Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • Not to Be Defeated

      “The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but being tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated.” ― Katharine Hepburn

      On the face of it, not to be defeated doesn’t feel like a bold act. It feels fatalistic. Shouldn’t the goal be to win? Perhaps in sports this is true. Perhaps even in business or a spelling bee or war. But look closer at each and we learn that the one who wins often is the one who made the fewest mistakes.

      To win feels like we’ve conquered our adversary. But that adversary is temporary. The true adversary of our lifetime is indifference, apathy and nihilism. Those who succumb lose their life force—that which fuels the fire within. The bullies of the world would drain our life force. Just look around and it’s easy to see how they draw us towards the cliff.

      Look back on the characters in history who rose to meet their moment and we may feel compelled to measure up in our own time. Are these times challenging, upsetting, and disheartening? You bet. Is life unfair? It always has been so. This is our time to toughen up! Grow a spine and rise up to meet the moment, like all those characters we admire did in their time. They’ve shown the way if we’ll only look and see it for ourselves.

      “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      We all know people in our lives with no agency, no direction, no purpose. We may even feel that way ourselves in our lowest moments. To be fully alive and vital is a daily choice of rising to meet our days head-on. Especially these days, we may feel. But these are the ones we’ve been given. They may feel darker and more frustrating to navigate, but they’re miracles just the same.

      When we dream of greatness in our lives, we must necessarily turn our focus to today, for it’s where greatness is made. We defer our greatness at our peril, for there is no tomorrow. Instead of being drawn to the cliff, build a wall between the nihilists and destroyers. Then turn around and begin climbing to meet the moment.

    • Creativity and Work

      “Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent Van Gogh

      Work without creativity is drudgery. Creativity without work is nothing but daydreaming. The optimal condition for any of us is to do creative work every day. When it all comes together, it’s magic.

      When we go through the motions in our work or creative pursuits, we quickly grow bored and look for distraction or an exit plan. When we do creative work, we imagine doing it forever. We ought to ask ourselves in all pursuits, is this enough? What more can I bring to this? The answer may drive us to make the changes necessary to be more actively engaged in creative work.

      So many people are lost in their days, either plodding through the hours or daydreaming the time away. That’s no way to live. I’ve been there myself, struggling through soul-crushing work looking for a viable escape plan. It wasn’t until the moments in my career where I brought creativity to my work that it lit a spark and illuminated my days. It’s the same with writing—when I go through the motions, nothing interesting happens. When I work through the walls I find the muse waiting on the other side.

      None of us have the time to waste on meaningless activity. Bringing work to our creative pursuits is just as essential as bringing creativity to our work. We cannot go through the motions in our days and live an optimized life. Creativity and work must be integrated together to fully realize our potential.

    • Boldly now

      “When I took my first wobbly steps on ice skates aged four, my mother was standing on the sidelines cheering me on. The ice was cold, hard and not very even, and I didn’t like trying out new things. I wanted to leave. My mother smiled encouragingly, and as I shakily ventured out farther on the ice, I heard her shout “Rohkeasti vaan!” behind me. This Finnish expression can be roughly translated as “Boldly now!” and typifies our attitude to raising kids.” — Joanna Nyland, Sisu: The Finnish Art of Courage

      This blog is a series of railroad ties laid one day to the next, carrying the writer and anyone who cares to follow along across the blank slate towards heightened awareness. Sometimes the journey reveals stunning vistas, sometimes it slogs through the dullest of plateaus seeking a breakthrough. The sum of our daily action is carrying us somewhere. The compass aims at better, but it comes down to what we’ve done with the days.

      The trick with anything we set out to do is to keep doing it until we reach our goal. To be bold is not itself a goal, but an aspiration of attitude to bring to this next step and the one after that. It’s the long, purposeful stride, not the timid baby step. Both move us along, but we’ve only got so many days. The bolder step carries us faster and farther, and builds momentum necessary for the occasional leap.

      When the days become routine and the weeks blend together into a level of sameness that leave us uninspired, let us remember to be bold. The Finnish phrase quoted above, “Rohkeasti vaan!”, isn’t likely to roll off my tongue, but the translation, “Boldly now!” has the power to inspire the laying of more track, on an ever-higher plane, towards those aspirational vistas. Baby steps may offer forward progress, but we must remember to boldly lengthen that stride and get after it, now.

    • Remember Your Dreams

      Take it all in
      It’s as big as it seems
      Count all your blessings
      Remember your dreams
      — Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Dreams

      We who try to reason with an unreasonable world can get pulled into distraction before we know it. We know that distraction steals our lives away as quickly as a murderous thief. The time given to distraction will never be returned to us. Focus on the future. Remember your dreams.

      Just writing this, I thought maybe I’d link to a video of Buffett singing the song I quoted, which led me to YouTube, which promptly threw a hundred distracting options at me that could easily have taken this productive moment from me in exchange for trinkets of frivolity. It happens so quickly, so easily, that we hardly notice it anymore. And before we know it our dreams are deferred to a tomorrow that will never come.

