On some days, we say we must “just power through.” We think it’s the powering that gets us through, but, usually, it’s the other way around. Strength follows from accepting our tough reality, and whether we feel powerful or not, remembering we’ll see the end of the day actually helps us get there.

Sometimes, you can spend a long time looking for something inside that may or may not exist, or you can simply look ahead, and the path will appear. After all, it is not strength that overcomes darkness—but light.

That’s the assumption in many companies, isn’t it? If you’re not dropping some, you must be juggling too few balls! Whoever manages to stay on top of everything is suspicious. “Does she have enough work?” God forbid we send someone home at the end of the day with 5% left in the tank.

The good news is it’s not a big deal. If no one can cover all their projects, delays are as common as coffee breaks. It’s only when managers expect miracles that the situation becomes problematic. Luckily, most of them don’t. After all, they, too, are frequently behind.

Still, it seems a better way is so close we could all easily grasp it. Why not say no once you’re booked out? Or even a little bit before? We can always pause less important work if a bigger opportunity comes along. And it simply feels a lot better to end your day with all boxes checked than with worry about everything you’ll still have to tackle tomorrow.

Work is like the ocean: Don’t let the sheer volume of water get into your head. We’re all just swimming as far as we can each day—and that must be enough.

George Lee was the master maker behind much of Bruce Lee’s unique training equipment. Nunchakus, a three-section staff, a gripping machine—even shoes: Whatever Bruce needed, George made it.

Sometime in 1966, George received the following letter:

George,
I heard from James that you didn’t feel good. I hope you are much better by now.
Take care my friend,
Bruce

Lucky is he who has a friend like this, and honorable he who continues to deserve it. Let’s be both—and check in on our friends just the same.

Despite around 10,000 people visiting my blog every month, only around 50 or so sign up for my newsletter. That’s far less than the supposed industry average of around 2% of your visitors converting to an email list, but at least I know why: I don’t push people very hard to do so.

There aren’t any popups or constant calls to action. Only a casual signup form at the end of each post and a dedicated signup page. I might add more incentives to join again at some point, but in general, I believe this low-friction approach is the right thing to do. Blogs are for reading. What good are they if they constantly distract you from the very thing you’re there to do? It makes my email list growth a struggle, but the sacrifice is worth it.

There is, however, a silver lining: Everyone who does sign up actually wants to get my emails. They really choose to be there.

Since cross-posting my daily blog to Substack for the last nine months, I’ve gained 900 subscribers there. Most of them, however, come from so-called “recommendations.” When you sign up to a newsletter, that person may recommend you join up to three other newsletters. It’s a feature designed to be sneaky. You can opt out, but everyone counts on you glossing over it, and voilà, you’ve now joined four newsletters at the same time! More green for everyone’s dashboard, but what will you actually end up reading? Most likely none of the emails in the barrage that is about to follow—including the one you originally wanted to get.

What’s more, Substack is a platform, and on the platform they’d like to keep you. You can browse and read publications in the app, and the line between subscribing and merely following blurs more by the day. When a new subscriber joins your email list, you can see how many publications they are subscribed to. Often, the number is 99, where it tops out. Does anyone actually read 99 newsletters on a regular basis? If so, I have yet to meet that person.

In other words, Substack may be a decent place to “get” subscribers, but are you capturing any of their actual attention with their signup? On my blog, meanwhile, the numbers are much smaller, but if each of those folks subscribes deliberately, with full intent, that’s worth more in the end.

How much stronger is the connection between me and someone like that vs. someone who just accidentally forgot to opt out while trying to join another writer’s list? 10x? 100x? In any case, I’ll take the former over the latter any day of the week.

The quality of attention isn’t as easy to measure as clicks and numbers, but it’s still the correct thing to focus on. Don’t let its nebulous nature pull you away from working towards the right end.

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, our protagonist attends the most frustrating tea party of all time. Sitting at a big table with the March Hare and a mad Hatter, Alice can hardly make sense of a single thing the two strange creatures say. Every next line is either a pun, a twisting of words, or gobbledygook altogether.

Eventually, Alice complains at their wasting of time, and it is precisely here the Hatter decides to have a lucid moment: “If you knew Time as well as I do,” he says, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.” Once again, Alice is lost, which the Hatter finds perfectly reasonable. Clearly, Alice has “never even spoken to Time,” he asserts. And while Alice admits as much, she does purport to know this: “I have to beat time when I learn music.”

Finally, the Hatter’s face lights up. “Ah!” Here is where the misunderstanding lies. Of course Time, like anyone else, does not like to be beaten. “Now,” the Hatter explains, “if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”

If you don’t like where your Time is going, maybe it’s time the two of you agreed on a direction. Ask him! Where does he want to go? What about you? Can you band together? If you ran hand in hand, I’m sure you’d reach anywhere in a jiffy.

Perhaps Time is not an invisible force we are paddling against. Maybe he is a dear friend, and all he wants is to be treated well. Stay on good terms with Time, and perhaps one day clocks will fade from your life altogether.

“I only have an hour or 90 minutes each day to work on my blog and book now, but I try,” I told my friend Zhenya. It’s probably more—and more consistent—effort than I used to put into my next book before I got my new job. Still, it rarely feels like much.

“I think 60-90 minutes is great,” Zhenya responded. “That stacks pretty fast!” In an instant, he transformed my perspective. At my snail’s pace, was I doing better than I thought after all? Recently, I finally found out.

I had been doing last year’s taxes. As with my book, it was only the odd hour here and there. Every weekend, it was yet again on my plate, and every weekend I made less progress than I hoped to make. Until, last Saturday, I suddenly found myself saying, “Oh. This is the last invoice. Is that…? Am I…? Wow. I think I’m done!” I collected the last bits and bobs, submitted everything to my tax advisor, and that was that.

