Hello Friends,
And happy Monday!
There is no shortcut for hard work and putting in the hours.
Take More Pictures: The counterintuitive way to build resilience 4min
When everything rests on the numbers
Sometimes, achieving something really is about quantity over quality not the other way around.
I’ve asked wedding photographers how they manage to capture such perfect moments.
They all say the same type of thing: “I just take way more pictures. I’ll take a thousand pictures over a three-hour wedding. That’s a picture every 10 seconds. Of course I’m going to have 50 good ones. I’m throwing 950 pictures away to find them!”
“So you won the lottery. How do I win the lottery, too?”
I always answer the same way, with a reply I stole from Todd Hanson, former head writer at The Onion.
He said that whenever someone asks him the question “So how do I get a job writing jokes for money like you did?” he gives a straightforward answer:
“Do it for free for 10 years.”
We cannot hack our way to success
Some things take time. They take time. They just take time. It’s not about the number of hits but rather the number of times you step up to the plate. The most important questions to ask yourself are:
Am I gaining experience?
Will these experiences help?
Can I afford to stay on this path for a while?
Success stories are not stories of success
We need to stop looking at successful people with the lens that their lives contain a success that led to a success that led to another success.
Because you know what we’re really looking at? Not success, not really. Just people who are just really good at moving through failures.
Moving through failures, swimming through failure, recovering and going forward from failure? That’s the real success.
Successful people get to where they’re going because they are willing to try something when the possibility of failure is high … they know and accept that and don’t shy away from it.
I always used to do all my homework before anything else.
This essay explains why self-imposed deadlines make sense.
How to Cut All Meeting Time in Half 6min
"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.” Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson’s Law”
As part of a job I had at Walmart years ago I suddenly took ownership over the company’s weekly meeting for all employees.
The CEO would speak for as long as he wanted about whatever he wanted and then pass the mic to the next executive sitting at a table, who would speak as long as he wanted about whatever he wanted, before passing the mic to the next person. It was unpredictable—and starting at 9:00 a.m., it rolled into 10:00 a.m., sometimes 10:30 a.m., and occasionally 11:00 a.m. People would go on tangents. Nobody was concise. And everyone would leave two hours later in a daze, trying to remember all the mixed priorities they heard at the beginning of the meeting.
So I worked with the CEO to redesign the meeting. We created five segments of five minutes each and set up an agenda and schedule of presenters in advance. “The Numbers,” “Outside Our Walls,” “The Basics 101,” “Sell! Sell! Sell!” and “Mailbag,” where the CEO opened letters and answered questions from the audience.
The new meeting was twenty-five minutes long! And it never went over time once.
How come?
Because I downloaded a “dong” sound effect that we played over the speakers with one minute left, a “ticking clock” sound effect that played with fifteen seconds left, and then the A/V guys actually cut off a person’s microphone when time hit zero. If you hit zero, you would be talking onstage but nobody could hear you. You just had to walk off.
If you can’t say it concisely in five minutes, you can’t say it.
By then people doze off or start checking their email.
Have you ever tried listening to someone talk for twenty straight minutes?
Unless they are extremely clear, concise, and captivating, it’s a nightmare.
Jack Welch, GE CEO:
"Insecure managers create complexity.
Real leaders don’t need clutter.
Clear, toughminded people are the most simple.”
How do you complete a three-month project in one day?
Sam Raina books his entire team for secret one-day meetings and then issues them a challenge in the morning that he says they’re going to get done by the end of the day. There is only one day to make an entire website! From designing to layout to testing—everything.
"Everyone freaks out about the deadline. And then everyone starts working together. The less time we have to do it, the more focused and organized we are. We all work together. We have to! There is no way we’d hit the deadline otherwise. And we always manage to pull it off,” Sam says.
By spending a day on a project that would otherwise take months, he frees up everyone’s thinking time, transactional time, and work time. There will be no emails about the website, no out-of-office messages, no meetings set up to discuss it, no confusion about who said what. Everyone talks in person. At the same time.
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
What’s the solution?
Create last-minute panic!
Move deadlines up, revise them for yourself, and remember you are creating space after the project has been delivered.
Do only nerds do their homework Friday night?
Maybe.
But they’re the ones with the whole weekend to party.
Before being a dad, being in this kind of flow for a whole day happened to me a few times - never on weekdays because of all the meetings.
And I do agree 100% with the author: the outcome is incredibly non-linear.
Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week 7min
Meetings never really go away.
I used to be one of those “wake up at 4 a.m.” or “keep chugging ‘til 4 a.m.” guys who grinds away at work for hours while everybody else sleeps.
But I now understand that you can only drive in the express lane for so long before the wheels come off.
I’m no longer that guy. Now when I get home after work, I soak in time with my wife and two little boys.
Nothing is or will ever be as precious to me, and I resist insight from anyone who isn’t making space for loved ones.
I realized that what I needed was a practical way to get more work done without taking more time.
I finally found a solution that I feel has saved my career, my time, and my sanity.
If you’re with me right now, I bet you need this solution too: I call it “Untouchable Days”.
These are days when I am literally 100% unreachable in any way…by anyone.
Untouchable Days have become my secret weapon to getting back on track.
They’re how I complete my most creative and rewarding work.
To share a rough comparison, on a day when I write between meetings, I’ll produce maybe 500 words a day.
On an Untouchable Day, it’s not unusual for me to write 5,000 words. On these days, I’m 10 times more productive.
How do I carve out Untouchable Days?
I look at my calendar sixteen weeks ahead of time, and for each week, I block out an entire day as UNTOUCHABLE.
I put it in all-caps just like that, too. UNTOUCHABLE.
I don’t write in all-caps for anything else,
So what do Untouchable Days look like up close?
I think of them as having two components.
There is the deep creative work.
When you’re in the zone, you’re in a state of flow, and the big project you’re working on is getting accomplished step by step by step.
And then there are the nitros — little blasts of fuel you can use to prime your own pump if you hit a wall.
These unproductive moments of frustration happen to all of us, and it’s less important to avoid them than to simply have a mental toolkit you can whip out when they happen.
What are my tools? Heading to the gym for a workout. Grabbing a pack of almonds. Getting up and simply running down the street, or going on a nature walk. A ten-minute meditation. Or switching to a new workspace.
Red alert: The Untouchable Day is under threat. What do I do?
I have a simple rule. Untouchable Days may never be deleted, but they can move between the bowling-lane bumpers of the weekends.
They can’t jump weeks, though.
The beauty of this approach is that when you plant the Untouchable Day flag on your calendar, it really does feel permanent in your mind.
You start feeling the creative high you’ll get from such deep output as soon as you start booking them in.
With a year of Untouchable Days under my belt, do I still go through the exercise of scheduling one Untouchable Day every single week?
The honest answer is no.
Now I schedule two.
Thanks for reading, and have a focused week ahead,
V