If you can come up with an idea for something you’d like to do that takes three or more steps, execute that idea the same day you came up with it, and not disrupt the normal responsibilities of your day otherwise, then you have an exceptional level of competence.
If you think that what I just described is easy, that’s because you can do it – and because you don’t realize that most people can’t.
Find a way to use that power to the benefit of others, and you’ll lead a rich and full life.
“Measure twice, cut once” is good advice. But the marginal return for each additional measurement drops dramatically.
Gathering the same information over and over again doesn’t make the cutting easier, more efficient, or sharper. But it definitely delays you, makes you question yourself, and adds to your costs.
Eventually, you can measure, measure, measure – and never cut at all.
Often, the best change you can make to your environment is to leave.
Whether it’s your job, your house, your state, your country – there will be things about “where you are” that you want to change. If you can make positive changes, do so! But there will always be limits on how far you can move the needle, and being stubbornly attached to a particular environment is just status quo bias in action.
Swap schools. Get a different apartment. Find a new job. These are all very viable options, and will often bring about the changes you want more swiftly than trying to eke out progress where you are.
Don’t abandon freedom. Go where the action is.
Excuses are evasion. You use them to get out of trouble, but you can’t get out of trouble with yourself and the results in your own life. If you’re making different excuses to yourself about why a problem persists, that’s one part of your brain betraying the rest of it. Don’t excuse – examine. If you need the help, around the third excuse is the time to ask for it.
I find I remember things from a long time ago fine, and recent memories fine as well, but things in the “middle distance” of about ten years ago are all a blur. I wonder if that’s a moving number, or if that time period was just the chaotic beginnings of my fatherhood so it’s all a blur.
Memory is funny – and fallible. But there’s joy in that, too. You can go exploring things that have familiar hints but new details. Old books, trips you’d like to repeat, even friends you haven’t chatted with in a while.
The past is a foreign country, but it’s very tourist-friendly.
You watch a man begin to build a grand tower. He works very hard and very diligently, taking each step in turn. He pours a solid foundation, carefully laid. He selects excellent building material and creates a solid frame. He fills in floor by floor. When he’s placing the last stone in the grand façade, he lays it slightly crooked. Upon seeing his mistake, he demolishes the entire tower. Not only that, but he never attempts to build another – he starts completely over with a totally new kind of building.
You’d think the man was insane, right? Instead of simply correcting the mistake and, at most, picking a different stone as the final piece, he scrapped everything he had worked on.
Insane as it is, I see people do exactly this all the time – usually in their careers.
I see people carefully research an industry to give themselves a foundation of knowledge about the work. They build a great resume, start networking, and practice interviewing, all for that field. They land an interview and take it through several rounds. Then, they don’t get the job – so they abandon the industry entirely, declaring firmly that they were wrong and it isn’t a good fit for them, after all.
Crazy! Persistent, tenacious people who will overcome any number of hurdles on their journey will nonetheless abandon the entire endeavor if they don’t overcome the last hurdle the first time they reach it. And I get it, that last hurdle is the most demoralizing. When you’re literally one step away from the goal and you get a setback, it stings more than if you stumble on something in the middle. But you’re still 99% of the way there, and all your other work is solid – after all, it got you to that last step, didn’t it?
Don’t overcome 99 obstacles only to let the final one defeat you. Your grand tower is only one last step away!
Today I took a squad of kids into the woods for a nature hike. They walked around barefoot in the lake, caught some interesting bugs, identified some plants, all that good stuff.
But at one point, my son shouted out, “I found treasure!”
He was as excited as could be. The treasure he’d found? A nickel and a golf ball.
But here’s the thing: that was treasure. Treasure is just novelty! It’s anything you don’t already have and don’t expect to find. It’s something in a weird place (like a golf ball in the woods, many miles from the nearest course). It’s anything that causes your imagination to wander, speculating on how this thing could have gotten to this place. (My son had no less than a dozen theories.)
If what you find does all that, then it’s worth it’s weight in golf balls.
If you’re the kind of person who likes debate and discourse primarily as a way of discovering new information and getting closer to the truth on a particular topic, it can be really disheartening when the other party reveals that they weren’t doing that at all – they were either trying to convince you of their point of view regardless of validity, or they were trying to score points with whatever audience there is.
I don’t like that any more than you do, so here are my tips to spot that mentality early so you can gracefully exit the conversation before you waste much time:
Seek truth, but beware – there are many distractions along the way.
The person who takes a thousand steps, each one in a random direction, doesn’t get as far as the person who takes twenty careful steps in the same direction.
Activity doesn’t always equal progress. The formula is: “Action + Planning = Progress.”
When we want progress and we don’t have a plan, often we try to correct by increasing our activity. But while certain kinds of activity are generally always helpful, just throwing stuff at the wall isn’t generally beneficial unless you’re deliberately doing it to experiment – and experiments require intentionality and planning!
So if you feel like you’re always going, going, going, but never getting anywhere, then the answer is probably to stop. Look around a little. The activity surge isn’t what you need; you need a plan. Calm down for a day or two, and fight the notion that a break means you’re falling behind; you can’t fall behind by stopping something that wasn’t getting you ahead.
There’s a certain type of old video game where you start moving, and the whole point is just to avoid obstacles for as long as you can. You can swerve back and forth, but you can’t just stop – you keep moving and the obstacles keep coming (often with increasing speed) until you beat the game or you perish.
Life is like that, too.
Sometimes you don’t want to do something. You get a request to do some task, an offer with an opportunity, or a need to be met. It’s fine to not want to do that, whatever it is. But you don’t get to just pause your life. You keep moving forward, like it or not. You have to do something, in other words, even if you don’t want to do that thing.
You can’t say “no,” only “no, but…”
You can give yourself alternatives. You can swerve, juke, and pivot. In fact, you should! But you can’t just halt so the obstacle never comes.
The next time you don’t want to do something, pick something else. It doesn’t even have to be something you’d love, just something you’d hate less than the first option. Keep picking less-bad options each time, and your life will look pretty great before you know it.
