Tag: Work Habits

Breaking the Once and Done Mentality

I hate to mow the lawn.  Still, I love few things more than a freshly cut and edged lawn.  I like the result, the problem is that only a few days later, it’s already visibly growing back.  That means it has to be cut again.  I want to be able to get it just right once and never have to deal with it again.  (I hate haircuts for the same reason.)

I want to do things once and move on.  I don’t like maintenance and repeated actions.  I try to carry all the grocery bags into the house in a single trip, even when it ends up taking longer and being ridiculously awkward.

I’m not going to pretend this mentality is all bad.  I think it’s a big strength much of the time.  But the main problem with it is that it creates all kinds of existential overhead.  I gets stressed just knowing something is in a constant state of limbo and not done for good.  This stress sucks, especially when you run a business.

I’ve never met a business owner who loves their current website.  It’s always, “Yeah, it’s not what it’s supposed to be.  We’re making some changes.”  Same goes for marketing copy, sales process, product, back office, etc.  Everything is a process.  You don’t just build it once.  That kind of dynamism is wonderful for customers and necessary for producers, but it can be frustrating for a build-it-once-and-move-on guy like myself.  I have to surround myself with people who enjoy the open-ended process (yet still have the ability to finish).

I can do it, and I do.  It’s necessary.  But I still haven’t learned how to do it happily.  It still stresses me out.  I guess I can start with my lawn.  If I can make my peace with the fact that grass just keeps growing back no matter how short I cut it, and embrace the rhythm and cycle, maybe I can apply that to larger things.

You Have to Pick Two

I wrote recently about how you can’t have a growing business, a robust social life, and a great family life all at once.  You only get to pick two.  The implication is that, though everyone wants all three, you get a maximum of two if you want to succeed.  I’m beginning to think the heuristic is not just a maximum, but a minimum as well.  You don’t just get to pick two, you have to pick two.

If you pour yourself fully in to any one of these at the expense of the others, you’re unlikely to find long term success and fulfillment.  If you’re a passionate, single-minded entrepreneur, you need to create space for some kind of social life or family/significant other.  You won’t be your best if you don’t.

Many people accept this notion but mistakenly assume all that’s needed is a balance of time spent on the activities.  As long as I carve out 30% of my time to not work I’ll be balanced because I’ll be with friends or family.  This is far from the truth.  You need time with an interest or hobby around which friends congregate, or family time, but you can’t expect it to happen simply because you set aside time to not work.  You have to be just as intentional with your non-work time as you are with time spent working.  You have to be definite and deliberate in the creation of a social or family life.

Again, it’s not about the number of hours spent on each.  Maybe you’re able to pour yourself into a job with only a four hour workweek.  Maybe you can have a meaningful social life with nothing more than one kite-boarding session a week.  The point is to ensure you have more than one thing on which to put your energy and attention.  One needs to serve as an outlet for things left unexpressed in the other.

I don’t believe it’s really about creating a stark divide or work/life balance either.  Depending on your personality and habits, you may need that in order to do your two things.  Or you may need a seamless synthesis.  I tend to have a much better family and work life when I have fuzzier lines between them.  I love working from home. I’m writing this at the breakfast table with noisy kids all around.  I like taking my kids with me on work trips when I can.  I enjoy responding to emails at all hours, and I feel less stressed and more in the moment with family when I don’t have to put work completely on hold.  You may be the opposite.  Neither is better or worse.  The important thing is to have something outside of work to devote yourself to.

Success as a Discipline

I like to view success as a skill not unlike any other.  I think it can be learned.  If you apply discipline and form good habits you will get better at success.

Perhaps there are elements of heredity or good fortune that might bring a person success or the appearance of it.  But those are less common and tend to be fleeting.  In fact, if you have not learned success as a discipline, even good fortune could end up making you worse off in the long run.

Success is the ability to imagine a desired end and achieve it.  Both components – the imagining and the achieving – are important.  The thing that connects them and ties ideas to outcomes is a willingness to pay the price.  Many people imagine lovely things and get upset or confused when they don’t get them.  But few are realistic about whether or not they actually are willing to do what it takes.

How can you learn the discipline of success?  You learn by doing.  First imagine something you want.  Then think through what it will take to achieve it.  Decide if you’re willing to pay the price and if so, fully commit.  Now begin taking the steps and don’t stop until you achieve it.  That’s it.  Each time you accomplish what you set out to you begin to form a habit and become accustomed to the process of success.  For this reason, as with any other skill, start small.  Think of modest goals and ends that aren’t too far off.  Practice achieving them and you not only get whatever the end was, but you learn how to succeed.  Do it over and over.  Once you’ve mastered success as a discipline, you can apply it to more grand and ambitious ends.

