Why don't we make the best use of our time? Why is it so easy to procrastinate? To stay in bed for that little bit longer. Even the emperor of Rome struggled with this:
"I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" - Marcus Aurelius
It is funny how nothing much has changed over the years. Even in Ancient Rome, they were worries about excesses. Today, all of us have access to more than the Emperor of Rome.
He did not have electricity, a phone, a TV, a car. He had slaves, but so do we. We just call it capitalism. We have outsourced our lives to technology or cheaper labour - building our phones, preparing our food, connecting across the ether. Perspective is a needed jolt sometimes. With all the luxuries at your fingertips today, what is really stopping you. âGet out of bed and do something.
This is often quoted by the software industry where being slow and waiting for perfection to launch can be an excuse just to stop yourself putting something out there. A more nimble competitor will likely beat you to market with an "inferior" product. This can be true with any industry, obviously.
But the opposite can also be an excuse. "We are not waiting for perfection" can be used as an excuse for crappy, not well thought out product, terrible processes and poor customer service. An excuse to not strive for continuous improvement. And to argue about whether you are aiming for perfection or not is completely futile as you have to define what perfect is. If you have to define anything, then better to just define what "good enough" is. What features can we live without? What has to be there? When something is good enough, using your previous criteria, then it is good enough. Ship it. âThe thing that a lot of companies trying to copy silicon valley's way of doing things miss is that minimum viable product actually needs to be viable. You cannot launch with a shell that does not actually do anything. You cannot launch an X management system that does not calculate, report or analyse X correctly. You cannot use MVP like a snake oil salesman and expect that not to impact your reputation and your customers. Once you launch, you need to keep getting better. Should you then strive for perfection? Or at least excellence? I would say yes. Through a ladder of "good enough" steps, each getting you closer and closer to an end vision. You cannot ship a new car if the wheels fall off. Arguing that the customer wants a perfect car because he wants the wheels to stay would be quite arrogant. In a world where even the big software companies (looking at you Apple) release updates that break core workflows of their users, this is simply not sustainable. I think at some point Silicon Valley will take some lessons from the history of manufacturing processes and two companies who should be at the forefront of this are Tesla and Apple. Who will bring stability to innovation first?
I use the 5-minute journal daily, morning and night. In the nighttime entry, it makes you ask yourself, "how could I have made today even better?" I seem to interpret this as "what did I regret doing or not doing today?" In these micro regrets, as all other regrets, I find that it is always something I did not do rather than something I did do
Rather than waiting until the end of your life to find out what you wished you had done, you can do this in advance or at least react quicker than waiting until your deathbed. If you think about what you would have done differently each day, using the 5-minute journal or otherwise, after a year you have 365 micro regrets. If you analyse them I bet there is a pattern. Use this to not have the same regrets the next year. Of course, you can do this even faster. Review the last month. The last week. Make sure you put something into action today from yesterday's micro regret. Why wait until the end of your life, when you cannot change anything? Use micro regrets to ensure you don't have any later. Live in the present.
When you are out of inspiration to write the best solution is to just write. With no hang ups or expectations over whether it is good or not. Tim Ferriss said of one of his mentors when writing a book the goal should be to write one crappy page per day. Similarly, morning pages is just a practice of writing three pages each and every morning. No agenda, no purpose, just write.
This gets you into the habit of doing. And it is amazing what you can achieve when you make a habit of doing something small every single day. James Altucher has a list of things that he needs to do in order to avoid himself falling off the precipice (as he has been bankrupt a number of times). One of them is to write ten ideas per day. They can be random ideas or ideas about a theme. For example, ten businesses I could start today or ten products for cats. The goal is to do the doing, not to come up with a great idea to run with. Of course, this is likely a side benefit. In having no expectations your mind will be free and will likely hit a great idea after doing this practice for a while. When you can let your mind be free, great things can happen. How much of your current situation is a result of your current thinking and actions? All of it. You are what you consistently do. And you do what you consistently think about becoming. Get into daily practices that open your mind and the rest will follow. I recently tried a flotation tank and the owner said that you rarely get out of a float what you want but you always get what you need. Some people have experiences like being on psychedelics. But if you are burned out and do not have the time to be creative then this is what you need - time and space. Or maybe just a sleep.
We have a access to more information than any other human before us. Why is not everyone on the same page of working productively, of running that meeting properly, of avoiding interruptions? It has been covered in texts time and time again.
As Derek Sivers says, "if more information was the answer, then we would all be billionaires with perfect abs." Is the fact that we have more information mean that there is a proliferation of choice so it is hard to find the best advice to improve yourself? To make you better at whatever you choose to do? Or is it actually that the majority of people do not choose to even try to make themselves better? To try to be more noble, more virtuous, more productive? If you are even trying, then you are at least in the top 20%. If you are trying consistently, then you are in the top 20% of that. Keep trying.
Deadlines and rushing around. Why is it that we feel that adrenaline rush with the feeling of being busy? Where we can do all the things we have been meaning to do for weeks in the space of a few hours. Why is it that we let ourselves get distracted?
