Don’t plan a career, concentrate on now

Posted by William Gallagher

You can’t figure out the future. Even young people who have a plan (be a doctor, lawyer, research scientist, singer) don’t really know what will happen. If they have any certainty at all, they’re a bit deluded. Life doesn’t go according to plan, and while a few people might do exactly what they set out to do, you never know if you’re one of those. Other things come along to change you, to change your opportunities, to change the world. The jobs of working at Google, Amazon or Twitter, for example, didn’t exist when I was a teen-ager. Neither did the job of Zen Habits blogger.

So if you can’t figure out the future, what do you do? Don’t focus on the future. Focus on what you can do right now that will be good no matter what the future brings. Make stuff. Build stuff. Learn skills. Go on adventures. Make friends. These things will help in any future.

Leo Babauta – Zen Habits

Via 99U

When you have two equally urgent things to do

Posted by William Gallagher

Do one of them.

That’s it. No great debate, no big decision, just do one of them. Either of them. Doesn’t matter which. Try random, try flipping a coin, try alphabetical order. Just try something, just pick something, and start on that right now.

In the most extreme case I can think of, you have two commissions from different places. Both equally important, equally urgent, both equally on deadline, both equally hard to do. And you can’t afford to disappoint either commissioner.

Even then, do one.

The odds are that you won’t really disappoint anyone: even if the other piece is a bit late, often that’s okay. But even if it isn’t, even if choosing to do one commissioner’s job will seriously disappoint the other, you should still do it. Because the alternatives are worse.

The first and most obvious alternative is that you will try to do both pieces in the same time. We can do amazing things under pressure but even if you manage to finish both pieces, neither will be good enough. Cue disappointment from both commissioners and the certainty that you won’t be hired again.

But then the second alternative is that you try being clever. Clever is good. Except in this case you try to prioritise the pieces, looking at which commissioner will be the most valuable to you later, which job is the better. But we’re talking about the most extreme case when there are two exactly equal tasks. Even if they aren’t spot-on equal, though, this truth applies everywhere and everywhen: the time you spend deciding between the two is wasted.

Don’t spend time prioritising, spend time doing.

Change your identity and feel better

Posted by William Gallagher

I have a bad opinion of myself. You can't tell because I write books, I do a lot of talks, I run this news website: plainly I have an ego. But you can probably guess. I'm a writer, the collective noun for us is neuroses. Sometimes this opinion of me gets in my way and I wrote recently about how criticising oneself in the third person is surprisingly more successful than doing it the usual “I bollocksed-up there” way. (I liked that post a lot: Must Do Better.) Now there's more.

Now there's the idea that you just change yourself to fix this bad opinion:

Let’s say you want to become the type of person who never misses a workout. (If you believed that about yourself, how much easier would it be to get in shape?) Every time you choose to do a workout — even if it’s only 5 minutes — you’re casting a vote for this new identity in your mind. Every action is a vote for the type of person you want to become.

How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to Your Goals for Good – James Clear

It's not the greatest of reads – Lifehacker's coverage of it is better – but try the full post.

Experts are wrong – says expert

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve often thought about this: experts say this or that can’t ever happen and then it does. Or they say it must but it doesn’t. I’ve just concluded that there is always another fact or another element that you don’t know or don’t see the significance of until it’s happened.

It has scared me a bit, actually. You know that Titanic wasn’t strictly speaking called unsinkable but few people seem to know why the term ever came up. It was to do with a new system of watertight bulkheads that meant if one was holed, it couldn’t flood the others. But these holds were open at the top. Nothing could flood enough to go over the top, of course.

So I spend some time, distressingly regularly, wondering what gaping hole I’m not seeing, what questions I’m not asking:

There will always be a wealth of experts arguing a number of sides to any given issue and most will be proved wrong. Yet we still seek them out because whenever there is uncertainty, we listen to anyone who professes to know more than we do. By looking for easy answers, we’re just asking for trouble.

Why Experts Always Seem to Get It Wrong – Creativity Post

The full post has more examples, better ones than my Titanic thing, plus more detail on why this all seems to be true.