I don’t mean to imply that you can succeed every time you try anything.  Skills don’t work that way.  You can’t master piano playing such that you’ll never make a mistake and you can play anything perfectly the first time.  But we all recognize piano playing as a skill that can be cultivated through discipline and the formation of habits.  Success is the same.  You can teach yourself how to imagine a goal, commit to paying the price, and reach it.

Some Lies I Believe

I think Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame Induction speech where he calls out everyone he thinks disrespected him is one of the greatest ever.  I find Alec Balwdin’s “Always be closing” monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross incredibly inspirational.  I loved when Kevin Durant said, “It’s my fault” after playing an amazing playoff game while his teammates let him down.

Strictly speaking, all of these are lies.  Jordan’s high school coach didn’t disrespect him.  He saw an undeveloped talent and made a reasonable decision with no malice.  All the employees Baldwin yelled at were not losers who shouldn’t even think about drinking coffee until they can close a deal.  Durant was not to blame for the loss.

Jordan chose to interpret everything as a sleight.  He used it as a chip on his shoulder.  Probably not a very psychologically healthy move in normal life.  Baldwin’s speech is a terrible way to manage people in the workplace.  Durant’s claim that he was to blame reveals a God complex that is a pretty dangerous outlook.  Yet I love each of these instances.

Only once you know no one is out to get you can you benefit from pretending they are.  Humans adopt beliefs and take actions based on story.  We need narrative.  Sometimes, especially if you’ve achieved some modicum of success, life simply does not present much conflict or direct opposition.  Yet we are moved by stories of heroes and villains.  This is when the truly great ones fabricate a narrative that powers them to achieve.

I sometimes joke with my wife that I want her to pretend to leave me for a few days so I can feel enough angst to write music.  As a teen I wrote songs constantly, fueled by high emotions.  A stable, secure marriage is a real challenge to musical creativity!

When life doesn’t provide them I tell myself stories of struggle.  I create myths wherein villains and haters are obstructing my way or mocking my effort.  I don’t actually make enemies with real people, but I weave a narrative that produces a chip on the shoulder.  I enter into a game where no one really believes in me and metaphorical bullets fly from every side.

A belief that the universe is trying to destroy you is incredibly disempowering.  But once you know it’s not true yet selectively choose to play as if it is you become unstoppable.  You can’t be unstoppable if nothing is trying to stop you.

Put that coffee down.

The Trade-Off Between Productivity and Adaptability

When I got to the office this morning the WiFi was down.  It put a wrench in my whole day.  I had planned to write a blog post then jump right in to my task list.  Today was one of those productive days.  I could feel it.  But with no WiFi I couldn’t start in my preferred order.  I could do emails and several other things on my phone, but it’s much harder to write a blog post that way, so that had to wait.  I am now off my game, and struggling to get back on.

Some days I’m pretty adaptable.  If I know things are going to be unpredictable, I enter a flexible state of mind and can handle it well (when travelling, for instance).  But even though I handle it well, I’m far less productive when I’m highly adaptive.  I get back from a trip and I have a lot of catching up to do.  I have yet to find that zone where I can be highly productive and still easily roll with unexpected schedule shifts or curve-balls.

This apparent trade-off got me thinking about great sports teams.  Some of the greatest regular season teams are highly productive.  They have a plan, they are excellent at execution, and they deliver results week in, week out.  But many of those teams struggle mightily in the post season.  They face top defenses who have had longer to plan and throw out every trick in the bag.  They can upset the schedule.  Teams who operate far on the productivity side of the continuum suffer from lack of adaptability and can sometimes get blown out just by missing one or two early series.  I’m thinking of football especially.  How many Super Bowl winning teams have been the most consistently productive regular season teams, compared to the more tumultuous, creative, adaptive, and even streaky “big moment” teams?  Outside of Manning’s Colts, not many in my lifetime.

Where does this leave me?  I don’t really know.  I suspect the sweet spot is to find a way to dial in to productive mode for the regular season – the daily grind when travel and tumult are not the norm – and flip the switch to adaptive mode during the post season – the busy times and big moments where a lot is in the air.  I’m not sure how well one person or team can embody both styles of play and change between them on call.  I’ll have to think of some examples.  Still, I suspect that is where consistent greatness comes.  The kind that can win day in, day out, playing to strengths and rising to the big game with whatever’s needed.

