You can’t start yesterday. You won’t start tomorrow. Start now.
Regret about yesterday will choke your stability today. Worrying about tomorrow will strangle your creativity. Forget yesterday’s failures and don’t plan too much for tomorrow.
Loose planning is good and starting right now is perfect.
Don’t just do the hard work. Do the right work.
Shut off the distractions and spend quiet time thinking and identifying the important work. Then break down the wall and start doing work and building momentum. Do the right work, the important work.
Whatever you be, be good at it. The best of the best in most fields of work get the largest rewards for being the best.
Growth in your business, finance, and personal gratification is not linear when you develop valuable skills. It is exponential. As you get better and better and move into the top 1% of skilled people in your position, your salary should be doubling, tripling, and more!
This is why we should not ignore marginal gains. Getting a little bit better here and there will equate to edges we develop in our skills and getting a tiny bit better in ten places, makes us 100x more valuable. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a genuine statement. It might equate to more than 100x the value depending on the work you do.
Focus on getting good, even in the small details.
I heard a baseball player talk about how to make it in the big leagues. He said that the most important thing was being able to manage failure. Because baseball is a game of failure.
I don’t understand why baseball gets called a game of failure, every game is a game of failure. You’re probably going to lose a bunch, most of your shots don’t go in, and most of your work is usually for naught.
The same is true for creative work. 70% of your art is not that good. It simply isn’t. 20% of your art is pretty good. 10% of it is amazing.
So how do we, as artists, designers, and photographers manage our failure to ensure we keep moving forward and doing good work? We had better be prepared for 70% of our stuff to fail because if we give up when half of our work is failing, we’re going to miss out on the really amazing work that we’re capable of.
Manage expectations, manage failure, and embed yourself in the process.
The renowned Greek historian, Polybius has a great quote about learning from history versus learning from your own experience. Sure you learn from both, but having the humility to learn from history sure makes life much more peaceful.
"There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others; the former is the more unmistakable, the latter the less painful... For it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment, and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs." –Polybius
I ask myself this simple question each day before I begin work. I like to take a walk for 20-30 minutes and mull over in my head what tasks will make the day a successful day and have me feeling satisfied when I lay down for sleep, knowing that I did my best.
I begin the night before and ask “what makes tomorrow a win?” I list three or four important tasks that I must get finished the next day. To this is added the more mundane shallow work that needs to be done to keep the lights on, but it’s the work that moves my business forward.
Having a short and simple road map for each day of what makes the day a win helps you know what you should be doing when you work, when you’re finished with work, and the satisfaction that you had a great day of work.
When you begin to do something that you’ve never done before, where do you start?
I’m working on putting together a series of books I would like my children to read over their 12 years in school in order to encapsulate a wide swath of world history. I’ve never done this before and I don’t want to follow a simple school’s curriculum. I want my kids to learn about the kings of the Assyrian Empire and the Jewish revolts of the century following the crucifixion of Christ. I want them to know the rulers of the Roman Republic and the difference between the Republic and the Empire. What was going on in China and the east during these years? How does it tie together? What about the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire and how those empires were altered by WWI? Alexander the Great, Captain Cook, Development of Islam, The Zagwe Dynasty, The French Revolution, The Spanish American War, The Moon Landing, Watergate, 9/11, etc…
There are so many incredible historical characters and events and they all seem to have some fascinating connection with each other. I almost think a school cannot possibly cover it all!
But I want to build a reading list that can introduce my kids to these things and create a good timeline in their minds of the history of the world.
So how do I begin? How do you build a house if you have no idea how to build the walls?
I think the answer is you build without concern for being efficient. You build an igloo. Pile stuff up and cut away the unneeded things.
To build this reading list for my kids, I need to build timelines and plot events and characters and movements throughout the history of the world and try to decide what I think is most important and most interesting. I'm looking forward to the task.
After this, I want to find important literature that I'd like them to read as well. They might hate me for this during their schooling years, but hopefully, they'll appreciate it later in life.
When I have a really bad day of work or when I know I did not put forth the effort I could have, it’s hard to shut down for the evening. Sometimes it's hard to go to sleep.
There is a rotten type of feeling on the inside. In my heart of hearts, I know that I didn’t work to the best of my abilities that day.
