Principle: To counter aimlessness, you must define your battles wisely, and build your life around winning them.
Success in emptying yourself of your best work each day depends on your ability to define the right battles, and do the small but critical tasks that will help you progress toward your true objectives rather than just the ones that others expect you to strive for.
Defining Your Through Line
Have you ever thought about what’s truly important to you? What battle would you be willing to fight anytime for any reason? What triggers your primal instinct to act?
Principle: Mediocrity doesn’t just happen suddenly; it develops slowly over time.
Why does this happen? Why are so many discarded ideas, projects, and opportunities tossed to the roadside, replaced by something easier, safer, and more imminent? Why do so many people start strongly and with such hope, but succumb over time to the siren song of mediocrity?
When we start our career or an exciting project, everything is new. We throw ourselves into the work with full vigor, because we know that we need to prove our worth to our manager or clients. In some ways, it’s like a new dating relationship. We put our best foot forward because we want to win the respect and approval of our potential partner. However, over time familiarity sets in and some of the aspects that once seemed new and exciting become predictable and mundane. The tasks we perform no longer stretch us, and some of them we can even do on autopilot. We’ve lost the thrill of the challenge.
Even though work sometimes feels like one massive, melded blend of tasks, conversations, and meetings, it can be parsed into three different forms: Mapping, Making, and Meshing. To truly unleash your full capability, and to ultimately find your sweet spot of contribution, you must engage in all three.
Mapping
Mapping is fairly straightforward. It’s planning, plotting your objectives, and setting priorities. It’s the “work before the work” that helps you ensure you’re spending your focus, time, and energy in the right places. You often map instinctually, as when you make a list of tasks to accomplish, or block off time on the calendar. Sometimes mapping is also done in collaboration with others, such as in strategy meetings or planning sessions.
Principle: Your body of work should reflect what’s important to you.
Engaging in deeply gratifying work does not require you to check out of life, pack your bags, and head off on a pilgrimage to India. It simply requires consistent, focused efforts to cultivate your instincts and skills, and make measured progress on your goals. Brilliant work is forged by those who consistently approach their days with urgency and diligence. Urgency means leveraging your finite resources (focus, assets, time, energy) in a meaningful and productive way. Diligence means sharpening your skills and conducting your work in a manner that you won’t regret later. When you adopt the mind-set of urgent diligence, you’ll pour all of who you are into your days, and subsequently you’ll find that the unique value you bring to the world comes more clearly into focus.
In my (Todd Henry) first book, The Accidental Creative, I recounted a meeting in which a friend asked a strange and unexpected question: “What do you think is the most valuable land in the world?”
Several people threw out guesses, such as Manhattan, the oil fields of the Middle East, and the gold mines of South Africa, before our friend indicated that we were way off track. He paused for a moment, and said, “You’re all wrong. The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow.’ Once day, however, their tomorrows ran out.”
I’m always asked about my approach to social media. Here are five simple ideas that have helped me reach and impact millions of people everyday:
1. Read Every Day
Within the first hour of waking up, I read something inspiring or instructive about life. I read a lot of biographies, a lot of philosophy and psychology, a lot of quote books and poetry too. To be a thought leader, you simply must train yourself to read because it helps you think bigger and constantly broaden your mindset and perspective. By reading more you become more informed and creative. And more than anything else it’s that perspective and creative thinking that causes people to follow you.
It takes a lot of work to achieve your dreams, but what do you do when the struggle gets too hard? Here are four strategies to keep you on path:
1. Visualize
Inexperienced personal development teachers always tell you to visualize, but often in a tragically limited way. They tell you to visualize nothing but victory. But high-achievers know that it’s even more important to visualize themselves at the point where they want to quit, and then see themselves working through the struggle. What will you say to yourself in that moment when it gets too tough or your dream seems too hard? How will you be resilient when it matters most? It’s not just about seeing yourself validated and victorious; it’s about visualizing yourself push through struggle to achieve your dream.
It’s a great myth that we should never compare ourselves to others. How would we gain perspective, values, standards, ideas, ambition, or growth if we removed ourselves from our social context? The truth is there are healthy ways to compare yourself to others:
1. Compare for Creativity, Not Looks
It’s demoralizing to compare yourself to others at surface levels like appearance or outward success. Instead of asking how you can be like others, ask how you are different; compare to discover creative distinction not to conform. You can’t make any major contribution in life without understanding how you are distinct. You’ll access a new creative edge when you start looking outward and asking, “How would I go about that differently? What’s my perspective and how is it different? How could I add even more value in a unique way?”