Two Habits That Help Me

I was checking out some new podcasts while travelling yesterday and listened to an episode of Tim Ferriss’s show where he interviewed Josh Waitzkin, on whom the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer are based.  Waitzkin mentioned several habits that keep him productive and help him maximize his day.  Two in particular stood out because I’ve found both extremely helpful when I practice them, but had not consciously thought about why that might be.  Waitzkin helped clarify the why.

The first is simply to begin the day with writing or some other kind of creative activity.  Do your creative work first, before checking emails or social media.  Those tasks and inputs will put your mind in a reactive orientation.  Once in react mode it’s very hard to keep the creative part flowing and it can make for a more stressful, chaotic day.  If you create first, you orient your mind creatively and then when it’s time for the inputs and tasks, you’re less reactive and more creative.

The second habit is to finish the work day with high quality work.  Whatever task or project you end the day on, make it your best work.  This not only gives a sense of pride, completion, and accomplishment that helps you transition away from work and unwind, it also leaves you in a productive, high quality mindset.  Your subconscious will carry that over into the night.  When you awake the next morning to create, you’ll already be in a good frame of mind to do so.

I’ve not always been consistent with these habits, but both essentially formed on their own as I found how valuable they were to getting and staying in the zone.  As I said, I hadn’t actually pondered them as explicit habits and discovered why they worked until the podcast, but they definitely do for me.

Don’t Go to College

Good friend and collaborator T.K. Coleman invited me on his show, “Conversations with FiFi & T.K.” to talk about Praxis and why traditional education doesn’t cut it any more.  We had a great conversation and I got to field some good questions about the Praxis idea.  Made me all the more excited for the start of our first class in February!  Hope you enjoy the interview.

Compound Your Worth

Would you prefer to have one million dollars in one month, or have a penny, doubled every day for that same month?

It’s a popular question that illustrates the power of compounding.  The penny, doubled every day, equals more than five million dollars in a thirty day month, and nearly eleven million in a thirty-one day month.

Compounding is powerful even if you’re not doubling every day.  And it works with more than money.  If you assign a numeric value to something, even arbitrarily, it can illustrate the transformational ability of this effect.  Let’s say the value of you as a person – your abilities, output, and offerings to yourself and the world – is 100.  If you resolve to improve your self by one percent every day, in just a month, your value will be 135.  In a year, it will be more than 3,700.  However imperfect this quantification is, there is no denying that a small, daily improvement has immense power to enhance your worth.

How do you improve, even by just a little each day?  By doing.  What things matter to you?  What do you want to produce, or be skilled at?  Once you pick something, just do it.  Do a little every day.  Sure, you can read about cooking, counseling, playing the oboe, writing, tennis, or investing.  That’s fine, but it won’t be of much use unless you’re also doing those things.  It’s not that intimidating when you realize the power of compounding.

Improve yourself every day, even a tiny bit.

Expect Benevolence; Don’t Need It

Wake up every day expecting great things to happen to you.  Look forward to some unforeseen goodness to fall from the sky.  But make plans and take action as if you’ll never get a thing you don’t scrap for and earn with hard work.

People who live on the hope of unexpected good news end up sitting around waiting to win the lottery.  It’s a corrosive, stultifying mindset.  People who embrace the opposite, and assume nothing good ever happens and every inch must be taken through sacrifice and grit, are often cynical, overly skeptical, and can miss opportunity because they don’t think it ever knocks.

If you can expect the universe to shower goodness on you every day, yet work like the only rain is the rain you make, you’ll be hopeful and cheerful, yet motivated and persistent.  You won’t be bitter when good things don’t fall on your lap, and you won’t miss it when they do.

On Not Having a Goal

I’m a very goal oriented person.  Everything I do is towards this or that short or long term goal, and anything else seems like wasteful fluff.  I’m pretty efficient at only doing things that advance toward my goals.  I used to feel bad for people who didn’t seem to have many goals, and would kind of float by, just taking in the scenery, with no real purpose to many of their actions.  Now I see something valuable in it.

How many of my goals arose just because I had nothing to focus on, craved it, and picked the first thing that seemed right?  I’ve put tons of energy into things that were goals almost for their own sake, not because I took the time to find it really resonated with me.  Certainly some things were gained and learned, but often in a haphazard, accidental way.  Contrast that with people I know who are slow to adopt a goal.  Sure, they have some long periods of aimlessness, but they are often taking the time to discover what they want and what goals are truly worthwhile.  When they find one, they are not as burnt out, and they’re ready to dive in.

That will never be me on an instinctual level, but I have definitely learned from observing such people to resist the urge to pick goals just to have them, and even be comfortable for periods without really clear goals.  This has helped the truly important things come into clearer focus, and let me hone in on a smaller number of more valuable goals.

