The best way to not waste the morning is to have your marching orders, so to speak, ready the night before.
I call this “setting up the bowling pins.” By having a secure nighttime routine you ensure that the morning gets off to a focused start.
By setting up your crucial tasks the night before, you enter the following day with purpose. And if you’re like me, without that purpose you’ll flounder and find ways to waste time.
Set up the bowling pins.
Go knock them down.
By Brendan O’Meara
Nowadays our attention is taxed.
Algorithms are designed to lock us into the constant scroll.
I realize this even as I try and write/record a blog post that I hope people will read and enjoy.
But you don’t have to go too far back in time to remember the days when phones were attached to walls with spiraled cords that always got tangled.
The only ping notification was when the phone rang and you had to get up and walk to the wall and pick it up.
Mobile devices are great in so many ways, but I think employing an old-school filter to the smartphone is an act of revolution. Put the ringer on, but put it in a different room. Bring it with you in the car, but leave it in the console as you run your errands.
Once untethered, it no longer becomes the candy fix that it is, a kind of burden lifts.
This is by no means original, but it might be worth a try. You may find you’ll get more work done. Or maybe you’ll simply take pride in your tiny revolution.
The first ever image of a black hole was recently published. It was a cool school portrait. Smile!
It is more than 50 million light years away. It has the mass of 6.5 billion suns.
A few years ago a little chirp picked up by LIGO moved a laser the diameter of a proton that proved the existence of gravitational waves.
If it makes you feel small, it should.
But it should also make you feel lucky. Look at what we’re given. Look at you’ve been able to accomplish.
We’re so small in the cosmic scheme of this universe that we have no excuse to run from our most ambitious visions. Sure, fear is real, but when you realize how tiny we are, why be afraid? Why not start and finish a terrible book? Why not take 1,000 horrible photographs? Why not start a dozen terrible businesses? What do you have to lose?
Let the titanic size of the cosmos set you free. Let it liberate your inhibitions because this is all we’ve got. Nothing matters and everything matters all at the same time.
Please, jump, and create your own event horizon where nobody can escape the great pull of your gravity.
I’ve kept a journal for over 20 years. I can’t envision a time without one. I recommend it if you don’t.
But something happens if you’re being honest. Oftentimes, you write down nasty stuff. Nasty self commentary. The kind that reeks and stinks. You don’t want to lie to your journal! If you can’t be honest with your journal, than where can you?
But what if you start believing the bile you’ve habitually spilled into your journals? What you if instead of bloodletting, you imprint a negative story that effectively weighs you down with iron boots?
James Victore in his wonderful book Feck Perfuction writes:
Stop deprecating all over yourself.
We pre-crap on ourselves so others won’t. We joke about how fat we are while trying on new clothes, or pooh-pooh our talents before sharing our talent. … Self-deprecation is healthy when it means being humble or witty, but continually calling yourself a loser becomes self-sabotage. … Words have power. The problem with repeating negative mantras to yourself is that you start to believe them. Then others believe them. Watch your words.
Negative self-talk has ruined the past 20 years of my life and I’m working on that. I’ve noticed that changing my language in my journals has helped. But instead of lamenting over something and dwelling and wallowing, I reframe it as a gift. Nobody listens to my podcast? Great, I can make it better. Got another rejection? That’s an opportunity to improve. Drank too many beers and ate too much cake? Today’s a new day to eat clean and drink water and get back on the path..
Point is every obstacle is an opportunity. And the way we frame it in private will manifest in public.
Every successful artist makes garbage. Every single one. No exception.
Every struggling artist, every artist trying to gain traction or has no traction at all makes no garbage.
Wait, what? The best make garbage and the worst make nothing? How does that work? That’s right. Seth Godin asks middling or anonymous writers to “show me your bad writing.” Professionals make garbage because it’s only through working through garbage that you might make something good.
Kevin Hart, the arena-packing comedian, told Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience:
People don’t understand how hard it is to develop an hour of stand-up material. People act like you just turn on a new hour. It’s an hour. To get to an hour, you’re going through four to five hours of bullshit you thought was funny.
Four to five hours of material to get to one hour of greatness.
So the minute you think you’re not making enough good work, maybe the problem is you’re not making enough garbage.
A great way to step up your re-writing or editing game is to print things out.
Why?
Well, when you print things out you have something in hand, plus when you take out your colored pen and make an edit, it doesn’t disappear. You see the old way beside your note for the new.
In a sense you’re archiving the old draft while tinkering. The best way to learn is by seeing your old work and when you delete or make changes on the computer, it’s gone and all you’re left with is the edit.
Plus, by looking at cold, hard ink over pixels, you give your eyes a rest. The paper doesn’t ping with a Twitter notification or an email.
And an edit without proper context doesn’t teach you anything and it doesn’t show the great progress you’ve made over time.
I’m sure you’ve heard of this: DOMS. It stands for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.
You work out hard on Monday and you’re a little sore Tuesday, but you’re really sore Wednesday. You went so hard Monday that the next two days are a waste and you lose all that momentum.
Better to take smaller chunks to sustain it over the long haul.
This notion piggybacks off of the post I did about doing creative work for 20 minutes a day. By doing a little work, you keep from burning out, or getting sore.
We’ve all had days where we hammer, maybe write 5,000 words, but I know I’m worthless for a few days after that. For my money, I’d rather do that little bit and come back the next day in the gym and keep progressing toward my goal.
This way I come back energized and unbruised, day after day.
Why the fear of the blank page? All the time you hear writers lament that the blank pages gives them all kinds of anxiety.
It’s time to rethink the blank page for what it is: a new beginning.
Don’t be paralyzed by the whiteness of it all. Don’t look at the taunting cursor. Flip the script.
It might sound cool to lament about the struggle, how crippling all those possibilities can be. Because it’s blank, it can be horrible or it can be great or somewhere in between, but you’ll never know unless you start.
It probably will be bad, but pros show up to work.
That blank page is a gift, man, a freakin’ gift.
It can be anything, so let it.
By Brendan O’Meara
The entirety of a book, a painting, a podcast, it’s all too overwhelming. Too overwhelming to start. So what do you do?
Often, you do nothing or something almost as bad as nothing: You start many things and never finish them.
The answer? Give yourself 20 minutes today to work on that thing. Set a timer. Remove all distractions.
Work for 20 minutes and be done.
What you’ll find is that you’ll get hooked on the habit and you’ll want to come back. And that’s what we need from you. We need you to show up.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day. I promise you you can find 20 minutes. It doesn’t have to be good. But give it 20 minutes. It’s all it takes and those minutes add up and before you know it, there’s a body of work. At the end of five days you will have worked for 100 minutes!
Go on. Give it 20 minutes. Ready, set, go!