James Clear's Blog, page 19

One Month Sabbatical: I’m Taking June Off From Writing

As regular readers know, I believe that creative genius reveals itself when you show up consistently, put in enough repetitions, and focus on the system rather than the goal.

And that is why I have published a new article nearly every Monday and Thursday since November 12, 2012.

But I also believe in balance, rejuvenation, and the importance of play and having fun. And for that reason, I’m choosing to take a sabbatical from writing during the month of June.



This is the second time I’ve done this. I also took a break during December 2013 and I believe my work improved as a result. I like the pace of working hard for five months, giving myself one month to reflect and rejuvenate, and then repeating the cycle at a higher level of quality. [1]

I find it important to give myself free time to explore ideas and to make sure that I continue writing each week because I love it and not because it’s an obligation. Plus, I like to put my ideas into practice and do things I can sustain.

With that said, I want to say that it is truly a privilege to write for you and I want you to know that I will be spending part of this sabbatical thinking about how I can raise the quality of my writing to a higher level.

You can browse the most popular articles from the first six months of the year (and the full archives) here: Most popular articles and the full archives.

And wherever you are in the world, I hope you find some time this month to balance yourself and insert play and discovery into your life.

Thanks for reading. See you in a few weeks.

Notes

My strategy of taking one month off every June and December means that I have about 16 percent unstructured time each year (2 months out of 12). This is similar to the policies of other very successful businesses like 3M (15 percent free time), Google (“20 percent time” policy), and Treehouse (4-day workweek). The 3M policy famously led to the invention of the Post-It Note and Google claims that their policy has led to major projects like Google AdWords and GMail.

Masters of Habit: The Wisdom and Writing of Maya Angelou

Sadly, Maya Angelou, the great American author and poet, passed away yesterday. She was known for her award-winning autobiographies as well as for her numerous plays, scripts, poems, and essays.

Her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has sold millions upon millions of copies. It holds the record for the longest-running nonfiction New York Times best-seller (2 years). And in 2011, Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.

Angelou is widely known as a voice for women, especially black women, and her works have courageously covered themes of identity, racism, and family. During an interview with USA Today in 1988, Angelou said, “One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

Maya Angelou’s Writing Routine

As you may expect, Angelou’s creative genius didn’t expose itself without hard work. She was a true master of habits, routines, and consistency.

Here’s how she described her writing habits in 1983 interview with Claudia Tate (as covered in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals),

I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind. I shower, prepare dinner, so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. We have a semblance of a normal life. We have a drink together and have dinner. Maybe after dinner I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Sometimes I hear the dissonance; then I try to straighten it out in the morning.

Angelou’s routine and her willingness to sit down and do the work for at least five hours each day — even when it was going poorly — is just another indication that great artists don’t wait for inspiration.

Below, you’ll find a range of quotes from Angelou.

Quotes and Thoughts From Maya Angelou

On identity…

“What I represent in fact, what I’m trying like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. That’s what I’m trying to do. And I miss most of the time on that: I do not represent blacks or tall women, or women or Sonomans or Californians or Americans. Or rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. But that is not all that I am. I am all of that and more and less. People often put labels on people so they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s a honkie, that’s a Jew, that’s a junkie, or that’s a broad, or that’s a stud, or that’s a dude. So you don’t have to think: does this person long for Christmas? Is he afraid that the Easter bunny will become polluted? … I refuse that… I simply refuse to have my life narrowed and proscribed.” [1]

“When I try to describe myself to God I say, “Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?” And I almost always get God’s attention.” [2]

On dealing with difficulty…

“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” [3]

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” [4]

“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.” [5]

On loving yourself…

“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ … There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” [6]

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”

On finding your calling…

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

On courage…

“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”

On living life…

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” [7]

“I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.” [8]

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” [9]

“I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns.” [10]

Click here to leave a comment.

Masters of Habit is a series of mini-biographies on the rituals, routines, and mindsets of great athletes, artists, and leaders.

Sources:

From a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich as mentioned in Brain Pickings.
From an NPR interview with Lynn Neary.
From an interview with The Paris Review
From Angelou’s New York Times best-seller, Letter to My Daughter
From yet another New York Times best-seller, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
From a 1997 Weber State University lecture
From a 2012 interview with Beautifully Said Magazine
From a 2000 interview with Oprah
2011 quote from Angelou’s Facebook page.
From the book, Conversations with Maya Angelou

How to Change the Habits of 107,000 People

It was 1995 and Pieter Ernst was battling a serious problem.