Radically Practical

There’s an assumption that practical and radical are on opposite ends of the spectrum.  Sometimes, the reverse is true.  The most practical things can be the most radical.

Radical means outside the status quo; something not often done or considered; something beyond the social mores and institutions of the day.  Practical means something that’s efficient at achieving your tangible, real-world goals.

Think about how many social norms and activities are horribly inefficient: K-12 education, college, formal attire, working in a giant office building instead of from a remote office, buying instead of renting, working for someone else instead of contracting out or starting your own firm, waiting to retire before you live where you want to, and on and on ad nauseum.  None of these are bad in themselves, but considering the stated goals of those who engage in them, they’re almost always an unnecessarily costly and painful approach.

If you zoom out, get in touch with your real desires and goals, and consider the best way to achieve them, so many of the standard approaches turn out to be wholly impractical.  Don’t worry about what’s considered radical by society; ask yourself what works best at getting what you want, and do it.  It’s prudent and practical, even if others consider it radical.

If doing what works best for you is radical, wear it as a badge of honor.

When to Take the Plunge

Every idea is not worth pursuing.  Even good ideas may not be worth pursuing.  And sometimes, even mediocre ideas are worth pursuing.

If you’re thinking in terms of odds of success, you might be going about it the wrong way.  It’s very difficult to realistically assess the odds of success.  If you are in love with an idea, every data point will scream, “this is going to work!”.  On the other hand, if you are only surveying the landscape for a sure thing, no matter what it is, you might end up pursuing something with good data behind it, but for which you have no particular passion or special skill.  Neither are great recipes for success.

So if the odds of success, the level of love you have for the project, or the “goodness” of the idea are not sufficient metrics for deciding whether or not to act, what is?  Tolerance for failure.

Only go after an idea that you are willing to fail at it.  There is always a chance of failure.  If you can imagine pursuing something and failing, and it doesn’t feel that bad, do it.  If you know you’d be happier to have “loved and lost” on your idea than never to have attempted, do it.  If, on the other hand, you think failing at something sounds worse than never trying it, it’s a good sign that it’s not a project worth your effort.  If your main worry is over the chance of failure, rather than the discomfort of not attempting, it’s not a good fit.

Do What You Love, or Have it Easy?

The hardest thing to do is what you love.

It’s a long and difficult process to discover what you love; what truly makes you come alive.  It includes a series of epiphanies about your own errors of judgement and direction.  It demands brutal self-honesty.  It requires tedious and dangerous trial and error.  It cannot be found by mere reflection, but deep reflection has to occur alongside experimentation.  None of this is easy, and you’re never done.  You change, and what makes you come alive changes.  The journey toward it is endless and adaptation and adjustments of your goals are continuous.

That’s just to discover what you love.  Once you’ve begun to remove the chaff and hone in on a direction that makes you fulfilled, actually moving in it is even harder.  You have to muster the grit and determination to move toward it, even when the individual steps themselves are grueling.  You have to continue to remind yourself of what really awakens your love of life, and not let yourself off the hook pursuing anything less.

It’s much easier to find and do what you mildly enjoy, what you can tolerate, or even what you hate.  Anyone can stop the discovery process short and find what feels comfortable in the short term.  Anyone can choose not to chisel away the distractions; not to get to the core of what makes you fulfilled.  Anyone can treat what they love as an unattainable object that exists only to torment and tease.  Anyone can come up with mediocre, safe, reasonable, sound, and predictable goals and activities.

People say when you do what you love you never work a day.  It’s easy to hear that and envy those whose profession seems to be something they have a lot of fun with.  It is true that when you’re in the zone pursuing your passion, it doesn’t feel like work.  But discovering that zone, and making yourself enter in is more work than anything.

Some people think work is hard because they’re not doing what they love.  In reality, they haven’t been able to do what they love because they’re not willing to work hard enough.

Finding and re-finding what you love, and moving toward it every day, is the hardest thing in the world.  It is also the most worthwhile.

The Neutrality of Everything

A hammer is neither good nor bad.  It is a tool.  It is useful.  It can be useful in achieving good things, and equally useful in achieving bad things.  It is valuable because it is useful, but the fact that it has value does not make it good or bad.

The same is true of an iPhone.  The same is true of money.  These are all morally neutral, inanimate objects (Siri notwithstanding) that become extensions of human will and volition, and act as a catalyst for whatever good or bad ends we intend.  They deserve neither vilification nor praise, except in regards to their usefulness.

