GarthBox

When you know you’re playing the long game, you’re more generous and empathetic.

When you know you’re playing the long game, you’re less stress and frustrated.

When you know you’re playing the long game, you’re going to experience more granular, but consistent satisfaction.

Can you imagine how stressful it would be to be a realtor trying to just sell a multi-million dollar house? Or how about leading a nonprofit to get a billion dollar donor?

Reality is that it’s likely easy for you to imagine because we treat so many projects in our life as if they are short term, make or break, has to happen now kind of work.

Worth noticing when we feel that way and to ask if we’re still playing the long game?

Stay Positive & Play The Game Worth Playing

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Here’s a promise worth making to yourself.

If you ever say “I’ll see what I can do” your goal should be speed.

These are words only ever uttered when we’re fulfilling someone else’s agenda. We never say it to ourselves regarding our own ambitions.

Which means that going slow is just a way to delay either the work that we should be doing or to put off the reality that we might figure out a path forward and then we’re on the hook for making sure it’s done well.

Both scary, but both will see better results if we get through that initial hump faster.

Stay Positive & Enter The Speeding Zone

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If you can treat it as more important than they’re treating it, you’re bound to surprise and delight.

If they treat it as less important than you treat it, you’re bound to be frustrated.

The first is fairly easy for you to control. The second, not so much.

But being frustrated definitely won’t help you help them treat it as important as you.

The work worth doing is finding out how.

Stay Positive & You’ll Both Get Better Because Of It

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Leaders can’t be leading all of the time.

So here’s the secret sauce.

When they’re not leading, they’re surrounding themselves with peers who are pushing themselves slightly more, ideating slightly more, being slightly more generous,

You might say that they are following.

We’re all better because they make time for it.

Stay Positive & The Best Leading Isn’t A 24/7 Activity

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Well, of course you didn’t actually miss your chance.

You can still deliver; still show up; still put your hard work out into the world.

You can still be generous; you can still host the event; you can still do whatever it is you thought you missed your chance on.

No, maybe not in the exact time you had hoped and maybe you missed a deadline, but stating you missed your chance is simply a copout, a way of hiding, a really cruddy reason to not see something to the finish line.

Here’s the deal: grab some chalk and draw your own finish line.

Then launch. Go. Host. Ship.

You may need to pivot the work a bit, but that’s really the easiest part. You’ve done the hard stuff already.

Alas, the hardest part is in front of you: to admit that chance you thought you missed has been in front of you the whole time.

Stay Positive & The World Is Waiting

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If you want better leads, you need better…

If you want a better career, you need better…

If you want better sales, you need better…

If you want a better relationship, you need better…

Habits.

Stay Positive & Better Could Start Today

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My daughter had a pineapple with sunglasses tattoo on her arm for about five days.

Most of the work we create is even shorter lived than that.

That email copy won’t live on much past today.

The content that you got someone to open up likely won’t open it up again in a few days.

Not to say the temporary things aren’t worth putting time and attention to; I’d be upset if she got a vulgar temp tattoo or if it was placed on her face instead of her arm.

The fact is, we spend too much time evaluating the temporary things and not investing the time into the meaningful, longterm things.

By all means ship work on the regular and with intention, but carve enough time for relationship building or working on something that’ll last longer than a week.

Stay Positive & Create Balance

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