When you work on something in tiny doses, you can barely see the end coming. After all, it’s the same small number of steps you take every day. It just so happens that, one day, you’ll walk into the end zone. When you do, it feels like a miracle, but it’s not. You put in all the work that was needed—you just did it in increments.

Once you’ve initially calibrated your inner compass, you don’t need to see the finish line. You just have to cross it. Keep chipping away. No matter how small the units, they stack pretty fast.

“I don’t want to limit my readers’ access to my work, but I do want to grow my email list to support my career as an author,” I told my friend Herbert. “I don’t want to have calls to action everywhere, drown them in ‘content upgrades,’ or be super pushy with my signup forms. But if I don’t—and, right now, I’m not—my subscriber base stagnates or goes down.”

Herbert also is most generous on his daily blog. There are no ads. No popups. No intrusions of any kind. Unlike me, he doesn’t even have an email signup form at the end of each post. Only a single page where readers must deliberately go in order to join his newsletter.

Referring to one of our mutual role models, Herbert told me: “I appreciate how Seth Godin just publishes ebooks and PDFs without gating. There is something really confident about that.” I jokingly responded that Seth also hasn’t had money problems since selling his company for over $20 million in 1998, but that just might be part of the point: Had it not been for his unapologetic generosity, Seth likely never would have gotten to where he is today.

A scarcity mindset can twist our perception in the strangest ways. “Do I try to sell 10 units of this for $100 each? Or do I give it all away?” “Do I share the best idea up front, or do I make people give me their email for it?” The answer depends on the situation, but the path to getting to that answer is always obvious: Which one is the right thing to do? And if you find yourself wondering, “Can I afford to do this?” that’s how you know the scarcity trap has already snapped.

Most of the time, we’re perfectly capable of doing the right thing. We’d just rather take a shortcut. Instead of accepting a short but guaranteed delay in arriving at our dream destination, we’d rather risk driving off a cliff. Isn’t that silly? I know, right? It’s totally silly.

Don’t sweat. You can afford to do the right thing.

Shinichirō Watanabe only releases a new anime once a decade or so, but they all leave their mark in pop culture, most notably Cowboy Bebop in 1998 and Samurai Champloo in 2004. Both shows are similar in several regards. They feature involuntary trios of friends trying to get out of a variety of jams. They deal with existential themes at times. And they both have a killer soundtrack, cool action, and serene scenes in-between.

Most fans love both shows, and comparisons usually end in, “Just watch them all,” but when it comes to wider impact and making anime cool in the West, Cowboy Bebop takes the crown. If you forced me to pick one over the other, I would also go with the king. Recently, I figured out why.

Both shows run for a total of 26 episodes. In Samurai Champloo, set in Japan’s Edo period, the same pattern repeats several times: The female protagonist gets kidnapped, and her two male travel companions bail her out. Both of them have near-superhuman strength, and it is only in the last two episodes that they finally meet their limits. It is also in those last two episodes that we finally learn more about each character’s origins, little of which has been revealed thus far.

Cowboy Bebop, meanwhile, sends its cast on 26 extremely unique adventures. Along the way, every episodes reveals one or a few critical detail about one of the characters. The backstory gets filled in slowly over time instead of being heaped upon you in one go. There’s little repetition, and every challenge derails the team in a completely new way. By the time the conclusion rolls around, you are not only satisfied with the arc of the story. You also care deeply about Spike, Faye, and Jet, all of whom have bled dearly—literally and figuratively—to reach their final destinations.

Both shows have taught me wonderful lessons. That some things can only be nourished in increments. That 20 minutes is enough to tell a great story. And now, their comparison yields one more: In the end, jagged paths are the most beautiful. We can try to straighten our stories, but that’ll just make them look flat and repetitive. Embrace the detours, and count every detail along the way—because in the big picture, every detail adds color.

But yeah, even if “B” comes before “C” in the alphabet, when you can see a master like Watanabe at work, there’s no reason to skip to the crescendo—so you should definitely watch them both.

Sometimes, I go to my website but don’t know where to start. Usually, it’s not that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I’m overwhelmed by the length of the list. As a result, I start fretting about the order of things. When that happens, I can spend a good while going in circles before remembering: Just start.

One little trick that helps bridge the gap between overwhelm and action? Pressing the little “Update” button in the top left corner. If I’ve got nothing else to do, might as well run the website updates first, right? Funnily enough, this microscopic maintenance task often gets me over the hump. “Okay, now that that’s done, why don’t I get to updating some posts?”

Momentum begets momentum—but the former and latter may vary in size. A tiny push can keep a boulder rolling downhill all day long. Start with the update button, and maybe everything else will refresh itself as well.

One of the beauties of having a job while pursuing your creative work on the side is that you get to carry more attitudes into a greater variety of situations.

When I review designs for an animated course made by a third party, I share my opinion the same way I would criticize my own work. But when I hear back that a suggested change would significantly slow down the process or that someone else believes the diagram should stay as it is, I’m not fussed at all. “Okay, that works, let’s keep rolling!”

The reason it’s easy to let things go at work is that I can obsess over my own stuff in my spare time. If I want to be a perfectionist there, I can fully indulge that tendency. No compromises. It takes as long as it takes. That, too, is satisfying in its own way.

In theory, most of us know we can change our mind on any day, any occasion, and in any moment. In reality, being forced to adopt multiple personas makes it significantly easier to practice actually doing so. You can wear a different hat, and be a different cat. Lean into your characters, and see what you learn.