Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • The Worthwhile Endeavors

      “Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren’t worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated. Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.” — Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

      In all honesty, last night I was planning to make this my last blog post. To end with a bang on the 4th of July seemed poetic. I’ve thought this before, but talked myself into sticking with it for a round number or a date with particular meaning for me. The 4th has particular meaning for me and so it felt appropriate to roll out the Annie Duke quote and wrap this thing up.

      Naturally, this is why I write in the morning, with a fresh mind not yet beaten down by the realities of the world. This is why I read poetry and listen to music with the ear of a philosopher. This is why I travel to places that leave me gobsmacked. And this is why I favor quiet conversation with the smallest of circles, that we may each be heard. The well was empty last night, it’s not quite so this morning.

      No, I’m not ready to stop writing just yet. But the thought was a red flag for me that I must pursue other worthwhile endeavors to ignite the kindling before it floats away in the winds of time. There’s a whole world out there awaiting our graceful experience with it. So frequently asking ourselves whether we should stick with things opens up the possibility that maybe we shouldn’t. Recalibrate. And in the absence of obligation to that thing other opportunities may open up before us.

    • The Immediate Concern

      “A bad goal makes you say, ‘I want to do that some day.’ A great goal makes you take action immediately.” ― Derek Sivers

      I type this a little sore. All over sore, the kind that makes you move a little slower and assess your choices in life. Still, it’s a good sore of layered exercise expressing change in the body. We all ought to embrace such positive change in our lives. At least that’s what I’m telling myself, knowing I have work to do today to keep that momentum going in the right direction. And so I appreciate what Sivers is talking about when he assesses a good goal.

      The immediate concern is sustaining positive momentum towards the goal of completing a lot of mileage in a relatively short amount of time. To average 6.5 miles a day is a reckless goal at this stage of my professional life, but calculated to force me to row more often. I’m already feeling the effects of this, and I’m energized by the goal despite the fatigue it brings to me. We are made to move, not just sit staring at a variety of screens all day.

      When the summer is over, I’ll have kept my commitment to myself by keeping the goal alive to completion. Plenty of other things will keep me busy in that timeframe, but some things will be sacrificed for the greater good of finishing the goal. Life is full of tradeoffs, isn’t it? Why trade a good fitness level for comfortable distraction?

      At this very moment there’s a creeping urgency to stop writing about it and get back to stacking miles on top of what’s already been done. What doesn’t get done in July will have to be done in August, and frankly, I’ve got enough on my plate already in August. Great goals make you question your sanity while you’re making them come true. And yet, it makes you feel more alive than a less worthy goal ever would. It’s literally putting bold words into action. What’s more transformative than that?

    • How Was Your Experience?

      I received the same question from my dentist and my automobile service team recently—How was your experience? It turns out both left me a bit disappointed this time around, where I’d come to expect excellence. Perhaps that expectation led me there, or maybe they simply didn’t measure up to their own standards. Either way it was the same result.

      We ought to ask ourselves this question every day with an ever-higher standard for our own behavior, execution on goals, and an ever more refined philosophy for how a life should be lived. What gets measured gets managed, as Peter Drucker supposedly said. Each day offers an opportunity to ask ourselves, how’s it really going? What needs to change? How do we become a better version of ourselves than we were yesterday? It starts with the right questions and follows with an honest answer.

    • The Route of the Routine

      “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” — Pablo Picasso

      To have a plan is to have a route. A route transformed into a daily routine is what carries us from who we have been to who we aspire to become. Who we are today represents a single step on the journey, but it’s often what we fixate on the most. So it is that we get frustrated with performance standards on any given task, workout or event we’re in the middle of at the moment. We measure ourselves against there, when we are still here. Never a fair comparison.

      It’s good to focus on small wins while gently pushing to a higher standard. Yesterday was a good day of work but not a good day of working out. Today offers an opportunity to turn that around. Seeing the forest for the trees, it’s may become clear that the routine is the same, even when the steps along the route change. Just keep following that desired compass heading.

      As Picasso pointed out, the trick is to vigorously act on our goals. Otherwise they’re nothing but dreams. Daydreamers don’t get very far, do they? Once we know the route, we must get to it already.