Ernst was a physician with an interest in community-wide behavior change and he was currently in Mozambique. For nearly twenty years, a brutal civil war had ravaged the population and landscape of the country.

The war had ended three years earlier, but the entire healthcare system of the country had been crippled. Thousands of mothers and children were dying from preventable diseases.

The biggest problem was the scale of the issue. Dr. Ernst needed to reach a population of 107,000 citizens with a staff of just 19 people.

Ernst realized that it was impossible for his team to do it alone. Furthermore, he knew that if they were going to reduce the incidence of preventable disease for good, then significant behavior change would need to occur within the community. His team couldn’t stay in Mozambique forever. These changes had to happen in the homes and minds of the community.

Ernst came up with a plan.

Changing the Habits of 107,000 People

First, they found over 2,000 volunteers from the community. Then, each member of his 19-person staff was responsible for teaching groups of 10 to 15 volunteers from the surrounding community about the steps they could take to reduce the incidence of preventable diseases.

Then, each volunteer would visit 10 to 15 households and share what they had learned. The volunteers repeated households every two weeks and continued to spread the ideas.

But this was the part that made the plan brilliant: the support group for the volunteers was not the 19-person healthcare staff. It was the other 10 to 15 volunteers in their small group. Each group of volunteers talked among one another about what was working, what wasn’t working, and how to get people on board with the changes in their community.

What happened?

Not only did they reach the massive population, they also got the changes to take hold. The number of underweight children was cut by half. The mortality rate of children under five dropped. Pneumonia treatment was six times better than before the project began.

In a followup survey taken 20 months after the project had officially ended, the volunteer groups were still operating with 94% of the original volunteers and the health metrics continued to improve. [1]

The changes had stuck. For good.

The public health victory of Ernst’s team is impressive, but this isn’t just a feel-good story. There is a deeper lesson here that we can all apply to our own lives.

Here’s the deal.

The Identity of the Group

Most of our behaviors are driven by two things: our environment and our beliefs.

And environment is perhaps the most powerful of those two because in many cases your environment can shape your beliefs. This is especially true when you consider your environment to include the people who surround you.

I’ve written previously about identity-based habits — the power that your beliefs have to create better habits that actually stick over the long-term.

But it’s not just your identity that impacts your beliefs. It’s also the identity of the groups that you surround yourself with.

Consider the community in Mozambique. In the beginning, the community had a certain identity. After the war, many basic public health approaches simply weren’t part of daily life.

But as the volunteers began expanding their reach, working with each other, and sharing news of what techniques were working, the community began to develop a new identity. New behaviors began to be seen as normal behaviors. And when a new behavior becomes the norm for any particular group, the change sticks for good.

The lesson is simple: doing something is much easier when it’s the normal thing to do in your community.

What is the Identity of Your Group?

Every group has an identity.

Google employees have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their cultural identity.
CrossFitters have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their identity.
Investment bankers have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their identity.

The question is, do the groups you belong to have the identity you want?

There were only 2,300 volunteers in the Mozambique project, but 107,000 people began to take on new habits and behaviors when the identity of the group changed.

This happens to all of us. We take on the behaviors of the groups in which we live and the communities to which we belong.

Want to workout more? Become part of a group where working out is normal. Not a goal. Not an event. Just part of the lifestyle.
Want to do better work? Surround yourself with people who make each day a work of art rather than seeing work as a reason to clock in and clock out.
Want to live a life of service? Step into a group where service is part of the day-to-day routine.

Lasting behavior change happens when it’s part of the cultural norm. As Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources

Ernst calls his community volunteer group method “Care Groups” and the system has been replicated effectively for public health projects in Mozambique multiple times, Cambodia, and a variety of other countries.

How the People Around You Impact Your Behavior

It was 1995 and Pieter Ernst was battling a serious problem.

Ernst was a physician with an interest in community-wide behavior change and he was currently in Mozambique. For nearly twenty years, a brutal civil war had ravaged the population and landscape of the country.

The war had ended three years earlier, but the entire healthcare system of the country had been crippled. Thousands of mothers and children were dying from preventable diseases.

