Quitter
Highlights
… discipline begets discipline. When you step up to a challenge before you, your ramped-up resources rub off on other areas of your life. You wouldn’t think eating less “fat” would impact how closely you monitor your family’s financial budget, but it’s all tied together. Discipline and focus are contagious and they tend to spread their benefits around. Unfortunately this works both ways.
More often than not, finding out what you love doing most is about recovering an old love or an inescapable truth that has been silenced for years, even decades.
People with somethings are weird… We are embarrassed to have big, unruly somethings and would much rather go with the flow and have a normal life like everyone else. Not at thirty or even twenty years old. We begin thinking this way at eleven or twelve.
Questions I found helpful when figuring out my own hinge moments:
- What do I love enough to do for free?
- What do I do that causes time to feel different?
- What do I enjoy doing regardless of the opinions of other people?
- If only your life changed, would that be enough?
- Are there any patterns in the things you like doing?
90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.
You have the perfect amount of time in each day for the things that matter most. The key is spending time on those things.
“by now” is a phrase we say to ourselves when we’re trying to believe the lie that it’s too late to start pursuing our dream.
If you’re ailing in one portion of your life, it tends to infect the other portions. If there’s poison in a glass of water, no one says, “Be careful, the middle of that water is poisoned!”
I work so that my kids can eat and wear clothes and sleep indoors. Sometimes I forget things like that. In the midst of chasing my dreams, I can get lost in being selfish and self-serving. I act like I’m the captain of my own planet and my actions only impact me. There’s a wild amount of self-confidence needed to successfully chase a dream, and it’s easy for that to mutate into pride and arrogance.
Don’t let the Plan Myth paralyze you. A plan is not the first thing you need. Often, it is the third. The first thing you need is a passion… The second thing you need is practice.
I once heard innolution.com’s Kenny Rubin ask, “Why do we make our most important plans and decisions at the point in the project when we have the least amount of information?” His point was that we are at our most ignorant about what the future holds in a project on the first day.
When you start something new, you want it to be successful right away. You want it to grow and get visible quickly. But there are some problems inherent to visibility. For starters, it’s harder to take risks when people are watching you. It’s harder to experiment when many eyeballs are tracking with you. It’s harder to remain innovative when people have a specific expectation about who you are and what you do.
That’s one of the simple rules of hustle. Do more of the things you love and less of the things you like. Make your hustle matter.
Although it might look like an opportunity, maybe even a well-paid opportunity, saying yes to the wrong thing ultimately takes you one step away from doing what you really want to do.