    • The Minimum Viable

      When you’re short on time, what gives? The routine being what it is, an abundance of minutes to accomplish everything is often necessary to meet our expectations of ourselves. But some days there just aren’t a lot of available minutes. Still, we must move the chains.

      James Clear discussed this concept of minimum viable habits, for which he coined the name atomic habits. Makes a great book title for sure. The concept itself is pretty straightforward: what is an acceptable level of effort applied to a habit to make us believe we’ve checked the box today? Read one page? Ten pushups or a walk around the block? When we set the minimum viable number, we give ourselves a way to pat ourselves on the back and move on to the rest of our hectic day.

      I’m quite literally rushing out the door, but attempting to create a blog post that meets or hopefully exceeds that minimum viable for me to consider it a worthy submission. I do this at the expenses of some other habits I’d very much like to do as well, but they’ll have to wait a few more hours—when they too most likely will sneak in above that minimum. That’s how we make progress and keep streaks alive for one more day. And some days, that’s just enough.

    • Showing Up

      The hardest day in a new workout routine is the second day. You’ve hit it hard on day one, felt that sense of accomplishment, and then get up the next morning a bit stiff, with lactic acid buildup and a hundred reasons why you should wait just a little while before you get back to that routine. This is the day when you’ve got to show up and push through it, no matter how it goes. Showing up is where committed identity is established.

      The thing is, the results may be pretty ugly. My day two was humbling and embarrassing to post, but it’s one workout in what should be a steady climb to better. What does it matter if we don’t set a PR on day two? I’m not rowing in the Olympics, and the dog walking team hasn’t called me just yet. All that matters is the streak, and you can’t get to day three without getting through day two.

      We are what we repeatedly do. That’s the only success formula that matters in a lifetime. The reason The Beatles were so prolific in the relatively brief time they were a band was because they showed up and did the work. When they slid into a distracted fog they fractured and broke up. The analogy isn’t any different for us. We must show up and do the work that calls to us, every day.

      I was talking to one of my favorite writers a few days ago and she told me she hadn’t been writing lately. I reminded her then (and now, I suppose), that writers write, every day. It’s the only way to avoid atrophy. It’s why I publish this blog every day, and check a dozen other important boxes every day. We must show up, if only to keep a promise to ourselves. There’s nothing worse than a dysfunctional relationship with our inner voice.

      Easy for me to say, right? I’ve already established the habit. But that’s just one part of a routine that is always a work in progress. We never quite reach excellence (arete), do we? All we can do is try to move closer. The rubber hits the road when we gently put our excuses on the nightstand and rise up to meet the moment.

    • BHAG At It

      “Set goals that are so big, so hairy, they make you gulp. When youre about to fall asleep, your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is there by your bed all hairy with glowing eyes. When you wake up its there: ‘Good morning, I am your BHAG. I own your life’. — Jim Collins

      Yesterday I set a goal for myself that was so ridiculous that I laughed. I more than doubled the lofty goal I set for myself a year ago in mileage for the summer, all for a good cause. The thing is, I did it in a calculated way, on a spreadsheet, with a key differentiator from a year ago: I’ve learned what is possible if I simply change the way I arrive.

      The answer to doing more in the same amount of time is to do work with a higher return on time invested. I love a great walk as much as anyone, but they take time. Rowing is far more efficient, and I can cover a lot more mileage in less time. If there’s a red flag in the plan, it’s big blocks of time when I’ll be away from the rowing ergometer for business and personal travel. It’s why I emphasized walking a year ago: because I can do it almost anywhere. By combining the two, but with emphasis on the rowing workouts, I can accomplish 235% more in the same amount of time. That’s what you call a big, hairy, audacious goal.

      The trick is to stop talking about what you’re going to do and get right to doing it. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it will get done. Just like every other habit in our lives, we must consistently show up and do what we promise ourselves we’re going to do. That’s the only way to make a BHAG our friend. So gulp and get to it already.