The biggest problem was the scale of the issue. Dr. Ernst needed to reach a population of 107,000 citizens with a staff of just 19 people.

Ernst realized that it was impossible for his team to do it alone. Furthermore, he knew that if they were going to reduce the incidence of preventable disease for good, then significant behavior change would need to occur within the community. His team couldn’t stay in Mozambique forever. These changes had to happen in the homes and minds of the community.

Ernst came up with a plan.

Changing the Habits of 107,000 People

First, they found over 2,000 volunteers from the community. Then, each member of his 19-person staff was responsible for teaching groups of 10 to 15 volunteers from the surrounding community about the steps they could take to reduce the incidence of preventable diseases.

Then, each volunteer would visit 10 to 15 households and share what they had learned. The volunteers repeated households every two weeks and continued to spread the ideas.

But this was the part that made the plan brilliant: the support group for the volunteers was not the 19-person healthcare staff. It was the other 10 to 15 volunteers in their small group. Each group of volunteers talked among one another about what was working, what wasn’t working, and how to get people on board with the changes in their community.

What happened?

Not only did they reach the massive population, they also got the changes to take hold. The number of underweight children was cut by half. The mortality rate of children under five dropped. Pneumonia treatment was six times better than before the project began.

In a followup survey taken 20 months after the project had officially ended, the volunteer groups were still operating with 94% of the original volunteers and the health metrics continued to improve. [1]

The changes had stuck. For good.

The public health victory of Ernst’s team is impressive, but this isn’t just a feel-good story. There is a deeper lesson here that we can all apply to our own lives.

Here’s the deal.

The Identity of the Group

Most of our behaviors are driven by two things: our environment and our beliefs.

And environment is perhaps the most powerful of those two because in many cases your environment can shape your beliefs. This is especially true when you consider your environment to include the people who surround you.

I’ve written previously about identity-based habits — the power that your beliefs have to create better habits that actually stick over the long-term.

But it’s not just your identity that impacts your beliefs. It’s also the identity of the groups that you surround yourself with.

Consider the community in Mozambique. In the beginning, the community had a certain identity. After the war, many basic public health approaches simply weren’t part of daily life.

But as the volunteers began expanding their reach, working with each other, and sharing news of what techniques were working, the community began to develop a new identity. New behaviors began to be seen as normal behaviors. And when a new behavior becomes the norm for any particular group, the change sticks for good.

The lesson is simple: doing something is much easier when it’s the normal thing to do in your community.

What is the Identity of Your Group?

Every group has an identity.

Google employees have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their cultural identity.
CrossFitters have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their identity.
Investment bankers have a set of actions and beliefs that are part of their identity.

The question is, do the groups you belong to have the identity you want?

There were only 2,300 volunteers in the Mozambique project, but 107,000 people began to take on new habits and behaviors when the identity of the group changed.

This happens to all of us. We take on the behaviors of the groups in which we live and the communities to which we belong.

Want to workout more? Become part of a group where working out is normal. Not a goal. Not an event. Just part of the lifestyle.
Want to do better work? Surround yourself with people who make each day a work of art rather than seeing work as a reason to clock in and clock out.
Want to live a life of service? Step into a group where service is part of the day-to-day routine.

Lasting behavior change happens when it’s part of the cultural norm. As Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources

Ernst calls his community volunteer group method “Care Groups” and the system has been replicated effectively for public health projects in Mozambique multiple times, Cambodia, and a variety of other countries.

Do Things You Can Sustain

In 1996, Southwest Airlines was faced with an interesting problem.

During the previous decade, the airline company had methodically expanded from being a small regional carrier to one with a more national presence. And now, more than 100 cities were calling for Southwest to expand service to their location. At a time when many airline companies were losing money or going bankrupt, Southwest was overflowing with opportunity.

So what did they do?

Southwest turned down over 95% of the offers and began serving just 4 new locations in 1996. They left significant growth on the table.

Why would a business turn down so much opportunity? And more important, what can we learn from this story and put to use in our own lives?

What Is Your Upper Bound?

Starting in the 1970s, Southwest was the only airline company that made a profit for nearly 30 consecutive years. In his book Great by Choice, author Jim Collins claims that one of the secrets to Southwest’s success was the willingness of company leaders to set an upper bound limit for growth.

