Trying to encircle your objective or remain one step ahead is often pointless if you’re not ready to take action and attack at some point.
Spending time and energy getting one step ahead will eventually lead you to making a mistake and losing any advantage you gain.
You must get ahead, gain your advantage, and take action.
Fault always lies with him weak enough to lay blame.
The most important part of your work is the last 1% where you publish it. If you can’t finish a product and ship something, who cares about the first 99% of your work?
Maybe it’s great in a vacuum or in some theoretical sphere, but it never comes into play in the world we all live in.
It takes courage and nerve to publish the things you create and to expose your artwork and ideas to the examination of other people. But this process makes you incredibly strong and resilient. I also believe it allows you to become truly at peace with yourself. When the compliments are ignored just as much as the insults, then you can be at peace with where you are and the work you create.
No matter how great a writer or artist you are, you are still imperfect and liable to failure. You will fail and, if you do not care for yourself, you will burn out.
The trick is understanding that it happens to all of us, even if right this moment you feel like you’re the strongest person in the world.
We all fail. We all crash. We all get tired.
One of the most difficult things in life is to make sound decisions. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it is more important to be able to merely make a decision and not worry if it’s the right or wrong decision.
The more we focus on all the little details and try to squeeze more out of every decision, the more we paralyze ourselves. Making no decision is only choosing to fail.
We are incapable of computing the thousands of dynamics that go into every decision we make and the massive fallout that every decision will have.
There is an idea known as the butterfly effect which is the concept that the world is profoundly related, such that one slight happening can impact a much larger system. The effect is named after an allegory for chaos theory; it evokes the idea that a small butterfly flapping its wings could, hypothetically, cause a cyclone. Imagine that but with all of your decisions.
We just need to make decisions and figure out the details as life happens. Don’t worry about the results of your choices; just do good, do honestly, and work hard.
As Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
When computers take in information, the circumstances don’t matter. The computer writes the data and is never sick, tired, or worried about the weather.
The brain continues the process of information long after it receives the initial info. The quality of our memories depends on how the information is processed when we receive it.
Our memory changes as our bodies change and every time we recall a certain memory we, in a sense, re-write that memory to our consciousness. Long-term memories become short-term memories again when we recall them.
When that short-term memory is converted back into a long-term memory, we re-examine all the connections we have to that memory with all the new life experiences and wisdom we’ve gained.
Biological memory is a fascinating thing.
Multitasking is not faster and it harms our ability to think deeply, work deeply, and do our best creative work. One thing at a time. It’s faster than multitasking and you do better work.
There are varying opinions on the order in which we should work. Should I do a bunch of easy tasks first and build momentum into an awesome work day? Or should I just into difficult tasks when I am more fresh?
Our focus runs out as the day goes on. I used to believe that a day that started with a bunch of easy tasks was a great way to build momentum, but I have switched to a “hard tasks first” approach. I’ve been MUCH more productive since this change.
As your energy wains, your focus fades, and as we over-tax our brains, we find distracting things more distracting. We also begin o feel like all those easy tasks were lots of work and maybe we don’t have to get to the difficult tasks until tomorrow. And so the process of procrastination begins. Do the hard stuff first when your energy is high and your discipline meter is at 100%.
We’ve never been more connected to each other than we are at this very day. With the ability to be constantly plugged in comes the ability to be plugged into work 24/7.
One of the reasons this leads to eventual burnout is because the human body is great under short, intense periods of stress. Short intense stress usually makes you stronger. But long, dull, and constant stress is a killer. Literally. It’s terrible for both body and mind.
How can we de-couple from the 24-hour work cycle?
I think that having a solid set of available hours when we work and a good shutdown routine at the end of the workday is a good start. These are ideas stolen from the author and brilliant thinker on the issue of “Deep Work,” Cal Newport.
Newport posits that only when you have the confidence that you’re finished with work until the next day can you even begin to recharge your energy and prepare for another day of work. He says that trying to squeeze out a little bit more work in the evenings could make you a much less effective worker the next day.
