You might feel like you failed. But if you are still trying, you haven’t failed. A failure doesn’t try, but a man looking to learn keeps trying.
So, whatever you do, keep trying.
Taking a week off
I’m taking a week off from writing my blog posts. I don’t need the time off, I’m just doing it because I’m cutting away most of the technology and social media in my life for the next seven days.
When I started writing these posts in late 2019, I did not honestly believe that I would stick with daily writing for more than a few days, maybe a month at most.
But, it’s become a habit. It’s become part of my morning routine. I just do it now.
Three years ago taking a week off would have been the death blow to this little daily writing habit, but today I am 100% confident that I’ll be right back to writing come Monday, May 23rd. Cultivating good habits is hard work and requires changes that sting, but the result is calm confidence that feels akin to the most soothing massage or calming beach vacation you can imagine.
Choosing things
It’s easy to look at something and find reasons that it will be good. It's a short walk to then adopt a new practice or buy a new tool.
Usually we find positive reasons to support things we’re inclined toward and we leap at the negatives with respect to things we are repulsed by.
That is merely using emotion to dictate what is good or bad and pretending like we have good reasoning for it. Those reasons are there (while excluding any reasons to the contrary) because you already decided you liked/didn’t like the thing.
What if we considered what was good about the thing and then considered possible negatives as well? What would happen if we looked for ways that our favorite tools, services, social medias, personal routines, vices, and virtues affect us and made some adjustments?
Just because you see a great reason for something, doesn’t mean there aren’t three other reasons that are bad. Honest examination of the things we choose will lead us to a more fulfilling, happier, and more productive life.
Life would be better with more TLDR
TLDR is the internet acronym for “too long, didn’t read.”
I think every email should contain the essential piece of info in the first sentence. The reader should have everything they need in 10 seconds. Get to the point.
Then use the following few lines to smooth out that message and add kindness, context, and more info.
You’re busy, I’m busy, and we both stink at communicating in a friendly, yet succinct manner.
Spit out your message and smooth it out afterward. Approaching your emails, blog posts, instant messages, videos, social media content, etc… with a TLDR-first mindset will help make everything you do more user-friendly.
I’m still working on it, myself. Too often, these benign blog posts are often verbose beyond belief.
Empty cathedrals and brilliant minds
All of the infrastructures in the world means nothing without brilliant minds filling them. The innovation that injects life and excitement into the world doesn’t come from having the best gear or the biggest office. It comes from the daring, the risk-takers, the wild thinker, the oddballs, and the renegades.
Let not the outward trappings of the biggest corporations intimidate you. Without your mind and your ideas, they’ve got nothing but empty cathedrals. Train your brain and intestines to learn fast and take risks.
Shorter deadlines. Shorter than that! Even shorter!
Stretch the limits of what you think is possible at least once a day. Crush yourself by setting aside fifteen minutes in which you will complete a 30-minute task.
You do this with an intensity of focus and a viciousness of work that you cannot sustain for a long period of time.
But by training your mind your intensity and speed of work will increase over the months and years.
Practice getting faster and focusing harder by setting hard deadlines that are very difficult to meet. Then voraciously attack the task.
The brain must be trained
The ability to deeply concentrate on something is a skill that you can practice and train to improve.
It is not something that magically appears when inspiration or motivation strikes.
The systems you build to govern your life, your morning routine, your structure of working hours, enforcing a strict “no-internet-distractions” policy with yourself during those working hours, etc… these systems beat inspiration.
They are repeatable, they are reliable, and they don’t wait for the angel of inspiration to stir up your waters of motivation.
Don’t rely on that fickle fool in your mind who tells you of motivation. "I just need some inspiration!" "Oh, how I could use motivation!" These are seductions of your lower beast.
Instead, build systems that force you to train your mind to focus and do deep work. It's hard. It takes time and effort. Get started as soon as you can.
Be on or be off
Don’t be in-between. When we work, we should work extraordinarily hard and be extra focused. And then, when we stop working, we should stop working. No checking email, no making plans for new ventures on the restaurant napkin, no talking about work and stressful obligations, etc…
Our brains need the rest and, while sprinting and resting make us stronger, constantly running at a middle churning speed is stress that squeezes us like a grape. We end up imploding.
Figure out a routine at the end of your work hours and stick to that shutdown time. Give yourself the rest or await a burnout that consumes your ability to get things done.
It can be tricky, but we must make every effort to be either on or off.
Strategy and execution
Execution is so much more difficult than strategizing. And writing the to-do list is a breeze. But tomorrow, the work begins, and you're going to ask yourself why you made such grand plans.
When we make our plans, we have the ability to remove ourselves from the difficulty and pain of doing the work, so we have huge ambitions and we heap work onto our future selves.
We also believe that we will abruptly become superheroes and live in a world where time moves half as quickly.
Execution is hard. Focus on only a couple of very, very important things each day–no more than two or three at most! Shift your focus to your input, not the output.
Are you doing that very, very important work? Good. Keep going. The output will come from that. Focus on the hours you spend working or focus on anything that you actually do rather than getting stuck focused on massive deliverables that take much more time to complete.
Focus on writing 5x paragraphs a day, rather than your goal of writing a book this year. Focus on smoothing the concrete driveway with each trowel stroke you make, rather than how many driveways you want to build each week.
By doing more smooth trowel strokes, and by writing more paragraphs, you will deliver on your goal, and probably go much higher, too.
Achievable tasks focused on vitally important things is the way.
Morning distractions are the worst distractions
Stay away from the dopamine train early in the day. Distractions are bad enough, but morning distractions will derail an entire day.
Funny enough, early success and getting things done early in your day propels you forward into an amazing day.
Distractions early in the day making switching your brain into “work mode” nearly impossible. You’ll spend all day fighting the urge to not work.
Not ideal if you want to be productive.
Avoid distractions, but especially avoid them in the morning.
Achieving financial and mental stability in work
It is better to get a little bit done regularly than get a massive amount done only once in a while.
You will look back at a body of work over a year in which you did more than you ever dreamed of and felt less pressure than you thought possible. Your financial and mental stability will thank you for it later.
Slabs of time make the creative mind tick
Interruption and distraction are the single most detrimental thing to productivity and creativity.
The finished artwork is hours, months, or years of work that is distilled into a single piece that you can consume in a moment.
For the artist to create requires empty blocks of time. Slabs of hours, uninterrupted and without distraction. A block of six hours is not the same as three blocks of two hours. What can be done in six uninterrupted, focused, free six hour block might be 25x blocks of two hours.
Smaller sporadic chunks of time are exponentially less valuable than the bigger chunks of time.
If you can reserve several large (90+ minutes) blocks of time in your day and block out the distractions your life and business will change drastically.
Slabs of time make the creative mind tick. In them you get lost and in them you discover the things that make you special.
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.