Anxiety of the future cripples the present

When I lose focus on my larger plans for the future, I lose sight of the goal on the horizon.

When I lose sight of the goal on the horizon, I lose the clarity I have in my day-to-day work.

When I lose my clarity, I become a much, much less effective worker. This happens more acutely with my personal work because I need to do the daily work, but I also need to do the planning and writing the to-do list for my work each day.

When I become uncertain of the future or I lose sight of my goals, writing that daily too do list becomes much more of an exercise in scheduling busy work rather than the work that moves my business forward.

I’ll easily spend hours doing email and organization while ignoring the deep intellectual work that pushes my business forward.

Being anxious about the future cripples the present. You lose clarity in what needs to be done, you lose the courage to do it, and you pick yourself apart for these daily failures.

It becomes a self-fueling cycle that feels impossible to break free of. One major key to overcoming this is to see what you’re doing and prioritize planning and ensuring you keep a crystal clear picture of your future and your goals. Take it with your hands and don’t fear it.

The thrill of victory

To be the best, you don’t have to beat the best. To be the best, you must hate losing more than you are afraid of losing. Hate losing, don’t be afraid of it. Fear doesn’t serve you. Fear is something that can paralyze us and keep us from doing what needs to be done. But a hatred of losing motivates us to practice hard and put in the time to win.

Nobody is impressed with what you have

Money is a funny thing. We all treat it a bit differently, but kind of the same.

We don’t look at the fancy things other people have and think that they are cool people whom we should have huge respect for. We usually look at what they have and, if we consider the expense of it at all, think that other people would think that we are cool if we had the fancy car, the big house, the expensive vacation, etc…

The fancy car, the huge house, and the expensive vacations don’t make people respect or admire you. Expensive stuff doesn’t do that. Usually, people will feel less comfortable around you or harbor some kind of envy. Expensive stuff is not worth it if you’re trying to impress people or gain respect. People are too busy thinking about themselves to care.

If it is respect and admiration that you seek, don't buy more fancy things. Instead, practice being more humble, kind, and helpful. That takes more time and effort than buying a fancy car or a huge house. But you will gain real respect and admiration, and you will gain it from people who are worth having the respect of.

At first you must believe

If you believe that you’re able to do something, you will be able to do it. Those who can do, do because they first believed that they could. Those who don’t believe, cannot and will not.

Dreaming big

Don’t criticize other people for dreaming big. It’s how real change takes place. Most big dreams never come to fruition whether you support them or not. But big changes and spectacular advances don’t come by the ones who dream small.

So bad, yet still some good

There is no book so bad that some good cannot come of it. There is no person so bad that no good can be learned from them. There is no catastrophe so horrendous that some good cannot also be extracted from it.

Talent working hard? Working hard is a talent.

They say that hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. I think that hard work is a talent. Hard work is something that you can get better at. The ability to focus, undisturbed, for long periods of time to study a technical topic, or to practice an artistic skill is itself a talent.

If hard work was so easy, everybody would do it. But some people have the self-discipline to dedicate time to getting better at working hard.

Push yourself to practice, study, and work hard. Cultivate your ability to work hard and then apply that practice and study to areas where you have some natural talent and you can accomplish great things.

Learning everything (and doing it so well that they think you’re lying.)

I’ve found that learning many different things is as rewarding as it is frustrating. I love learning new things and the process of learning might be one of my favorite things on earth.

On the other hand, when you are not a specialist in one specific area, two things happen: 1.) They assume that you are not an expert in anything. 2.) They don’t know how to use your talents (i.e. hire you) because you are not stuck in a specific niche.

So what is a person to do who wants to learn everything? I don't want to believe that the answer is to choose to learn less and become less talented. So for me, I’m going to continue trying to learn as much as I can while diving deep into specific interests that benefit me intellectually and in business. When I write a book about my life, it will be a book about the world and the small part I played in that. So I must learn about the world.

To learn you must have had a strong upbringing that taught you to keep your mind open to new ideas, you need to find strong resources (white papers, books, documentation, courses, etc…,) you must seek out the best tools to help you work with the knowledge as you learn, and lastly, you must take the knowledge into the real world and test it.

You get better at chess, at drawing, at coding, at photography, at writing, at speaking, at anything by learning a little and ripping off the training wheels, and learning from the mistakes you make.

For example, write your own code, don’t just follow coding tutorials. Real learning comes from having to apply skills in the real world in all of it’s dynamic and fluid beauty.

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.