GarthBox

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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The stories of workers working a little extra usually go something like this.

The bakery is owned by John. He’s behind the counter every day, counting how many pastries he’s sold and needs to sell to provide for his family.

Alex, a summertime assistant is trying to make a name for herself, so she goes outside and polishes the sign of the bakery every day. She washes the windows so it’s easy for people to see in. She assorts the pastries in a way that you can’t walk by without stopping to take a look. From the outside, the bakery looks incredible and it’s all due to her extra elbow grease and eye for detail.

But there are details getting missed. The story goes deeper than the face of the bakery.

The pastries aren’t baked to perfection. The equipment is rusty, some of it breaking frequently. There’s no delightful surprise or smile with each transaction. No remarkability. Nothing’s polished inside.

The arch that’s wrong with this storyline is that Alex (and John, obviously), are missing the fact they need to be giving as much care to the inside of their business as they do the outside.

A polished sign and pastry display might get someone in, but what happens once they enter will be what either keeps them coming back … or not.

Stay Positive & Care For The Inside, Too

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A name is simply a carrier, a vehicle.

Consider an actual vehicle, for example. You can be given any four wheeled automobile, but it’s not until you get in it and begin to drive that you feel. When you use what is named, that’s when you begin to associate memories and power and ideas with it. The name becomes something more than a name.

Sure, what you see and how it sounds and how it feels to the touch sends a signal, but signals are merely associations of the brain, not the heart.

At least, not the heart in a way that a meaningful experience can have. Signals give you an idea of what to expect, but only by going through the experience do you truly know.

You have an idea of what Airbnb is because people talk about it, but people talk about it because they have experienced it or know those who have. A name without an experience doesn’t carry much weight.

So go ahead and come up with a good name by the standard of one that sends a nice signal, but understand that the real meaning of it won’t come from the name, it will come from what people experience because of it, what it lives up to each and every day, and how it makes people feel.

A vehicle for meaningful impact, the gateway to memories, the touchpoint to something remarkable, that’s what a name is.

Stay Positive & For Those Who Need Help Coming Up With A Name: Wordoid

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