What, even Sundays? Do something every day

Posted by William Gallagher

Getting up, for one. Probably eating. Exercise if necessary. But then also at least something, just something of whatever you're working on:

NO ZERO DAYS. A zero day is the day when you don’t do a single thing towards your goal.

Its 11.58pm and feel like you didn’t do anything? Do that one pushup. Write that sentence. Read one page.

You may say its not much but hey, its not a zero. 1 is much much better than a zero. Zero is your enemy. Fight it, ruthlessly.

Limitless

It's similar to the Jerry Seinfeld Technique (now famously denied by Seinfeld who says he has no idea where it came from or why it's named after him) and it's similar to my own Bad Days advice. So that's three people or three entire philosophies in agreement: can it possibly be wrong?

Nod to Lifehacker for reading Limitless

Shit Writing Syndrome and its cure

Posted by William Gallagher

They found it by accident. I had gone to the doctor for a routine penile enlargement procedure. I had filled out the standard Writers Guild insurance forms, and that’s where it turned up. When my doctor walked into the room, she had a hard time making eye contact.

“We won’t be enlarging your penis today,” she started, haltingly.

Ordinarily, she spoke with such clinical reserve. But this was different, personal. “When we looked at your paperwork, something seemed off. I took the liberty of sending it to a lab,” she continued. “Andy… your writing… it’s almost a hundred percent shit.”

How Writing for the TV Show “Community” Cured Me – Andy Bobrow – Medium (14 May 2014)

Writer Andy Bobrow naturally writes very well about writing very badly – and what little you can do about that – in the full piece.

Seriously, nuts to what anyone else thinks

Posted by William Gallagher

Go ahead and do it. Whatever it is. If they really like you or they really matter, they’ll catch up.

“Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. The best moment of my life…was the day I realized that I know longer give a damn what anybody thinks. That’s enormously liberating and freeing, and it’s the only way to live your life and do your business.”
— Cindy Gallop

That’s the entire quote I found on the Swiss Miss website but I’m linking to that anyway because it’s so good. It’s a design site that I just find engrossing and delighting and actually inspiring too. So do go take a look at Swiss Miss and then on to Cindy Gallop’s Creative Mornings talk.

Pssst… how to make millions. Yeah. Right.

Posted by William Gallagher

SECRET! The TRUTH that Wall Street/Any Government/Somebody With Money DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

And yet here it is. Somehow you have been chosen to get this hot tip that nobody knows about and of course it’s yours for just $99.99 or something. Always and 99c.

You get these emails, I get these emails, I’m sure we’ve both thought phrases containing words similar to ‘bollocks’ yet still they come.

Trent Hamm has a good piece on The Simple Dollar about why we keep being drawn to these – and knowing something about that helps us avoid them.

Lighten up and take more time off

Posted by William Gallagher

I want you to get more work done. (Because I want to get more work done too.) But The Guardian newspaper says you're better off doing less:

Most time management advice rests on the unspoken assumption that it's possible to win the game: to find a slot for everything that matters. But if the game's designed to be unwinnable, [book author Brigid] Schulte suggests, you can permit yourself to stop trying. There's only one viable time management approach left (and even that's only really an option for the better-off). Step one: identify what seem to be, right now, the most meaningful ways to spend your life. Step two: schedule time for those things. There is no step three. Everything else just has to fit around them – or not. Approach life like this and a lot of unimportant things won't get done, but, crucially, a lot of important things won't get done either. Certain friendships will be neglected; certain amazing experiences won't be had; you won't eat or exercise as well as you theoretically could. In an era of extreme busyness, the only conceivable way to live a meaningful life is to not do thousands of meaningful things.

This Column Will Change Your Life: Stop Being Busy – The Guardian 19 April 2014

The piece is an interesting and persuasive read. It's really also a part-review of Schulte's book, Overwhelmed (UK edition, US edition)

I'm thinking a lot about this idea of winning the game. That's not really me. I just know that I am happiest when I've thought of a new thing I want to create and then I've created it. When it's a real thing instead of a pipedream. You think of it and then you do it. That's what I want: would you call that a game?

The one good thing I can see about a game is that you can change the rules. I'm definitely up for that.

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