

Focusing on important work for extended blocks of time is very difficult. Doing the important work is difficult for most of us, even if it’s a difficult task that doesn’t take up most of our day.

It’s easy to do the surface stuff. Check email, tweet a few times, make a tiktok video, go live on Instagram, check email again, run papers to John’s office down the hallway, and so on. This surface work fills in our need for “getting stuff done” and feeling somewhat accomplished about our day of work.

However, if all of your time is spent doing this surface work, it’s probably primarily because you don’t have a clear idea of what you really need to do and why it is the most important work. It could also mean you are simply not organized and never get started because all of the important work is too big to do in “five minutes” (like sending out a tweet, etc…)

The whole world is trending toward this shallow surface work. Where there opens a vacuum, there opens a valuable position–if you can occupy it. Practice doing deep and important work. Practice doing it for hours each day. Don’t prioritize the shallow email, information, and social media work before the important things. You will literally waste years of your life and potential for doing work that matters.

As more people are used to surface work, your ability to work deeply and intently on important things will set you miles ahead of those around you.

Clarity about what matters

When your ship is suddenly beset with a great storm, you aren’t upset that your breakfast bagel was more toasted than you prefer or that traffic was pretty bad earlier this morning.

The crisis gives you an instant clarity on the things that really matter.

You’ve probably run into people who have never had these crises in their life and thus have a terribly skewered idea of what matters. Or maybe you have run into people who have had multiple crises, but drink or drug them away, thus wasting prime opportunities of growth that they were handed.

When you have clarity about what matters, you also have clarity about what doesn’t matter. In that state of mind, there is much less distraction and stress even after the crisis subsides and life returns to normal.

Constantly connected, constantly distracted

All throughout the day, our phones buzz, notifications pop up, and people give us their two cents.

Modern workplaces have been brought to a point where emails must be responded to within an hour and slack/instant messages should be responded to immediately. When the notification bubble appears, we just have to respond right away!

It fills our days with lots of emails and messaging "work" hours. We feel “productive” but the work we did was low-level easy work. Messaging and passing information along is work a robot can do most of the time. It’s not the way to generate real value in your work and develop skills in our rapidly changing work environments.

Imagine that you have a big, beautiful block of seven hours to complete your most valuable tasks. But every twenty minutes a notification appears and breaks your focus. You address the email or instant message for a couple of minutes and then you try to get focused again. You lose twenty minutes of every hour, at least, just trying to get back to the focused state you were in before that notification.

What is the longer-term effect of that on your work? How many special things could you have done but you never did because you were never able to sit still and work on the important, but difficult work–the stuff that will give you the most satisfaction and also be the best for your business long term.

To be constantly connected feels good and is the “easy way out” in terms of helping us to feel productive when we have delivered little to no actual value that propels our company forward. Disconnection allows us to shut out the world and deeply focus on the difficult, the rewarding, and the valuable work.

The illusion of control

We all think we are in control of making decisions in our life. Are we?

I have noticed that I am far too quick to assume that the music playing in the background doesn’t distract me, but I notice its presence, so it must be taking something from my brain. I think.

I feel the same way about podcasts, background noise, co-workers coming to my desk and shooting the breeze, etc…

Don’t we all know, deep down inside, that most of our “choices” are a response to where we “just happen” to be?

The choice to take the elevator instead of the steps is really about your age and lack of fitness. Sure, it’s your choice, but there wasn’t a real alternative.

The choice to eat the chocolate instead of vanilla cake seems like a choice, but you don’t even like vanilla, so the circumstances dictated the choice as much as anything.

What would happen in our lives if we focused more on planning and building an ideal environment for life, work, family, finance, etc… instead of constantly responding to less-than-ideal circumstances?

Some things we can’t change, but most things we can. I guess it’s easier to complain, but complaining is annoying.

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.

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.