Patience will defeat all enemies

Very often, patience is the correct answer. Put your head down and work at a sustainable pace. Don’t rush too fast and burn out. Well, you can take the risk and rush, but if you burn out and everything blows up, at least you’ll know why.

Working at a slowly productive pace is a highly productive pace. When things aren’t going your way, keep working. Consistently and unflinchingly. Like a piston that slowly presses until it completes the job.

Opportunity comes to us all, but it must find you working. So work and focus on a sustainable pace that makes life enjoyable and your work incredible.

Creativity is the enemy of habit

The act of creativity comes in direct conflict with the act of habit. When the habit is done well, it’s almost automatic. It makes habits extremely powerful. The habitual life is a stable, peaceful, and productive life. But it’s also a very predictable and boring life. That’s not a bad trade-off if you don’t mind those attributes.

For the artists of the world, the thought of being boring and predictable is a thought almost too painful to bear. However, without stability and productiveness, your creativity will hardly matter (at least, while you’re alive.)

Creativity involves the flexibility of stepping outside of your habits and thinking outside of preconceived notions. But these systems are what give us all great stability in life and community. It’s one reason that the artist is often viewed as a rascal or a renegade. It’s also why so many great artists have such unstable and boisterous lives.

Creativity is the tool that can solve any problem. It is the source of originality in the world.

The difficult balance for the working creative is implementing enough habits to give your life stability while preserving enough free creativeness to be interesting and make interesting things. I’m still working on how to strike that balance myself.

The virtues of boredom

Boredom gives you time to think. Boredom gives you time to meditate and turn ideas over in your mind. Boredom allows you to achieve more creative ideas.

We’ve become uncomfortable with being bored. You sit and wait for a haircut. You pull out your phone and stare at anything to fill those minutes with mindless filler. You go for a walk, but you can’t leave the earbuds at home.

The background noise must be piped in, otherwise, you might have an interesting thought drift through your mind. Or worse, you might begin to examine your life and the processes you use. It’s surely better to be distracted by TikTok videos that you’ll forget by bedtime.

My suggestion is: don’t stare at your phone every time you have downtime. Embrace the boredom and dwell on your thoughts. Running from thoughts, no matter how scary, is never good. You’ll spend your whole life running from them and miss out on living a better and deeper life.

Great ideas come to you in the shower. But not after you install that waterproof speaker. The shower is one place where we’re forced to drop the distractions and we have the most creative insight and deep thinking as a result.

Small fears breed big fears

Avoiding what we fear is the gateway drug to being afraid and anxious about more things. If you allow yourself to avoid some job, interview, opportunity, or interaction because you’re afraid, you’ll soon find yourself afraid of many more things.

Every imagination will become a bogeyman and you’ll self-destruct under the weight of your anxiety. It’s been a large part of my slowness in regaining my form on YouTube and making the videos and educational content that I love. I gave in to some of my fears years ago and it’s led to the past three very difficult years of work for me personally.

But I am no longer afraid and I force myself to confront everything I fear. I should fear none of it and I have no right to fear any of it.

The small fears are my particular focus because they turn into big fears. If I overcome small fears, I will overcome the bigger fears.

It doesn’t matter if I don’t want to do the work. That’s exactly the reason why I must do the work. Fear must be rooted out–especially when it’s utterly irrational.

Envying the hard work of other people (and things?)

Sometimes I see other people going about their business and getting things done. It could be a president or a cashier at the grocery store. Most of them probably hate their job, but I can’t help but feel some envy about their productivity. They show up and they get some stuff done. Simple, but consistent. I am trying to be simple, consistent, and steady.

I’m not there yet, but I will be soon.

There is a funny (or maybe strange) thing I notice about myself when I’m having an unproductive day. I can be so obsessive about seeing other people working, that I will catch myself staring at inanimate objects, like a gutter’s downspout during a rainstorm, and admiring that it simply does its job. There’s no distraction, no extra movement, no excuses, it just does its job. It’s difficult not to laugh at myself, but I do these things sometimes.

Simple, yet consistent and reliable. I want to be more like that. Like a gutter.

Loose planning and starting now!

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.

Do the right work

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.

Get good. It’s worth it.

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.

Manage failure like an artist

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 ability to learn from history makes it less painful

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

What makes today a win?

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.

How do you build a roof without walls?

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.

Satisfaction from a genuine effort is unmatched

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.

Do it

I just noticed that the phrase “Don’t quit” begins and ends with “Do it.” I like things like that.

An important fact of beautiful design (or photography!)

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.

Physical motivation is not enough

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.

Chicken or the egg? Procrastination or the distraction?

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.

Steal what you love

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

Running from the truth, the data, and the numbers

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.