I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
I cannot describe how awesome that commencement speech was.
EDIT: I have linked to the video a billion times but here is the transcript
Like many people out there I looked forward to this long weekend as I saw it at a chance to slow down a bit and escape the daily grind.
And I did so by going to work.
To me the daily grind is not going to work itself but the mundane work involving some combination of spreadsheets, databases, emails, meetings and phone calls. In our business these are essential, but that doesn’t make it fun. In the end I get this work done but I don’t feel like I have achieved much.
Today however I went in to work later than usual, closed all of my usual programs and worked on a side project, one which I have unsuccessfully tried in the past. As an added bonus I allowed myself to get distracted (without the guilt) and ate badly.
I left work at 5pm, fulfilled and extremely excited for things to come.
As a result I have come to the following conclusions:
*Just to make it clear, this means fun work is to have equal importance to essential work and not unceremoniously pushed aside because my time management skills are poor.
With this commitment I know that I am moving towards achieving something daily. It might not always be gold standard work (and I find this difficult to accept) but with being stagnant as the other option I’ll just have to live with it.
Thoughts?
Until recently I thought that one of the ultimate goals of productivity is comfort. By comfort I mean that fundamentally you are proficient enough to do what you need to almost automatically so you can use your left-over mental capacities towards something else, like achieving world peace or becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
Being comfortable had the complete opposite effect on me. My increased proficiency lead to complacency and as a result I didn’t have the same attention to detail in completing everyday/procedural tasks. Overall I didn’t feel as sharp and switched on. Luckily it didn’t affect things too much. Inside me however, I felt that this new found comfort had dulled my creative/innovative mind, in effect it gave me a false sense of security. After all things are going good, so why change something that works?
A shift was occurring. I could feel that I was becoming a reactive rather than proactive person. I didn’t want to be going mentally stale, long story short I had to make some changes.
To counteract this shift I started taking more time to be “less comfortable”, which means an almost obsessive monitoring of my own progress and self-improvement.
I now take regular scheduled time to:
By doing this I held myself more accountable and feel like I am able to be on the front foot to tackle issues rather than cleaning them up after the damage is done. The feeling of being active and in control saves a bit of stress too.
Having these sessions scheduled regularly means you are constantly keeping an eye on where you are going and improving on things. Or in the words of our Prime Minister “moving forwards”.
It has been a couple of weeks since I saw the film The Social Network but the one thing that I can’t get out of my head is the way that Zuckerberg was able to completely zone out of the world around him to create his work. The way that he single-mindedly pursued his idea left me completely in awe.
It just shows how a killer mindset, determination and focus can make a big difference in the way we live our daily lives regardless of the circumstances we are up against.
While trying to research a bit more into this mindset I stumbled across this article, well worth a read.
Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/phone/
This morning I managed to..
..All before 9am
Sometimes waking up super early does make sense as you can ease yourself into a new week rather than being thrown into it. You should try it.
“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.”
The gist is that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.
Interesting theory.
Very often we are told conflicting messages about ‘having it all’ and whether we can or can’t have it. Personally I do think that things need to be sacrificed to get to where you want to be.
In my time to be successful means you have to constantly balance and adjust the intensity of individual burners according to your own situation.
In my world I often come across companies that go at a million miles an hour to promote a new concept product without really stopping to think about:
Sadly the result is a tonne of enthusiasm + great press at the start, followed by a quiet period from the manufacturer while they sort out the details and if you’re lucky a product pops out in the end. The product itself isn’t always exactly as the manufacturer described initially and the masses get disappointed.
The first device that comes to mind is the Crunchpad which started as a low cost, lightweight tablet computer for the masses to access the internet on the couch. Which sounded awesome (this was pre-iPad announcement). But then after a bit of internet intrigue, lawsuits and pictures of a birthday cake the ensuing device was launched by an entirely different company as the JooJoo a few months too late, a few dollars more expensive and had all its thunder stolen by some device called the iPad.
This got me thinking about how I go about executing my own ideas and concluded that I need to practice what I call ‘controlled enthusiasm’ to give them the greatest chance of success. Ideas are a funny thing, almost everybody has them, we all like to think that we have great ones (we probably do) but what isn’t so apparent is that a great idea is one that is executed and exists. And this execution is a massive labour of love that requires persistence and dedication to see through to the end.
From my perspective I try and use the enthusiasm I have for an idea to go all out in a flurry of directionless doing. The result is normally less than optimum. Why? Two reasons.
So going forwards I am going to give this controlled enthusiasm thing a whirl. It will involve painful meticulous planning and completely go against how I like to work. In fact I am even going to try and apply these techniques to some past ideas that didn’t work out and try them again. This time I hope that by slowing things down there will be a sustained effort and I see my visions through till the end.
I even did it with this post, instead of pushing it out the door right away I will let it stew, re-read and edit before posting.
Beautiful.
