You don’t get time—to read, eat well, love your spouse, exercise, or whatever.
You have to make time. This applies to anything important to you. If it matters, you must carve out time in your day to ensure it happens.
Otherwise, life will ensure it doesn’t.
The person who experiences the consequences should make the decision.” —James Clear
How different would society be if this were true?
Which wars would be fought if the soldiers who did the fighting made the decision whether or not to fight, rather than the politicians and generals thousands of miles away from the battlefield?
Which social policies would be enacted (or cut) if the decision were up to the people reliant on those policies rather than the lawmakers who have only an academic understanding of what they’re implementing?
The visceral reality of a decision changes when you are the person affected.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I challenged myself to come up with as many business ideas as I could in 10 minutes that met the criteria I laid out. Here’s what I came up with. Feel free to steal any of them and start your own business.
10 minutes, 25 business ideas. I don’t know that I could pull all of them off, but some of them seem promising.
The hard part is picking one and being brave enough to face rejection. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll get a lot of no’s.
But if you’re starting your own thing, that comes with the territory. Don’t let it deter you!
Here’s a question I’ve been noodling on:
What if you got fired today? What would you do?
But wait, it gets worse…
Not only were you fired, but your industry collapsed and no longer exists. And to make matters worse, all the specialized skills you built up in that industry are now irrelevant (hypothetically, an AI could do them all now and for free).
And, you can’t hide by going back to school for another degree.
You have to start something of your own—you have no choice.
What would you start? What would you build? What problem would you solve and for whom?
Take a 20-minute walk and think on this today.
The physiological reactions we experience when we’re afraid (racing pulse, sweaty palms, lightheadedness) are the same as those we feel when we’re excited.
Fear, therefore, can be reframed as a form of excitement.
How might you act differently if you told yourself you were excited about this new possibility rather than frightened by it?
H/t to Peter Shepherd and Jen Waldman for this idea.
“We become builders by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.” —Aristotle
Like any craft, virtue must be practiced. You get better at woodworking by doing woodworking. You get better at leadership by leading others.
Virtue is no different: You develop courage by being brave in trying or risky situations. You develop discipline through practicing self-control and keeping promises to yourself. You develop justice by doing the right thing repeatedly, especially when it’s hard (that’s where courage comes in). You develop wisdom through wise decision-making, intentional learning, and self-reflection.
Virtue isn’t something you “have.” It’s a part of you that must be cultivated.
This post is a follow-up to a previous one: What is virtue?
Can you ever motivate yourself well enough to do the work?
If not, there are two options:
One might be the path you really want to take, but the other might be the more feasible option if you don’t have a lot of flexibility to radically change things.
Virtue is moral, physical, and mental excellence.
Most major religions and philosophies recognize four “cardinal” virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Each of these virtues helps us develop the aforementioned excellence.
Why are they called “cardinal?” The word “cardinal” comes from the Latin cardo, which means “hinge,” the things upon which a door pivots.
This is an apt description, as these are the virtues on which a life of excellence pivots.
Deliberate practice is essential for developing thinking and writing skills.
But how do you do that when it seems like such a nebulous skill to develop?
You practice by extracting the gist of an idea and writing it down in your own words. Then do it again tomorrow.
Now you’re a writer.
The most beneficial thing a leader can do in 21st-century knowledge work is to allow employees to spend most of their working hours applying the high-value, high-return skills for which they were hired.
They should be allowed to do this without being encumbered or distracted by the “busy work” of modern knowledge work, such as email, Slack messages, and administrative overhead.
Imagine if it had been necessary for Charles Darwin to respond to 40 letters a day. How long would it have taken him to publish On the Origin of Species?
Or what if Mozart had to deal with five unplanned visits from other musicians every hour? Would he have become the musical genius we now know him to be?
Yet, between instant messaging software, email, and open-office pop-ins (for those not working remotely), these hypothetical scenarios are everyday occurrences for most of us.
It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed, overworked, and chronically unproductive, even with all the stuff we’re doing.
The solution, then, is to build workflows and processes so that your teams can spend less time discussing tasks that need to be done and actually complete those tasks (while also having the slack necessary to think and rest).
