When you’re trying to make a point or defend your position and you find yourself complaining, blaming, or explaining, you’re losing ground–and probably the argument.
When you remain calm, display how you offer value, and confidently display your understanding, you’re winning.
Blaming and complaining almost always signal that something isn’t right. Understanding and confidence often signal that you’re headed in the right direction.
First, we procrastinate in the morning because we can get it done in the afternoon.
Then we procrastinate in the afternoon because we’re sure we’ll get it done in the evening.
But then we procrastinate in the evening because we can do it late at night or tomorrow morning.
And as you know, the next morning we simply restart the cycle.
Then the deadline looms, and we get stressed out, overworked, and irritated. We suffer the pain of regret that we didn’t just invest a few hours each day on the project. We could have had it done with just a little bit of work done each day.
Procrastination is stupid because we convince ourselves that the future us will feel different about the work than we do right now. The work never gets easier until we start doing it. Suffer the pain of working, or the pain of regret when you still have to do the work, but without the time to do it well or at a relaxed pace.
Don’t let the smoke screens distract you. The opportunist will try to blind you and confuse you into making a decision quickly or without having your senses about yourself.
The opportunist is the guy who hands out baloney disguised as food for thought. He has confidence, but not competence.
Get up early and get started fast. I’ve never been much for getting up early because getting up early is no better than just getting your hours of effective work in each day–whether that is early or late.
However, if we get started first, we don’t have to run the fastest to win the race. Getting started first establishes you as competent, confident, and someone who others can rely on. Getting started first is valuable for this reason alone.
The way people perceive you is more important than nearly anything else about your relationship with customers, clients, and co-workers.
It’s always better to worry more about the direction you’re headed rather than how fast you’re moving. Moving heavy loads means moving slowly. Just because you don’t think you’re moving fast doesn’t mean you aren’t getting things done.
Focus on where you’re headed, not how fast you’re getting there. Maybe you are moving mountains, but moving slowly.
To the extent that animals have the ability to grow and learn as a species, they are limited to what instinct teaches them and what their experience teaches them. The problem with learning by experience is that some experience leads to death. This is a bit of a problem because either that animal or one of his animal friends must die so that he can learn the right thing to do.
Humans have an advantage. They can contend on the battlefield of ideas.
Ideas can go forth and die so that a human doesn’t have to. We must argue and debate and encourage and allow our ideas to be attacked from all angles.
This is, in a sense, trying to kill our idea. If the idea survives, it’s probably pretty good. If it dies, then we can learn–in a pretty harmless way–that the idea wasn’t quite as good as we thought.
Let ideas die so that not as many people die. Never shy away from sharing your ideas. And allow your ideas to be attacked.
Be careful that you aren’t so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. We convince ourselves that we know best and we’re dead sure of what we want. This close-mindedness can shut down the exploration and openness in negotiations or discussions that often reveal an even better move.
The advice given to all beginners in chess to find a good move first, and then look for an even better move, holds true in all facets of life.
Years ago Seth Godin wrote a blog post about the biggest risk we can take is to avoid taking risks. Not all of us have money that we are willing to risk in business ventures. But all of us have time, effort, and reputation that we can risk.
If you spend your time on something. If you apply yourself with real effort. If you become willing to “put yourself out there” and have your family and friends mock you, you can do just about anything that your money investment could do.
Take the risks that you can take. Take all the smart risks that you can take and you won’t regret it.
Strangers can wash the car, but nobody washes it like the owner. Put your skin in the game and take ownership of every single project you work on. Own that opinion. Own the room. Own your decisions. Own your responsibilities.
When you take ownership, you do better work and you gain the respect of others for having courage.
I never give up. Even when I should give up I don’t give up. I’ve been writing these blog posts since the end of 2018 and a couple of busy months that break my day-to-day writing rhythm will not deter me. If anything it’s made me realize how much I enjoy taking a few moments to scratch out something each day on this blog.
I miss it. I want to spend more time crafting and perfecting each blog post.
So here we are kicking off Monday with a reminder to myself to write more and enjoy the process of writing.