      We must be bold to dream big, but then we must be disciplined to realize them. Be present. Be aware. Be alive and vibrantly focused on the things that matter most in this time and place. These are days we’ll remember—the madness in the world assures that, but we must make it our mission to write the script ourselves.

      To be alive and aware of what we’re doing with the time puts us ahead of the masses of minions watching curated videos all day. We may leverage that time advantage to realize a dream or two in our allotment of days. There is no other reasonable alternative but to be bold and leap into life.

    • Putting Nothing Aside

      “If you do nothing, nothing will happen.” — Joanna Nylund, Sisu: The Finnish Art of Courage

      Nothing simply delivers the results we deserve. The lesson is to do something more to earn more, so that something might be realized. Even better, we may choose to take meaningful, powerful action, so that meaningful, powerful things may be realized. Boldness may be our dance partner, but she doesn’t dance with just anyone. We must be bold ourselves.

      We wake up with a blank slate each day, and get to fill it in with world-building activity. We are building the world that we live in each day, aren’t we? It might be true that we don’t control a lot of things, but we forget in focusing on that to focus on the things with which we have agency. Forget what we cannot control! That leads to a whole lot of nothing. We must put nothing aside and get busy building.

    • Purposeful Motion

      “It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment, between—the words clicked sharply in her mind after a startled stop—between spirit and body. First, the vision—then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought—then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other? Wasn’t it evil to wish without moving—or to move without aim? Whose malevolence was it that crept through the world, struggling to break the two apart and set them against each other?” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      Purpose comes with clarity. Clarity comes with mental space to sift through the noise and find our calling. Once our why is clear to us, we must then act with purposeful motion towards that goal, or the game is up. So many days are wasted playing the wrong game. So it is that we must have clarity to maximize our days with purpose.

      We can be well aware of the news, but that doesn’t mean we have to consume the poison. We vote, we donate, we work to be the voice of reason in a maddening world, but at the end of the day, we’ve got things to do, and we must get to them. We must stay on track with our goals or we’ll never reach them. As my bride loves to say about the madness in the world, it’s not our circus, not our monkeys. Our circus is filled with exciting possibility waiting for our attention to be realized.

      I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
      I can see all obstacles in my way
      Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
      It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
      Sun-shiny day
      — Johnny Nash, I Can See Clearly Now

      This year will be filled with obstacles in our way that demand our focused attention to navigate. How we get past them is to be determined, but doesn’t it make sense to build a little momentum first, that we meet them at peak performance? It’s easy to look out at obstacles and simply give up. Easy, but not very fulfilling.

      The thing is, it’s never been about the obstacle, it’s about the goal beyond the obstacle. Write the book, build the business, reach the peak, build a lifetime partnership—we know our goals, we must stop focusing on obstacles and focus instead on the way beyond them. Life is an accumulation of accomplishments and milestones. On our deathbed will we only talk of obstacles, or of the things we realized in our time?

    • In the Ripple

      “Men see God in the ripple but not in miles of still water. Of all the two-thousand miles that the St. Lawrence flows—pilgrims go only to Niagara.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      As a pilgrim to many a waterfall, including Niagara, I know the call of white water. Isn’t it thrilling to experience the power of water channeled into a plummet? Yet Niagara herself is only a fraction of what she was before most of her water was redirected to hydroelectric power. It turns out that I’m keen on productivity too, and appreciate the clean energy even as I wonder what those falls felt like before they were diminished.

      We focus so much on the ripple we’re making that we forget that a pond was beautiful before the splash is made at all. Deep down we know that those still waters may still be here for what feels like eternity, but humans don’t have that kind of timeline. We feel a compulsion to do something in our time. If it any wonder we’re attracted to the ripple?

      Action is thus our call. Sometimes it’s in service of the harvest; productive and purposeful. Often it’s merely busyness for its own sake, as if churning the waters enough will make up for direction. The thing is, it’s no secret that water that’s been churned up is often murky. To bring clarity we must also have stillness. All this busyness in our lives doesn’t lend itself to insight or revelation.

      I grew up in New England, where great mill cities were built with the power of channeled water. In the spring when the waters are flowing quickly it’s not difficult to maintain momentum in the mills. But after the waters recede, the mills have difficulty getting enough power. So the mill engineers built giant reservoirs to help regulate the flow of water for optimal performance.

      We run ourselves dry if we don’t pause now and then and gather ourselves. We must learn to settle into our stillness and see what it brings. We may find our creativity flows far better when we fill our own reservoir. Seeking out balance in this way brings us to sustained productivity and the ripple we wish to make, and also to revelation and purpose, that we may find the right channel for our power.

    • Life, On Schedule

      “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen Covey

      It’s well-documented in this blog that I’m a morning person. My bride is just the opposite—a night owl who seems to charge along right to the end of the day. I wake up in the morning and she’s done a whole project while I slept. I try to keep pace and have my own projects done when she wakes up. Teamwork makes the dream work, as the silly saying goes.

