Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Some may resonate with the “what matters is what you do when no one is watching.”
Some may resonate with the “someone is always watching.”
Others may resonate with “it doesn’t matter if they are watching or not.”
The story leads to the same action: doing what’s right, impactful, and positive.
Stay Positive & What Resonates For You?
The amount of German you can learn if you devoted yourself for a few months is astounding.
Same with writing a novel.
Or being a remarkable parent.
Or calligraphy.
Or coffee-making.
Or _______ insert your passion there.
Fortunately for you and me: devotion is just a choice.
Stay Positive & What’ll You Choose?
You’ll dive for it. You’ll ask for help. You’ll do a lot to not let the balloon touch the floor.
My favorite part about the game? When the balloon touches the floor, you pick it up and start again. More determination. More joy. More coordination.
Of course, all of our work is a balloon if we want it to be.
Stay Positive & It’s A Game About Attitude, Not A Balloon
Every decision we make diminishes our willpower or gumption or all around energy.
You wonder why you’re so exhausted at the end of the day?
Decisions.
That said, if you were to double click into it: the decisions that diminish us often (and often the most) are the ones we have to make again and again.
Hitting the snooze button five times diminishes us more than just doing what we set the alarm or notification for.
Deciding to get to the hardest task after this easy one…but then after the next easy one…but then after the next easy one… diminishes us more than if we just did the hardest task first.
The examples are endless, but deciding to list them all out would be yet another example of decision diminishment.
Stay Positive & Decide Once
The math Seth does about the number of copies of a book that a new author may sell could be harrowing.
Could be if we’re not okay with a few.
It could be paralyzing to think about the small impact we can make at work over the next five years. Or the time we have with our kids. Or the likelihood of this blog post breaking through the noise of more than 103,234,342 blog posts getting published today.
Stay Positive & It Could Be…
It’s definitely one of the most important questions to continuously ask on your journey.
Regardless if it slows down the progress; 100% of the time it makes it better.
And better may not be in the work itself but in the impact it has; the connectivity; the network effect.
Ask for input. Share it with others. Connect two people who may be the ones to get it in the end.
This part of the creative process is by far the easiest to skip.
It’s also the most detrimental to.
Stay Positive & It’s About Them, Not You/The Work
It’s easy to assume progress isn’t made because of skill gaps.
It might be the case, definitely, but more times than not… it’s not.
It’s often focus gaps or attention gaps or bandwidth gaps which all sort of says the same thing: where is the time going each day?
I supposed you could say time management is a skill gap. But no one hires for that. There’s no Director of Time Management. (Perhaps there should be?) I’d argue that’s not a leader’s responsibility either – to manage time. Manage expectations and direction and quality of work, sure, but time? Not directly, anyway.
(Could you imagine how emotionally tolling that would be? “I want you to spend 10 minutes on this. No more. I don’t care what the reason.”
Yuck.
That is… unless you’re connecting time to goals and OKRs and what the company needs each person to focus on. It’s talking about time without talking about time.
Rather than skill gaps… find the time gaps and you’ll find the reason you’re not making the progress you want to make.
Stay Positive & Time Is Focus, Focus Is Money/Progress/Success/Impact…
