Life Lesson

What you price your baked goods could be anything.

What style glass you serve your beer in could be anything.

What you base your novel on could be anything.

What you do extra on your job to work your way toward a promotion could be anything.

What you do to win the love of someone could be anything.

Because it could be anything, it’s more important than ever that we choose the right thing. The thing that adds to the narrative others are telling themselves about how they’re interacting with yours pastry, beer, novel, project, heart…

The $3 baked good is an entirely different story than a $9 baked good.

Buying a plane ticket to see someone special in Florida will make them feel different than writing a series of love letters.

In a world of anything, we put just as much value in how something works as we do in how it makes us feel and how it supports the story we are telling ourselves.

The details matter. They always have. They always will.

Stay Positive & The Best We Can Do Is Make Sure All The Details Support Each Other

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Allow me to take a burden off your shoulders.

Unless you’re pitching to angel investors at 6:00 a.m. and you’ve been told you only have a 30-second window to win their attention or you end up on some show like Shark Tank, you don’t need a 30-second story.

No elevator pitch. No trimmed down narrative of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

It’s not necessary.

If you want to do it for you, by all means, go for it. It’s a fun exercise, but I’d advise you go after interacting with people who want to hear the whole damn story.

Better to connect with those you can share your heart with and spend more than 30-seconds with.

Better to put yourself in situations when you can really sell your idea, not pray you’ve got a good hook.

Those who will listen to more than 30 seconds are the ones who will help you make the change you seek to make.

Bonus: The best action you can take before sharing you story? Asking about and listening to theirs.

Stay Positive & Let’s Talk

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I’ve had a love-dislike relationship with routines over the years.

Some routines simply have nothing but positive impact. Telling your significant other what you appreciate about them every night, for example.

Other routines (six in particular) set you up for an incredible day.

But some routines put you in a rut, prevent you from doing meaningful work and merely close the door to potential and surprise and helpful interruption.

That still being said, when the work you’re doing – the change you seek to make – becomes hard, routine can carry you through.

Writing 2,000 words every day or having that trusted friend look at your work over every lunch hour or starting to make calls right at 8 a.m. every. single. day.

The routines worth building are not necessarily in the work itself, but in the starting of the work.

Once you build a habit of starting, it doesn’t quite matter how hard it is anymore, does it?

Stay Positive & Put It In Motion

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A letter from a missionary out in the jungles of New Guinea once wrote the following to his friends at home. It resonated well with me and hope it does for you.

Man, it is great to be in the thick of the fight, to draw the old devil’s heaviest guns, to have him at you with depression and discouragement, slander, disease. He doesn’t waste time on a lukewarm bunch. He hits good and hard when a fellow is hitting him. You can always measure the weight of your blow by the one you get back. When you’re on your back with fever and at your last ounce of strength, when some of your converts backslide, when you learn that your most promising inquirers are only fooling, when your mail gets held up, and some don’t bother to answer your letters, is that the time to put on mourning? No sir. That’s the time to pull out the stops and shout Hallelujah! The old fellow’s getting it in the neck and hitting back. Heaven is leaning over the battlements and watching. “Will he stick with it?” As they see who is with us, as they see the unlimited reserves, the boundless resources, as they see the impossibility of failure, how disgusted and sad they must be when we run away. Glory to God! We’re not going to run away. We’re going to stand!

Stay Positive & Keep Standing

The good stuff, and I mean the really good stuff, is never a reward. It’s not a consequence or a result of action … it is the action.

It’s the acceptance of the struggle of making the change you seek to make.

It’s the hustle and sweat and fierceness of taking one step after another and jumping through one hoop after another and making one leap after another.

It’s the embrace of adversity and the appreciation of the journey.

Happiness is doing. Progress is action. All that good stuff is forward movement, not a destination.

Stay Positive & Enjoy The Ride

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Tough decisions can be paralyzing.

There’s a lot of feeling risk and fear and vulnerability and uncertainty.

But there’s a trick to making them easy and it has to do with something that’s easy too: listening.

Listening to the story of those you seek to impact and then decide what’s best for them. What does your target care about? Does deciding A instead of B help them achieve the change they are seeking to make?

Decisions are hard when they’re about us, but that piece is controllable.

Decisions get easier when we make it about those we seek to serve.

Stay Positive & Remember Them

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You might have an idea that will trigger something meaningful in someone.

You might be holding onto a book which contains a thought that someone is out there looking for.

You might have something on your to-do list that would set a positive chain reaction rippling through your community.

In reality, you probably have a lot of these. A lot of gifts.

The result of holding them in, keeping them to ourselves isn’t just that we don’t have to feel scared or vulnerable or stupid for sharing.

The other result when we don’t share them is that we hold others back, we lower the average, we lose the opportunity to ignite a series of positive impacts bigger than we could have imagined.

Stay Positive & The Best Thing To Do With A Gift Is To Share It

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