For me, I need constant reminders. Not of tasks to be done but of what is important. In my morning affirmations I wrote, "...and I will put all of this ahead of work at my day job, or any other salaried job." When I wrote it, I realised that working for someone else, no matter how much money or how flexible they are, would not ultimately meet my goals. It is very easy to get sucked in without this constant reminder. Sucked into the steady income. Sucked into the thrill of negotiating a raise. Sucked into the adrenaline feeling of all the tasks that need to be done in your current role. Sucked into the feeling of accomplishment when one is ticked off the list. Until you realise that the steady income is never as risk-free as you think. Until you have lost half the raise through tax. Until you realise that none of this has moved you much further towards your ultimate goals and dreams and that you have been doing all this as an excuse. An excuse away from starting that side project. An excuse away from making something. An excuse away from putting yourself out there. You are very unlikely to get fired for being late. Work on your side hustle before starting your day-job. No one really cares if you leave early and if they do are very unlikely to say something. Even if they do say something, they are very unlikely to fire you if you are producing results. Focus on the 20% of tasks that produce 80% of the results and do these first. You will be producing more output than 80% of anyone else in the shorter time you are in the office. No excuses. Even if you do get fired, at least you tried to make both work. And now you have been given the gift of focus. No excuses. How many people do you know who got fired for their side hustle? None. No excuses.
This distinction grabbed my attention in a post from @thefabulousjourney
Nothing is as hard as math in high school. Not much else in your life after that requires learning alien concepts. The rest of your life is solely about putting in the effort. It is not hard to do the work, it is just working 'hard'. Although there is really no 'hard' about it. It is just being consistent and not giving up. The only person that can make you fail is you. By quitting. Keep going.
Being fit and healthy has to be number one priority. Without this, you will not accomplish very much.
There is a line between using this time as an excuse: "I cannot start that project because I have no time, what with all the exercise and warm ups and warm downs and juicing and protein shakes and nutribullets and meal preparation" ...versus using it to propel you forwards, Jocko Willink style. Discipline equals freedom. And discipline in one area of your life will transfer to the rest of it. Starting with discipline enforces it for the rest of the day. January is a great time to start afresh. But only because that time is now! Start anytime. Do not wait for an entire year if you have already given up on your New Year's resolutions. Just get back on track as soon as possible - now, this afternoon, tomorrow - but do not write off an entire year. Putting yourself first could be seen as arrogant and dismissive of others, but actually, the opposite can be true. By thinking of others and then trying to fit that into a prioritisation list with yourself at the top, what you need to do becomes clear. If I want to look after my wife and son and spend the time I want with them AND I am also putting myself first (I need to exercise, meditate and complete the rest of my morning routine to be the best I can be and have the energy to deal with the day) then I need to do my stuff before anyone else gets up. There are a lot of problems that can be solved by just getting up earlier than everyone else.
Ideally, when I did the website for our app launch I wanted to remind people they are going to die, but I didn't think this would be well received. Most people think that remembering death is morbid rather than liberating.
I have just bought two coins from dailystoic that have made a prominent place on my desk. Memento Mori, remembering that we are going to die, I find a great daily (and more frequent the reminder the better) to treat people better including myself. I need to treat each hour as every hour ticking away. Do you really want to waste a precious human life sitting for an hour in a meeting that is going nowhere? That is no use to anyone involved? What if it was your last hour alive? Well should it be any different to this hour, that all count towards death the same. I read the following from Seneca today which puts it better than I could: "But we to whom such corruptible bodies have been allotted, nevertheless set eternity before our eyes, and in our hopes grasp at the utmost space of time to which the life of man can be extended, satisfied with no income and with no influence. What can be more shameless or foolish than this? Nothing is enough for us, though we must die some day, or rather, are already dying; for we stand daily nearer the brink, and every hour of time thrusts us on towards the precipice over which we must fall. See how blind our minds are! What I speak of as in the future is happening at this minute, and a large portion of it has already happened; for it consists of our past lives. But we are mistaken in fearing the last day, seeing that each day, as it passes, counts just as much to the credit of death...
Lately, I am making decisions based on imagining whether my future self is more likely to regret doing something or more likely to regret not doing it.
If your phone already works fine, are you more likely to regret buying an iPhone X or more likely to regret not buying one? Imagining spending over $1000 and then realising it only does the same tasks as your existing phone once you get it. It is easy to imagine that if you knew nothing of the iPhone X, you would not regret not having one. If your phone is old and tired, suppose that the next time the battery runs out on you at a critical moment, it is easier to imagine regretting not buying the new phone earlier. Unless it's broke, don't spend money fixing it. I have a couple of times in my life got buyers remorse from a new phone or a new car when I replaced them and the old one was fine. With "stuff" it is relatively easy - a rough rule of thumb is that you would regret having it more than not. This type of decision making broadly aligns with what is already known about happiness - better to spend money on experiences rather than things. If you are invited somewhere, even if you are not sure you are going to like it, better to go and regret doing it than to regret not doing it - it could be the best thing you ever did, after all? Would you regret going out in your 20s versus staying home and not meeting anyone? Pretty easy to imagine you'll regret something you haven't done more than something you have done in this example. What about if you regret spending your 20s working to build a business and never going out but then you have all the money you ever need and can retire at 30? More difficult to imagine - but is this the real decision you are making? You have time. Do both. |
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