Author: Garth Beyer

More often than we probably acknowledge or appreciate, the way things happen is actually often aligned with what we were hoping for.

Of course, we often put focus on when something doesn’t go the way we were hoping for.

We try to rationalize it after the fact. Find a place to assign blame, perhaps.

All at the loss of doing one or two better moves.

The first being finding the lesson. Perhaps you didn’t get the job because of a missing attribute. You have control over adding that in and learning from the experience.

The second being finding a way to move on. Perhaps a coin was flipped and you didn’t luck out with the job. That’s out of your control and there’s nothing to learn from that, which means it’s time to spend the energy on hoping for something new than sulking in how things didn’t go how you hoped.

Stay Positive & You Control Your Hope

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The master creative reviewer surfs the high tides and the low tides.

She gets in the weeds as well as boards the helicopter to see the 2000 AGL view.

He evaluates the big picture and the tiny details of it.

She reads the room at the same time she’s engaging in discussion.

It’s a difficult dance, but someone has to do it.

Stay Positive & Maybe That Someone Is You?

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Funny how instruction manuals and part lists and how-tos can have the wrong language in them or be missing a piece or some step isn’t quite aligned with what’s in front of you as you’re trying to complete it.

When this happens, you’re left with two options.

Invest a lot of time to figure it out (and any time there is a time investment, you’re undoubtedly getting frustrated or enraged, too). You might discover there was a missing piece or find the missing step in some thread in the deep web. Key word, though, is might.

The second option is to evaluate if it’s truly needed to still get the result you want. If you think about it, the language is wrong, the piece is missing or the step is misaligned because it’s not critical in the first place – it was the last prioritized element of someone’s role.

Rather than investing time to figure it out, it’s worth investing time to evaluate if you can keep going with the task anyway, first. Perhaps this entails simply leaving that void a void or it’s quick thinking on how to fill the gap with an alternative.

More often, shipping the work, completing the task, moving forward is more important than getting it absolutely perfect (especially when it doesn’t need to be).

Stay Positive & Time Is Of The Essence

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We’ve got so many choices.

And even when it feels like there’s only one right answer, there’s more than one. Versions. Nuances. Parallel paths.

The only real way to know if the choice you’re making is the right one to make is to ensure it ladders up to your mission.

Business or personal, it applies.

If a decision can ladder up to your brand’s positioning of, say, pushing boundaries with sustainability or in the great outdoors (Sierra Nevada) then it’s a decision worth making.

If a choice can ladder up to your personal why, say, to extract meaning from victories and defeats so that I can help others recognize, reflect and continue pushing forward beyond their own (my personal why statement), then it’s a choice worth making.

It’s all about what a decision ladders up to.

Stay Positive & Less Time Arguing Over Pros/Cons, More Time Making Sure It Ladders Up

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Teaching someone a lesson.

Proving someone wrong.

Going through the process of elimination.

Crafting a rebuttle.

It’s all wasted time.

Time that could have been spent:

Learning something new.

Proving yourself right.

Creating magic.

Yes, anding an idea with someone.

Stay Positive & You Choose How You Use Your Time

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People want consistency in their lives.

People won’t often tell you that they want the consistency. Some don’t even know they do. But their actions speak the thoughts they don’t see.

Consistency doesn’t have to be the same thing every day. It can be something new but familiar every day. (Dumb example: a person wants coffee every day, but they might be someone who is okay with a different flavor each day.)

Art without consistency is just a passion project, not actual art. The recipe requires both ingredients: passion and consistency.

If you get deep enough in the weeds of consistency, you find nuance (often confused with inconsistency. Dumb example: someone who is on a year long diet journey but covers their salad with ranch dressing).

Once you find the nuance, that’s when you can market differently to different people, have real empathy and make consistency really matter.

Stay Positive & Inconsistently Consistent

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It’s fun when multiple choice questions have “none of the above” as an option.

Most of the time, when it’s the right choice, it’s blatantly obvious.

But in real life, it’s not because most of the time on a test, we know what the answer is supposed to be, but life? Not so much.

So we default to picking out of the options available instead of saying they’re not for us and treading our own path and discovering what the answer behind “none of the above” is for us.

But is picking from what’s available really the right answer?

Stay Positive & Life Is Not A Scantron Test

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