Will it make the boat go faster? Benjamin P. Hardy wrote a great article yesterday on how to keep focussing on the right things with a lesson from the British rowing team of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Read the whole article for context but my favourite excerpts are below:
They developed a one-question response to EVERY SINGLE DECISION they made. This one question allowed them to measure every situation, decision, and obstacle - and to not get derailed where most people do.
Find out what you want in life and for everything that gets in the way, ask yourself, will this help me hit my goal? If not, you know what to do...or not do.
Read the full article
'Let's move on'. The three greatest word to change. Much better than 'this won't work' or 'tried it before' or 'you're talking rubbish.' Better than 'we're off topic,' 'no I won't,' or 'this isn't working.'
"Let's move on' can replace all of these other three-word phrases and it is charged with positivity rather than negativity. How much will the other phrases actually change anyone's mind? It is very difficult to change someone's opinion. Why do you need to do it right now? It will take time. Realise this and let go of your position; better to build the relationship. Let's move on. Let's move on to a subject we do agree on. Let's move on to a better future. Let's move on to a different option. Forward progress is all that matters. Everything is in constant flux anyway. Everything on the planet is made from the same materials that build and decompose. We are all in this together, so let's all try to move forward together. There will be opposing forces, but let's move on. There will be people that want us to fail, but let's move on. We will doubt our own ability, but let's move on. And keep moving on. What is the smallest step you can do? Do that. Then move on. Keep moving on. Repeat every day. Let's move on Let's move on Let's move on
"Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now." This got stuck in my head after listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. I'm sure it means lucky to be alive rather than dead on a battlefield - it is relatively hard to follow having not seen the show, as well as competing with a five-month-old finding his own voice whilst driving in the car - but I do love this quote.
It is amazing to be living right now. So many things we take for granted growing up and so many more things the next generation will take for granted. How many hours of our teen years were wasted feeling sorry for ourselves despite having more than most humans in history before us? It is amazing that we have electricity, that we can make light at the flick of a switch, let alone that we carry around a pocket-sized device every day that can instantly connect us to anyone else in the world in any format we want: text, voice, video. We can talk to computers and they understand some of what we are saying - that is amazing. But how easy is it to take for granted? Cursing when the lightbulb goes pop or when there is a power cut for a few hours. Cursing at Siri when she thinks you said "plum" rather than "mom." Cursing the crappy Wi-Fi when a Skype call drops for work. Look around - how lucky we are to be alive right now. Right now, in this age, before all the dead dinosaur juice is depleted and there is a massive power shift in global politics and monetary policy. Before the water levels rise and we live on smaller and smaller islands. Before our food loses all nutrition from people chasing short-term profit targets. This is the best time to be alive right now. We do not know if it is going to get better than this. Do you really want to be the person that did not try to follow their dreams during the best time to be alive? Take action today. Wanting The Results Without The Effort Or: The Long Game Is Not A Game If You Love What You Do19/2/2018
If you do not love what you do, you are not likely to stick with it long enough to be able to make it successful. You need to love the process. And when you love the process it does not really matter if you are successful as you are getting to do what you love.
However, as a side effect, it is more likely that you will be successful BECAUSE you are doing something that you love, and all the positive energy slowly makes an impact. I was speaking to a server in a cafe whilst getting my lunch. It was 31st Jan after having a dry January and also cutting out caffeine, grains, any white carbs, sugar etc. As I was paying for my salad I joked that I might treat myself to one of everything they sell tomorrow as a treat for being good in January. She said, "if I was as skinny as you, then I would eat everything every day." Clearly, we were both joking, but as I walked away I found it interesting that people do want results without knowing what it takes to get there. If I ate anything every day, then I would not be skinny. It is strange how our brains do this to us. It is easy to see the muscled man or the toned woman and assume that it is easy for them, they are just fit, rather than thinking that they might have been fat, geeky children for all but 1 year of their life and they have worked really hard every day to keep working out and avoiding the temptation of eating crap in order to look like that. The same thing happens in business - nothing is an overnight success. People with overnight successes have worked for ten years behind the scenes (and will work hard for at least 10 more years) to make something that you have not heard of one day and that everyone's heard of the next day. It builds, it does not bang. People want results without the effort. If you asked someone if they wanted to win the lottery they would, of course, say yes. If you said to them that they could have even more money than a lottery win and all they had to do was work on themselves for 15 years for 15 hours a day without a day off, do you think that they would do it? I think not. Enjoy the journey - make the results be the side product. Should You Work And Work And Work And Wait For The Payoff Later Or Should You Enjoy Yourself Now?16/2/2018
It all depends on what you drive joy from.
