Step into the unknown and embrace the challenge of uncertainty

Too often we set our sights on the end result and ignore the next steps. When the end result is far away, we can feel overwhelmed and simply never get started.

I think this is particularly true when we want to learn new things. We think it will take so long to learn and acquire new skills, so we simply stop learning new things or taking on new challenges.

When the end result is far away, stop trying to look at it. Focus on taking some kind of step toward your desired result. Just one step each day. If you focus on taking one step every day you will reach that far-off result that had looked so far away.

The years of work that scare you away from getting started are going to go by whether you use them to work toward that goal or not. Might as well work toward the big goal you have.

Recovering from failure(s)

Recovery is as important as it is difficult. I’m not talking about recovery from a workout (though, that is important and difficult, too.)

I’m talking about recovery from a failure. You put in so much work and the project flopped, or the client rejected your work, or your proposal was shut down by the bosses.

The great ones don’t blame or shift focus. There is always something you could have done differently that might have dramatically affected the outcome.

Every competitive person must have an ego and an understanding of his own value and skill. This makes the losses even more difficult to take. Failures are a real-world repudiation of your heightened sense of importance and a reminder that you must get even better.

To recover from failures, we must learn to put them out of mind. The best way to put them out of mind is by learning from them.

Learn to forget the failure, but not before you re-examine why you lost and how you lost. The great ones are able to humble themselves and learn before re-establishing the confidence that makes them so great.

Accept the failure as your own. Learn from the failure by examining it. Forget the failure altogether. There is no failure where a failure is turned into a learning experience.

I do not lose. Either I win, or I learn.

I Guess I've Been Married For Awhile

The other day was my 8th wedding anniversary. That’s almost 3,000 days. I also primarily work from home. Many, many hours spent together with my wife and yet we still love one another. She’s helped me be a husband and has done her part to make me a father, too. Here’s a photo I love from our wedding. Words are inadequate to describe how thankful I am for you and what you do for me and the kids. I love you, Melanie.

Machines don’t ask the right questions

With enough practice, anyone can become good at anything. Knowing how and when to apply the basic principles will make you good at any artistic or technical endeavor. Knowing when to violate those principles is what will make you great.

This is part of the difficulty with machine learning, at least in the year 2023. It is easy to make machines that follow strict rules and parameters to mimic humans stiffly and robotically. But there is no understanding of context or nuance, so the performance is pretty bad.

Now we have machine deep learning and neural networks. These are a series of layers that process data and spit out an answer that it believes to be correct. It then compares its answer to what is true and re-processes the data backward to correct itself and make future processes more accurate.

This is how Google Translate can look at a hand-written sign in a foreign language and translate it on your phone. The "artificial intelligence" has been trained enough to understand the rough shapes of letters and return a translation that is (usually) very accurate.

Machines are great at answering questions, but they still don’t know the right ones to ask–unless a human gives them that data. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, there is a world where machine intelligence has advanced to identify and understand the context better.

If I am ever to understand artificial intelligence fully, I might just need a computer to help. 😅

The courage to learn and adapt

The weight of any success we have had tends to harden us in our approach to new problems. This would be great if the world never changed or if circumstances remained the same in every event of our lives.

We know that is not the case, however. Thus, when our past success hardens us in a mode of operating and we’re closed off to new ideas or methods for getting things done, we “get stuck in the past.”

The 60-year-old former drill sergeant had success screaming to get things done. If he doesn’t accept the circumstances which made the screaming and threats both acceptable and effective, he’ll be doomed to a life of people seeing him as a violent or unsettled person.

The same can be said for the 60-year-old marketing executive. The tactics and methodology of the 1990s may have given him success, but he was perfect for the 1990s. The question becomes, will he adapt to the new Information Age and the way people purchase things today?

The lesson for each one of us is that we must take great care not to let our past success harden us and thicken our willingness to adapt to an ever-changing marketplace. We should be open to seeing the need to change and then courageous enough to do something that we might be unsure will work at all (after all, nobody had success with social media marketing in the 1990s–because nobody had social media.)

The courage to learn and the courage to do what we haven’t done before. This will become my generation’s greatest marker of future success.

The lifecycle of accepting new tech

The adoption of new tech is a funny cycle.

1. We start out skeptical.

2. We become fearful.

3. We become reluctant users.

4. We become proficient users.

5. Finally, we come to rely on the very thing that we feared.

To be skeptical of something new makes sense to me, but I don’t always understand the need for the doomsday-like predictions that seem so prevalent with so much new tech (i.e artificial intelligence could take over the world and who knows what could happen!)

