Letting opportunities go. “Don’t let an opportunity go” might work for those who don’t know how to create the opportunities they seek. A strategic focus requires us to say no to everything that doesn’t align with where we seek to go. And be patient to figure out which path is
Making better excuses. It doesn't matter how good your excuses are. ~ Seth Godin, Get It Done - Complete Projects that matter Get It Done: Complete Projects that Matter with Seth Godin Online Class | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.comLearn strategies to effectively tackle, finish, and ship projects that matter to you.LinkedIn
Stopping the car. Driving fast might not be a good strategy if we don't know where we are going. Stopping the car and calibrating the navigation is, of course, better, especially when a map of the terrain is available. But with the work that matters, we rarely have a map. At
The skill of showing up. Showing up is more than half the work done, maybe even most of the work. That's what most people fail to do. They wait for permission to show up. They listen to the voice inside their head that persuades them to wait, that tells them that later is
3 kinds of tasks. 1. Go or No-Go Decisions: Are we shipping this or not? Can we make a non-emotional decision? If we are shipping it, when do we ship? 2. Shifting work from ambiguous to specific: Now that we have decided that we are going to ship it, what do the specific tasks
The dance of scarcity and abundance. Abundance and possibility go hand in hand. A universe of possibility is abundant, generative and infinite. To engage with abundance, though, we need to engage with scarcity also. Scarcity creates tension. Human behaviour craves that which is scarce. This dance of scarcity and abundance is what leads to creativity. Scarcity
The trap of recurring decisions. Recurring decisions don't make up for an elegant strategy. Every decision requires emotional labour and spending it on decisions that do not matter leads to decision fatigue and take us away from the work that matters. If you see yourself asking the same question again and again, maybe
Doing your part. When we engage with possibility, we can only do our part. We can put ourselves in places where possibility can happen. The other part is not in our hands. The part where we need to trust that the other side will show up. The one thing we can trust is
Intentional relaxation. Just like work, relaxation does not happen on its own. We have to create the conditions for it to happen. Find things that relax us, keep them handy. Figure out things that stress us, put them out of reach. And as with everything, we get better at it through practice.
System or exception? Every decision we make is either aligned with the system or is an exception. Yes, we have to make exceptions every now and then, but exceptions in themselves don't make a system. And don't take us too far. We can design a system with intent. Exceptions
Searching for elegance. The lack of elegance makes working on our goals tedious. We seem to be starting from scratch each time. When we find elegance though, the systems in place work almost effortlessly to take us where we seek to go. It's tempting to solve this by working hard, but
Choose your "people like us". People like us do things like these. ~ Seth Godin When we choose our people like us, we choose our things like these. The group we identify ourselves as a part of will influence us to do things that the group does. Yes, we can use willpower to do things separate
Strategy, instead of resolutions. Resolutions are short term and dependent on willpower. Most resolutions don't last a few weeks into the new year. Strategy, instead, is a philosophy of becoming. It invites us to see the systems that we are building or engaging with, games we might play, empathy for the people
Working on the story. As we are coming close to the end of the year, it provides a good opportunity to write and work on the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Seth's blog below is a great place to start. Find a friend who'd like to do the exercise
Thank you. Today's my birthday. The last one year of my life has been one of the happiest one so far. In no small part because of you. Thank you.
Embracing the uncertainty between. We think we fear the rejection, the "no". What we resist though is the uncertainty between creating tension and getting an answer. You may have felt it when you asked someone out for a date or shared an idea with your boss or planned a trip with your
Skill or luck? Some games are skill games, like chess. Some games are luck games, like picking the higher card from a shuffled deck. Most games, however, are somewhere in the middle. When we focus only on the luck aspect, we lose the opportunity of building the skill, the only place we have
Embracing uncertainty. Uncertainty is a difficult pill to swallow. For the hunter-gatherers, uncertainty mostly meant a potential lethal attack by a predator. Over time, this fear has evolved into a desire to seek certainty everywhere. What this leads to is that we make assertions and if they are wrong we are afraid
Shipping takes much less time than deciding. Instead of choosign A or B, many times both A & B in most cases is much more faster than just keep deciding. Resistance wants to keep us in deciding mode. Shipping breaks its hold.
There are multiple money games. We can choose the game we want to play. Some money games can help in the short run but don’t become better over time. They pay too little for too much work/emotional labour. Working in a McDonalds can help a student get enough to pay his expenses but
Money is a game. And like with any game there are rules. You can’t win a game if you don’t know the rules or are not willing to accept them.
The kind assumption. If someone cuts us across on the road, it's justified to feel angry. But if someone tells us that this person was rushing to take someone to the hospital, we are able to empathise and our anger vanishes. Our default assumption is mostly not kind either to the
Getting out of the rut. The expectation to jump directly into our best selves or routines keeps us stuck in the rut. When we are in the hole, the first thing we need to stop digging. And then we have to focus on figuring out a way to get out of the hole. And only
Hustle is overrated. And elegance is underrated. It’s much more effective to say no to things (or people) that are not aligned with where you seek to go than trying to convince them to go there. When we make better choices, we don’t need to hustle.
What would Dory do? In the movie Finding Dory, the characters use this mantra to get out of the troublesome situation they are in. We all know people in our life we get inspired by, people who seem to be able to act with courage in the face of challenges, people who seam to