The most successful, in monetary terms, and probably achievement, enjoy working, grinding, moving closer towards something meaningful. For the person that achieves longevity, the money is usually a side-effect. They like doing what they are doing and they need to do it to be who they are. On the flip side, you could die crossing the street tomorrow. Is it really worth putting yourself unnecessarily through all that hardships rather than going to that party, buying that car, spending time with your family? Well, probably not. However, what if you do not die tomorrow? What if you live to be 100 plus? You have a lot of time left AND it is going to go quickly. What are you going to do with it? Why not do it all? Just like tasks, you can batch things. Why not spend some amount of time, that could be a week, a month or a year, solely focussed on building your business, then take some time off? Or, like eating healthy, focus on being how you want to behave 80% of the time and take one day a week off to do anything that you want. In the hyper-connected world that we live, the reality is that you can probably do it all. The only thing that will stop you is not doing anything at all or spending too much time on one thing at the expense of the rest. You can still keep up to date on binge-watching Netflix as long as this is not the only thing you do. You can go travelling and party as long as you are working on something for the future too. There are examples of success all around you of how different people did it. All with different balances. The common thread? No one did it without hard work. If you love what you do, then you are halfway there.
What will you do with your life? What will you do with your time? Our time on this earth is short and fleeting, yet it is still enough to those that spend it wisely.
How you spend your days is how you spend your life. What are you doing today? How you spend your hours is how you spend your day. Which hours are being wasted by you or by someone else? How you spend your minutes is how you spend your hours. Do you really want to spend ten minutes in the shower instead of five? Do you really want to watch just one more YouTube video before you start? Do you really want nine more minutes of snooze time (why is the snooze button always nine minutes anyway?) Being mindful of your minutes is where you can carve out vast amounts of time if you know where to look. But if you do not know how to spend your time in the first place, you are unlikely to even want to try this out. What do you want from your life? What would you do if you could not fail? What would you do if you already had $100Bn? What would you do if you thought you were better than you are? Whatever you came up with you can do all these things now. You can be all of these people now. You might not have all that they have yet, but you can be the same type of person that you need to be and do the same actions needed. If you do these things, then you have already won. You will be the person you want to be, doing the things you want to do. Therefore, you cannot fail. You might not be able to have the things you first thought of, but if you are doing the things you want to do and already feel like the person you want to become then you are likely to not be bothered about having those things anyway. Take the pressure off. Focus on the inputs (being and doing) and the outputs will likely come anyway. The Two Ways To Get Promoted Or: The Questions To Ask Yourself Before Working For A New Boss.8/2/2018
Where do people spend their time at work? On frivolous things. On worrying what other people, who are no better than them, think.
Everyone has their own shit to deal with. Just because someone is higher than you on an org chart does not mean they have sorted everything out. Probably just the opposite. Ask yourself why are they working here? If they were that good, why have they not started, or tried to start, their own company? Do they actually know how to market if they were spending their own money? Do they know how to sell with the pressure of not getting any income if they do not convert? Do they know about stock holding and cash flow when that same cash needs to pay the mortgage on their own house? Are all the people above you on the org chart the critics that Theodore Roosevelt was talking about? Have they actually done anything? Well, some have. Some have battled their way through. Some have taken hard stances. Some have tried lots of jobs to expand their knowledge and see first-hand that it is easier to criticise another function rather than do the doing that they do, day in day out. At the same time, there are also the blow-hards. The ones that talk a good game. That set things up like a house of cards and get promoted before leaving the inevitable winds of change to knock the cards down for some other sucker to sort out. The ones that do not seem to actually know anything. That ask what they think are profound questions in the style of a leader, when in fact they are just obvious simple questions that do not require any thought. Being mistaken for a blow-hard when you are a doer is gut-wrenching. Being mistaken for a doer when you are a blow-hard is surely the ultimate aim of the blow-hard. The quicker you can work out which one of these you are working for, the better. Preferably in the interview before you accept the job. No need to leave your job if you find out too late - just know. Blow-hards are always looking for doers. Just try to get directly to the people they speak to as they are likely to steal your work for their own gain. If you are working for a doer, they will give you the credit - like a brotherhood.