      Whatever our productivity tools, we must embrace them to do the things we wish to do in a day so often filled with stolen hours. For my bride, a traditional Franklin Covey planner seems to do the trick. For me, the free flow of a bullet journal sets my days straight. Whatever the methodology, a system of scheduling and honoring our priorities each day keeps us on track.

      The thing is, the use of a planner or bullet journal is itself a system. My utilization of the bullet journal slipped away when I went on a long vacation in April and never really got back on track until I changed jobs. I maintained some positive habits during that time, but also some bad habits. For me, returning in earnest to the bullet journal coincides with a refocus on positive change.

      The last few weeks I’ve reset my compass, and with that reset, I’m shedding some habits that were stale for me in favor of habits that will hopefully help me arrive at those new goals. Once those goals are established, a routine must be identified to carry us to them. This is best exemplified by daily habits that are either done automatically or reinforced through a scheduled event. I use the bullet journal to check the desired behavior off once completed, and track it in a habit tracker in the same journal.

      Why all this talk of schedules and routines? Because it leads to a larger life. We can be generally happy with who and where we are and still aspire to grow closer to our version of personal excellence (arete). We can’t get to arete by winging it, we’ve got to build purpose and direction into our days, no matter where we are on our journey. In this way, routine leads to excellence, so long as the routine is scheduled.

    • The Thing Speaks For Itself

      I’m not a lawyer by trade, but I still believe in law and order. In legal doctrine there is a Latin phrase, “res ipsa loquitur” that means “the thing speaks for itself.” We may apply that phrase to many things in the world right now, and shake our heads at how we got here, but ultimately we must begin with what we can control. When it comes to our own behavior, the law is our standard for who we want to be in this world, and order is our routine or system, best seen in the daily habits that make something of our days.

      Bill Belichick has a philosophy that every New England football fan can recite in their sleep; “It is what it is.” Applied to our lives, these two phrases clarify where we are. The good, the bad and the ugly are all laid out for us. It is what it is, and the thing speaks for itself. We may add, “We’re on to Cincinnati”, as Belichick also famously said. For those in the know, that means what’s done is done and we’re only focused on this next thing now.

      But we can’t just flip the script and move on to whatever the next thing is in our lives without awareness of where we are, how we got here and thus, what to change in our way of doing things that will put us in a position for success on that next thing. To change we must know what needs to change. Jim Collins calls this confronting the brutal facts, that we may move from good to great.

      We’re close to the end of the runway on this year. What have we done with the time? No doubt there were some brilliant moments, but also a few stumbles. Which habits held up? What’s fallen by the wayside that needs to be changed or revived? Whatever we’ve done, whatever we’ve become, the thing speaks for itself. So what are we going to do about it?

    • Different Things

      “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” — Attributed to Albert Einstein (but probably someone else lost to history)

      Habits have gotten us this far. Writing every day, for me best exemplified by this humble little blog, has expanded my experiences in the world as I sought out interesting things to write about. Reading every day pays dividends in creative thinking, a more expansive vocabulary and generally helps on trivia nights. These are habits that have brought me here, for all that here represents, and I’m grateful for having done them.

      And yet, some habits hold us back. I developed a routine during the pandemic of sitting at the home office desk and largely working from my desk. I bought a cool and comfortable chair. I bought a sit/stand desk that the cool chair neatly rolls under. I’ve gotten very comfortable in this space. Too comfortable. That routine no longer works in a world that wants engagement, and I force myself out into the world more often.

      If we want different outcomes, we’ve got to do different things. And so we must find new positive habits, systems and routines to replace the old ones. To try to stay the same represents stasis and our eventual decline. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep reading and writing and working out, but it does mean we ought to question why we do things a certain way and look for ways to improve.

      I made a decision this week to stop doing Duolingo, the language learning app that has been a part of my routine for 5-6 years now. It’s become an obligation to keep a streak of days going, but I’m not serious enough about it to actually reach proficiency in the languages I’m trying to learn while using it. Plus they keep ruining the experience by making it more of a game to lure more young users in. More power to them, but it doesn’t resonate with me anymore. And so it joins other apps that seemed productive once and now ring hollow. Au revoir Duo.

      The thing is, that’s not the only part of my daily routine that I’m questioning. I’m ready to turn it all upside down and try a new routine on for size. I almost shut down the blog a while back, but recognize the value in writing every day and changed my expectations about it instead. The first thing one ought to do with any habit is ask why we do it in the first place? What’s our why? Where is it bringing us? If we don’t like the answer, change the habit.

      Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?
      — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      Thanks for the reminder, Mary. Yes, we’re all going to be lost to history one day, too soon: Memento mori. When are we going to stop diddling around with a routine that wastes our precious life and get on the path to meet our potential? Personal excellence (arete) is evasive, but it’s mostly a lifestyle choice. We can choose to keep getting better at the things that matter the most on our trajectory or we can get distracted by silly things. The choice has always been ours to make.