Sure, Southwest executives wanted to grow the business each year. But they intentionally avoided growing too much. The company leaders chose a pace that they could sustain, so the business could grow while maintaining the culture and profitability. They set an upper bound limit for their growth.

This is an approach that can be applied to nearly any goal, business or otherwise. Most people, however, tend to do the opposite and focus only on the lower bound.

An individual might say, “I want to lose at least 5 pounds this month.”
An entrepreneur might say, “I want to make at least 10 sales calls today.”
An artist might say, “I want to write at least 500 words today.”
A basketball player might say, “I want to make at least 50 free throws today.”

We tend to focus only on the lower bound: the minimum threshold we want to hit. And the implicit assumption is, “Hey, if you can do more than the minimum, go for it.”

But what would it look like if we added an upper bound to our goals and behaviors?

“I want to lose at least 5 pounds this month, but not more than 10.”
“I want to make at least 10 sales calls today, but not more than 20.”
“I want to write at least 500 words today, but not more than 1,500.”
“I want to make at least 50 free throws today, but not more than 100.”

A Safety Margin for Growth

In many areas of life, there is a magical zone of long-term growth: Pushing enough to make progress, but not so much that it is unsustainable.

Take, for example, weightlifting.

Over the past year, I have slowly added 5 pounds to my squat every few weeks. A year ago, I started with a weight that was too light: 200 lbs. for 5 sets of 5 reps. Last week, I did 300 lbs. for 5 sets of 5 reps. I never followed a magical program. I simply did the work and added 5 pounds every two weeks or so.

Sure, the lower limit was important. I had to keep adding weight in order to get stronger. But the upper limit was just as critical. I had to grow slowly and methodically if I wanted to prevent inflammation and injury. There were plenty of days when I could have added 10 pounds. Maybe even 15 pounds. But if I aggressively pursued growth I would have quickly hit a plateau (or worse, caused an injury).

Instead, I chose stay within a safety margin of growth and avoided going too fast. I wanted every set to feel easy.

The power of setting an upper limit is that it becomes easier for you to sustain your progress. And the power of sustaining your progress is that you end up blowing away everyone who chased success as quickly as possible.

Put another way: Average speed wins.

Do Things You Can Sustain

There is a very simple way to put this idea into practice: Let upper bound limits drive your behaviors in the beginning and then slowly increase your output.

Say you want to start working out. Most people would focus on the lower limit and say, “I have to start exercising for at least 45 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

Instead, you could turn the problem upside down and say, “I am not allowed to exercise for more than 5 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

By setting an incredibly easy upper limit, you make the process of getting started and sustaining your behavior much simpler. Once you establish the routine of doing your behavior over and over again, you can raise the limit as needed.

It is better to make small progress every day than to do as much as humanly possible in one day. Do things you can sustain.

Thanks to Mitch for sharing the “5 minutes in the gym” idea with me and to Jake Taylor for telling me about Great by Choice.

Free Workshop: How to Build an Audience for Your Business, Your Art, or Your Writing

I spent the last 4 days at an entrepreneurship retreat in Colorado. One day, we were asked an interesting series of questions:

If you spent the next 20 years creating the most beauty in the world that you possibly could, how would you do it?
If you spent the next 20 years creating the most knowledge in the world that you possibly could, how would you do it?
If you spent the next 20 years creating the most good in the world that you possibly could, how would you do it?

I wrote down my answers, and then the next question came…

In the same 20 years, if you had to increase your impact by 10x — spread 10x the beauty, 10x the knowledge, and 10x the good — how would you do it?

My initial answers focused on what I could create: I would take photos to create beauty, write articles to spread knowledge, and build a business to do good in the world.

But if I wanted to multiply that impact by 10x?

After thinking for a moment, I realized the answer: to teach. I can only take so many photos, but if I taught 10 people how to take great pictures … that would increase the beauty by 10-fold. The same is true if I taught 10 people to write or 10 people to build a business.

And then I realized that one strategy would help spread more beauty, knowledge, and good all at the same time: teach others how to spread their work far and wide. Teach others how to build an audience.

And that is exactly what I’m going to do in a free workshop next week. Let me tell you what’s going to happen and why I’m the right person to do this.

Free Workshop: How to Build an Audience

Some people may already know this, but if you don’t: my work on JamesClear.com has spread incredibly quickly.