Everyone has their own shit going on. At home, at work, in their own minds. It is worth remembering this throughout the day. As you also have your own shit going on too.
Before you launch into a tirade, before you react to someone else, you always have the option. The option of adding fuel to the fire to the option of extinguishing it. It depends what the fire is for. If the fire is anger, conflict, hurt, then adding fuel to this is not going to be very constructive. Do you think that when two people are feeling this way that they are going to be in the right mind-set to resolve anything? Are they likely to feel better during or even afterwards? Probably not. What if the fire is a fire of change, of possibility, of creativity? Then better to be the person adding to this fire, to make it burn as intensely, brightly and as long as it can before it goes out. Ideally, this type of fire should never go out - and you should take responsibility for being the fire watcher. Anyone can be a leader. It does not matter what your role on an arbitrary hierarchy is. The only decision you have to make is which type of fires are you going to keep going and which ones are you going to help extinguish? There is not much more to be done. When people are busy, they liken this to going around putting out fires. Small blazes set alight by others who are seeking to harm you in some way. If left unattended, their fires may grow larger, they may join together in a massive blaze of negativity. On the other hand, they may just go out themselves. Others might not keep them going and they run out of fuel. But if you go around putting out other people's negative fires, you are unlikely to have the time to start, tend to and grow your own fires into a massive blaze of creativity and positivity. Which is easier? Which will be more successful? No one will care if there are a few small pockets of negativity against a blaze of positivity. All your job boils down to is to manage the relative difference in size between the two.
I was listening to best life ever podcast on the drive to my day job the other day about reversing your usual thinking towards focussing on who you want to BE rather than what you want to HAVE.
It was inspiring to hear them riff together as they are so natural it is obvious that they are truly passionate about the subject and doing what they are supposed to be doing in the world - I hope that everyone can find their thing. Anyway, it made me think of Think and Grow Rich. When I read it, I thought that the first few pages were a bit woo-woo, but that the rest of the book was one of the most practical books I have read. If you don't have money, work for someone else; work to learn, not to earn etc. Only much later after reading it, and relatively recently, I found out that the book is heralded by the manifestation community, the Secret, the "put a thought out into the world and sit and wait" brigade. How could the same book be taken in two different ways? I got from the book that I need self-confidence and hard work, whilst others got the "think". Just think and you will be rich. Maybe I picked up what I needed? Maybe others didn't actually read it and just read the title? I guess it doesn't matter. Anyway, the Best Life Ever episode reminded me of Think and Grow Rich as I have the affirmation from that book in my morning routine. It says, "I shall keep trying until I have developed sufficient self-confidence for its [definite chief aim in life] attainment." In fact, self-confidence is scattered throughout the book. So, linking the two, book and podcast, I got a moment of an epiphany. To get the self-confidence to reach my goals, I just need to BE someone who has self-confidence in reaching their goals. What would that look like? Have you ever bought anything off an unconfident salesperson? It feels awkward and creepy or just downright terrible experience. BE the opposite of that. Be passionate, be outgoing, go to conferences. Shout about your product and be proud of it.
Now that everything is completely global, jobs are going to the cheapest countries. IT was outsourced to India and now Ukraine and Romania. As a human population, we have the risk of massive upheaval across the globe.
Yet, when you think about a country in the context of the universe, it is an insignificant speck of dust floating on a pond of water on a rock. Really, we need to the think of the whole planet - all countries together. I wondered if we asked all the world leaders what they would focus on first if they were the leader of the world? And then the follow-up question - what is stopping us doing that right now? You can ask yourself the same question. And bringing it closer to home. If you were playing yourself in a movie about your life, how would you want the main character to be like and what would they do? Again, the follow up - what is stopping you doing that right now? What would that character in the movie do? |
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