Before we know it, we will have it harnessed and we will be using it to our great advantage.

Catering to our comfort

I have a theory that, when left undisturbed, humans immediately begin to slide toward an undisciplined and self-indulgent lifestyle. I don’t have any science to back up the claim and maybe it’s just an indication of what I know about myself deep down inside.

When we cater to our desires for an easy life, we elevate comfort and short-term success above our larger goals–delivering greater value to our clients, creating artwork that has an impact beyond our bank account, and taking the time to develop and acquire rare and valuable skills.

No matter what we’re doing or how much money we are making, we should be constantly competing with ourselves and creating challenges that force us to extend our capabilities and deepen our skill sets.

Competing with ourselves will keep our motivation alive, prevent us from doubting our worth, and ultimately improve our lives.

The case for daydreaming

The human mind wanders. Whether we’re doing what we love, or suffering the agony of trying to pass the time, our minds wander into an unfocused haze.

This unfocused haze contains all kinds of wonderful things that we all too often miss in our haste to get back to work.

However, this wandering focus is both a weakness and a strength of the human mind. Often these moments of wandering thought return nothing. Sometimes they return terrible ideas. But sometimes they provide us with moments of brilliant creative insight that seem to come to us with spontaneous unpredictability.

To paraphrase the brilliant Latvian Chess Grandmaster, Mikhail Tal, very often it’s better to follow the intuition that springs into your mind after deep thought and contemplation rather than carefully considering every possible condition that may arise.

To take more interesting pictures, we need to become more interesting people. This allows us to have more productive sessions of unfocused contemplation. In these moments, there will spring forth brilliant ideas that will inform your art.

To the outsider, you might appear brilliant. But it wasn’t deep thought that gave you the idea, it was your ability to give up searching for the right decision and spend time in the hazy unfocused world that we drift into every so often.

The great artist can relax and fall into this state of creative insight from which he extracts brilliance.

Getting there and staying there

With success comes responsibility and tremendous pressure to be even more successful.

Some people are incredible challengers and then terrible champions.

The drive to get somewhere or conquer some goal is much different from the challenge of staying on top.

If you’re great at building, start working on getting better at sustaining, too. Both driving and sustaining is the goal.

Don’t focus on your strengths

The willingness to keep trying new things, even when you are an expert, is what separates the good from the great. It showcases your humility and your ability to cope with uncomfortable things. The ability to cope with the uncomfortable will transform you from bad to good and good to great in any endeavor in life.

Focusing on what you’re best at is needed for optimizing your performance, but improving what you’re weak at will lift all aspects of your work and life. It’s easier to go from 20% to 80% competent than to get from 80% to 98% competent. Improving what we’re bad at will have a massive payoff much faster.

Greatness comes when we eliminate weaknesses, not accentuate strengths.

When things are going well, it’s hard to leave your comfort zone. Outside of the comfort zone is where growth happens. Growth in the weak areas will lead to greatness.

Strike while the iron is hot

Don’t burn your opportunities in exchange for temporary comfort. Instead, we must be willing to make sacrifices and tolerate some discomfort in the short term.

When we choose to procrastinate or avoid difficult tasks, we may experience a momentary sense of relief, but ultimately we are sacrificing our opportunities for growth and success. There is little deep satisfaction from the distractions that keep us from working hard on the opportunities that we have.

Instead of seeking temporary comfort, we should focus on the long-term benefits of hard work and perseverance. We all probably know this. The key is analyzing our behavior to find the weak spots, then building barriers to help keep us from those fears and distractions, and finally, we ought to slowly build habits that push us to a more structured and disciplined lifestyle. (Hint: Achieving productivity is behavioral, not a product of circumstance.)

By staying disciplined and committed to our goals, we can avoid burning opportunities and achieve better productivity.

Minimal Efforts vs. Max Effort

There is work for everybody in the world. Everybody can make money and build a living. No matter how much effort you choose to put forth, you can make something.

The question is, how great do you want to be?

If you’re comfortable living a quiet and forgettable life, you can skate through life with minimal effort. Doable, easy, but forgettable.

If you put in the work, take the notes, and really commit to deep learning and deeply working on specific things, you take the more difficult road.

That road takes you to a place of impact and influence. You are rewarded for your hard work and practice with prestige, freedom, and money (among other things.)

I am convinced that virtually anybody can become great at something they do. Most people can become so good at what they do that they might be one of the best in the entire country.

