Alexandersmap

    Tag: Seth Godin

    • For Discovery

      “We’ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it’s interesting to note that this trait doesn’t show up until after a few years of schooling.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      “Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      A few days ago, Seth Godin offered up his e-book Graceful as a free download. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I downloaded it immediately and read it almost as quickly. It’s a short book jammed with little nuggets of gold like the quotes above. Seth’s best books and blog posts are tiny gems that punch above their weight. Something to aspire to as a writer—perhaps I’ll arrive there myself in a few thousand more blog posts.

      Many of us wing it in certain parts of our lives, but meticulously plan other parts. I write what flows through me when I sit down to write, but feed myself with a steady diet of reading material and life experience to widen the lens. The result is an often eclectic mix of topics that are most certainly not what some sign up for. But who wants to read or write about the same thing every day anyway? Art, learning and living a full life should be a meandering progression.

      There’s something overly formal about mapping out our experiences, but there’s value in the process. I have some travel coming up this spring that I’m particularly excited about. With every trip I take, I do a ton of research and planning to optimize my time in any given place. I leave some room for discovery, but in general I live my life in the fashion the lyrics of an old Seals and Croft song, “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)”. You don’t have to look up the lyrics: that’s it right there in the title. It’s the kind of ear worm song you curse for it’s persistence, but a good reminder to be fully aware in the moment.

      We don’t venture out into the world for predictable. We venture for discovery. When we leave the rigidity and structure of the classroom, we either spiral into indifference or grow into a fascination with the world and our place in it. To be lifetime students of living seems an aspiration worthy of our remaining time, don’t you think? Our growth depends on it.

    • Leap (Right Now)

      Don’t wanna wait til tomorrow,
      Why put it off another day?
      One more walk through problems,
      Built up, and stand in our way ,ah
      One step ahead, one step behind me
      Now you gotta run to get even
      Make future plans, don’t dream about yesterday, hey
      C’mon turn, turn this thing around
      Right now, hey
      It’s your tomorrow
      Right now,
      C’mon,it’s everything
      Right now,
      Catch a magic moment, do it
      Right here and now
      It means everything
      — Van Halen, Right Now

      Another Leap Day is upon us. Seth Godin’s blog post today suggested this is a great opportunity to leap ourselves. I would suggest something similar. And shouldn’t we take our own advice? Be bold today. Do the thing that we’ve procrastinated on. We won’t have another Leap Day for four years. Imagine, what can we accomplish in that time? Leap.

      When such thoughts creep into my head, a playlist comes to mind. Really, there’s a playlist for everything in my world, and Leap Day is no exception. Today’s theme then must align with the day. What better tune to have in the back of your mind on this day than Right Now? So catch a magic moment. Do it right here and now.

      When we leap, we ought to have a rough idea where we might land. But all leaps have uncertainty to them. That’s why most people never leap at all, but shuffle along in life climbing from one safe landing to the next. That’s fine most days, but shouldn’t we shake it up now and then? Maybe once every four years isn’t enough leaping, but isn’t it a good place to start? We might find we like the journey all the more.

    • Favorable Conditions

      “We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

      For years I didn’t write because the time wasn’t right to write. Now I write every day, no matter what, and the words flow. It’s not ever about finding the perfect opportunity to do it, it’s about simply doing it. Always ship the work, as Seth Godin would put it.

      So what of other things? When will the workouts be more consistent? When will the pergola be fixed? What of the broken window that’s been nagging? Life is full of things we say we’ll get to someday, when. Every one of these deferred promises pile up one atop the other on our mind, rising to the top, sliding downward for another promise until they are wrestled to the top again. A lifetime of deferred promises is no way to live a life. Do what must be done and throw the rest away.

      “You can do anything, but not everything.” ― David Allen

      Looking back, it’s clear that momentum plays a big part in where we are now. We are what we repeatedly do and all that. Does that make it excellent or merely routine? Repetition for its own sake can be our salvation or our ruin. If I only write when conditions are perfect for writing this blog would be published every month or two, maybe with a longer break while I took care of some other things. Perhaps that would result in better content, but I should think it would mostly result in lost momentum and another promise broken. Do the work, whatever the situation, and ship it.

      The thing to defer is the excuse. I’ve promised myself many times that I’ll stop writing this damned blog over and over again when things get hectic or I’m on a vacation or I’m amongst friends and family and the time used for writing feels better served elsewhere. What’s one day off from the routine? Ultimately I push something out anyway, just to check the box, written in a hurry on my Jetpack phone app and most definitely not perfect. Tomorrow I can quit this routine, just not today.