I heard a quote today, “Nobody washes the car like the owner.” Find a way to take ownership and put your skin in the game and you’ll almost always do a better job.
Writing has been a little bit of a struggle for me lately. I can’t even say that it takes a lot of time to write these short blog posts. I have been very, very busy working on a few big projects, but who doesn’t have ten minutes to spare?
I think the underlying problem is that I have not been reading at my normal level for almost two months. When I am reading, I am constantly playing with thoughts and ideas. I’ll read something in the morning that will dance in my mind all day. Writing is often the only way to get those thoughts clarified and off of my mind.
To write more, I need to read more.
I took a Clifton Strengths test the other day. I was very skeptical about whether this thing could accurately describe who I think I am. I’m aware that maybe my perception of myself might not be entirely accurate. But I have spent a good amount of time reflecting on who I am and why I do the things I do.
This test tells me that I am a strategic thinker with tendencies to execute the things I set about to do. According to the test I am not very good at influencing other people or building relationships.
My top ten traits are:
Learner
Input
Context
Intellection
Responsibility
Belief
Achiever
Connectedness
Self-Assurance
Developer
You don’t know what any of those things are? I didn’t either until I went and read up on them Check out this link to see the 34 different themes that you someday might find out about yourself, too.
When we complete a task, we stop thinking about it. When we start a task and get interrupted before we finish, it remains active in our minds while it is in that undone state. Three simple rules of work are:
1.) If it takes less than five minutes, do it right now.
2.) When you start something, finish it. (If the task is too massive, break it into smaller tasks and do them.)
3.) Never ever, ever, ever multitask.
Harness all of your energy and focus on one task at a time and you’ll do more work at a higher quality than you ever thought possible.
When everybody is good, how do you become great? You become great by perfecting the details. Greatness lies in the details and the little things. When you do those well, you differentiate yourself from the good and you enter into the realm of great.
When you start falling behind, I think the best thing to do is let the missed days be missed days. When we try to make up for lost time we compromise our effectiveness. It has been nearly a month since I have written a blog post here because I missed a couple of days and thought I should probably write 2-3 blog posts to make up for it.
That turned into having to write 5-6 blog posts and before I knew it I hadn't written anything for nearly a month.
Missed days aren’t the end of the world and seasons in our life where we are not quite as effective or productive happen. They only become problematic if we destroy our ability to work by trying to make up for that lost time. You can never make up lost time. Either don’t lose the time or become comfortable losing some time every once in a while. You can’t be effective yesterday, so focus on being effective right now.
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
In boxing, the saying is that anyone with fast hands can be dangerous. Just because you have weaknesses doesn’t mean you can’t become a champion. Focus on what you’re best at doing and do that better than anyone else. You’ll have some losses, but you’ll have many more wins than you would expect.
Treat winners like losers and treat losers like winners when you’re leading and coaching them. Winners need to learn to return to the grind and keep getting better, while losers need to be given confidence so they have a chance.
However, not all of life is coaching. I would imagine that if you always treat winners like losers, they’ll eventually grow weary of your presence. Not all of life is coaching, but maybe much of it is.
Last week I went to a memorial for a dear friend of my father who passed away about a week ago. He died as, what I would characterize, a "young" 83-year-old. I knew him my entire life and he was one of these guys who never seemed to grow old.
I never saw him angry or heard him speak a bad word about others. He was also the first–and maybe only–person I ever met who would pause and think for a moment before responding to whatever you asked him. A remarkable trait.
I can’t say I knew him that well, but my experience and what I’ve heard of him remind me of an old Charles Spurgeon quote.
“A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.”
When we’re faced with two terrible decisions to make, start examining earlier decisions that we have made. We rarely arrive at impossible decisions unless we’ve made some pretty bad decisions prior.
“We may run out of chips; we may run out of toilet paper; we may run out of (simeticone) antiflatulent pills; we may run out of biodegradable nonstaining bicycle chain degreasers; we may run out of five point .5mm mechanical pencils; but we will never, never, run out of suckers.”
I love his irreverence and interesting choice of vocabulary throughout his writing. Taleb is a treasure.