From the time I posted my first article 18 months ago, our community has grown from 0 readers to over 70,000 email subscribers. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the fastest growing single-author blog on the planet. [1]

But it wasn’t always that way. When I started my first business idea almost 4 years ago, I totally failed. I paid $1,600 to have an iPhone app built and when it launched nobody downloaded it. To this day, it has generated $117 in revenue.

What was the difference between then and now?

In the beginning, I had no audience to share my work with. I figured, “If I build it, they will come.” And I was wrong.

I’ve learned a lot since that time — especially when it comes to building an email list to share your work, your art, or your business with the world.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are tons of people out there with great ideas, fantastic work, and good hearts … but their hard work never gets seen. This workshop will help change that.

Click here to sign up for the workshop.

What Would the World Look Like?

Imagine what the world would look like if everyone who wanted to share meaningful work had a platform for doing so.

If every coach and consultant could reach the people that needed their help.
If every artist could share their work with an audience that loved it.
If every entrepreneur could find the people their business was built to serve.

How much better would the world be? How much more beauty and knowledge and good would be spread?

Our community is a team. And as a member of that team, I want to do whatever I can drive your success and spread more beauty, knowledge, and good in the world. Sometimes that means sharing strategies for making you more productive. Sometimes that means spreading the science of how to build good habits. And this time it means teaching the lessons I’ve learned about building an email list, so that you can share your work, your art, and your projects with people who can benefit from them.

The workshop will be called “How to Get 100 Email Subscribers Per Day.” I’ll share my top 3 tips for building an an email list and I’ll show you how to implement them.

If you’re interested, you can sign up here.

Sources

There may be a faster growing single-author blog that I haven’t heard of. The main point isn’t to make a competition out of it. It’s simply to share that I’ve learned a lot about growing an audience online. That said, if you know of a faster growing site, I’d love to know about it so that I can learn from them. Feel free to share in the comments.

The Only Productivity Tip You’ll Ever Need

Ernest Hemingway woke each morning and began writing straight away.

He described his daily routine by saying, “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.”

Hemingway’s routine — along with hundreds of other prolific authors, artists, and scientists mentioned in Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work — hints at the most productive strategy I have found for getting things done and making daily progress in the areas that are important to you.

Let’s talk about the only productivity strategy you’ll ever need, why it works, and what holds us back from using it consistently.

Productivity, Simplified

No need to draw this out. This productivity strategy is straightforward: Do the most important thing first each day.

Sounds simple. No one does it.

Just like Hemingway, who produced an remarkable volume of high-caliber work during his career, you can make surprising progress each day if you simply do the most important thing first.

Why It Works

We often assume that productivity means getting more things done each day. Wrong. Productivity is getting important things done consistently. And no matter what you are working on, there are only a few things that are truly important.

Being productive is about maintaing a steady, average speed on a few things, not maximum speed on everything.

That’s why this strategy is effective. If you do the most important thing first each day, then you’ll always get something important done. I don’t know about you, but this is a big deal for me. There are many days when I waste hours crossing off the 4th, 5th, or 6th most important tasks on my to-do list and never get around to doing the most important thing.

As you’ll see below, there is no reason you have to apply this strategy in the morning, but I think starting your day with the most important task does offer some additional benefits over other times.

First, willpower tends to be higher earlier in the day. That means you’ll be able to provide your best energy and effort to your most important task.

Second, in my experience, the deeper I get into the day, the more likely it is that unexpected tasks will creep into my schedule and the less likely it is that I’ll spend my time as I had planned. Doing the most important thing first each day helps avoid that.

Finally, the human mind seems to dislike unfinished projects. They create an unresolved tension and internal stress. When we start something, we want to finish it. You are more likely to finish a task after starting it, so start the important tasks as soon as possible. (Just another reason why getting started is more important than succeeding.)

Why We Don’t Do It

Most people spend most of their time responding to someone else’s agenda than their own.

I think this is partially a result of how we are raised by society. In school, we are given assignments and told when to take our tests. At work, we are assigned due dates and given expectations from our superiors. At home, we have tasks or chores to perform to care for our kids and our partners. After a few decades of this, it can become very easy to spend your day reacting to the stimuli that surround you. We learn to take action as a reaction to the expectations, orders, or needs of someone else.