      Which leads back to that pile of promises weighing me down, nestled just so on the back of my mind. There’s a distinct loss of stability when we become top heavy. The answer is to shed ourselves of the things that don’t matter all that much in favor of the things that matter a great deal. Break down the latter into manageable bits and chip away at them no matter what.

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.” — James Clear

      At some point we look back and realize that we’ve been doing that thing we promised ourselves we’d do for a good long time. It dawns on us that it’s become part of our identity, not just empty promises but clear examples of who we’ve become. Something as simple as reading and writing and taking a walk every single day make a huge difference over time. We simply must begin and persist in perpetuating the myth on our hero’s journey to whom we will become.

    • On Changing a Routine

      “The next few minutes or days or months–sure, you own them, and you can put them to whatever use you choose. But just because you’ve been using your time in a particular way for a long time doesn’t mean you need to keep doing that.” — Seth Godin, The Best Possible Use

      Normally I won’t read a blog before writing my own, because it often pulls me away from whatever I was going to write towards something else entirely. But today I read Seth Godin first specifically because I’m changing up the routine and what does Seth do but reinforce exactly what I’d been thinking anyway. As Tao Te Ching put it, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

      Everything is habit and routine stacked upon intent. When we want to make a specific recipe, we pick up the ingredients necessary to make that dish and get to it right away. When we have no plan, we stare into an empty refrigerator wondering what in the world we’re going to eat for dinner tonight. Worse, we’ll purchase a bag full of great ingredients without a plan and throw them all away a week later when they’ve rotted in the produce drawer because we stuck to the same old things while that fresh thing slowly lost all its vibrancy. Even as I write this I can hear once-fresh ginger and red peppers screaming for attention. A bit of pre-planning goes a long way when we make changes in our lives.

      Seth’s post calls attention to a question we all face in our lives. Are we using our time in the best possible way? Is this what we should be doing today and again tomorrow? Are Tuesdays forever destined for taco’s or might we change things up now and then? We know the answer, we just need to stack the deck in our favor with a new plan, well-executed. We don’t own the future, but we surely can influence our little corner of it in small ways.

      For years now, writing first thing in the morning has been my tried and true way of ensuring that I write every day. The day soon floods in to greet me, and other habits are washed away. James Clear would suggest habit stacking as a way to build off the one good habit. A trusted way to stack a workout or reading on to my writing habit is to get up even earlier.

      “The reason I wake up at 4:30 in the morning is because no one else is awake yet, so that gives me the opportunity to do things that I need to get done, kinda selfishly for myself, and the big one in that category is working out.” — Jocko Willink

      Now we know that everything in life has a price. The price of getting up earlier is going to bed earlier, lest we suffer the consequence of burning the candle at both ends. Sleep deprivation is not an aspiration of mine and I’m not sure 0430 is my magic number. We’ll see whether this habit stack grows or tumbles. The only thing assured is change, and we must be willing to try new things now and then to learn what is possible for us beyond the norm.

      What drives us to become all that we might be? Habits and routines and the discipline to get up and meet our commitments to ourselves. When we build our days with intent, great things may happen in a lifetime. When we settle for more of the same day-after-day, we are destined to meet regret someday sooner than we expected. Completely changing a routine that’s working well for us makes little sense, but layering on new positive habits to that routine freshens the recipe now and then. What might we produce with a bit more creativity in our days?

    • In Service of Better

      Many months ago I dropped what used to be Twitter from my life. I missed it immediately, not for the political extremism but for the carefully cultivated feed I’d developed over the years I had it. Sometimes I still miss that, because the alternatives aren’t all that great yet. But I keep pressing on with Mastodon and Threads and added an annoying email subscription notification that will go away soon I promise, and keep putting content out there for incremental growth numbers. The question I keep asking myself is why? Why have any social media link at all? Why gather email subscriptions at all? To increase followers seems a bit of an ego stroke. But engagement fuels consistency. We just can’t confuse the subscribers for the work.

      “A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

      The question is, which tree are we tapping on? Is the end result going to be fulfilling or will it just be an empty hole that we honed from time we’ll never get back? Why keep publishing every day when I could use that time for other creative work? Unless you’re an author putting your name and work out there for the masses to find, or selling something else you’ve built, then the end game of a blog shouldn’t be about accumulating a massive following. The end game is the development of the person creating and publishing it every single day.

