You don’t become successful and then it’s all finished. Success is not a process of constantly making more money, and building straight upward.
Prosperity ebbs and flows, but success is getting to the top over and over again. It’s not a straight line. It’s up and down.
But when it’s heading down, can you remain composed? Can you begin pulling yourself back up?
A good morning routine begins the night before.
I switched up my morning routine to make it as short and fast as possible. My thought process is, “get to work as quickly as possible.” Keep the balance that a good routine gives, but don’t let that routine go on for more than 90 minutes or so.
One of the things to get pushed to the evening was writing my blog post each day. Low and behold, I’ve missed two days in a row and two of the past four days. I’ve never done that since I started writing.
I’m learning that a morning routine is good, but all the focus I was placing on the morning routine was distracting me from looking at my evening routine. A good morning routine begins the night before. Preparation is vital and the preparation for a good morning begins the night before.
The major payoff of the work you do and the investments you make is ten years away. Finding a motivation other than immediate success will ensure longterm success.
Otherwise, you’ll constant put the important tasks and jobs on the backburner in favor of chasing the quick buck and the job that puts a little cash in you hand today.
But then you wake up one day at age 65 and realize you could have invested in yourself, invested in the markets, and built a business with long term sustainability and opportunity.
With all your might, resist the quick buck and the pressing, yet unimportant tasks. Instead, make time for the important tasks that aren’t as pressing, but the tasks that push forward your life, business, and satisfaction.
I’m mixing things up and writing these blog posts the night before they go live. Tonight (this morning for you) is the first night and I almost went to bed and forgot. It’s 12:22am and I’m sitting here writing a paragraph about nothing.
That’s changing routines for you. It’s more of the same, but everything’s different.
Setbacks happen. We get upset about things in moments of weakness. It happens. You’re not going to stop it, I’m not going to stop it. A good reminder is the old saying, “We consume our tomorrows fretting about our yesterdays.”
Instead of being focused on never getting upset, it’s probably better to focus on limiting the damage once we get upset.
If we can fathom expanding our idea of ethics beyond “don’t steal stuff from people and don’t hurt other people,” we can see how working hard and chasing success is a matter of ethics as well.
I think our definition of ethics and doing what is morally right should include the notion that we are required to live up to the potential with which each of us has been blessed.
The more talent you’re given, the more you should expect of yourself.
When I sit down to write something, particularly something that is meant to share information and teach others, I like to review source material and make sure that I have my thoughts in order.
It is absolutely fascinating how much clarity you get when you clear out the distracting thoughts and intently pour over books, papers, and presentations.
You begin to see the structure that the writer or speaker started with. You begin to see their brilliance in the arrangement of the book or speech–given it’s a good book/speech you have in hand.
This is just one of the things I’ve come to love about writing. It makes me dive deeper. In that deep dive it’s as if you’re seeing a world that very few others see.
I hope it’s not me turning into an elitist or a charlatan, but I stop and wonder how many people reading the book, or how few in the audience of that speech, are really grasping the multi-faceted points that the author is making.
If you skim over books and media, preferring the breadth of a matter rather than the depth, you might be missing out on some stuff that would blow your mind.
You can quickly turn a profitable job/project/shoot, etc… into a money pit by giving the client a “deal.” Value-added bonuses are one thing. They can elevate a normal business deal into one the client remembers for a lifetime–for all the right reasons.
But if you overcommit because you’re afraid to remain firmly respectful when declining the client’s request for additional free work or a deal that’s a little too good, you will make a profitable job one that you remember–for all the wrong reasons.
Remain firm, don’t worry about the client getting upset. The most they will be able to complain about is that you wouldn’t give them a deal that only an idiot would take.
Use less words. Bring the point into focus. Respect the time of the user. Skip the tangents and digressions. You might feel like you’re losing valuable stuff, but it's all dead weight that will make you more free and the end user more engaged.
Do more with less.
I looked at my oldest daughter the other day and she’s changing. She’s starting to grow up a little bit and look more grown-up. The difference between a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old is pretty big.
