I was up most of the night because my daughter was born overnight in the early hours of October 14th. We named her Collette Elizabeth. I don’t have much else to say. Words always fail me in moments like this and I’m envious of people who have the perfect things to say in times like these. She’s great and mom is great. I’m going to get some sleep.
Trap the problems of today within today
When you’re writing your to-do list for the day at 10:45pm you can probably chalk it up as a day that’s gone off the rails.
I usually write my daily blog post at 8am, but it’s 11:35pm right now and I’m writing what should have been written 15 hours ago.
Bad day in terms of productivity, but I see it and I’m feeling it, and it will not spread into tomorrow.
A slow day can’t be made up by working late into the right. That simply destroys the start of the next day and drags the problems of today into tomorrow.
Tell better stories and do more creative work with this trick
About ten years ago, I was close friends with a young guy who started a YouTube channel about tech. Every day he would find time to work on his channel and create content. He focused so much on getting better and the process of making his videos. He never cared about the numbers. Just the process and what he controlled. After a few years of grinding his audience grew incredibly and his business exploded. This caused him to become one of the most influential YouTubers in the tech and creative space and has allowed him to connect with an audience that loves him and loves his work.
This story is an exercise in story-writing with a form. Use forms for everything you can. They make things easy and they guide you when you feel lost.
The story guide I’ve stolen from Pixar writers goes like this: “Once upon a time, there was _________. Every day _________. One day, _________. Because of that, _________. Because of that _________. And because of that _________. Until finally _________.”
If you look, I used this form in the story at the top of this blog post.
I have guides, systems, and forms for email responses, social media content, video content, email newsletter ideas, and speeches or presentations I give. Guides aren’t cheating, they become your brand and they help you present your thoughts and ideas in clear, compelling, and professional ways. They also help smash creative block.
In upcoming blog posts, I hope to talk about some of the forms I use for content creation, logo design, photo shoot planning, and more of the creative work I do. Forms and systems are good!
95% is perfect
Trying to achieve 100% perfection is impossible. Trying to close the 3% gap from 95% to 98% takes as much effort as it took to get from 0% to 95%.
So the energy used to get to 98% is wasted energy that could have been used to create another 95% perfect product.
95% perfect IS perfect.
How to make money
Making money is pretty simple. You need to show up and do the job. Even if you’re not particularly good at it, you’ll make money and you’ll get better at it. You just have to show up. For you, for your family, for whatever your purpose is, you have to show up. That’s how you make money.
How to control pressure and be more creative
Pressure is the force that strangles many creative efforts before they ever get off the ground. The anxiety-inducing deadline and the tightness you feel in your chest. Sometimes it tingles, and sometimes it just flat-out hurts.
The most creative ideas and insights come when the pressure is gone and when you can trust your ability to come up with ideas and just fall into that beautiful comfort of creative confidence.
So how can we remove pressure? One of my favorite ways is by setting unrealistic expectations.
Imagine having a client that expects three logo concepts in the next week. That might sound scary. But then you decide to deliver 20 logo concepts. That is pretty much impossible, but the ridiculous nature of the goal means that you free yourself of the expectations and give yourself a bubble of freedom in which you have the capability of being much more brilliantly creative.
Insane expectations that you can’t possibly achieve make it easier to get the work done. Halfway to impossible is a really good place to be.
Sick today
Well, I’m feeling pretty sick today so I’m mailing in this blog post. It wouldn’t be a problem if I had a backlog of a few blog posts for when things like this happen. However, the goal of these posts is to have me write something every day, not just get a blog post up.
It’s boring and devoid of value, but it has me writing a few sentences before I lay back down, so that is a success. Hoping to feel better tomorrow.
This one cruel trick of nature
The more we give a human, the less happy they seem to be. This is, of course, a vast general statement that I have no way of proving, but I think most of us understand the type.
I believe that the misery that comes with abundance is because as we acquire more material stuff, our desire for more grows in proportion to our acquisitions.
However, the cruel trick of the geocentric world is that as we get more stuff, the pleasure we derive from that stuff diminishes.
Part of deep happiness comes from the ability to enjoy less and thrive where there is a lack. That contentment steadies an uneasy ship and quells the boisterous waves of misery. Be content, my friends.
Scholars and warriors
Read something interesting the other day.
"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
I think the lesson is that it is vital for everyone’s good if you have skin in the game. If you spent all your time thinking, you can be brilliant in your own mind because your ideas never get tested by reality. If you thrash about without thinking, you’re an overly zealous idiot.
Be thoughtful, but make sure you have skin in the game if you expect people and society to take you seriously.
Consistency is better than intensity
Consistency is far more important than intensity. Intensity is the fast burn. It’s fun when we have the intensity, but when our energy fades, the season of drought is painful.
Imagine for a moment that you have a very intense day and you get 100% of your planned work done. Then you have a letdown and only get 5% of your desired work done for the remaining five days of that week. That is a completion rate of 20.83%. You’ve left nearly 80% of your work undone.
Now imagine that you have a casual and consistent series of days where you only get 50% of your desired work done, but you can maintain that pace for six days. Obviously, this means you get 50% of your weekly work finished.
Intensity is fun when it’s happening, but it’s all-or-nothing and it’s very exhausting. Consistency requires self-discipline, but you end up having easier days of work that result in much more productive weeks.
Spoiler: by targeting consistency, you also end up developing discipline and stamina. We can develop the skills to complete 80-100% of our desired work.
Consistency is better than intensity.
We have lots of average
We need to be honest and we need to put forth a good effort. Those are the minimum requirements.
It’s nice to continually find ways to improve your processes and your skill set.
It’s a bonus if you can have fun while doing all of that.
So we have the needs, the nice-to-haves, and the bonus of making it enjoyable.
To merely survive, you have to be honest and put forth a good effort. That’s an average life, making average things, having an average impact. For most of us, that’s the most we’ll ever do.
The world has lots of average, so if you want to be noticed, you’ve got to be special and you have to work to make yourself a master of something. Make the task of finding ways to improve as important as putting forth a good effort and being honest. That is the way to get noticed and build an above-average organization that makes a special impact.
What are your systems and how do you get things done?
What are your systems? The processes you do every day? Things like making your breakfast, stretching, showering, teeth-brushing routine, going for a walk, and how you organize your day. These are all personal systems.
Your business has them, too. How you plan projects, how you develop content for social media, how you keep in contact with clients, how you tackle problems, pay the bills, and handle the different tasks required.
We do the things we do in a certain way and the way we do these things is the “system” we’ve adopted to tackle those tasks.
Refining your systems and developing better ways to do things is one of the best and fastest ways to be more productive and less stressed out about your work. Refining your systems is the classic example of working “on” your business, not “in” your business.
Do you want to improve? Observe your current systems and find ways to make them better.
Make bad things and refine them
Step one is to make something that you know isn't very good. Step two is to turn that bad thing into an imperfect thing. Step three is to make that thing a little less imperfect. And step four is to make that imperfect thing pretty good.
That is the fastest and most sustainable way to make things. Make junk and refine it over the course of several passes. All of the sudden, you’ll have something that’s really quite good.
Do the difficult things
Do the hard things and life becomes easy. Do only the easy things and life becomes hard. Be the agent of action and don’t wait for life to happen to you.
Get good results by not caring about the results
Do what’s right. Do good. Be honest. Expect the best results. Focus on hard work and a good process rather than the result. When the result is the goal, everything can be sacrificed to get to that end. When the result is all that matters, expect bad results.
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.