In the early 20th century, the most important man in the world of American literature wasn’t an author. His name was Maxwell Perkins.
Read MoreCategory: Motivation
One Day, You Will Be Enough
I don’t know why you can’t let go. Why you have to keep pushing. I know it upsets you. Deeply. Why do you love excellence so much? Why can’t you be normal? Just chill out. Just for a month, pretend work doesn’t matter. Wishful thinking, that is. Of course it matters. Deeply.
You’ve gained a lot from it. You can look back on so much. Every time you do, you’re proud. You know you’ve come far. You just don’t look back enough. You should turn around more. All this reaching high, falling down, it messes with your neck and back. Stay on the ground for once, will you? Ha, as if.
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12 Core Values to Live By
Who are you?
As we grow up, we’re taught different ways to answer this question. When we’re kids, we’re told to introduce ourselves with our full name. “I’m John Doe,” you might say.
On the first day of high school, our teacher might suggest we tack a hobby on top. “I’m Daisy, and I like dancing.”
After we graduate and go to work and college, we drop the hobbies and replace them with achievements. “I got a BA from Stanford, where I ran the debate club, and I now work at Google.”
None of these are good answers. They all focus on a tiny part of your life, usually some externality, and then enlarge it to the point where it looks like your name, your job, or your accomplishments are all you are. That’s not true.
No matter how impressive you can get your introduction to sound over the course of your life, at the end of the day, you are not defined by your résumé. You are defined by your character. What shapes that character isn’t your work history or even any set of traits in particular — it’s your values. “Values are our fundamental beliefs informing our thoughts, words, and actions,” Darius Foroux writes.
If you don’t make an effort to define your values, no one else will do it for you. You’ll just passively adhere to a blend of the values of those around you. Worse, without values, your life has no direction. You’re moving, but where? Nobody knows — not even you.
Last year, I reflected and wrote about my values. Here they are, briefly summarized and explained.
Calmness
If you’re not calm, you can’t do anything the right way, let alone do the right thing. First and foremost, breathe, pause, think, and start from a position of poise in all things.
Rationality
Base your decisions in logic, ethics, and common sense. As a result, they might not always look sensible to the outside world, but that world mostly wants you to not change. Change is the only constant there is. Embrace it, try to see the world clearly, and then make sound choices with your sound mind.
Commitment
Whether it’s in your career or relationships, once you find what you believe in, commit to it with all your heart. The only thing that makes us miserable is committing to nothing at all. Use dedication to cut through fears, doubts, and criticism like a laser, and let it empower you to drop all distractions.
Restraint
Doing the right thing won’t always be easy, but choosing to do the right thing can be if you value restraint. Restraint sounds like a bad thing, but if it’s attached to a commitment you believe in, it’ll not just come easy, it’ll actually feel liberating. Give in to fewer temptations, and you’ll gain space and peace of mind.
Humility
Don’t pretend to control more than you do, which is very little and always less than you’d like. Be humble. Show up every day, do your best, and patiently wait for the results, even if it takes longer and you feel like nothing is working.
Vulnerability
Being yourself is scary, but in a big world that doesn’t care, you might as well show us the truest version of yourself. Don’t be afraid to expose the parts you’re scared we’ll judge you for. Those are the moments we really connect with others because we finally realize: they’re not so different than us.
Patience
Whether you get hurt or not, surviving provides the best form of reassurance: You’re still here, and you’ll live to fight another day. No matter how bad reality gets, turn the fact that you’re still around today into more fuel for tomorrow.
Empathy
Everyone is struggling with something. Most of the time, you have no idea what it is. But you can imagine it. You can mentally place yourself in their shoes, and no matter what you find, it’ll help you understand them. You’ll be less likely to judge people, communicate better, and remember we’re equal.
Compassion
Be kind and forgiving. Don’t hate people. Lend a hand where you can. Empathy and compassion are related. When you understand people, it’s easy to feel sympathetic. Life is short. See it as a big journey we’re all in together.
Acceptance
You’re human. You’ll make mistakes, some of which you’ll never be able to fix. So will other people around you, sometimes to your detriment. All of this is survivable, as long as you accept it. Accept yourself too. Your good sides. Your bad sides. And extend that same courtesy to others.
Hope
When times are bad, imagine different times. Have faith. Remember that you’re not alone, and trust that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. You might not be able to see it right now, but whatever you’re going through will make sense down the line.
Love
Combine all the above values, and you get love — a catch-all for our best traits. It’s also a verb. Don’t just say that you love people, show them. Your family, your partner, your friends, the little gestures you use to show you appreciate them are what makes life worth living. Cherishing these little moments is how you create the memories that’ll stay with you till the very end of your life.
Whenever I struggle, feel lost, or am disappointed myself, I think through my list of values. Which one do I need right now? What am I lacking? Every time, I find an ideal I can aspire to that’ll help me get back on track.
