One trait I try to avoid

There is one trait that I try to avoid in myself and when I hire people to work for me. This is the demeaning of other people or organizations that they’ve previously worked for.

We show our own character when we describe others. Whether they’re people or companies.

When a man has had problems with all of his previous employees or all six companies he’s worked for in the past, the problem might not be the company or the other people. It’s probably the guy.

If we speak well of those who aren’t around to defend themselves, we show confidence, competence, and responsibility.

Also, people will take your complaint more seriously when you’re not complaining all the time.

Hold back less, do more.

The mistakes we regret are the things we didn’t do, not the things we did.

Inaction, when we’re afraid, is easy at the moment, but it’s what we regret most later on.

Action now is difficult, but we regret that much less later on.

If we could do the past over, most of us would hold back less and do more.

The stress of success

It’s easy to miss the difficult parts of success. Success seems great to all of us. If you have that success, you have nothing to be upset about anymore… right? Wrong!

When you start becoming successful, you have more to lose when you fail than if you have no success at all. This becomes a major stressor.

Falling from failure to total failure is bad, but it’s much worse to fall from semi-successful to failure. Hence we see why some people can’t handle the pressure that comes with success.

We're usually more fixated on the potential for a small failure and we completely ignore the potential for the same action having incredible success.

We must develop the courage to continue operating freely and recklessly even when we wear the heavy jacket of success.

Risk and mistakes

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually afraid to make one. The greatest risk you can make in life is being afraid to take risks.

Exposure breeds comfort

If you’re going to create content, how much content can you create before you over-expose yourself to the world and people start to hate you/your work?

Over the past ten years, I have always assumed that if I create too much, people will get sick of watching my videos. This is true, however, we need to understand how much is “too much?”

This mindset has caused me to pull punches and hold back from creating as much as I should.

We probably only create about 5% of what we would need to before people get sick of our content. Most people don’t create enough because we all see the people who create way too much and we assume that everybody does that.

Spoiler: Most people don’t. Most people hold back.

We should be creating 10-20x what we are if we want to create an impact.

In fact, the more you create and the more familiar people become with your work, the more they like it. People enjoy your artwork, content, or videos more, the more they see it. That is unless you over-share.

Share more, not less. You probably won’t over-share if you’re a person who has concerns about over-sharing.

Earned respect and better influence

It was Albert Einstein who stated, “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” So how can I get people to listen to my ideas when they aren’t status quo?

I believe the answer to be that we must build respect by doing the quiet work that delivers value.

When we try to influence the room but lack the respect of those in it, we are viewed as difficult, self-serving, and generally annoying.

That respect, that status, cannot be given. It is earned. Like all real respect, you can have to merit it.

Work hard, over-deliver, and the rest comes with it. Influence, respect, and a certain amount of power to change systems and voice opinions that otherwise would have been ridiculed or fallen on deaf ears.

Sadly, too often, we skip the hard work part and demand respect, preferment, and influence. Your idea is probably good, but if you don't have the respect of the room, it simply doesn’t work.

The armor is heavy

In the mid-1150s Emperor Frederick I conducted a military campaign to subdue much of northern Italy. He laid siege to one of the wealthy cities. In this city was a young nobleman known to be boastful and full of himself. The young man gathered his arms and armor and rushed out the gate to fight.

As he did this, he yelled at the other young men to hurry up and suggested that their “slow pace indicated that they were afraid to fight.” He boasted that he would go and confront the enemy himself.

He raced along with his horse the miles toward the enemy. While riding, he encountered some fellow soldiers who had been wounded and were retreating. After seeing them, he slowed the horse's pace considerably.

A few moments later, he could hear the noise of the battle and saw it from afar the fighting. At this, he brought his horse to a complete stop.

People afterward asked him why he did not participate in the battle after so much talk. He responded that he did not feel so stout or courageous when he wore the armor. The weight of the armor prevented him from engaging.

We can all talk the talk, but the armor is heavy when you get out there to do it.

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.