    • Beyond the Same Old

      “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.” — John Foster Dulles

      I first encountered this Dulles quote 25 years ago. I know this because I wrote the date in pencil right next to it. I was a different person then in countless ways, and exactly the same in others. Some positive, transformative growth has happened in that time, and some stubborn habits that hold me back still have a hold of me even now. We all have things that carry us forward or hold us back in our lives, and mostly that’s between our ears.

      If I were to track broken promises to myself over that time, I’d see the same ones appear over and over. We can focus on such things and beat ourselves up, or celebrate the ways in which we’ve grown into a better human. If life has taught me anything, it’s to identify the positive systems, habits and routines that make us incrementally better and do more of those things. There will always be problems and challenges in our lives, the question is whether we’re just repeating ourselves or actually evolving into a person who is more adaptive, resilient and wiser than the person we were before. If so, our problems and challenges will evolve into different ones, indicating progress.

      The alternative to new and greater challenges is having the same ones. That’s as clear an indication of stagnation and being in a rut as any. When we’re in a rut we ought to climb out as soon as possible before it becomes our grave. Countless people go to their graves wishing they’d done something transformative in their lives. We should live our days with Henry David Thoreau’s warning from Walden in mind:

      “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” Which led to his most famous observation, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

      So what occupies us? What are our own factitious and superfluous labors distracting us from moving past the problems that have nagged us over and over again? We must live creative, bold lives that we may break from the rut altogether and transform ourselves for the better. To be successful, deep down in our own minds, is to transcend who we once were to become something greater.

      The thing is, we know all of this, and yet we still stall out here and there. Our epitaph ought to be more than “steady but unremarkable”. Progress towards remarkable is measured in the value and contribution we bring to the world; to be useful to others and ourselves, and to move that investment ever higher. What is our verse? What is our dent in the universe? What ripple will carry well after we’ve checked out? Do more of that to move beyond the same old problems.

    • Productive Motion

      Some of us abhor stasis. I can’t imagine sitting in one place for long without some measure of productivity involved. To lie on a beach towel? Only possible with a great book or conversation happening, otherwise I’m out of there. Give me motion please.

      But often motion is just its own distraction. To “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”, as David Gilmore put it, can be thought of as scandalous and wasteful, whether we’re moving or sitting around doing nothing much at all. But that’s being human, isn’t it? We all waste some amount of our time in the course of living a full life. But we ought to lean into things that move us forward.

      We know what’s essential for us, why do we fill our bucket with fluff? Because it kills time? Our habits and routines will carry us to greater places or drag us sideways down the abyss. We may have a say in our fate.

      So it is that I’ve begun weeding the routine to foster growth in the productive and important at the expense of the frivolous habitual. A bit more productive exercise, a bit less watching YouTube videos. A bit more reading, a bit less scrolling. It’s amazing where we find the time when we add a bit of selective bias to our habits.

    • Momentum in the Moments

      “We should tell ourselves, once and for all, that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. Herein is no egoism, or pride. To become effectually generous and sincerely humble there must be within us a confident, tranquil, and clear comprehension of all that we owe to ourselves.” ― Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny

      We must first reach for our own potential, that we might fully lend it to others. Put another way, we must become increasingly necessary to those around us through the value we bring. Value is our accumulated skills, knowledge and presence applied to contribution. To make a greater contribution, we must build up our value.

      When I look at my career, the times when I’ve been happiest are when I’ve been able to contribute something substantial to the overall cause. The times when I’ve been most miserable in my work are almost always when I feel like I’m not contributing my full value and I’ve lost my way. The thing is, these feelings come well after the work that it took to arrive there, for momentum is built in the moments leading to it.

      This is most obvious in how we feel about our fitness level. If we’re feeling fit, it’s generally because of all the work that led us to physical fitness. Working out can be tedious when we view it as something we have to do. When it becomes part of our identity it’s simply part of our days. And this applies to everything else we do in life: reading and learning, writing and artistic expression, connection to the people in our lives, and our continual development in the self.

      Excellence is a habit. But so is laziness, sloth and a bankrupt soul. Both ends of the spectrum are paths built on the moments that precede our arrival there. We must choose how we spend our days accordingly and build momentum in the right things. So it is that nothing is more important in a brief life than our self development, that we may be more valuable to ourselves and others in the moments to come.