Your list may be shorter, longer, or completely different, but I’m confident it’ll allow you to do the same. Not all days are great, but even on the worst ones, you’ll never feel directionless. Plus, you’ll finally have a good answer to that all-important question: Who are you?
Take the Stairs, Not the Escalator
When there’s an escalator with stairs next to it, which option do you take? I take the stairs. It seems like a small thing, but it’s a big deal. Embedded in this little, seemingly innocuous decision — do you walk or do you stand? — is a whole way of looking at the world.
People on the escalator lose time, momentum, and energy. They choose to wait then they could be choosing to do something. Of course, at times waiting is the right choice. Sometimes, you can use a bit of rest. Or enjoy the moment of quiet with your partner.
Most of the people on the escalator, however, don’t stand because it makes sense to stand right now. They stand because it’s their default to wait. They stand because they hope the world will magically carry them to where they want to go.
Meanwhile, the people taking the stairs know every minute counts. They see a set of steps that leads up a mountain and say, “Okay, bring it on!” They take the obstacle head on and do what they can to overcome it. Instead of losing momentum, they build more. They charge — and their metabolism kicks in.
Of course, there are times to slow down. To assess the challenge ahead, weigh your options carefully, and form a plan together with others. Nothing is black and white, but the question remains: What is your default?
Even if you do your very best, you might not get what you want. So actually, your very best is the least you can do.
Zig Ziglar once said, “There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.” It’s cheesy, but it’s true. There is also no escalator. If there is, it’s going the wrong way — and you have to run up to get to the top.
Casey Neistat once put it like this: “Life is like going the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. Walk, and you stay put. Stand still, and you go backwards. You have to hustle to get ahead.”
Taking the stairs instead of the escalator may seem like a silly little decision, but the mindset shift may last forever. Whatever uphill battle you’re currently facing, which one is it going to be? The escalator? Or the stairs?
5 Good Things That Will Follow From This Pandemic
The best way to stay calm amidst the coronavirus madness is to focus on the present moment. Accept reality as is, realize you’re okay, and then handle the challenge at hand with direction and resolve.
The second best way is to time travel to the future. What will happen after all this is over? Can you imagine a more peaceful tomorrow? What good will come from this? There will come some good from this. It’s hard to see it now, but making the effort will give you something to aspire to in these dark times.
Of course no one can predict the future, but when I think about what positive, long-term consequences we could see from this pandemic, I spot a lot of potential. Here are 5 predictions to provide some comfort while we’re all stuck at home.
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Choose Hard Problems
The restroom has been closed for months. There are others, of course. One downstairs. One upstairs. Which one do you go to?
Upstairs is nicer. Downstairs is closer. And, well, you walk down, not up. At least initially.
Most people go down, and it shows. The towels are empty. The room smells. In times of global sanitary crisis, it’s not where you want to be.
You decide to go up. Just once. Just to try it. You’re surprised. No one’s here. The sink is clean. There’s a window. It’s open. What a breath of fresh air.
If that’s the prize for going up instead of down, what else might be out there? You wonder — and then you venture. Endless hallways stretch in front of you. Here’s another nice restroom. And another. And another.
One day, you turn a corner and find a completely renovated part of the building. Whoa! Shiny white tiles, 15-foot-ceilings, fragrance sticks, what lavatory luxury is this? And all it took was another five minutes of walking.
“The long way is the shortcut,” Seth Godin says. We shy away from the extra mile because we think it’s long — but it’s just another mile. Plus, there are no traffic jams on it, according to hall of fame quarterback Roger Staubach.
Four years ago, I went to a library every day. The lockers were public, you chose at random, but I could always rely on mine being empty — it was at the bottom. The rewards for solving harder-than-average problems are often extraordinary, making them well worth the additional effort.
Another reason to go a little further, work a little harder, stay a little longer, is that it brings its own form of motivation.
The more time you spend on your application after everyone has sent theirs, the more used you’ll get to having — and satisfying — higher expectations — both your own and those of others. It’s a positive, self-reinforcing loop. Shoot higher, do more, want to shoot higher, want to do more. Meanwhile, the exponential rewards keep accumulating.
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss said: “99% of the world is convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre middle-ground. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming.”
There’s a third reason to tackle hard problems, and it might be the most compelling: The easy ones are already solved.
We have AirBnB. And Uber. And Netflix. There are enough electric scooter startups. We don’t need another one. We don’t need another bubble tea store, another listicle, another dieting hack. We need someone committed to doing the work. We need you to show up — and not just when it suits you.
Once your ass starts to hurt, how long can you stay in the chair? How crazy are you willing to look before we realize you’re right? “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life,” Jerzy Gregorek says.
The hardest part of solving a hard problem is rarely the problem itself. It’s deciding to go where no one else will. Because how’s that gonna look? How’s that gonna feel?
