The purpose of a habit is to make tasks automatic. Habits remove self-negotiation, you just get started because it’s a habit. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it.
Work on a new habit every three months and you’ll be a different person in a year or two.
Professionals are simply amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
Professionals finish whereas amateurs fade. Professionals endure the rocky moments and emerge, while amateurs collapse under the pressure or challenge.
It’s not about doing less work, but about working smarter. Working smarter is working just as hard, but taking the time to discover what work is the most valuable.
Focus all of your time and energy on the most valuable work and find ways to systematize, automate, or delegate the other tasks to hired people or machines.
Imagine how much more we could do if we worked 5x harder on the few important things rather than getting bogged down in urgent, but non-essential things like paperwork, logistics, and emailing all day?
Stay on top of what is most valuable to your business and what should be the highest priority and you will see incredible success in whatever you do.
Fear of sharing is the enemy of creativity. Not pressing upload. Not pressing the share button. Not sharing your opinion. It’s so much worse than sharing your work. Yet the trap is that it feels safe to leave our artwork hidden, our voice silenced, and the impact we could have, unrealized.
If you’re scared of the feedback, share your work, and don’t read the comments. Post and ghost.
In all my work I seek to deliver value by enlightening the mind or by eliminating pain points. Today I want to talk about eliminating pain points.
You eliminate pain points by understanding the other person’s point of view and simultaneously eliminating confusion and increasing comfort.
Find the common ground between you and your colleague and build on that to draw them into the information and experience that will enrich their life or work.
Make it easy in all that you do and there will always be a place for you. Making it easy for others is a value that anyone can deliver.
If you can eliminate the pain points of others, you can make even the most complex job easy.
Did you know that you can also fail at what you don’t love? You might take that boring administrative job because it feels safe, but you hate the work and it is unfulfilling. Then one day, you get fired. You failed even at the thing you didn’t love. How crushing.
When you compromise and you still fail, that hurts the most.
The alternative is to do what you love and do it with vigor. If you fail, you fail. But the sting of defeat is tempered by the knowledge of your courage and the passion for doing the work you love.
It is much easier to rebound from that failure.
In a world where you might fail while doing what you love and you might fail while doing what you hate. Start by doing what you love.
Rushing is focusing on the next moment while ignoring this moment. This is why we make so many errors and mistakes when we rush. You’re stressed out by a distraction of choice.
It’s also why we can’t slow down. How can we slow down when we don’t rest on each moment? We have the next moment, the next worry, the next step, or the next problem to deal with instead.
If you hook a fish on your line and rush to reel him in, you put your line under max stress and it breaks. You catch the fish by letting out some line and being patient. Take it moment by moment rather than thinking only of the moment he is finally in your boat.
When we rush, the risk of making an error goes up dramatically. Nobody likes being in a rush, yet we all find ourselves rushing constantly. Why? Why? Why?
I believe the problem lies deep within our subconscious. Too often we’re in a rush simply because we are more uncomfortable slowing down and letting things develop while we stay quietly still. “Better to rush and make mistakes than awkwardly stand there waiting!”
But if we could become comfortable waiting a little bit before we jump to a conclusion or jump to get involved we’d eliminate so many mistakes and so much stress.
Patience and being comfortable while waiting are essential to slowing down and not rushing.
Can we give the other person more time before jumping to a conclusion about them? Can we let the conversation breathe without flooding the airwaves with our words? Can we give the client our price and simply stop talking? How can we become more comfortable slowing down?
I’m not sure I have the answer. I do have some ideas, but I’m running out of time and space in this blog post to explain.
Anxiety and rushing seem to go hand-in-hand and maybe, just maybe, if reduce one, the other would also diminish.
We learn from our failures. The baby learns to walk when she falls down. Unlike the self-doubting creative type, she tries to get back up and doesn’t care about failure. She’s completely forgotten it within a moment or two. Without a few stumbles, she would have never learned to walk.
Without our creative stumbles, we won’t create anything worthwhile. We just have to find a way to forget the failures, but not before we learn a little bit from them.
Keep trying. Don’t let the fear of failure paralyze you.
We probably only learn what exactly our parents did for us when we have children of our own. It’s the stuff that falls between the cracks, the stuff that everyone forgets about, that you realize when you have to go through it.
There is an old saying that goes, “He who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that.” To be able to critically think and examine any issue requires that a person should admit the fact that his opinion may be false, or at least not as precise as it could be.
When you are open to hearing the critiques or anger of other people toward your ideas and opinions, you open yourself to being forced to question and examine what you believe and improve.
A belief that is not grounded in some deep conviction is a belief that will give way to the slightest resistance or argument to the contrary. If an ungrounded belief is actually the truth, but the person who believes it can’t explain it, that is a belief held by faith. In some things faith is understandable, but in many things, we have faith in things that are little more than superstitions.
A deadline gives you clarity and urgency to get your work done. It makes art better because it helps you publish your artwork. Deadlines stop you from trying to make everything perfect. Instead of being perfect, you focus on being different. Different is better than perfect, but it’s impossible to be truly different or perfect. Different is just easier.
We read in many major systems of morality throughout history about an idea so eloquently outlined in the Bible. This idea is that we should not be bothered by the speck in our brother’s eye, because we have a beam in our own eye we should be focused on getting rid of.
It’s very easy for us to see the evil in others and to point out the bad people “over there.” But when it is time to honestly assess ourselves, we extend all manner of charity over our bad behavior.
As Solzhenitsyn puts it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
We always seem to make it onto the good side of the fence, but maybe we should be a little more critical of our own behavior.
A small candle flame is fragile. A slight wind will extinguish it with ease.
A fire, on the other hand, gets stronger as it is blown by the wind.
So in life, let us be the fire and hope for the winds of difficulty by which we learn, grow, and gain strength.
When I was in my twenties, I’d use the phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Now that I’m in my thirties, I prefer to sleep when bedtime comes around, and sometimes even with a nap in between. I’m sleepy and can’t wait until I’m dead to get some rest. I guess I’ve officially crossed into middle age and it’s pretty nice.
Winners don’t look for motivation to get started. They start with a plan. They commit to that plan. Getting started and getting committed turns into motivation and a major change in your life.
Forget motivation and find a plan.
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." –Mark Twain
Don’t underestimate the hole your absence has left. We all have something unique to offer the world at large and most directly to our family and loved ones.
When we don’t offer ourselves to our families and loved ones, we pull our family a little further from the edge of a paradise on earth.
Mark Twain once said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” The microclimates of the Bay Area, but most specifically San Francisco, lead to some drastic temperature changes even a short drive away. I love this town for so many reasons and I hate this town for so many reasons. But undoubtedly, San Francisco has an advantage in the natural terrain of the area that not many places can match. If only the city was a little bit cleaner.
The grateful guest remembers only the good offered to him by his host. The ill-willed guest remembers only what he did not get. Be a grateful guest in this world. Magnify the good of others and minimize the ill.