Tools have their own qualities and characteristics; they have their own nature.  They will react in certain ways to certain conditions.  If you slam an iPhone down on a hard surface, it will crack.  It’s silly to get angry at the characteristics of the iPhone.  Part of growing up is learning to understand and work with the natures of the objects around us, rather than being surprised or angered by them.

So much for tools.  What about people?  Immanuel Kant, along with just about every decent person I’ve met, would bristle at the thought of people as morally neutral tools; useful if properly employed, but neither praise nor blameworthy in and of themselves.  For good reason.  People as objects is probably a terrible and incorrect notion.  People have wills and can choose right or wrong.  People don’t just react, they can act to thwart one another.  They have qualities that take them beyond the level of tools.  That may be their place in the cosmos, but what about in our day-to-day perceptions?

It can be incredibly enlightening and freeing to treat people with the same neutrality we treat our iPhones.  Not because they are the same, but because seeing them that way can help shed bitterness and accomplish more.  If, just like you would with an inanimate object, we try to learn the natures of those around us and get an idea of how they will react to conditions around them, we will be better equipped to cooperate for mutual benefit.

Sure, they have motives, but ascribing motives and assuming intentions are often hindrances to productive relationships.  Whether or not it’s for good reason, if you know a person gets angry every time you say X, rather than begrudge them this habit, adapt.  Learn to navigate the world of human relationships with the same judgement-free attitude you do the non-human world.  People have natures.  They’ll act in accordance with them.  Don’t hold it against them, learn it, know it, expect it, and work with it.

There are certainly times when some kind of confrontation or intervention is required.  There are times when working around a person’s modus operandi may be worse than trying to help them see the need to change it.  I think these times are rare, and only really worth it when a kind of standing invitation to do so exists in the relationship.

See how it works to view people as morally neutral, rational agents, rather than out to help or harm you.  It can turn even unpleasant interactions into a kind of interesting puzzle.  It may be untrue, but it is useful and in some ways makes it easier to appreciate people and treat them well.

(An alternative approach, much more bizarre and playful, is to treat everything like we treat people.  Ascribe will, motive and personality to your car, your iPhone and your coffee mug.  Perhaps I’ll discuss this another day…)

The Art of Science

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal this week claimed that great scientists needn’t be good at math.  E.O. Wilson argued that big ideas, not number crunching, are the source of major breakthroughs.  In other words, it’s the art of science, not the science, that inspires the game-changers.

I think there’s something here that applies beyond the physical sciences.  The social sciences, in particular economics, have been in a race of sorts to see who could mathematize fastest.  While complex modelling and statistical analysis can illuminate, they cannot generate.  Data is meaningless without a theoretical lens through which to interpret it.  Path-breaking work comes not from those with the best “hard” skills, but from those with the best paradigmatic innovations.  The best work seems to come from seeing the world differently, constructing theories from the new lens, then running some numbers to see how they look from the new vantage point.

This bit about seeing the world anew has never been more profoundly communicated to me than in a book by the novelist Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation.  Koestler sets out to reveal general rules of creation that apply across media – from the creation of a joke, to a work of art, to a technological invention.  It is a stunningly informative and ponderous work.

Koestler describes worldviews as matrices of thought; well-worn knowledge and assumptions that we carry along with us and use as shortcuts for understanding our world.  The eureka moment – the burst of laughter in a joke, the flow in the making of a sculpture, the sudden insight that unlocks the innovation – comes when two separate matrices intersect.  Koestler calls this intersection “bisociation”, and sees it as a kind of relieving of tension as two paradigms moving in what appears to be unrelated directions suddenly converge.

A poignant example in the book is Archimedes’ discovery of how to measure the purity of gold in a crown.  Archimedes knew the weight per volume of gold vs. other metals, but he could not melt the crown down to figure out its volume.  The thought matrix relating to weights, volumes and metals was completely unrelated to Archimedes afternoon bathing.  Yet as he slipped into the tub and noticed the water level rise, matrices collided and the bath solved the measurement problem of the crown.  It was not new, fancy calculations that resulted in this breakthrough on determining purity in oddly shaped gold items.  Instead, it was a bisociation of existing knowledge on water displacement with that on metallic weight.

Not only is creation about seeing familiar facts in new ways, it’s about allowing oneself the time and mental play to do so.  Some of the greatest eureka moments have come upon waking from a dream, going on a long walk while the mind wanders, or taking an explicit break from the problem at hand.  It is true, the great innovators have been versed in the science of their craft.  But what separates creators from specialists is not better technical expertise, but new eyes that generate new ideas.

Think big.  Explore.  Don’t let a lack of mastery keep you from probing the mysteries that fascinate you.