The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a good read, for a lot of reasons. Strategy in general is an interesting topic to study, and strategy in one arena often transfers well to others. The kinds of techniques that improve your capabilities in the boardroom, the battlefield, and the marketplace all have elements that flow into the others. Your life will pass through many if not all of these arenas, and so it can be helpful to have a broad understanding of the concepts.

My favorite concept from The Art of War is the Nine Grounds. Essentially, Master Sun identified and categorized the nine different situations an army could find themselves in, and defined broad strategic ideas for what do to in each.

Each of the nine grounds provides certain incentives to the soldiers on them, and knowing those incentives lets you command most effectively. A key insight here is that people aren’t robots; they can’t be expected to obey commands flawlessly, even if those commands can be flawlessly delivered (which of course, they can’t be). No transfer of knowledge in either direction (from soldier to commander or vice versa) is perfect, and everyone has their own goals that may be separate from yours.

This is even true of an individual. You are different people at different times, and commands you give yourself in periods of low stress and high clarity won’t necessarily translate perfectly when you’re truly in the trenches. You can’t always trust yourself to obey your own orders.

Because of that, it’s good to know your own capabilities and set reasonable expectations, and design your orders to yourself around those facts. Give yourself things to do when your natural motivation is high, and other things to do when it’s low. Align your incentives.

The insights for the Nine Grounds translate well to this. Master Sun knew to look for win/win situations when they were available and not start fights then. He knew when to strengthen a strong position or flee from a weak one. He said to be safe when you’re in trouble, and be bold when the rewards are high. These are powerful lessons everywhere.

One of the grounds he defined was “dying ground.” Dying ground is when you’re in a hopeless situation – you can’t retreat, the odds are hopeless, and defeat is nearly assured. We’ve all been in that situation – and if you haven’t yet, you will be. Master Sun’s advice when on dying ground is profound.

On dying ground, fight.

When you’re almost certainly going to lose, but there’s no escaping, fight for all you’re worth. Master Sun even said it was good to put your soldiers on dying ground in some instances, because that’s when you’ll get the absolutely full measure of your soldiers’ capabilities. If you can’t surrender and there’s only a 1% chance of victory, you’ll fight like hell for that one percent.

If not fighting means losing it all, and fighting means even the slightest chance you won’t, you’ll do amazing, incredible things to win. And even if you lose anyway, you’ll lose as a warrior. Head held high, on your feet, with your boots on.

I truly hope that in most of your life, you find yourself on solid ground and your life is good. But it won’t always be. And sometimes that’s good, too. When that happens, remember – all is never lost. Fight.

I dislike stuff. My goal is to have as few physical fetters as possible without giving up my ability to navigate the modern world and all it has to offer. My general philosophy is the “car trunk” principle: I should be able to fit everything I physically own inside whatever car I own.

Going by just my own stuff, I’m wildly successful in this regard. (I say “my own stuff” because my children pointedly do not live by this principle – though my oldest child has adopted it mostly, and I love her for it.) This is easy for me while it’s hard for so many other people simply because for me it isn’t a sacrifice – I actually hate stuff. Clutter. Junk. I have zero sentimental attachment to objects. I throw greeting cards away as soon as they’re read. Presents from my kids put up a noble fight, but I explain to them the temporary nature of all things, and how objects are meant to serve a purpose for a time, and then we grow out of them. Very few things are permanent.

Therefore, I have certain criteria when it comes to new objects entering my life. The following kinds of objects get a pass, and in fact are even welcome:

1. Objects that eliminate 2+ other objects. Things that have many purposes and can thus allow me to get rid of even more stuff are quite welcome.
2. Objects that increase my overall freedom. I like having a car for this reason. If it were viable for me to own and maintain a plane or boat, I’d probably do so.
3. Objects that are especially durable, and thus serve their purpose for a long time without me having to think about them. Unobtrusive objects. I’ve owned the same pair of excellent boots for sixteen years.

