Giving your tribe something to look forward to doesn’t just keep the energy high, excitement up, and positivity streaming.
It also makes the inevitable challenges feel smaller. It gives them the attitude to tackle the small annoyances they will – also inevitably – have to deal with.
Ensuring they have something to look forward to puts them on the hook – and you, to keep showing up, keep surprising and delighting, keep innovating, keep moving forward.
And forward is good.
Stay Positive & It’s Another One Of Those Win-Wins
If you’re spending, you might get something, but likely not a large enough return on what you spent. It likely exhausted you. It was work. You spent your money, time and energy. It’s gone now and you’re left with less.
If you’re investing, you’re getting more back than you put in. It likely inspired you because investing is meaningful, culture-changing work. It’s still work, no doubt, but a different kind.
Of course, the same task or project can either be something you spend on or invest in.
The way I see it, there are three options when you’re facing something you don’t want to do.
The first is to not do it. Of course, there are consequences, memories and experience lost by not. Maybe you’ll disappoint someone or yourself for not doing the thing. But life will go on. There will certainly be more things you don’t want to do down the road that you’ll face, too.
The second is to find all the reasons to appreciate, like or be interested in dong the thing you don’t want to do. This usually fuels the tank enough to get done what you need to get done. Curiosity is magic to your willpower.
The third is to make the task interesting or worthy. Who says the thing you don’t want to do has to be done that specific way? Why not infuse some treats throughout the task or ask a friend to help you (misery loves company!)? You have the power to think outside the box to make the thing you don’t want to do something you do want to do.
In the end, the worst thing you can do is not decide which path to take. The worst thing you can do is suffer in the time between learning there’s something that needs to be done that you don’t want to do and the decision to do it or not.
I got a Goonies playcard in my first order of a Johnny Cupcakes t-shirt.
This one hotel was fairly mediocre, except for one nuance: they included a bottle of bubbles so you could take a bubble bath.
A brewery in northwest Wisconsin looks like a lot of other breweries, except they have a remarkable Theodore Roosevelt quote painted on a wall.
When you’ve been nose to the grind, focusing on big picture, building a brand, doing what your customers or clients expect, we can often lose sight of doing the cool things.
The things that can be a difference between 4 stars and 5. The difference between being talked about and not. The difference between disliking your job and loving it.
It pays, literally, to create efficiencies in a process.
There should be a line that is drawn on when to stop tweaking for effiiency, however.
And that line is right before the end. Right before the face to face interaction. Right before the connection with another human. Right after something meets spec, but before it’s sent out – wherein you have a minute to figure out how to make it more special, more valuable, more meaningful than what the conveyor belt brought you.
The best way to optimize humanity is to not.
Stay Positive & Pause At The End Of The Process To Make It Better
It might come naturally now, but it didn’t before.
The only way it came to be that it comes naturally is that it became familiar.
The more familiar it is, the more naturally it happens.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s still not work and certainly there are new innovations you can try with it, but foundationally it does get easier the more familiar you are.
It’s why writers need to do the reading as well as the daily writing. Make the thing you want to excel at feel more familiar every day.
Only then will it come naturally.
Stay Positive & Show Up Every Day To Make It More Familiar
