Stop worrying about greatness

We judge the greatness of a person by their peaks, not their averages.

Kobe Bryant averaged over 35 points per game in one year of his career, but also 13 points per game a few seasons later. However, he scored 81 points one night against Toronto and had 4 other games in which he scored 60+ points. He also captured five NBA titles over his career.

The peaks define him as a top-5 NBA player of all time. If he never got through moments of average play, greatness would not have been achieved. But I don’t think he was worried about being average or being great in those moments. He just went out and did the work.

The peaks came and the peaks defined the level of greatness.

Slave to the moment

The future is tricky. We are so quick to put off work from today onto a future date, but then we regret it when the future arrives. Credit cards get maxed out and it pinches to pay them back. We knew the future would come, but we almost didn’t believe it.

We also can look back on things we regret deeply. Many of those things we knew at the moment were not good or useful things, but we thought that the future would sort it out. The problem is, the future doesn’t sort it out, it just eventually places us in a bad way where we have no options remaining.

Imagine if we all had the respect for the future that we have for the moment. We wouldn’t write checks today that we can’t cash tomorrow. We would be more ruthless in our endeavors, but also more upright.

I think, also, we wouldn’t suffer as much.

Respect the future by taking care not to become a slave to the moment. The moment is never as big as you feel it is.

Why the experts are so inflexible (and why they get it wrong so often)

The more expertise we gain in our field of work, the less flexible we become. Experts tend to struggle when the rules change more than a beginner who has more recently entered the field.

When there is no historical precedent of something working, an expert will reject it far sooner than an open-minded novice will.

Novel ideas get rejected because of the discomfort associated with a new thing. It could fail, so why would I give up something that seems to work just fine now?

There are plenty of reasons to give up the good and reach for the great, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Expertise gives us blinders when we don’t temper our expertise with humility. Our humility enables us to strip away our assumptions and adopt a beginner’s mindset once again.

When we approach problems that require creative solutions, the unbounded mind is the one that is more able to think outside of the problem and find the best solution. Only after our child-like approach to the problem, ought we to put on our expert’s cap and apply our wealth of knowledge and experience to put that creative solution into action.

“Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.”
— Laurence Peter

The unknown side of perfectionism

Many of my posts have been about my own battle with perfectionism–the fear of creating new work that I think might not be as good as it could or should be.

One of the most tragic side effects of perfectionism is that it slows down your ability to create lots of pieces of artwork. You get stuck with a few ideas and spend years trying to “perfect” them. You end up getting nothing done.

We need to make lots of stuff to run into the good ideas, so when we slow that flow of ideas, we harm our potential.

Edison had more than 1,000 patents, yet most people only know him for the lightbulb. Einstein had more than 200 scientific papers published, yet people know him for relativity, being a symbol of intelligence, and his crazy hair.

To have good ideas, we must have lots of ideas. Do what it takes to allow your body to generate lots of ideas without allowing perfectionism to hold you back.

Prime the idea cannon!

Creative people aren’t magical. In fact, we’re all creative and we all have great ideas every once in a while.

The issue we have is that we all tend to be pretty terrible at judging what will be a great creative idea. In fact, in my line of business, I’m constantly trying to figure out what makes a good idea work and how exactly I can replicate great ideas.

The solution appears to be that nobody knows which ideas are good ideas, so if you simply pursue as many ideas as you can, you have a much greater likelihood that you’ll hit on some good ones.

In the battle between quality and quantity, I choose quantity. A high volume of stuff that is done at a 70-80% quality level.

I guess Napoleon was correct when he spoke of his artillery and said, “Quantity has a quality of its own.”

Don’t be defensive

It isn’t gospel, but it’s something I try to live by. Defensiveness is the mark of a person who thinks a little too highly of himself.

Be proactive and then humble about what you did by making others feel like you value their input and their ideas. Think of it as a sort of reverse know-it-all attitude.

Take this scenario: Your customer orders two tacos. One pork and one chicken with cilantro. You make both tacos and wrap them individually. Because, of course, some people hate cilantro (because it tastes like soap.)

Then the customer comes back to the counter as the order is nearly complete and asks that both tacos be wrapped separately.

You can respond by saying, “Oh yeah, I already did that.” That’s perfectly acceptable and nobody would mind it.

But I think that the best answer is to say, “No problem! I’ll make sure that happens.” –That’s right, even if you’ve already done it. The customer feels in control and that you’re listening. All you lose is the minuscule bit of ego-boosting that comes from letting them know that “you already got that taken care of.”

The devil is in the details, and I don’t know why I think about these things, but I clear the thoughts from my mind by writing them down.

Flexible routine

The grail I’m chasing is the regularity of a routine, but the flexibility of missing a day or two and not being thrown off altogether.

The past Saturday was an out-of-the-ordinary day and I miss three or four days of writing.

It stems from my Saturday evening being completely thrown off and not getting off to a hot start on Monday. My kids also got sick, which got me sick for Wednesday and part of Thursday.

It still seems like a bit too much of an aberration for a simple Saturday that was full of excitement.

I guess I’ll keep chasing that flexible routine and you can find me jumping back on the routine horse within 24-48 hours of being jostled loose.

No one tests the depth of a river with both feet

When you take risks in life or business, don’t take a risk for the sake of risk. Risk, itself, is not the thing that brings about success.

We must not be afraid to take a risk if we wish to be successful, but we must take a cautious risk and we must move with courage–but also with intelligence.

