Life Lesson

A great test to see if you’re contributing the right kind of work is to ask the question if they would miss it if it/you were gone.

The next great test is to make sure the work can still carry on without you.

It’s one thing to be needed in a certain way.

It’s another to be needed for anything to get done.

Stay Positive & More Of The First, Please

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Let’s just imagine you owned a coffee shop for a moment. No doubt there are some people who would enter that you would go above and beyond for.

Or maybe you manage an email list.

Or maybe you’re at a firm with a handful of clients.

Now imagine if your “above and beyond” situation became the norm, the status quo, the expectation.

Two things would happen. The first is you’d blow the competition out of the water and two, you’d need to find even more ways to treat different people differently.

Both are possible.

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On a similar note, there was a seminar on the college campus that I went to when I was younger. The speaker told everyone to stand up and reach as high as they could; to really stretch and get our arms, hands and fingers pointed as high as we could. We did. Then we were all asked to reach a tiny bit higher – and we did. Then he said something along the lines of this. “You guys rock more than you know. At first you thought you were reaching as high as you could, that was what was asked of you. But you were still able to reach higher. We hold back on ourselves. We can do more and be better if we ask it of ourselves.”

That experience has stuck with me to this day and it doesn’t just apply to how we hold back on ourselves, it’s also how we hold back on others. We can give more than we think we can.

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Stay Positive & Go Above And Beyond (Then Go Above And Beyond More)

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Reality is that those who maintain the basics are the ones to excel further than those who try to stray away.

The basics of putting things back where you found them, the basics of common sense etiquette, the basics of leaving a place/conversation/work better than how you found it, the basics of listening more than talking.

You can go above and beyond, but what people remember and care most about is that you’ve got the basics down, consistently and with care.

Stay Positive & Take Time For The 101

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You can do two, three, four things at once.

You can be in a meeting and do unrelated work at the same time.

You can drive an Uber and take a call with a friend.

You can draft a blog post, listen to your kid and eat at the same time.

We can but it doesn’t mean we should. Efficiencies drop. Focus ebbs and flows. And, more often than not, we leave someone else short – and that’s not cool.

Respond “not attending” to the meeting. Set aside time for your call. Listen first, blog and eat later.

Stay Positive & Prioritize

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Listening closely enough, asking questions with the delightful weight of you caring to know the answer and then truly seeing a person. That’s the hard work.

Committing yourself to see a project through the end and applying polish to every piece of it and keeping it consistent with the target (who it’s for). That’s the hard work.

Creating an experience, connecting people around it and then giving them enough reasons to tell others about it. That’s the hard work.

It’ll never get easier. But it will always be worth it.

Stay Positive & Enjoy The Climb

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Our feet do a lot for us. They carry our weight day in and day out. They give us balance and help us move forward.

There are people who do the same, too.

And there’s some work or hobby or passion that does it as well.

Which begs the question if we’re as grateful for all that supports us as we should be.

Stay Positive & There’s Always Time To Break For Gratitude

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There are a lot of weaknesses we have. And they’re often obvious.

Maybe we took a personality test to learn them or we read about our weaknesses in a performance review. Alas, there are weaknesses.

But none are as deceptive and often overlooked as the weaknesses that are made from our strengths.

That’s when the real dance and challenge begins. Not to repress our strengths, but to use different ones for different situations.

Stay Positive & Will You Accept The Challenge?

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