So naturally, when it comes time to start our day, it doesn’t seem strange to open our email inbox, check our phone, and look for our latest marching orders.

I think this is a mistake. The tasks assigned to us by others might seem urgent, but what is urgent is seldom important. The important tasks in our lives are the ones that move our hopes, our dreams, our creations, and our businesses forward.

Does that mean that we should ignore our responsibilities as parents or employees or citizens? Of course not. But we all need a time and space in our days to respond to our own agenda, not someone else’s.

Not a Morning Person?

Does the word morning make you mourn? Does the morning sun remind you of the The Eye of Sauron? Can you think of nothing worse than rays of golden sunshine streaming softly onto your pillow?

No worries, night owls.

As I scanned the daily habits of hundreds of authors, artists, and musicians in Daily Rituals, I noticed an important trend: There was no trend.

There is no one way to be successful. There are just as many night owls producing fabulous work as there are early birds. But no matter what their particular routine looked like, every productive artist embraced the idea of protecting a sacred time each day when they could work on their own agenda.

I find morning to work best. Your mileage may vary.

The phrase “Do the most important thing first each day” is just a simple way of saying, “Give yourself a time and space to work on what is important to you each day.”

Click here to leave a comment.

Let Your Values Drive Your Choices

Nearly every problem you face is temporary.

But these temporary problems cause immediate pain. And we often let this pain drive our choices and actions.

For example…

An employee suffering from the pain of not feeling important enough or powerful enough might take a terrible job with a fancy title.
An individual suffering from the pain of feeling unloved or unappreciated or misunderstood might try to resolve that pain by cheating on their spouse.
An entrepreneur suffering from the pain of a faltering small business might resort to using questionable marketing tactics to try to drive more sales.

…and so on.

This is how you make choices you wouldn’t normally make. When you let the problem drive your decisions, you make exceptions and “just this once” choices to resolve the pain, annoyance, or uncertainty that you’re feeling in the moment.

How can we avoid this pitfall and make better long-term choices while still resolving short-term pain?

Here’s an approach I’ve been trying recently. See if it works for you…

Let Your Values Drive Your Choices

One of the solutions I’ve been trying out is to let my values drive my choices. That doesn’t mean I ignore other aspects of my decision making process. I simply add my values into the mix.

For example, if I’m working on a problem in my business, rather than just asking, “Will this make money?”

I can ask, “Is this in alignment with my values?” And then, “Will this make money?”

If I say no to either, then I look for another option.

The idea behind this method is that if we live and work in alignment with our values, then we’re more likely to live a life we are proud of rather than one we regret.

The Power of a Constraint You Believe In

Every decision is made within some type of constraint. Maybe it’s how much knowledge you have. Maybe it’s how much money you have. Maybe it’s how many resources you have. Why not what values you have?

Making better choices is often a matter of choosing better constraints. By limiting your options to those that fit your values, you are taking an important step to ensuring that your behavior matches your beliefs. (Plus, constraints will boost your creativity.)

Know your principles and you can choose your methods.

How to Put This Into Practice

Most people never take the time to think about their values, write them down, and clarify them. Maybe it sounds too simple or unnecessary.

For what it’s worth, my 2014 Integrity Report was the first time that I sat down to clarify my values and tie them directly to my work.

You are welcome to use that report as a template for discovering your own values and aligning them with your work and life.

The Bottom Line

He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.

—Aesop

If you never sit down to think about your values, then you’ll be more likely to make decisions based on whatever information is in front of you at the time. That can be a recipe for regret down the road.

Life is complex and we are all faced with moments in our personal and professional lives that require us to make a choice without as much information as we need. The default assumption is that we need more knowledge or research in these situations, but often we just need a clear understanding of our values.

If you don’t know what you stand for and where you’re headed, then it’s far too easy to get off course, to waste your time doing something you don’t need to be doing, or to make an exception (“just this once”) that leads you down a dangerous path. There are brilliant men and women with decent hearts and families they care dearly about spending a long time in jail right now because they made business decisions that were based on the pain they felt and not the values they believed in.

Let your values drive your decisions.

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How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius

There is a interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes.

As the story goes, Picasso was walking though the market one day when a woman spotted him. She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

“My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.” [1]

Picasso isn’t the only brilliant creative who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many creative geniuses. Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice.

Let’s talk about why that is, and even more important, how you can reveal your own creative genius.

