Tag: life

3 yards at a time

I was listening to a podcast the other day when I heard the host make a football analogy for business success. He said, “if you just focus on getting 3 yards at a time, and you keep doing that every single play, you’re going to win the game. But if you keep dropping back to throw a Hail Mary every play, you might get it sometimes, but you’re going to fail a lot more often than not. That is how you’re going to lose the game.” And it got me thinking about how this applies to business, health, and every area of life.

We’ve all seen the people who swing for the fences because of some get rich quick scheme but lose their shirts. Or the people who are very intense with a fad diet, but yo-yo and go from being very strict to not adhering to their diet at all.

Focus on winning just a little bit each day. Start out with your mornings. Try to win your morning today. After that, try to win the afternoon. With your momentum being built, next thing you know, you’ll find that you’ve won the day. And once you string together enough days where you’ve won, you will set yourself up for enormous success.

Seeking enjoyment, not total optimization

Sit down. Close your eyes. Turn off the tv, music, or podcast.

Take a moment to discover what you actually get enjoyment out of doing and find a way to do more of whatever that happens to be.

Look into what you’re mindlessly paying for but don’t get enjoyment from anymore and remove as much of that from your life as possible.

Understand that while everything can be optimized, trying to optimize every aspect of your life can cause you stress or anxiety. Maximizing efficiency is just like everything else in life. It needs to be done in some sort of moderation.

Remember the 80/20 rule applies to life. Remember to seek progress, not perfection. Remember to be kind and forgiving to yourself and others. Remember, in the end, we are only on this earth for a short period of time – try to enjoy it and focus on the positive instead of the negative. Life is good.

Good vs nice

There is a difference between nice people and good people. A person can appear nice or even charismatic, but actually be a “bad” person. That’s not always the case, in fact, if someone appears nice they usually are good as well. But you should not confuse the two. Let me explain…

Good is more important than nice. Being good involves making the best decisions with the information at hand, even when those decisions may not be the most popular. This means that being good may involve telling somebody something that they do not want to hear, but need to hear. Meanwhile, in order to be considered nice, sometimes you may hide the truth to avoid a difficult discussion, embellish facts to make someone feel good, or verbally agree to something someone else believes in, so that you don’t hurt their feelings or cause conflict.

Be nice and good whenever possible. But when push comes to shove, choose being good over being nice.

What to do (or not) in today’s “outrage culture”

There are a lot of hot button topics/issues at any moment in time, some legitimate and some not so much. Being in the United States, we have a remarkable freedom to say what we want. It’s a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean that we should abuse that freedom. We shouldn’t say mean or hurtful things as is so often done by the “tough people” on the internet. So with today’s blog post, I wanted to touch on two things I’ve been thinking about lately – 1) stop being so easily offended and 2) don’t apologize unless you really mean it.

First of all, we should always work to improve ourselves and one of the best ways to improve yourself is by improving your happiness. With that logic, removing happiness would be a way to make your life worse then, right? Well, one of the quickest ways to remove happiness from your life is to take offense to the everything around you. Today’s first action step is to not be so easily offended.

In today’s “outrage” and “cancel” culture, people seem to take offense at the most minor issues. If you feel you’ve been wronged, take a moment to think before reacting. Did the other person actually do something terrible to you? Was it done maliciously? Or was it a mistake? Do they even know that you feel this way?

Remember, you can’t control what other people do, you can only control your actions and reactions to them. If you live in America, chances are that you’re better off than the majority of the world and aren’t facing issues to the same extent as someone living in a hut in a third world country. Put your “problems” in perspective and stop being so easily offended.

The second thing that I think many of us should work on is to not be apologetic unless you really mean it. I’m not confrontational. I don’t like conflict, so I avoid it when I can. If you’re like me, you may find yourself apologizing to someone for offending them even if what you did isn’t bad in your eyes. Stop doing that. It’s inauthentic and won’t mean very much if you continue doing the same thing you just apologized for.

Think about why you’re saying sorry before you do next time. If someone is mad at you, don’t say sorry just to get back in their good graces if you don’t believe what you did was wrong. If you feel that what you did was right, you should either stand up for your actions (if it’s something worth “fighting” for) or let it go (if it’s something small). But don’t get defensive. If you are, is it because you are actually the one who offended now? They’re allowed to voice their displeasure and disagreement with you. That’s the whole freedom of speech thing that we talked about in paragraph one.

If you’re allowing yourself to become upset because someone else is offended by something you said or did, take a look in the mirror. Are you perpetuating the cycle of having thin skin? Don’t do exactly what you want others to stop doing. Don’t be offended by something that doesn’t really matter in e grand scheme of life.

To recap, don’t take the little things in life too seriously and try to be sensitive to how others feel. Yes, we have the right to a freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to provoke others. Be nice. Try to be the bigger person. If you change your mind about something you’ve said or done in the past, admit it and apologize to those you have legitimately wronged. And when others disagree with you, learn to let the little things go and instead choose to be happy.

Opportunity cost and the Kaizen method

There are trade-offs in everything you do. It’s called opportunity cost. Because you are spending your time, energy, or money on one thing, that means that you cannot spend that same time, energy, or money on something else. You do not have an infinite supply, therefore your actions are costing you the opportunity to do something else. You must choose what your priority is and focus on that. Take this into account when making daily decisions. You don’t always have to make the most efficient or effective choice, but if you regularly decide to practice inefficiency and ineffectiveness, it will eventually catch up to you.

One process to combat this is called the Kaizen method. Kaizen focuses on applying small, daily changes that result in major improvements over time. Thought about in another way, if you can improve yourself even fractionally (.5%, for example) each day, imagine how much better you’ll be in 5, 10, or 15 years.

The opposite is also true. If you get just a little worse each day, you won’t be able to tell at first. But after getting fractionally worse over a period of 10 years, you’re going to look in the mirror and wonder what happened to yourself.

Don’t be the person who peaked in high school. Understand that there are trade-offs in every decision you make and try to improve in something each day.