Far more people choose the path that requires minimal effort. With minimal effort comes minimal pressure. That’s momentarily comfortable.

With maximum effort is difficulty and challenge, but the rewards are greater than you would ever imagine.

The max effort puts our own happiness on the back burner temporarily for the hope of long-term payoff. The satisfaction of knowing you’ve performed your best and had a major impact is a greater satisfaction than momentary personal pleasure.

Making my daily nightmare

Be motivated by your dream of the future, and be invigorated to start by the nightmare of today.

The great ones find the doubters and the haters and generate their own “daily nightmare” to fuel their dream for the future.

When your commitment wavers or when doubt creeps in or when you start feeling tired or stressed out, don’t look to the future. Look at where you’ve come from and how much you have done already. Think about today’s nightmare and the beauty of tomorrow when you pressed on and finished the job.

When we feel strong and committed, then we must look to the future. Let us be filled with inspiration and aspiration when we look at the gap between where we stand and where we want to be.

Can you see the beauty?

“Some people could be given an entire field of roses and only see the thorns in it. Others could be given a single weed and only see the wildflower in it.”

— Amy Weatherly

The power of negative thinking

The big weakness of positive thinking is that it often blinds us to the pitfalls that we might face. We rush in brimming with confidence and when the first thing goes wrong, we don’t know how to react.

The power of negative thinking is that we work all this out in our heads. We’ve already embarrassed ourselves by tripping over our words and we’ve faced the calamity of absolute failure… in our own minds.

Then when we hit the stage and it’s time to get to work, we can better face the challenges and difficulties of doing work in the real world.

Our negative thinking must not stop us from starting, but it should be the motivator for better preparation. In that way, negative thinking and doubting yourself is one of the best things you can do to get ready for the next big thing you’re trying to do.

Eternal optimists fail to see their own weaknesses, and therefore they don’t improve them.

Optimism is good, but negative thinking can be one of the most effective things you do for yourself if you are trying to get better at what you do.

Artificial Intelligence and man

One interesting topic to explore is the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and its potential impact on society. With breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of tasks previously thought to be exclusive to humans. This has led to exciting applications in fields such as healthcare, finance, and transportation.

For example, AI algorithms can analyze medical images and predict disease progression with high accuracy, helping doctors make more informed diagnoses and treatment plans. In the finance industry, AI is used to identify patterns in financial data and make better investment decisions. And in transportation, self-driving cars are poised to revolutionize the way we move around cities and could potentially reduce accidents caused by human error.

Another fascinating topic to explore is the concept of time and how it is perceived by humans. Time is a fundamental aspect of our lives, but our understanding of it is limited by our subjective experience.

Recent research has shown that our perception of time is not fixed but can vary depending on our surroundings and circumstances. For example, time seems to pass more quickly when we are engaged in an enjoyable activity and more slowly when we are bored or anxious. Furthermore, our perception of time can be influenced by external factors such as the color of a room or the amount of light in a space.

Understanding how we perceive time can have practical applications in fields such as psychology and design, as well as help us gain a deeper understanding of our own consciousness.

Artificial Intelligence coupled with the human touch will form a robust and streamlined set of tools for those who use it well.

Hate losing more than you love winning

When the fear of failing outweighs the fear of failing or the fear of criticism, then you can act without delay. Fear of starting and procrastination will quickly fall by the wayside when you hate failure more than you love winning.

Humble but not timid

“Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.” –Karl Weick

Valid criticism and how not to be a cult

Valid criticism and minority viewpoints are important because they make us stop and address the issue. We’re forced to think around the problem and re-examine our position from different angles.

Even bad criticism or bad minority arguments are valuable in this regard.

When the consensus is disrupted, we almost always will come to a better or more creative solution for the problem at hand.

A CEO surrounded by “yes-men” and a culture of groupthink, is a CEO that will not have a company for very long.

Promoting dissent and allowing people to question things for themselves is one hallmark sign that you have a culture, not a cult. In a cult, dissension is swiftly crushed and no examination or questioning is allowed.

The value of mistakes

When we try not to make mistakes, we avoid all risks and, eventually, we become paralyzed by a fear of failure. Thus we cease doing anything that could fail.

This is the greatest failure of all.

Success is not avoiding making mistakes. It is to venture and risk and make mistakes, but only to make the mistake once.

Mistakes are valuable when we take them, examine them, and learn from them.

Otherwise, they’re useless and very harmful. Take hold of your mistakes and figure out why they happened and use them to make yourself better.