      “There’s a practice available to each of us—the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output.”
      ― Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

      The thing is, the writing has always been about cracking the shell of complacency off and having a go at a soufflé. Inevitably we get it wrong now and then. Inevitably we wonder why we’re doing it at all. But within us there’s someone who wants to reach mastery at something in this brief go-around. We know when we’ve done well, and we know when we’ve checked the box to live to fight another day. Both matter a great deal. The trick is the consistent push towards better.

      When I start thinking about the effectiveness of platforms and email subscriptions, I know I’m straying into a minefield. When I question why I post a blog every day instead of simply writing, I know I’m tapping on the wrong tree. It’s always been about mastery, and the long and often frustrating road to getting there. Discipline, focus and time applied to honing a craft you have the audacity to believe you ought to be honing. Don’t stop me now, for I have a ways to go. Still, it’s a hell of a journey.

    • The Magic of Following Through

      “I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through – then follow through.”— Eddie Rickenbacker

      The more time I spend on this planet, the more I feel the fulfillment of deliberate action. You build momentum in your life when you do what you say you’re going to do with enough people. There’s a tipping point where everyone in your life simply identifies you as someone they can count on. Following through is a beacon of hope and light in a world where so many quietly quit on others, and in doing so, on themselves as well.

      It wasn’t always so. I once mastered the art of excuses. Lazy and unfocused as a teenager, I would tell myself that it didn’t matter whether I did what I said I was going to do. It didn’t take long to realize the error of my ways. You hear a enough feedback from people in your life who you let down and you begin to feel the urgency to close the gap between who that person was and the person you aspire to be. Following through is the act of growing up and choosing to be the adult in the room.

      Much later in this lifetime, I tend to take on more than I ought to. Saying no becomes the challenge, not saying yes. But no is part of the commitment to yes. To follow through on anything meaningful, we have to subtract something else that might have been a yes. That might be people, or putting in extra time at work instead of being home with the family, or maybe it’s saying no to that donut with our morning coffee. We are what we repeatedly do, and we are also what we repeatedly choose not to do. Over time, many of us learn to choose wisely. Choice is a commitment to that one really essential thing over all other things.

      The unspoken rule here is that we must follow through on our promises to ourself as well. We must be the person we want to be. We must ship the work, as Seth Godin would say, when we say we’re going to ship it. Putting a blog post out in the world every day is just one of many small commitments I make to myself. Like those other small commitments, it pays dividends in profound and magical ways. For in following through over and over, you begin to believe in possibilities you might not have believed in otherwise. And others begin to believe in you for the consistency you’ve shown. We live the story we tell ourselves: this is evidence of who I am.

      There’s magic in following through on commitments we’ve made. We rise to a place of honor by doing what we said we’d do. This is our uncompromising vow to others, and to ourselves. We are showing respect for those whom we follow through with, and surely for ourselves. This leads directly to a better world for those we interact with, and a better night’s sleep for us. Who said we can’t be magicians? Follow through.

    • Doing If You Want To‘s

      “If you want to be a poet, write poetry. Every day. Show us your work.
      If you want to do improv, start a troupe. Don’t wait to get picked.
      If you want to help animals, don’t wait for vet school. Volunteer at an animal shelter right now.
      If you want to write a screenplay, write a screenplay.
      If you want to do marketing, find a good cause and spread the idea. Don’t ask first.
      If you’d like to be more strategic or human or caring at your job, don’t wait for the boss to ask.
      Once we leave out the “and” (as in, I want to do this and be well paid, invited, approved of and always successful) then it’s way easier to.”
      — Seth Godin, Are you doing what you said you wanted to do?

      Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
      And if you want to be free, be free
      ‘Cause there’s a million things to be
      You know that there are
      — Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out

      We complicate things with the stories we tell ourselves. We envision what a writer ought to look like, or an actor or leader or whatever we aspire to be. Instead of just slipping on the role for size and doing it. Just do it, as Nike famously coopted as their slogan. How many do just that? Don’t let it slip away, do some version of it now and grow into the rest.

      I write this blog fancying myself a writer. I wear plenty of other hats as well, so I try to write before the world wakes up and tells me I’m supposed to be something else now. Most of the time I give the world what it wants of me, but for a little time every day I simply write. If the posts are late in the day or seem a bit compressed and scattered, it’s usually a sign that I was running late, compressed and scattered myself. But I still put it out there as a humble statement that yes, I do in fact write.