Even if it means leaving some work on the table and not getting as much done today, respecting your “office hours” and keeping work in its place makes you a better, more stable, and harder worker.
Practicing any skill deeply works to make anybody better at the thing they are practicing because when we focus intently on a specific skill or study and drill it over and over again, we force our brain to fire a specific circuit in our brain over and over again.
When this brain circuit repeats again and again, it causes cells in our brain, called oligodendrocytes to wrap layers of a substance called myelin around the neurons in those circuits. Myelin insulates the transmission of electric pulses through our mind and literally helps us to think and function faster.
This slowly takes that skill we’re practicing and cements it into our nervous system and helps us get better and faster at doing or thinking about the things we’re deliberately focusing on (i.e. practicing!)
Practice sessions that are made up of un-distracted, deep, and intent focus on a single idea or skill are vital to this process.
The appreciation for a master builder, craftsman, watchmaker, etc… is not that we find every little thing they build to be amazing. The appreciation is the way they go about their work itself. The attention to detail, the willingness to work hard, the effort they put into their work, not necessarily the outcome.
The don’t need to do special work, you need to have a special approach to the work you do.
The best parts of somebody’s life tend to happen when they stretch their mind or body beyond the limits of what they thought was possible. When we voluntarily stretch our limits in an effort to do something difficult and worthwhile, we find the greatest sense of growth and accomplishment on earth.
When the human mind loses focus it doesn’t tend to think about what is good in your life. It tends to focus on the bad. The unfocused mind falls into the trap of catastrophizing even the most mundane parts of life.
Combining a bunch of mediocre talent does not add up to an outstanding talent. Talent cannot be bought in pieces and combined together by just making a bunch of mediocre people work together.
This is why it is important for us to work to be the best. When we are at the premium level, there is a value that goes with that which cannot be had unless they come and hire you.
You have premium talent. A bunch of pretty good designers do not combine to make one premium talent. Ask for your price accordingly and judge yourself honestly.
There is an old quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that goes something like, “The mind once stretched with a new idea never goes back to the old mode.”
It appears to me to be as much a warning as an invitation. What happens if your mind is stretched in a bad way, but you can’t see it? We’re always much more charitable toward ourselves and the things we do compared with how we deal with others and the things they do.
“It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.”—Alex Osborn
I was reading about somebody who was bemoaning the idea of chasing peak productivity in your life. I am a big fan of peak productivity in my life, but not an unbounded optimization to squeeze life until there is no juice remaining. The chase for peak productivity is really about optimizing the hours you spend working so that you can provide an amazing life for yourself and your family while not working 18hrs a day.
If you chase peak productivity for the 5-9 hours each day that you work and can deliver double what the “normal” worker can in that time, is that not an objectively good thing? You can nearly handle two jobs at once while investing little to no more hours than the person who does not manage their time and attention as well.
Search for peak productivity and discover optimized hours along the way. Don’t work more hours, push more work into your hours now.
It’s not a clever way to humblebrag to your friends. It doesn’t convey to others that you’re special, that you have high standards, or that you do good work. It communicates that you cannot complete your work because you’re chasing an illusion–perfection.
We don’t have control over the outcome and the more we try to control the outcomes of our life and work, to less freedom we will have to think and move.
When you fear making mistakes or breaking things along the way, you take away opportunities to learn.
Perfectionism kills your ability to be creative by trying to infuse control in a process that must be free to flow and splash around like water.
Be honest, hold yourself accountable, and be on time. These are all free and completely change your life if you make the effort to do them.
We can become so addicted to the feeling of “getting things done” that we speed run through our to-do list and completely lose the ability to enter an “open mode” of thinking where we can be playful with ideas and create innovation.
Maybe the addiction is the feeling of adrenaline when we put out new fires that arise on an hour-by-hour basis.
Either way, we begin to lose the flexibility that allows us to create new things. Productivity is vital, but producing things that are good ideas is the best productivity.
The goal is to enter a playful and open mode of thinking when brainstorming for ideas and novel things to create and then to enter a closed mode of thinking in which we can laser focus on knocking out tasks on our to-do list and building the ideas that we come up with.