It’s much easier to make your work better if you have something to work with.
You can’t edit your blog post if you haven’t written it yet.
You can’t make your new song swing if you don’t record the demo.
You can’t grow your business if you don’t start by landing one paying customer.
Trying to make things perfect before you put the work down on paper is futile.
Get the rough draft finished. Then go back and make it better.
I was leaving the gym this morning when I started checking my pockets for my car keys.
Then I thought, “Why don’t women’s clothes have pockets?”
Since I see the world through the lens of marketing, I came up with a theory:
Maybe women’s clothes don’t have pockets so industrialists could sell more purses.
Before there were purses, there were pockets in everything. You needed to be able to carry your stuff around with you.
I’m sure that didn’t sit well with the people who made and sold purses. When presented with a fancy new bag, I’m sure customers thought, “Why do I need a heavy, expensive bag to carry my stuff when I have pockets?”
But if you get rid of the pockets, you make things inconvenient. You’ve created a new need—the need to have something to carry your stuff around in.
(Let’s not even get started on all the accessories sold simply to carry around in a purse…)
If this is true, it goes to prove a great (potentially immoral) marketing point:
If you don’t have a problem, make one up, then sell the solution.
Marketers do this to us all the time. We need to be aware of it.
Are you actually being inconvenienced, or did a sly marketer make it that way?
Imagine a web designer sitting at her desk.
There’s this nasty problem plaguing her current project. For the life of her, she can’t figure it out…
What does she do? She sits and thinks and thinks and thinks until she comes up with a solution.
Right?
Wrong!
She’s a designer—she builds her way forward.
She writes a line of code and runs it. Does that fix the problem? No. Did she fail? NO! She just learned something about her code.
So she writes another line and tries again. She builds her way past the problem one line of code at a time.
Maybe we should approach more of our problems like designers.
Instead of trying to think our way forward, we build.
Millennials and Gen-Z-ers are often mocked because we want more from work…
We want more than just a paycheck and health insurance (a statement usually said in derision by older generations). We want meaning and impact in our work.
OF COURSE WE DO!
We spend the majority of our lives at work.
40 hours a week (if we aren’t forced to work overtime)…
50 weeks a year (if we’re lucky enough to get a 2-week vacation)…
For 40 years (probably longer with the way things are looking)…
On the low end, that’s 80,000 hours of lives.
We spend more time at work than we do with our spouses or children, who are supposed to be the most important part of our lives.
If we are to spend almost all our time on this earth toiling away, shouldn’t it also be the thing that brings us meaning and fulfillment? Shouldn’t it also impact the world in a positive way?
What’s wrong with that?
We launched our eBook for children!
All the generous volunteers over at The Carbon Almanac have been working extremely hard to put together an easy-to-read and beautiful almanac for children.
It’s meant to help spread the facts about climate change and give them an opportunity to contribute to the work of making things better.
Also, we’re planting TEN TREES for every one that’s cut down to print our books and we want YOUR kids to name them for us.
There is only feedback.
People who develop a growth mindset view every failure as a learning opportunity, not an end result.
Either you succeed or you learn. But you never fail.
Of course, something might not work out like you planned. But as long as you learn from the incident and improve, did you really fail?
Each of us has an internal narrative constantly chattering about who we are.
But what we don’t always realize is that internal narrative influences how we behave.
If you tell yourself the story that, “Overeating makes me feel happy,” that story might be a stand-in for the real story—“I’m unhappy with different aspects of my life and overeating gives me a small dose of pleasure.”
Until you realize this, you’ll continue to overeat and live on greasy fast food multiple times each week.
(I know this because it’s a story I’m trying to rewrite myself).
If you tell yourself a story that says, “I’m not skilled at sales or business,” you might never realize your unresolved dream of starting your own venture and working for yourself.
The first step to overcoming many of our chronic issues is to start telling ourselves a different story.
Changing what you do starts by changing your identity—who you believe yourself to be.
Change the story, change the person.
I’ve been volunteering for a fantastic project: The Carbon Almanac.
We’re on a mission to spread the SCIENCE behind what’s happening to our planet—without bias, without news media spins, without politicians arguing over what’s true or what needs to be done.
This is real, it’s serious, and it’s happening now. And all the proof you need (as well as the difference you can make) is in this book.
Buy a copy (or 10). Give it to people you care about. Send copies to your elected officials. Hand them out at work.
Help us make a difference so that we all have a safe, healthy place to live in the next century.
Learn more here.
You’re a dedicated internet user, which also means you’re an experienced “searcher.”
But what if those searches could help make a dent in our little carbon problem?
You can take a tiny action today and switch your default search engine over to Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees.
For every 45 searches you make, Ecosia’s team will plant a tree where it’s both needed and will thrive. And it’s powered by Bing, so your search result quality won’t change at all!
According to HubSpot, the average person makes four searches each day. That means if you switch, on average, you’ll plant one new tree every 11 days. Imagine the difference that could make to your carbon footprint.
Make this one small change. Click here and start planting trees now.
Most of us feel like we’re living out the movie of our life with expectation of some grand finale… A giant dance number at the end to celebrate all we’ve done or accomplished.
But at the end of the movie, don’t you feel just a little bit empty? A little lonelier because it’s finally over?
But life isn’t a movie. If anything, it’s more like a mini-series—multiple episodes and multiple seasons. And each one has its own stories, cliffhangers, and resolutions.
When you finish an episode of a mini-series, there’s anticipation and excitement for what comes next.
We should think about our lives in the same way.
When one story in life ends—when the credits start rolling—start working on a sequel immediately. Start filming the next episode or risk feeling lost.