      There’s a million things to be, you know that there are, but there’s usually a very short list of things you simply have to be to feel you’re on the right path. Doing those if you want to’s is the only way to feel like the world isn’t passing you by. Most of the universe barely recognizes that Seth Godin or Yusuf Islam put out similar statements, let alone me, but each of us knows that we showed up and shipped the work. We each grow into our identity with the things we do now. Sometimes that’s enough.

    • Become a Holy Fire

      “And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      Walking about the garden upon a return from two weeks in Europe, seeing the progress of some plants and the decline of others from neglect, it’s easy to become lost in self-forgetfulness. Minor tasks become meditative when we focus on the work. So it is with hiking in solitude, where every step matters and the mind is forced to quiet itself that you may land properly to take the next one.

      If the aim is to become more open to the spirit of the world around us, surely we must quiet the chatter in our own heads. Be still, learn to listen, observe and receive the energy that might otherwise bounce off our closed mind to find a more willing recipient. What do we lose in our closed-minded self-conversation but our chance to be one with the universe?

      The thing is, most of our self-talk is useless at best and detrimental to our progress at worst. Our Lizard Brain, as Seth Godin calls it, is our worst enemy, making us feel like we aren’t measuring up, that we should have done things differently, that we don’t deserve the moment we’re in now. It’s all crap, and not what we’d expect in a close friend. But who is closer to us than ourselves?

      This Hasidic concept of receptiveness is one way to push aside the self. If we are to become a holy fire today—and in our stack of days, we must tune our receiver and accept the positive fuel that stokes our furnace. We must throw aside the wet blanket of self and accept the world as it offers itself to us.

    • What You Put Out


      “Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority… When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.” — Derek Sivers, How to Live

      “When you ship, you silence the lizard brain. You beat the resistance and your ideas get out in the world. It’s not easy, but it’s very important. I am shipping because I don’t want to create art for art’s sake; I want to do work that matters, that makes a difference in people’s lives. Not tomorrow, today.” — Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

      Anyone who does anything creative knows the scorecard. What you intend to do has no place at the table: The only thing that matters is what you produce. If you don’t put it out there you aren’t a part of the Great Conversation.

      I focus a lot on productivity in this blog. More than some think I ought to. For me, productivity is the natural outcome of habits and routines and the gumption to click “Publish” every damned day. The lizard brain is a very real struggle, so is imposter syndrome, and so is the relative comfort of low agency. To overcome each of these hurdles, you must learn to be audacious. For most of us this doesn’t come in a spark of magnificent insight, it comes through incremental daily actions: teaching the brain that this is what is expected of it today and every waking day from here to the very last.

      This daily routine of writing profoundly changes you. I’d read that for years in Seth Godin blogs before I finally started posting regularly. I don’t look at my early posts often, for they’re full of typos and grammatical errors and run-on sentences (some things don’t change). But each brought me here. And here brings me to whatever comes next.

      What you consistently put out builds boldness and audacity and a blatant disregard for keeping up appearances. What I’ve learned during this dance with daily productivity is to avoid telling the world what you’re going to do. All that matters is what you have done. So by all means: ship it. Lizard brain be damned.

    • COVID Truth and Consequences

      “It’s often easier to discover the truth if we believe it’s there in the first place.” – Seth Godin

      Speaking with a gentleman I once worked for a dozen years ago, we quickly caught up on life since the last time we saw each other. You do that with old acquaintances, find the common anchoring points, fill the voids, and reset to the present. In filling voids I’d heard about his brother, who recently passed from complications related to COVID. He spoke of the abruptness of it all, and the hole it left in his heart. He then told me he didn’t believe in the vaccination, felt it was too dangerous to take and he was going to Las Vegas for a trade show this coming week. And my head spun.

      We all choose the information we consume. We all get to decide what’s right for us. The problem we have today is there’s more conflicting information available to choose from than at any point in our history. And we’re choking on it. And it’s killing us.

      There’s no time for all of this. If the truth is that the virus is far deadlier than the vaccine, and far deadlier for those who are unvaccinated, then we have no time to debate ad infinitum whether the vetting process was long enough for the vaccinations. The barbarians are at the gate, throw up the damned defenses. Will there be long term health issues for those who opted to vaccinate? Highly unlikely, but possible. Is the Delta variant accelerating through the unvaccinated at alarming rates? Definitely, and highly probable.

      The truth is out there, but seemingly harder to reach consensus on than ever before. And maybe this is our fate, to stall and debate and wait for the world to fall in line with our beliefs. Knowing all along that it doesn’t really work that way.