While I absolutely believe that what is right for me is not necessarily right for anyone else, my experience has taught me that almost everyone has too much stuff. You could pick one object you have – a shirt you don’t wear, something in a drawer, a gadget you haven’t used in ages – and ditch it, and your life would be better. Every object has a cost – not just to obtain, but to keep owning. A cost in space, a cost in freedom. You could always do more with space and freedom.

Travel lighter, my friend.

There are discrete pieces of information, but how those pieces interact is also a separate kind of information.

If you know A, all you know is A. But if you learn B, now you know A, B, and AB.

It’s like ingredients. If you own bread, then you can eat bread. But if you get cheese, now you can have bread, cheese, or a cheese sandwich. You only gained one new thing, but the number of options increased by more than just one.

Now if you get some ham, you can have bread, cheese, ham, a cheese sandwich, a ham sandwich, or a ham-and-cheese roll-up (which is totally a thing, ask my kids) as two-ingredient options, AND you can have a ham-and-cheese sandwich as a three-ingredient option. So you went from one ingredient -> one option to three ingredients -> seven options.

I know I’m explaining a pretty elementary mathematical concept here, but that’s because people don’t necessarily realize the impact this has on their ability to explore the wonder of the world.

Think of yourself as one discrete data point. You know what you know. But if you open a real connection with another person, you not only know what you know, but now you also have access to what they know, and that in turn gives you both access to all the new information can come from combining those two sets.

And because you know (presumably) more than one thing, and so (presumably) does the other person, you’re really getting this compounded many times. Add in even one more person, and the sheer number of successful ideas can boggle the mind. Add in twenty more, and you’ll never run out of new ideas.

The best part about this, is that the other person doesn’t have to know that they can give you more ideas. They might not even know what you want to know. You might be A, they might be B, but what you want to know is in AB. That’s why you shouldn’t always try to seek out people in a very specific way. If you’re looking for a new job, you don’t have to only try to talk to people that have a job opening or know of one. Lots of different “info combos” can lead you to your next awesome thing.

Connecting to nearly any new person will do tremendous things for the level of information you have access to. Try it – and tell me what you learn!

Excitement is a powerful feeling, but it can be difficult to harness. If the excitement comes after the planning, it can be great! You’ve crafted an action strategy and now you’re getting hyped for the action itself.

But if the excitement happens before the planning, it can actually really get in the way. Excitement is by its nature omni-directional. It’s like heat. It will push you in every direction, giving you a thousand ideas a minute before you can act on any of them – or even plan to do so.

That can be challenging to wrangle! How do you tell your brain not to have ideas, and to stay focused on the task at hand?

One avenue that has worked for me is to make sure I always have somewhere to “put” those ideas. An evergreen Evernote, a specific Slack channel, a blog, a notebook. Somewhere you can add things quickly but then leave them behind. Scratch the itch in your brain, and then circle back later.

The benefits are twofold – give your focus a chance to execute through the storm of ideas now, and later during a dry spell when you’re lacking in excitement and creativity you can dip into the vault and make yourself excited all over again. The strongest ideas will have aged the best. They’ll excite you as you plan and you can start all over again.

Your continual opportunity machine.

Another excellent day. My Chicago trip continues to be fantastic.

The nature of my work is remote, so most of the people I interact with professionally I do so at a distance. Phone, email, video conferencing. But tonight a large number of my past and present clients gathered together at the main office for a fun workshop I put together.

The workshop went great, but what I truly loved was just putting a bunch of bright, diverse people in a room and setting loose their purposeful creativity.

Go where people are. People different than you. Talk to them – deeply. Amazing things will happen.

I’m in Chicago!

I might be strange like this, but I love a good business trip. I like new experiences (such as a new city!), and I love a good work-intensive sprint. For a few days I can really dive into work that I thoroughly enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong; missing my kiddos starts to set in really hard after a few days, so I couldn’t live a life where I was on the road constantly. But I definitely get surges of wanderlust that are satisfied in a nicely positive way by work travel.

