Building something big as a community project has its joys, and is worth doing. But building something small all on your own is golden.

That little thing you do yourself – for yourself – is a nugget of pure joy. It can be painting a picture. It can be making a pizza from scratch. What matters is that all those little twists and turns in the process become yours, rough edges and all. Not smoothed out by the thousand lessons learned from a thousand practitioners before you. All yours.

Get that rough little gem, polish it just a tiny bit, and then let the light shine on it.

Have you ever tried “pushing a rope?” It’s different than pushing, say, a boulder.

A boulder is heavy; it resists being moved. It’s stubborn. A piece of rope isn’t like that. You can push all you want and you’ll meet no resistance at all – but still, the rope won’t go anywhere.

Some people are stubborn, too. I can often respect those people; certainly I can respect them much more than the people who are just pieces of rope, or puddles of water, or whatever other metaphor you want to use for a horse that eagerly lets you lead them to water, but just never seems to drink.

Motivation, the real stuff, it has to come from within. You can’t spoon-feed it to anyone. If they don’t want to be there, you can’t make them. What you can do is ask them where they want to be, and lead them there. That horse will drink, because it asked. It invested.

So there’s the two-part formula. You need a horse that wants to drink, and you need a river that you want to go to. If you have both halves, you get the team. But trying to force one or the other when it isn’t there is… well, it’s pushing rope.

Happy New Month!

February gets an extra day this year, so that’s an extra day to try for a particularly onerous goal: making improvements to my sleep schedule.

I’m not even going to set the bar at “fixing” my sleep schedule, which is notoriously borked. But it’s time to take some steps in the right direction. It’s actually been worsening lately, which is all the more reason to try to reverse that trend – or at the very least, stop it from progressing.

I’ll consider it a major win if – at least one time – I am asleep for 8 consecutive hours while it’s dark outside. That has not happened in… well, I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the last time that happened, so there you go.

Wish me luck!

There is no more certain death knell for actual productivity than the need to look busy.

The reality is that a lot of projects simply don’t need a hand on the tiller at all times. They need high-level direction, but too much interference at the mico level actually hinders progress. It’s like baking cookies. If you want good cookies, you need to have a good recipe and you need to mix those ingredients well – high-level stuff. But once they’re in the oven, if you open up that oven door every five minutes to check on their progress and manually adjust the shape of the dough, you’re just… you’re just not going to get good cookies, and what you do get is going to take a long time and probably burn you once or twice.

So if you’re a baker, and your boss is really concerned with how busy you look instead of how well the cookies turn out, then the cookies are going to be worse.

All this is to say, if you find yourself in such a situation, you should do your best to get out of it. At least, if you want to actually get anything done.

The first contraption the Wright Brothers built didn’t fly. And they knew it wasn’t going to fly when they built it.

But they didn’t know why it wouldn’t fly – not yet. That took experimentation. Sometimes you have to break something, failing again and again, to figure out the weak points. To improve on the design.

When you’ve done that enough, you get a keen sense of structural weak points. Someone might pull you in to observe something and ask “Do you think this will work?” They want you to say “yes,” of course. But if that isn’t true, a far more valuable answer is: “No, but I can tell you exactly why.”

When responsibility is deferred enough, people would rather charge blindly ahead than see the weak points. Pointing out problems doesn’t make you popular, and if there’s almost no chance that you’ll be blamed personally for the resultant disaster, a prudent strategy can just be to keep your head down and not rock the boat.

If you see an organization where that does seem to be the default strategy – run. When no one is responsible, then… well, no one is responsible.

You want to be the kind of person who can explain the miss. But once you are, you want to make sure you’re in a room where they’re happy you did it.

Whenever you stop yourself from doing something that you want to do because of fear, personalize it. Turn that voice into a person – imagine someone standing in front of you, demanding that you stop your attempt. Telling you that you’re not allowed. That he forbids it, in fact!

I’m not sure about you, but external people telling me I can’t do things tend to make me want to do those things a lot. So much that it’s probably a fault on its own, but hey – maybe I can turn it to some good here.

Because if I wouldn’t let Mr. Fear tell me that, why should I listen to the same words in my own head?

My first sales manager once explained to me a very poor sales technique that he would often see, as a way of warning me away from it. He said: “Never sell on rescission.”

“Rescission” is a fancy term for canceling a contract. Many states have laws requiring contracts above a certain amount to have a built-in period of time where the contract can be canceled at no penalty. Poor salespeople, eager to get the name on the dotted line, would use that as a selling technique. They’d basically say something like: “Don’t worry about signing right now; you have a three-day cancelation period so if you change your mind, you can always cancel it tomorrow.”

You can probably already see why that’s a bad sales technique. You’re practically asking someone to cancel on you, and you’re ignoring any reasonable objections they might have in the moment, when it’s possible that you could spend a little more time and find an actual solution that works for you and your client.

In any transaction, you have to not just sell the transaction itself. You have to sell the sale. You have to make the other party feel good about the deal they just made. Imagine you buy a cup of coffee for five bucks at a coffee shop. This is a pretty standard transaction, right? Okay, now imagine as soon as you handed over the money, the cashier yelled “No refunds! Hahahaha!” You’d probably not be enthusiastic about drinking the cup of coffee you’re about to get!

Perception matters. You should never make people feel like they just got taken – that’s not the way to get repeat business (or even to keep the business you just got). If you’re trying to build a strong foundation, you should make people feel thrilled to have made the deal with you. You should treat them even better after they’ve signed than you did before.

Unless, of course, you actually are scamming people. In which case… you know, don’t do that. But honest businesspeople can (and often do) shoot themselves in the foot because they don’t use basic sales techniques. In fact, the misconception that good sales professionalism is always shady is what keeps so many businesspeople from getting good at it, but really it’s just about savvy interactions that help all parties find what they’re looking for in mutually beneficial exchanges of maximum value.

And you get those by being good to people.

Sometimes you start a project of some kind and you don’t complete it. It happens. Do you remember “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?” Let’s make a slogan for your old projects: “Revisit, Reclaim, Remember.”

Revisit: You can always come back to a project later! Just because it’s been a few days – or a few years – doesn’t mean the project can’t be picked up again. It’s right where you left it. Coming back to an old project can revitalize your creativity, even if you use that creativity differently now.

Reclaim: The bits and pieces of that project might become fodder for a new one. Started writing a book but never finished? Maybe the main character finds her way into the screenplay you’re working on. Our creativity is modular; use it where it needs to go.

Remember: You don’t owe anything to your past self. If you want to just remember – fondly! – the efforts of the past and the enjoyment spent on them, that’s fine. You don’t have to have finished something to have enjoyed it and gained something from it.

Don’t let the past weigh you down. If an old, lingering project feels like it’s tugging on you, figure out which of these three it’s asking you to do. Then do it – and be done!

You may occasionally find yourself being carried by circumstance. Something is happening and there isn’t much you can do to prevent it or even steer it. It happens – we can’t be in control all the time.

When you find yourself in this circumstance, I’ve often found the best thing to do is just take a nap. Some things can’t be helped! You got on the wrong train, maybe? Well guess what, it’s not turning around for you. Figure out when the next stop is, then rest your eyes. If you can plan a little, go ahead. But worrying wastes energy.

When you can do something well with minimal effort, go find the people for whom it’s the hardest.

Your inclination is often to “be around people who appreciate you,” and you think that means your peers. So if you’re good at gardening, you want to be around other gardeners. But if you’re really good at it and it’s low-effort for you to be that good, then you add the most value surrounded by people who can’t keep a cactus alive.