Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

by Todd Henry

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

How do you set in motion a course of action that will allow you to unleash your best, most valuable work while you still can?

Emptying yourself of your best work isn’t just about checking off tasks on your to-do list; it’s about making steady, critical progress each day on the projects that matter, in all areas of life.

There is an overemphasis on celebrity and recognition in our culture, and it will eventually be the death of us. Cultivating a love of the process is the key to making a lasting contribution.

You must structure your life around daily progress based on what matters to you, building practices and activities that allow you to plant new seeds each day, with the knowledge that you will eventually see the fruits of your labor.

Brilliant work is forged by those who consistently approach their days with urgency and diligence. Urgency means leveraging your finite resources (focus, assets, time, energy) in a meaningful and productive way. Diligence means sharpening your skills and conducting your work in a manner that you won’t regret later. When you adopt the mind-set of urgent diligence, you’ll pour all of who you are into your days, and subsequently you’ll find that the unique value you bring to the world comes more clearly into focus.

Your legacy is built one decision at a time.

Your body of work comprises the sum total of where you choose to place your limited focus, assets, time, and energy.

The key to long-term success is a willingness to disrupt your own comfort for the sake of continued growth.

Even though work sometimes feels like one massive, melded blend of tasks, conversations, and meetings, it can be parsed into three different forms: Mapping, Making, and Meshing. To truly unleash your full capability, and to ultimately find your sweet spot of contribution, you must engage in all three.

Depending on how disciplined you are about engaging in the three types of work, there are four profiles you can fall into: Developer, Driver, Drifter, Dreamer.

A term championed in the 1950s by the professor, author, and researcher Herbert A. Simon captures the essence of this phenomenon: satisficing. It’s the combination of the words “satisfy” and “sufficing,” and means selecting an option that is sufficient to meet enough of our ongoing expectations. Simon explained that when dealing with limited resources and an environment of uncertainty, satisficing is sometimes a reasonable approach because our limited resources prohibit us from pursuing every possibility. Therefore, we settle for the best available option that meets most of our requirements. However, Simon himself warned that this strategy isn’t always the best one to employ for personal decisions, because there are too many nonrational factors to be considered, and opportunity is not truly unlimited.

Mediocrity comes from the Latin words medius, meaning middle, and ocris, meaning rugged mountain. Literally translated, it means to settle halfway to the summit of a difficult mountain. It’s a compromise of abilities and potential; a negotiation between the drive to excel and the biological urge to settle for the most comfortable option.

The waxing and waning of enthusiasm for your work is actually somewhat predictable. There are distinct phases of growth that you pass through as you adapt to a new environment or master any skill. These phases can be plotted along the “learning curve,” which is a representation of the difficulty of learning a skill plotted along with the benefits of skill acquisition. For complex adaptation, the learning curve tends to look more like a typical “S curve,” with slow growth at first, then rapid growth as the fundamental mechanics of the skill become easier to perform, followed by a slow leveling off. This is because complex skills and environments are nuanced and require a good amount of time to master, but the benefits of mastering them are substantial. (This is why specialists in highly complex fields are typically well compensated.)

The seeds of tomorrow’s brilliance are planted in the soil of today’s activity.

In my work with individuals and organizations, I’ve witnessed several key areas where mediocrity repeatedly creeps in and causes neglect of one of these three kinds of work, leading to ineffectiveness. Because they’re such common and destructive slipping points, I call them the “Seven Deadly Sins of Mediocrity.” To make them easier to remember, I’ve also named and organized them alphabetically, “A-B-C-D-E-F-G.”

Aimlessness is a destructive force because it removes both the joy of success and the gratification that comes from hard, focused work. In order to be effective and contribute meaningfully, you need to apply points of traction in your life to prevent aimlessness from becoming the norm. You have to define the battles that are important to you, and align your resources to fight them.

The key to conquering aimlessness is to concretely define the battles that you need to fight each day in order to make meaningful progress, then focus your efforts on those above all else.

The cure for boredom is intentional and applied curiosity. To be successful intellectually and professionally you need to maintain a level of disciplined curiosity, which means staying in touch with your deeper questions, and practicing the mechanics of divergent problem solving.

The key to overcoming the ill effects of a love of comfort is a commitment to continual growth and skill development.

Self-delusion is a fast track to a life of wasted potential.

To countermand ego, you must adopt a posture of adaptability. This means being in a state of continual learning and openness to correction. Failure is never the ultimate goal; it should be a learning experience rather than a shaming experience.

Fear thrives on the unknown. Its paralyzing effects are often rooted more in imagination than reality. The key to countermanding fear is to instill a practice of strategic, intentional, and purposeful risk-taking in your life and work. In other words, to experiment, play, and find your voice through taking small chances to express yourself through your work.

The solution to guardedness is to build a system of checks into your life to help you scan for relational outages, and to remedy them before they become destructive.