If I have several of those bad days in a week, it’s hard for me to let the week go, to move on, and just go to sleep on a Saturday night to close out my week.
It’s a strange feeling of disappointment in my effort and dedication mixed together with a feeling of not deserving to be able to “shut it off” or move on to next week.
Maybe it’s considered unhealthy to have that attitude, but it’s just how it’s always been for me. I’ve tried to us it to my advantage by reminding myself of how terrible it feels to have a lackluster effort.
I’m just writing this as a reminder for myself as I begin a very important week of work. Putting forth a dedicated and genuine effort feels incredible. To me, it's better than my best vacation, my most viewed video, or the largest check I’ve ever cashed. Satisfaction from a genuine effort is unmatched.
I just noticed that the phrase “Don’t quit” begins and ends with “Do it.” I like things like that.
The beauty of your design buys you credibility in the mind of a new viewer. If you’re the most talented scientist in the world, but you’re missing one of your front teeth, it’s going to take an incredible amount of effort before people take you seriously.
Along the same lines, if you’re starting a new business, and you don’t have a beautiful brand, website, photography, and emails, it’s going to be much more difficult to establish trust and credibility with your customers. It will also take much, much longer.
This is a great advantage to beautiful and aesthetically-pleasing interfaces, logos, photos, and all designs.
There is also the usability of an interface and effectiveness of a design to communicate the idea that needs to be shared with the customer.
Any of us can start a pizza business. The pizza must be excellent. But none of your new customers will trust that the pizza will be good if the presentation is garbage.
The best pizza on earth would taste worse if it was served in a black plastic bag rather than a beautifully designed box. Your beautiful design work will open new customers that good pizza that they would never have bothered to try otherwise.
There are many things that motivate people toward some end goal. I divide these motivations into two categories: the physical and the spiritual.
A physical motivating factor would be doing what you do to “prove the haters wrong.” Or maybe you dream of being a millionaire. Maybe you want to buy that expensive car, or a big house, or impress a beautiful girl.
The problem with physical motivation is that it only lasts until you achieve that goal, or until you completely burn out. This is the kind of burnout where people typically tell themselves that it was never possible to be successful and they generally give up on most ambition in their life.
Physical motivation sets out to achieve a specific end, but it can’t and it has no staying power.
A spiritually motivating factor would be something like “it’s my duty to get up and work every day.” Or “I must use the gifts (life, health, strength, etc…) to leave the world a better place than I found it.” Or “I need to harness my energy and focus to complete important work because doing important work is an objectively good endeavor.”
Spiritual motivators do not set out to achieve any level of success. You are motivated not by the end result, but by the effort generated before any material success or failure happens. Because of this, it is sustainable and it brings far greater success and more general happiness with the work you do.
To elevate our desires beyond the materials of the world and into a place that is larger than you or me, we find that our material success is more an accident of the self-sacrifice we feel compelled to make because of some higher moral principle.
I procrastinate very often. It’s the number one thing I am constantly working on improving. If I could cut my procrastination in half, I am certain my productivity would go up ten-fold.
I don’t know if the distractions that fill the time I procrastinate come first, or if the desire to not do the important work comes first, and then distractions just fill that time.
It’s all still strange to me. Procrastination has been the plague of my thirties. I used to be much more focused. That’s what leads to believe some fear of failure or not living up to expectations I’ve put on myself have led me to close off much more than I should and in that new, empty space, I run into distractions that fill the time.
The problem is that one day I will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things I’ve always wanted to do and fulfill the dreams and goals I have had. So I must get to work now and use the moments of time I’ve been given.
Young artists all seem to be trying to “find their voice.” It’s a way of saying that they still don’t exactly know what their “style” is.
It’s important to have a style and be recognizable. The problem is that you can’t merely go out and “find your style.”
Your style comes to you over time and as you work. You create and you find what you love and lots of things you might not even realize start to appear in your work. Things you would have never set out to create. Those elements become “your style.”
The fastest way to get there is to find work that you love and copy it a million times. Maybe less than one million times, but you get the point.
Copy work you love. It’s a fun and creative way to trick yourself into practicing and making new art.
The process of making new art is the process you need to find your style. It will come. Just work. Don’t rush and don’t worry.
“Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself. –Yohji Yamamoto
It’s easy to get lost in a bubble and tell ourselves that everything will work itself out. We become scared to examine the feedback in our lives. That’s the road of slow decline toward a total collapse.
The total collapse is hastened because of the fear of facing the reality of the feedback or data we get.
Don’t run from the numbers. Don’t run from the feedback.
Look at your bank accounts. Look at the numbers. Look at the analytics no matter how uncomfortable they are at any moment. Seek out the data. It’s your friend. It should motivate you toward your goals.
When we have the data or the feedback, we can make a plan and do the work that matters to eliminate stress from our life.
The crazy thing is that the feedback, the numbers, and the emails are virtually never as bad as we imagine them to be. We build monsters from shadows.
Julius Caesar has a quote: “As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men’s minds more seriously than what they see.”
The single greatest source of anxiety in my life is reading my emails. I'd have nightmares about running into a problem that would derail a day of work. But if I don't check my email, it nags at me all day like a constant squeezing pressure. Sometimes I go all week without checking my email and the pressure becomes incredible.
Personally, I’m working on genuinely believing what Caesar said. Because frankly, never (even a single time) has it been as bad as I imagined it to be.
I should probably go check my email now.
If we only look at the short-term, we use up everything we have and get rid of the reserve or the buffer. The buffer is there for moments of difficulty and high demand. An extra $25,000 in the bank makes difficult times easier. But if I spend the $25k on a new car, the difficult times are downright terrible.
Build yourself a buffer, not just in money, but in all things. That way you have a reserve into which you can dip during difficult times.
The buffer creates a bubble of space in which you can breathe and operate to stabilize the situation. Without the buffer, your hair would be on fire.
A buffer of pre-written blog posts is what I should have had to prevent a five-day lapse in posting here on the blog. But I write these every day so these things happen.
“Kids says the darnedest things.” That’s the saying. But why is that the saying. Why don’t kids just do the safe boring thing? They’re incredibly vulnerable and tender creatures. They also have not yet built the hardened bumpers on every facet of life like we have as we grow up.
When kids say the darnedest things, they’re really saying extremely creative things that we just haven’t thought of because our mature bumpers constrain us and keep our thinking “inside the box.”
Kids don’t have the same boundaries that we have. And they tend to be more creative and imaginative with their ideas. Interesting to observe.
So what if we could suspend the constrains we assume? Maybe not forever. The bills do need to be paid. But what if we could set them aside for chunks of time that we dedicate toward deep thinking and creative ideas? Maybe things we once couldn’t solve would become easier. Maybe our creative work would become more creative? What if we could act like we were three again?
Habits are funny. Routines are more funny. I’ve been writing a blog post for six days each week for almost four years at this point.
Yet this blog post is late. I didn’t write for several days last week because I was finishing the final bits of work in my studio/office space and simply did not write.
Now, having finished that, I have been badly inconsistent with writing everyday, going for my morning walk, and doing my daily workout.
I’ll pull it back together, but it sure would be nice if habits and routines just automatically clicked back into place when you take a week off.
Building comfort with boredom equals building one’s ability to focus. If you can build your ability to focus, you build your ability to do deep work. Deep work is the important work that moves you toward the goals you have in life. Checking email is not deep work. Deep work is building and creating art (whatever your art is.)
But it all begins with building comfort with being bored. Can we stand in line without looking at our phones? Can we sit and think or dream rather than scroll on TikTok? Or are we so uncomfortable being bored that we can’t resist “scratching the itch?”
Yikes. I talked about 5 minutes of silence and then I disappear for five days. I had to finish some renovation on my studio and recording space to get things back to normal for a solid week of work this week. So I’m back now, but I probably could have and should have tried to get some kind of posts up here in the meanwhile.
My excuse is that I was SO dedicated to getting the work done in my space that I simply spent 16 hours a day until it was finished.
Have you ever tried to put your phone in a different room and sit still with closed eyes for five minutes? Just sit there and stare at a black wall, or something. No talking and no exerting the mind. Just letting the mind go off and dream and think.
It’s not meditation, but maybe it’s a way to get closer to being in a peaceful or meditative state. It’s moments like this that I get some of my best ideas. And yet it’s still difficult to rationalize to myself why I should just stop everything for a few minutes and be quiet (with my mouth and my mind.)
I’ve found it to be a useful exercise.