I also had some truly delicious empanadas for lunch, so that was awesome. I don’t recall having had empanadas before; if I have, it was long enough ago that it definitely counted as new.

I feel like a thriving urban environment is more like the wilderness than either is like the suburbs, my nominal home. In both a very urban or very wild environment, you can walk around and explore. In the city, everything belongs to everyone; in the wilds, nothing belongs to anyone. In both cases, you can walk around and check stuff out in a way you can’t in the suburbs, where everything belongs to someone. The suburbs are big collections of private property; the spaces where you can freely walk around are much more limited.

On the one hand, that actually makes them nice places to live; secure little homesteads with a sense of community but also privacy. But it makes them the least interesting places to be for a short time.

I’m enjoying myself so far, here in the thick of things. I’ll tell you more tomorrow!

This is a busy week. I’m flying to Chicago (I’m very excited, except that I despise flying), and I have a lot to accomplish during that time.

I also have a lot to accomplish tonight in preparation.

It’s good to remind myself that I have a lot of processes on auto-pilot; outsourced memory.

That let’s me focus on what I want to focus on – the people I’ll be working with in Chicago. That’s exactly what I want to be doing!

Don’t let yourself get so busy that you forget why you’re busy in the first place. Remember that you exist in service to your future self, and your future self thanks you for your hard work now. But your past self also existed in service to who you are now, and it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate that.

See you in Chicago!

No matter what you do for a living, no matter the skills you’ve decided to develop, it’s long been understood that there’s an extra skill set you need in order to be successful, and that’s telling people about what you do.

No matter how good you are at something, it’s tough to be successful if nobody knows what you can do. If you’re in business for yourself, that means marketing and sales. If you want to work for someone else, it means interviewing and networking. If you’re in academia, it means writing and publishing. No matter where you are, communication is key.

What’s often strange to me is how much people try to communicate by keeping secrets.

So much of “selling yourself” on the modern job market seems to consist of telling people just how awesome you would be, but balking at any request to demonstrate anything. We’re happy to hand over finely-tuned resumes, but it never even occurs to us to provide a sample of our work. It’s like we’ve gotten so caught up in the communication piece that we’ve forgotten what we’re trying to communicate.

I see it all the time in various online and offline conversations: “I applied for a copywriting position, but they wanted me to actually produce a 500-word writing sample. They’re just trying to get free work out of me, no way!”

That’s crazy to me. Those same people will complain that no one will “give them a chance” because they don’t have the right qualifications or something. Have you ever heard the classic complaint, “you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience?” Well guess what – you DON’T need a job to get experience. You can get experience however you like, and then show it off.

Showing a sample of your work puts you miles ahead of anyone who isn’t. Yet people actually work hard to not do this! I had a client who was applying for a very interesting role, and they were coming up on a final interview with a panel of senior leadership who wanted to know how they’d approach the core problem of the role. The client said to me “I’m really struggling with how to present my approach without just actually doing it and showing that to them.”

I was flabbergasted. Why work so hard NOT to just do the task? I understand the concern, sort of. Maybe you’re worried that if you present your actual work, they’ll… run off with it? And not hire you? Well, let me tell you how ridiculous that is. Good ideas are worthless. Work is what matters. They’re not hiring someone to have good ideas, they’re hiring someone to work. If you do have good ideas, AND can show that you know how to work to make them real, then you’re golden.

Maybe you’re just worried that your actual work won’t shine as brightly as all the flashy resume language you use to describe your work? Don’t feel that way. You’re awesome. Do your best work and let them judge – you’ll learn more and be better for it.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to cut through all the bull and get as close as possible to just showing off your work directly. Think about what happens when someone sells something – they don’t talk about their resume. They show off the thing, as directly as they possibly can. Free samples, test drives, trial periods. They do that stuff because it works. Because if your product or service is good, people will buy it when they experience it.