Success in emptying yourself of your best work each day depends on your ability to define the right battles, and do the small but critical tasks that will help you progress toward your true objectives rather than just the ones that others expect you to strive for.

Have you ever thought about what’s truly important to you? What battle would you be willing to fight anytime for any reason? What triggers your primal instinct to act? Your through line is the theme of your life and work. It’s your thesis statement. It’s the “delta,” or the change, that you wish to see in the world through your efforts.

Identifying a through line around which to devote your focus, time, and energy is a journey, not a onetime task. The process requires persistence and a good deal of self-awareness, both of which can be challenging to muster when you are already managing the complexity of expectations, objectives, and relationships that comprise an average workday.

I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I do not want to play football.’” Martin said that one of the other people present on draft day was his pastor, Leroy Joseph. Joseph quickly reframed the conversation by reminding Martin of all of the great things he might be able to do for other people, such as single mothers and kids who came from broken and abusive homes. He told Martin that the platform an NFL career would grant him might be a wonderful opportunity to do everything he’d always said he’d like to do.

One of my favorite mission statements is from the Boca Restaurant Group: “Blow People Away.”

To avoid aimlessness, you have to stand for something. Don’t allow aimlessness to rob you of years of your life. You will ultimately be remembered for—and your body of work will be built upon—the battles you chose to spend your time fighting. Act with urgency and diligence today to define your through line and your battles, then carefully allocate your focus, time, and energy on things that matter to you. There are battles that only you are equipped to fight, and while I can’t tell you what they are, I suspect you probably already know at least some of them. We need you to act, and we need you to do it now. Run to the battle.

Reclaim curiosity by embracing an engagement mind-set rather than an entertainment mind-set. This means dedicating yourself to the pursuit of new and better questions, attuning your mind to dive deeply into important problems, and questioning the assumptions that sometimes limit fresh new perspectives.

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

As odd as it sounds, it can be beneficial to disconnect from certain sources of information and streams of content so that you can cultivate a more curated flow of inspiration. You get to play the role of curator of your own life and creative process. When you become more selective about where you spend your valuable attention, you cultivate the capacity to notice the subtleties of life and apply new observations to your work.

This requires a commitment to the discovery process, and active pursuit of possibility. You can’t just wait around for inspiration to strike—you have to aggressively pursue it by asking probing questions and mining your environment for the raw materials of brilliance.

If you want something to happen predictably, you systematize it.

Before going into a meeting, reading a book or article, or experiencing something new, take a few minutes to consider the questions you’re hoping to address through the experience. Write down a few of those questions, and use them as the filter for what you see and hear. By doing so, you’ll prompt your mind to look for answers to those questions and you’ll give yourself a head start on your objectives.

Additionally, you may want to keep a “commonplace book,” a term I first heard from Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist. With origins in early modern Europe, a commonplace book was a collection of quotes, recipes, or other items centered around a theme, and designed to help its creator recall important information.

consider compiling “the list.”

I keep a “Stimulus Queue,” which is a list of all of the interesting books, films, or articles that I come across throughout my day and I want to revisit later, during my study time.

Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, described the benefits of the prototyping process in his book The Art of Innovation.

Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

A second strategy for developing your curiosity is to leverage possibility thinking, especially in how you engage with your projects. This means refusing to settle for status quo ideas and instead relentlessly embracing the pursuit of great ones.

There are four elements that can help you explore the edges of your problem: Aspirations, Affinities, Assumptions, and Attributes.

Walt Disney once said, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, developed something he called the “Regret Minimization Framework.”

Seth Godin, author of Poke the Box, argues that many people in today’s marketplace are waiting for permission to act on their intuition. They refuse to move until the gatekeepers give them permission. “Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing,” Godin writes. “This is a revolutionary overthrow of time and motion studies, of foremen, of bureaucracies and bosses. It’s not a new flavor of the old soup. It’s a personal, urgent, this-is-my-call/this-is-my-calling way to do your job. Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.”

Where in your life and work are you waiting for permission? Don’t anticipate that someone is going to hand you a map. You’ll probably have to make your own. The good news is that once you get moving, the terrain becomes more visible and navigable. It’s only when you’re standing still, unaware of what’s over the next hill, that the path of progress is opaque and frightening. Say yes, then figure it out along the way.

I call these daily battles “step goals” because they help you make progress on your mission. They aren’t major milestones, but are small, measured steps that help you maintain forward motion. Sequence enough step goals in a row, and you will eventually make significant progress.

A sprint goal is a series of step goals that extend over a season. You will sprint for a week or two, then take a break, then sprint again, and so forth. A sprint goal is designed to stretch your endurance and generate significant momentum on your stretch goal.

A stretch goal is big. It’s a major feat. It’s something that will challenge you to grow. The important factor when choosing a stretch goal is that it’s something you can control and measure. If you can’t control it, you can’t plan for it.