Just 30 Seconds

The hesitation we all feel before starting is usually the hardest part of the process. The drawing flows freely if we just start. The music flows forth from us if we’d just pick up the guitar. The run happens if we just get our shoes on.

To circumvent the hesitation associated with getting started, give yourself thirty seconds to do a menial task to jumpstart the work. I read about a guy named Bob McKim, who worked with the Design Program at Stanford University. His solution was to draw something in 30 seconds. Grab the pencil and GO. This chunk of 30 seconds doesn’t give you enough time to be overly critical or be paralyzed by the fear of starting.

You only have to draw for 30 seconds, but in that 30 seconds, you fall in love with drawing and this short time period is the spark that lights the candle.

Take 30 seconds and shut out the world. Take 30 seconds to do something small and jumpstart the important things.

Chasing success and avoiding risk

Imagine the child prodigy. Everyone tells them how special they are and everybody is envious of their advances. The child certainly sees this and, for some, it becomes the motivation to press on.

However, there appears to come a time when the desire for achievement advances beyond the quest for excellence.

The child prodigy then uses his extraordinary talents in boring or ordinary ways. They look for the safe roads of guaranteed success rather than a curious and creative pursuit that could be revolutionary but also has a high risk of failure.

It would appear that the pursuit of success rather than the pursuit of purity in the work you do leads to risk aversion and potentially wasted talent and potential.

The riskiest way to conduct yourself is by taking no risks.

Why you should be more unreasonable

 
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw
 

Maybe being the reasonable one isn’t always the best.

You can go fast or go far, not both

We can do things fast, or we can do them for a long time. Rarely can we go fast for a long time. Instead of thinking about how much you need to get done this week, think about how much you could get done over the next 30 days.

Think long rather than fast. You’ll get much more done over the next month, year, and decade thinking about “slow productivity” rather than crushing your life with 16-hour days of work.

Indeed the French proverb rings true: He who wishes to travel far spares his speed.

Goodbye, 2022

This post is a bit late because I don’t write blog posts on the weekend and because I didn’t do this on the 1st of the year.

As I have been doing for the past couple of years, I’m not going to do results-based goals. I’m going to focus on the process. Here are a few of the things I am targeting in the year of our Lord, 2023.

  • Create 10 videos each month for my YouTube channel.

  • Do a photoshoot with my family every six months.

  • Photograph and write about the mundane moments of life and specifically my children (not necessarily on this blog, though.)

  • Read 3x books each month.

  • Get out of debt entirely.

  • Launch a new training course.

  • Launch a line of merchandise for my YouTube channel.

  • Start sketching faces a few times a week again.

Hope you have a great 2023. I’m going to work my hardest to make this year different than the past three. They’ve been rough on the personal and business development fronts. But a new year holds new optimism. I just have to do the work.

Accurate feedback and unconditional love

One thing I question about the “self-esteem” generation is when we confuse accurate feedback with unconditional love. The thought seems to be, "If I give accurate feedback, I'm being mean."

To love and encourage a child is good (and necessary!) to build a thoughtful and confident person.

But the confusion about giving honest feedback ignores the fact that children can take loving (but honest) feedback and improve!

We must build our children’s confidence by guiding them to success that will work in the world outside of the home. Their peers will not have the same love their parents have.

Mistakes are opportunities to teach and learn. Accurate feedback along with encouragement is the way to do this.

I believe this to be the case with new students/novices as well as children.

When we tell the child that the work they did was great, when it was terrible, undercuts our credibility in all things we teach them. The moment they have the “ah-ha” moment that you always told them they were great at everything is the moment that they are suddenly and catastrophically deflated of all self-confidence they might have had.

Accurate feedback keeps your child grounded in reality and binds the confidence of the child and the trust they have in you with a strong bond.

Nobody cares about the “inside” muscles

We’re so caught up working out our muscles, that we don’t spend time strengthening the inside muscles. Call it our “sensory awareness” or self-perception. It’s an afterthought to most of us. Do you take the time to taste the food you eat, or look into the sky, or listen to what somebody it telling you without just thinking about what you want to say?

What if we slowed down and trained our senses?

Too often we look but don’t see. We listen but don’t hear. We touch but don’t feel. We eat but we don’t taste. We talk without thinking, and more.

By slowing down and observing more, we improve our senses, our mind, and our overall experience of life.

Trust the reader

You don’t need to spell everything out for your reader. The reader can apply the information you are presenting. They can apply it to the moment more specifically than you could anyway.

When the writer is afraid of offending or looking stupid, he writes too many words and appears desperate to not be yelled at (or tweeted at.)

Don’t add caveats and “I’m sorry” statements to your work. Be unapologetic and your work will be timeless. Trust the reader to interpret you as you intend.

Fishing for compliments

If you’re fishing for a compliment, are you allowed to say “thank you” when you get one? Or should you quickly return the compliment from whence it came?

I’ve noticed those who fish for compliments seem to be more concerned with hoarding praise, rather than spreading it around.

Suffering from our opinions

Are we willing to acknowledge our mistakes or even our weaknesses? Can we learn from those mistakes? Are we able to work on our weaknesses?

Imagine being an NFL team that is 10th best at offense, defense, and special teams, with some small tweaks, you can be a top-5 team. But if you’re not willing to acknowledge that you’re ONLY the 10th best, you won’t learn from your mistakes and you can’t improve them.

Adversity is an opportunity for growth. The greatest deception men suffer is often from their own opinions.

If you can’t see where you can improve, your opinion that everything is “good enough” will ensure that it never gets better than that.