Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Maximize your profits, grow your busy, success is just around the corner, and when you get around that corner greater success is just around the next corner. There is always more to get, more to gain, more to achieve.
But at what cost?
What is your time worth? What happens when you grow too big to feel like a community? Where does the next dollar come from: cheaper parts, lower cost labour, a drop in quality at greater than maximum production?
And again, what about your time? How many hours do you put in? How many hours when you are not working is your brain still focused on your ‘to do’ list, or on your work in general?
Getting bigger isn’t always getting better. Sometimes it’s smarter to optimize than to grow. Sometimes your current customers are more import than your next customers. Sometimes your time with family and friends should be the most important thing you focus on.
But these two things are not mutually exclusive. Optimization can help build your business, profits, and even a positive working environment… and improve your time management. A model of optimization helps you achieve more with less, and allows you to improve in more areas besides a focus only on getting bigger.
Someone asks you about your day, and the first thing that goes through your mind is the thing that bothered you most.
“How was your meal?” It was really good, but…
An inconsiderate driver doesn’t let you merge and you are agitated for the next 20 minutes.
It takes practice letting go of negative thoughts. We hold on to unhelpful experiences unnecessarily. We almost cherish them. ‘Look at me. Look at how I’ve had to struggle. See what I have to put up with. Recognize my hardship.’
The real hardship is self-inflicted.
It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.
What was the best part of your day? What was your favourite part of the meal? Boy, I’m glad I’m not that guy that didn’t let me merge, poor guy probably isn’t living his best life… I’m grateful that most people I deal with aren’t like him.
When you are used to holding on to the hard parts of life it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to transform your way of thinking to a more positive outlook. Accept a compliment, don’t downplay it. Find someone to thank. Choose to let go of the frustrating part of the day that you want to bring up and relive, and instead remember a shared laugh, a kindness, a success.
It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.
One of my favourite sayings, almost a mantra for me, is:
The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.
This message has two important parts:
1. It puts the responsibility of good communication on me as a communicator.
2. It focuses on the result of my communication.
If someone doesn’t understand my message (2 – result), then I didn’t communicate the message well enough (1 – responsibility).
It reminds me to be clear and concise. It reminds me to check for understanding. It reminds me to bite my tongue, and listen so that I understand the perspective of the other person. And it harshly reminds me that I’m imperfect at doing these things when I’m not understood and when I don’t take ownership of the miscommunication.
This is most important when dealing with difficult conversations.
I’m reminded of this coaching advice about verbal jujitsu:
It’s easy to blame someone else for poor communication, much harder to accept that we can control the narrative when we recognize that we are accountable and responsible for our good communication… And that in the end it’s the result matters. Not winning a point. Not blaming someone else for misunderstanding. Not getting the last word in.
This is the world we now live in. Almost everything we do is public by default, private by choice. But even then we can’t guarantee our privacy. Share something, anything online privately and it’s only as private as the least privacy-minded person.
Send a photo to just your closest friends, but one friend finds it funny and passes it on.
Send an email to a few people to try to resolve a private problem, but one recipient decides to forward it beyond the group… or worse yet, shares it on a public forum because they disagree with how you are dealing with the situation privately.
Send a direct message to someone rather than having it in your public timeline, and they respond by sharing your message on their public timeline, along with their response.
Privacy is hard to do in a world where so much is easily made public. It’s hard to do when the default is public. This speaks to how important it is to act as if anything you share is public. Because while we might make the choice to be private, we are only one part of the sharing equation. Private by choice means keeping something just to yourself, and not saying/sharing it with anyone or on any social media platform.
All communication is public by default. Privacy is an illusion that can be broken at any time.
Just a simple reminder that we don’t live in a dichotomy. The world isn’t either black or white. Most ideas sit somewhere in between.
Nuances in politics, in culture, and in our communities create opportunities to learn, to explore, and to be empathetic. Not sympathetic, empathetic. I remember interviewing a friend of my aunt’s for an essay about discrimination. He was in a wheelchair and I quoted him in my paper, “The only place sympathy belongs is between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
We don’t learn if our ideas aren’t challenged. We don’t learn by talking but by listening. We can disagree. We can even argue and debate. We can research and support our ideas. We can walk away… and maybe we can change our minds. Maybe we can find the grey that allows us to coexist without feeling like we have to change others minds.
Ever find yourself feeling hesitant to say things are going well… or even worse, ‘Going smoothly’? You don’t want to jinx it, to turn your luck around. So things at work and home are going good, even great, but when someone asks you how thing are going you just say ‘fine’, or respond ‘ok’.
You might share that things are good, but preface it with something challenging. Or worse yet you might add that you are busy:
“How are things going?”
“Busy, but good.”
Like Dean Shareski says, Everybody’s busy. Busy is not a badge of honour. So, why mention it? Why preface your well-being with a statement about being busy or any other statement for that matter:
“How are things going?”
“Great, but have you seen the price of eggs?”
“Great, except for my favourite hockey team lost again.”