The same is true for you. Whatever you do, even if you want to do it in an employee context (as many do!), treat it like you’re selling a service. Show the work, let them see how awesome you are, and they’ll buy.

Here is one of my (many) flaws: I don’t like talking about things I’m going to do before they’re done. I’ve never liked the kind of person that always talks about things they’re “planning” to do but never seem to take any action on, and so perhaps I’m overly-aware of the possibility of becoming that kind of person.

For some goals, though, it’s easier for me to get over this than for others. Every month I publicly state my resolutions, and even when I don’t hit them I’m comfortable with talking about why and making improvements.

Not with writing a book, though. I’m going to talk about why, and it’s not really a comfortable thing for me to talk about. But here we go.

When I was a young adult, I was very different from the person I am today in a lot of ways (and distressingly similar in others). I loved to write, and I did so all the time, but I wasn’t trying to write anything particularly positive. I thought I was going to be the next Great American Novelist, but I also thought it would just pour out of me due to my obviously undeniable genius instead of, you know, requiring any actual work or struggle.

I was surrounded by “creative” types, all who had big dreams of being actors or rock stars or what have you, but none of whom were willing to do anything other than live the lifestyle that they imagined came with it instead of working towards the dream itself.

My father is one of the most talented amateur musicians I’ve ever met. He’s absolutely brilliant. When he was younger, he played in a band with a group of guys who were all also very talented. One of those guys went on to become an actual successful musician; a dozen albums, decades of tours, music for tons of movies and television shows, and now his own radio show. I asked my dad once why that guy “made it” but none of the other guys, including him, didn’t.

He told me: “Because Ben was willing to do nothing but practice music for twelve hours a day, and spend the rest of the time chasing the business side of it, making deals and putting in the work. The rest of us had other stuff we wanted to do; raise families, have other jobs, that kind of stuff. Being successful doesn’t just take talent. It takes a kind of obsession that he had, and we didn’t.”

The fact is, I didn’t have the kind of obsession it took to become the writer I imagined I already was. It would be years before I discovered how to make myself have that drive towards other things. Because I was such a miserable youth, I had wrapped a lot of my identity up in this creative, brooding writer persona despite having never published a single word (I’d filled notebook after notebook, imagining how someday they’d be so valuable because I’d be the next Bukowski or Kerouac, barf). Which meant that as I dedicated more and more time and effort into improving myself in other ways, becoming successful in my career, finding a family, all of that – some part of me was always dragging me backwards, calling me a sellout, and reminding me that for all my talk I’d given up on writing.

That “in-between” stage was the worst. I kept saying I hadn’t given up, that I was still going to write novels, that I was still that person. Instead of owning the (honestly, significantly better) person I was becoming, I was still clinging to this idea that all my career development was just to “pay rent” until my explosive entrance onto the literary scene.

There was no single moment when I finally realized it wasn’t going to happen, but I did eventually understand it. More than that, though, was the realization that I didn’t really want it to. If I had actually wanted to write a novel, I’d always had the ability. But I never had the drive, the obsession to do it. Plus, looking back at who I was then, it would have been terrible.

So now, I’m writing a book. Not a fiction novel, but a business book. On a topic I am obsessed with – that I write and talk about all the time, that I work with every day, that I think about when I first wake up in the morning. I do media interviews on this topic. People literally pay me to talk about it.

But it’s still hard to get over that voice that says “You said you were going to write a book before. You said it for years, and it never happened, and it hurt you to go through that. Maybe you just don’t have what it takes and this is the one mountain you can’t climb. You can try if you want, but you shouldn’t tell anyone that you’re trying, because then when you give up (when, not if) it’ll hurt less.”

That voice is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuge jerk.

And I try to make it a point not to listen to huge jerks. So here I am, publicly, talking about writing a book. I’m posting progress. I’m asking for market feedback. I’m working with a writing mentor. I’m not going to quit.

I’m not going to quit.