Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Which is better?
$1,000 on a magazine ad or $1,000 on swag to include as a surprise & delight?
100 email opens or 100 handshakes?
An hour spent evaluating SEO or an hour spent sharing your thoughts on a podcast?
We decide what’s productive, how to be efficient and what ROI means to us.
Stay Positive & More Questions Like These, Please
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You know you’re at where your people are at when you can just feel it in your gut.
Sales might be a slight indication or the line out the door.
The commentary you get from the people around you might be positive.
Your friends showing up might be a signal too.
That said, there are times when all of those are true, but something still feels off.
At the end of the day, that feeling is everything.
Why?
Because if you felt it in your gut, your people did, too.
And it’s that feeling that nurtures loyalty.
Stay Positive & Feeling > Seeing/Hearing
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A realtor shared that she doesn’t like adding love letters into home purchasing offers because the feeling of rejection is even worse when it happens.
Not only did they reject your offer… after they read your love letter, they rejected you, too.
It’s personal.
Except it’s not.
Not if we don’t want it to be.
The narrative we tell ourselves is written by… ourselves. No one else.
Perhaps I could tell myself they never read the love letter and just took the highest bid.
Maybe it’s that another person offered 100K more. Even I would take that, no matter how lovely the love letter.
You know, it could have been for the best that we didn’t get that bid because we just put an offer on a house even better.
The list of narrative options can go on… with none of them making us feel personally rejected.
This doesn’t just apply to homebuying of course.
Stay Positive & Tell The Story That Helps, Not Hurts
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The rotten truth about the urgent is that the queue of it never ends.
Even when we’ve tackled all the to-dos that others tell us are urgent, we make up a few of our own so we can keep busy.
Of course, this is damaging to our future and our feeling of long term fulfillment.
Alas. The answer isn’t to get done with the urgent stuff faster, in an attempt to have time to focus on other non urgent, but more important matters.
No.
The answer is to scrutinize the urgent and, when possible, put it off a day so you can do the meaningful stuff.
It’s not about having time. It’s about making it.
Stay Positive & Who Puts The Label Of Urgent On Something?
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There’s a story out there about a co-packer that tells a brewer, “on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the easiest beers to make and 10 being impossible, you’re all 9s.”
That says something about both the co-packer (who is willing to do the beers) and the brewer (who is willing to ideate and pay for the production of them).
Which begs the question: where do you fall on the scale with your line of work?
It’s probably no surprise if I told you the co-packer and brewer are making millions. It does beg the question, are they sticking with 9s on the scale because they have the money or do they have the money because they stuck with the 9s.
In case you need the answer, it’s the latter.
It usually is.
And it’s not always just money. It’s whatever you designate as success to you. The reality is that to get there, you’ll need to stick on one end of that scale, which requires risk and vulnerability and care and no shortage of failures.
You can easily guess which side of the scale that is.
Stay Positive & Are You Up For It?
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When we talk about the whole pie, we talk about the perfect crust; we talk about the freshly picked raspberry filling; we talk about the excellent whip cream display on top of it. Oh, and that garnish, too.
We treat a lot of our work and aspirations and dreams the same way.
Which is a bummer because it sets us up for frustration.
The whole pie also needs to include painstakingly managing the oven temperature and duration of bake time to ensure everything is cooked proportionality. We gotta talk about the blood drawn on our legs from the brush we walked through to pick the raspberries and that little rash that hasn’t totally gone away yet. We should probably talk about that person that hates pie and how we’ll deal with them, too.
We do ourselves a disservice when we ignore the hard work that goes into great work.
Of course it would be great to get a grant before we even do the pitch for it or that we’ll make people laugh at an improv show without hours of practice before showtime. That’s not the reality though.
We don’t help ourselves maintain grit and gumption when we ignore what really goes into a whole pie.
Stay Positive & Don’t Even Get Me Started On Those Who Half Pie It
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I’ve been a long time believer in the adage that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
There’s definitely a bit of truth to it, but the adage neglects one important factor: what you aim to get out of each relationship.
If the goal of any solid relationship is for it to be a win-win (and it should), then the mindset you have about it matters more than the person with whom you have the relationship.
My daughter is 1.5 years old. I spend a lot of time with her. If you factor her into that equation of me being the average of the five people I spend the most time with, then she’s definitely dragging me down. She can’t even use a fork properly.
Of course, how to use utensils isn’t what I aim to get out of our relationship. I want to feel fulfilled with a hug at the end of the day or the satisfaction of learning to be a better teacher or how to grow my own skill of curiosity. In that regard, she elevates my life.
So, yes. We’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with, but the way we view the relationship carries a lot of the weight in regard to their impact on us.
Perhaps you have a coworker that you currently can’t stand, but you spend a great deal of time with them. By the adage, they’re dragging your average down. Unless, of course, you change your perspective and what you want out of the relationship with them.
“I’m going to learn what not to do from this person,” is a whole lot more impactful than “I can’t stand that person.”
When you can choose who is in your circle, choose wisely. When you have little say in the matter, your next best choice is determining what you can get out of the relationship.
Stay Positive & You Choose To Win
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