I want to capture these years and these moments and seal them up to save them forever. I can’t do it, but maybe taking more pictures of my kids will help. I’m going to start trying to set aside time each week to take nice photos of my kids doing what they do. Not the staged and posed nonsense. Just them living and learning and being funny. I think I’ll be happy that I did when I’m older.
Don’t talk yourself out of it, find ways to talk yourself into it. Take 30-seconds and close your eyes and look at the potential success rather than the potential problems.
The focused life is the best life there is. It’s a life from which satisfaction is derived at a level 100x that of fleeting hedonism or chasing a momentary dopamine high.
It’s a life spent improving yourself and contributing value to the community around you.
To live a focused and productive life we must leave behind the distracted masses, the sports, the daily gossip, the news in general, and most of your social media.
We must ruthlessly constrain our time and be careful not to give it away to every “opportunity” that arises. It will feel selfish at the moment, but if you do it to optimize your productivity and you are delivering valuable contributions, it’s much less selfish than it may seem at first.
Set aside time and sacrifice the next hour to work without distraction, background noise, checking email, or phone calls.
Do that four times a day. Watch your life change and see how much happier you become and how much more free time you have to spend doing things you love with freedom and comfort knowing you are contributing and adding value to the people around you. It all begins with leaving behind the distracted masses.
If you can sum up your email in a simple yes or no question, do that!
I’ve talked about adding a “TLDR” to the beginning of emails or communications to respect the time of your reader and I’m here to say that making emails easy to reply to is also a form of respecting the reader and ensuring you get more responses and better responses.
Instead of saying: “Hey, I would love to get your opinion on “X topic,” thoughts?”
Instead say: “Hey, I am researching “X topic” and would love to get your opinion on it. Could I stop by your office at 4:45pm on Thursday for 10 minutes?”
The second question conveys more context about your project and gives the reader a chance to see if they are interested. You have also set up a date and time on their turf (convenient!), and you phrase it so they can literally reply “yes” and that is all the work they need to do to respond.
Just like that you’ve set up a meeting and shown a concern for the time and effort of others.
Make it easy to respond whenever you can. It’s usually more often than you or I realize.
Scarcity mindset is essential to adopt when you consider your own time and attention. Defend them and let nothing steal them. They are not abundant. They are limited. Defend them!
Abundance mindset is the idea that there is lots of money, work, and opportunity for all. This is probably true. But it is not true with respect to your time and focus.
Any “opportunity” that might steal any level of focus from the important tasks in your life should be viewed with caution and the default answer should be “no” when responding to most requests.
Chasing instant gratification provides instant, but low-value pleasure. This low-value pleasure becomes more addictive, but the more of it you crave and the more of it you get, the less satisfying it becomes.
As the chase for low-value pleasure consumes your life it leaves you with no satisfaction with any important work you do. All the important stuff (that doesn’t have the same instant gratification) is suddenly boring and you don’t want to do it.
Your life loses meaning and balance. You sink into a depressive state as you meander around searching for meaning and deep happiness.
If you cut the dopamine-intensive instant gratifications out of your life (drugs, alcohol, video games, porn, eating lots of sugar, social media attention-seeking, etc…) those boring things suddenly become much more rewarding. In fact, you’ll find satisfaction in simply doing those meaningful things that you once thought were too boring.
Less pleasure is more fun. It’s certainly happier.
Speech and silence are brothers to action or inaction. Yet they work quite a bit differently.
If you are talking about it, you are probably not doing it. If you are doing it, you are past talking about it.
You usually regret the things you say and the things you don’t do.
You almost never regret being silent or taking action.
When it comes to speech, not doing it is usually better. When it comes to action, not doing it is usually worse.
When considering speech or silence, I remember that I rarely regret the times I was quiet or spoke less. It was when I said too much that I messed up/
When I think about action or inaction, I remember that I rarely regret jumping in a going for it. When I pulled the punch or was too afraid to jump right in then I would miss the opportunity and feel regret afterward.
“I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”
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.
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.
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.
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.