“Fantastic, if only I had one more hour of sleep.
It’s not bragging to say things are good, when someone asks. Be good. Be great. Allow things to be wonderful. It’s not going to last forever, so why make it unnecessarily conditional? Enjoy the fact that sometimes things are going well without adding stipulations and parameters.
Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:
This was the premise I was working from,
When is failure really a success?When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges,the journey to success is often fraught with failuresthat can prove to be amazing learning opportunities.
Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?
Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?
4 years before this presentation I created this image:
Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.
The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.
We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.
When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.
So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.
The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Atomic Habits by James Clear. I’ve listened to it twice and have white-boarded some ideas I hope to share with students as soon as things settle down a bit.
Yesterday morning after waking up a bit later than usual, and taking a little longer than usual to write, I wasn’t sure if I had time for my workout. But rather than skip it, I decided to do a 10 minute row instead of 20 minute stationary bike, and then do 3 quick sets of tricep pull downs with elastic bands rather than weights… Less than the usual plan, but a workout nonetheless!
As I was rowing, I was listening to the podcast and came across this gem of a quote:
Here it is in-text quote:
The first thing is I give myself permission to reduce the scope but stick to the schedule. So if my typical workout takes 45 minutes, but I only have 15 that day, it’s easy to get into the story where you’re like, ‘Ah, I don’t have time to do it all, like why bother?’ But instead, I try to remind myself to reduce the scope and stick to the schedule, and there’s been a lot of days where all I have time for is to go in and do a couple sets of squats, but I’m glad that I did that rather than doing nothing, and it counts for a lot to, like, not throw a zero up for another day. In a sense, in the long run I almost feel like the bad days matter more than a good days, because if you showing up on the bad days, even if it’s less than what you had hoped for you maintain the habit. And if you maintain that habit, then all you need a time, so it counts for a lot. You also prove to yourself, you know, you can look yourself in the mirror at the end the night, and be like, ‘You know what, circumstances weren’t ideal, situation wasn’t perfect, but I still found a way to show up and, you know, like get some reps in today.’
It was so timely for me to hear this. I was on the row machine on a morning where I had reduced the scope but stuck to the schedule. I couldn’t do what was ideal, but I didn’t skip the workout. I showed up. And hearing this I went from feeling kind of guilty that I was cutting my routine short to realizing that I stuck with it. I did it anyway. I didn’t have a zero workout day. Because in the end consistency really matters, and a lighter, faster workout is still a workout.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get on my exercise bike and put a bit more time into my workout today.
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over examined life isn’t worth living either. 
Isn’t it interesting how two people can look at the same experience and see it completely differently? How is it that 2 prisoners of war with similar experiences can come out of the ordeal and one has PTSD while the other emerges strong and resilient?
I think some people let past experiences spill into their everyday life, while others compartmentalize their past into tiny little boxes. Some people tie their identity to things that make them feel like they are not in control, that things happen to them, that they must continue to endure what has already happened. The past is as in front of them as it is behind them.
Other people see past events in a metaphorical rear view window… there when you are looking at it, but the memories in the reflection seem distant. And the mirror is somewhere in your peripheral vision when you aren’t looking, and easy to forget to pay attention to, unless there is a reason to look back.
A loss of someone you love can haunt you, or it can provoke feelings of love and fond memories. A loss of limb can leave one person devastated with respect to what they can no longer do, and another person is left thankful for what they still can do. Both of these are painful things to endure. But the frame around the experiences can be very different. Two people and one experience. One frames the experiences into tiny little boxes, the other lets the past experience spill into new experiences.
Do we get to decide? Or are we wired a certain way? Maybe a bit of both.
Does our upbringing influence our ability to cope? Certainly! Trauma transcends generations, and growing up in a psychologically unhealthy environment will impact one’s ability to cope. Tiny boxes aren’t built in stressful environments, and it’s hard to ignore the rear view mirror when you are constantly reminded that objects there are much closer than they appear.
But there is always an opportunity to wrap things up in tiny little boxes… still there, still available, just not spilled out into the present when the memories don’t enrich the current moment. Because when we spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror, it’s hard to see the road ahead.
Sometimes you have to choose. You reach a fork in the road and you have to make a choice. Too often kids try to take two paths at the same time. They want the benefits of two competing options and so they try to do everything. Two sports with game times on the same day is a perfect example, but there are many more ways they try.
The hardest thing to tell a kid that wants to ‘do it all’ is to just pick one. Sometimes it’s a good life lesson to have them try both paths, but sometimes it’s better to draw a hard line and say ‘you have to choose’. Sometimes trying both means being successful in neither.
Successful people don’t spread themselves too thin. They don’t try to be the best at everything. They don’t half-commit to more things than they can handle. For a kid, sometimes a guiding hand is needed, and an ultimatum. As an adult it’s about drawing those lines yourself. It’s about being able to say ‘No’. It’s about understanding that you can’t always add more and still add value.
Sometimes the choice needs to be either/or, not both.
