The more you try to avoid being “pigeonholed,” the less likely you are to be known at all.

Generalists are fillers. They pinch-hit. It’s the specialists that carve out a well-known niche. Being pigeonholed is one of the best things that can happen to you, as long as it’s for something you want to do.

The best character actors are pigeonholed as heck, but they’re also famous and constantly working. Whereas leading “everyman” characters like the main protagonist of a Hallmark movie are here and gone in a week.

Figure out a thing or two that you like doing, and let people know you for it! Lean into it, make it your brand, do it a bunch. And get good at it – then charge appropriately. After all, you’re the best in your category!

Your brain is full of mush and garbage. It’s a total dumpster fire in there. Whole parts of it are complete mysteries to you; other parts are actively working against you. Most of it is trying to keep you alive, at least, but often in ways that are completely counter-productive to living a healthy and fulfilling life in the modern world.

It’s an autopilot designed by an endless series of serial barbarians going back hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, it’s picked up a museum of bad wiring.

Most of your brain is reactionary. Without outside stimuli, a lot of that programming is dormant. If nothing scares, threatens, or tempts you, then mostly your brain’s biggest vice is sloth.

Why am I trash-talking your brain so much? As a reminder that you have a reasonable amount of control over what stimuli get through the mental drawbridge into the little castle on top of the trash heap. Above all that other junk is one small oasis of conscious thought, and it’s just enough to be a gatehouse between the outside world and the roiling chemical soup that steers 95% of your actions.

Have you ever mixed baking soda and vinegar? It causes quite a reaction. Once you drop one into the other, you can’t stop the reaction – you probably can’t even contain it. It’s going to make quite a mess unless you’re well-prepared, and maybe even regardless. Trying to contain the reaction once the elements are mixed is a fool’s errand. But that’s what many people try to do – they try to use what little conscious faculty they have to control their reactions to things.

What you should be doing is using that gatehouse to make sure that the baking soda never gets dropped into the boiling vinegar of your brain to begin with. Don’t lower the drawbridge for things with little to no value, expecting that you’ll be able to maintain your values, honor, and nobility even as the chemical reaction has started. You won’t.

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!