The Age of Most Nobel Prize Winners

A recent study tracked the ages of Nobel Prize winners, great inventors, and scientists. As you can see in the graph below, the researchers found that most groundbreaking work peaked during the late thirties — at least a full decade into any individual career. Even in the fields of science and math, creative breakthroughs often require ten years or more or work. [2]

These findings match the work done by previous researchers as well.

For example, a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University by cognitive psychology professor John Hayes found that out of 500 famous musical pieces, nearly all of them were created after year 10 of the composer’s career. In later studies, Hayes found similar patterns with poets and painters. He began referring to this period hard work and little recognition as the “ten years of silence.”

Whether you are a composer or a scientist, creativity is not a quality you are born with or without. It is something that is discovered, honed, and improved through real work.

Which brings us to an important question: How can you do your best work and discover your hidden creative genius?

Permission to Create Junk

People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts… For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. If fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

In any creative endeavor you have to give yourself permission to create junk. There is no way around it. Sometimes you have to write 4 terrible pages just to discover that you wrote one good sentence in the second paragraph of the third page.

Creating something useful and compelling is like being a gold miner. You have to sift through pounds of dirt and rock and silt just to find a speck of gold in the middle of it all. Bits and pieces of genius will find their way to you, if you give yourself permission to let the muse flow.

Create on a Schedule

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

—Chuck Close

Amateurs create when they feel inspired. Professionals create on a schedule.

No single act will uncover more creative genius than forcing yourself to create consistently. Practicing your craft over and over is the only way to become decent at it. The person who sits around theorizing about what a best-selling book looks like will never write it. Meanwhile, the writer who shows up every day and puts their butt in the chair and their hands on the keyboard — they are learning how to do the work.

Ira Glass is the host of the popular radio show This American Life, which is broadcast to 1.7 million listeners each week. This is the advice Glass gives to anyone looking to interesting, creative work: “The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that … the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

If you want to do your best creative work, then don’t leave it up to choice. Don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I hope I feel inspired to create something today.” You need to take the decision-making out of it. Set a schedule for your work. Genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.

Finish Something

Steven Pressfield’s most famous work, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was a best-selling novel that became a major motion picture starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron. But if you ask Pressfield, he will say that his most important book was one that you never heard of: the first book he finished.

Here’s how Pressfield describes finishing his first novel…

I never did find a buyer for the book. Or the next one, either. It was ten years before I got the first check for something I had written and ten more before a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was actually published. But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was so epochal. I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath.” [3]

Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.

There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.

Practice Self-Compassion

When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in my mouth.

—Kurt Vonnegut

Everyone struggles to create great art. Even great artists.

Anyone who creates something on a consistent basis will begin to judge their own work. I write new articles every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that publishing schedule for three months, I began to judge everything I created. I was convinced that I had gone through every decent idea I had available. My most popular article came 8 months later.

It is natural to judge your work. It is natural to feel disappointed that your creation isn’t as wonderful as you hoped it would be, or that you’re not getting any better at your craft. But the key is to not let your discontent prevent you from continuing to do the work.

You have to practice enough self-compassion to not let self-judgement take over. Sure, you care about your work, but don’t get so serious about it that you can’t laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love. Don’t let judgment prevent delivery.

Share Your Work

When it comes to ideas, most people overestimate the risk of piracy, and underestimate the price of obscurity.

—Mike Trap

Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable to creating your best work. It will provide feedback for doing better work. And when you see others connect with what you create, it will inspire you and make you care more.

Sometime sharing your work means you have to deal with haters and critics. But more often than not, the only thing that happens is that you rally the people who believe the same things you believe, are excited about the same things you are excited about, or who support the work that you believe in — who wouldn’t want that? [4]

The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.

How to Find Your Creative Genius

Finding your creative genius is easy: do the work, finish something, get feedback, find ways to improve, show up again tomorrow. Repeat for ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.

Inspiration only reveals itself after perspiration.

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Sources:

I couldn’t find the original source for this Picasso story and I’m not sure if it’s true. The point remains just as strong and compelling either way, but if you know the original source please share.
Working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which can be read here.
Quote from The War of Art. You’ll also notice that it took Pressfield nearly 20 years before he published The Legend of Bagger Vance. He put in his ten years of silence, just like every other great artist.
If you look for it, you will also find a huge hidden benefit of sharing your work publicly: the gut reaction. Whenever you share something with someone else — a business idea, an article you wrote, a painting, a picture — there will be a split second when they first process your work that you get their true response. In my experience, you will either have genuine excitement (which is an indication that you are onto something good) or any other emotion (which is an indication that it’s average at best).

How to Solve Difficult Problems by Using the Inversion Technique

Here’s a new framework for thinking about how you solve difficult problems (like losing weight and getting fit, creating more innovation in your company, learning a new skill, or otherwise changing your behavior).

I call this strategy the Inversion Technique and author Josh Kaufman covers it in his book, The First 20 Hours.

Here’s how it works.

The Inversion Technique

The way to use the Inversion Technique is to look at a particular problem from the opposite direction. [1]

For example, if you want to be a better manager, then you would ask, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?” This line of questioning will often reveal some surprising insights.

Here’s an in-depth example from Kaufman’s book…

By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren’t immediately obvious. Take white-water kayaking. What would I need to know if I wanted to be able to kayak in a large, fast-moving, rock-strewn river?

Here’s the inversion: What would it look like if everything went wrong?

I’d flip upside down underwater, and not be able to get back up.
I’d flood my kayak, causing it to sink or swamp, resulting in a total loss of the kayak.
I’d hit my head on a rock.
I’d lose my paddle, eliminating my maneuverability.
I’d eject from my kayak, get stuck in a hydraulic (a point in the river where the river flows back on itself, creating a loop like a washing machine) and not be able to get out.

If I managed to do all of these things at once in the middle of a raging river, I’d probably die – the worst-case scenario. This depressing line of thought is useful because it points to a few white-water kayaking skills that are probably very important:

Learning to roll the kayak right side up if it flips, without ejecting.
Learning how to prevent swamping the kayak if ejecting is necessary.
Learning how to avoid losing my paddle in rough water.
Learning and using safety precautions when rafting around large rocks.
Scouting the river before the run to avoid dangerous river features entirely.

This mental simulation also gives me a shopping list: I’d need to invest in a flotation vest, helmet, and other safety gear.

Now … I have concrete list of subskills to practice and actions to take to ensure that I actually have fun, keep my gear, and survive the trip.

— Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours

Using the Inversion Technique will often reveal daily errors that you may not realize you are already making. Or, as shown in the kayak example, it will showcase potential problems that could arise. Inverting the problem provides a different perspective by forcing you to think through the hidden barriers that could prevent your progress.

Becoming Smart vs. Avoiding Stupid

Say you want to create more innovation at your organization. Thinking forward, you’d think about all of the things you could do to foster innovation. If you look at the problem backwards, you’d think about all the things you could do to create less innovation. Ideally, you’d avoid those things. Sounds simple right? I bet your organization does some of those ‘stupid’ things today.

—Shane Parrish [2]

It is far easier to avoid stupidity than it is to create genius.

Eliminating the errors and mistakes that are preventing your success can be just as powerful as building new skills or habits. This was part of the success story of football player Jerry Rice. Rather than trying to build skills he didn’t have (like speed), Rice focused on eliminating mistakes that he made by running the most precise routes. As a result, when his opponents did make mistakes, Rice was able to take advantage.

Reducing Risk

There is an additional benefit to this strategy as well: While there may be adverse side effects from seeking success, there is very little risk from preventing failure.

For example, say you want to increase your focus and productivity. You could take a drug or mental stimulant that increases your ability to focus, but you run the risk of possible side effects.

On the other hand, using the Inversion Technique you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? What are ways I could distract myself?” The answer to that question may help you discover distractions you can eliminate, which should also increase your level of productivity. It’s the same problem, but the Inversion Technique allows you to attack it from another angle and with less risk. [3]

Give the Inversion Technique a try and turn your problems inside-out.

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Sources

This is different than working backward or “beginning with the end in mind,” where you start with the same result and approach it from a different direction. Instead, the Inversion Technique asks you to consider the exact opposite of your desired result.
Mental Model – Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity by Shane Parrish.
Here’s a personal example of how I decrease distractions: I often leave my phone in another room while I write. Answering calls completely breaks the flow of my work. Simple, but effective.

Thanks to Josh Kaufman and Shane Parrish for inspiring this article.