You might be lonely. You might be ridiculed. But you might also find the comfiest restroom in the building. You might feel more empowered than ever. And you might change the world for all of us.
Choose hard problems. Venture off the beaten path. You never know what you’ll find, but it’s the only way that can lead to true growth.
When Will You Sacrifice Good for Great?
“It took a long time to blog like me.” I’ll never forget that sentence.
By the time Seth Godin dropped it in a 2016 interview, the man had written over 6,000 blog posts, publishing daily for nearly 20 years. Every time I hear him speak, I question why I do what I do.
I love writing. I want to be great at it. But I also want to ensure I can keep doing it, even if that means not doing it some of the time. And so I hedge. I diversify. I put my hands in more and more honey pots until one of them is stuck. Stuck in an average project, stuck in a new income stream, stuck trying to squeeze out another 10% gain. Of course, I’d need that hand to master the next 1% of writing. But it’s stuck so I can’t — until I let go.
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If You Can’t Do Big Things for Yourself, Do Small Things for Others
Your latest article flopped. Your boss criticized you in public. Your income is 30% down from the last month. It hurts, doesn’t it? To give your all and still fail. It happens to the best of us.
In moments of intense frustration, the weeks when nothing seems to be working, it’s easy to see each missed swing as a third strike. Can you ever recover? How will you come back from this?
The truth is simple and undramatic: You have a good meal, go to bed early, and show up again tomorrow. Except death, there are no third strikes in life. You’ll never have to go to the bench. You swung the bat and missed the ball. That’s all that happened. Nothing more, nothing less.
Most of all — and this is one of the best lessons you can teach yourself — hardly anyone noticed. The world doesn’t need you to be great just yet. We’ll get through the day without your grand achievement — just like you.
This isn’t to say your mission isn’t important or that you shouldn’t keep up the fight, it’s simply a reminder that, yes, it’s okay to be successful tomorrow.
There’s a story about Larry Page and Sergey Brin that, in the early days of Google, they were happy about small user numbers. “Good. Our product will be better tomorrow. Let people find us then.”
In Twitter’s first office, there was a big, upside down sign. It read, “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.”
Of course, right now, you don’t want to think about mistakes. You don’t want to think about tomorrow. You want to wallow in your failure. You want to steep in it like a teabag, but we all know what happens to tea that sits too long: it gets cold, bitter, and devoid of the energy it’s supposed to bring.
So what else can you do? You can take a deep breath. You can remember the world doesn’t revolve around you. You can forget yourself for a while and do something for others.
Answer your friend’s voice message from five days ago. Hold the door for someone at the grocery store. Buy flowers on the way home. Or ice cream. Or frozen pizza. Whatever makes your partner, kids, or neighbor happy.
Scan your inbox for a simple question. Instead of a one-liner, write a five-sentence response. You’ll get a beaming “Thank you!” back. Donate to your friend’s fundraiser. Their cause can use ten bucks. Recommend a good show to a colleague. They might return the favor at lunch.
When you can’t do big things for yourself, do small things for others.
It’ll take your mind off the monumentality of your task. Like that first gulp of air after being underwater, it’ll put you at ease. Then, it slowly morphs into a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Most of all, it’ll remind you: That big thing you want to achieve for yourself? It was never about you in the first place. It’ll be the result of serving others.
We look at people who make others shine and call them ‘great.’ We most respect folks who elevate others. Who step aside, time after time, and pass on the credit. The more spotlights you point towards those around you, the more we’ll love you in return.
Steve Jobs didn’t give people a new phone — he made them into pioneers, photographers, and folks with good taste. That’s why we loved him. Not because he invented some device.
Long before he was “Steve Jobs,” he too had many bad days. The latest demo crashed. The board fired him from his own company. I’m sure that, more than once, he wanted to quit. “How can I come back from this?”
But then, eventually, Steve remembered there was one more thing to do. One more task to take care of. Why aren’t the fonts perfect yet? How can we make initial setup easier? Which click can we do without?
Steve Jobs obsessed over details because it allowed him to keep going where others would have quit. It was a brilliant coping mechanism. No matter what disaster had happened, if he could get this one thing right, he still had a chance to make someone’s day.
Steve was a visionary. His commitment to innovation was remarkable. His greatness, however, rests on a million acts of service. Tiny, near-inconceivable ways of elevating the users of his products. By pushing him towards those acts — if only as a distraction in the moment — his worst days contributed as much to his success as his best ones, if not more.
If, one day, we tell your story like we tell his today, we might say the same about you. For now, remember that it’s okay to be great tomorrow. You may have failed, but it’s never too late to get back in the game.
If you want to do something big, do something small for others. True greatness is about making others shine.
Reach High and Hope You Don’t Fall
Yesterday, I went bouldering for the first time. Finally, the source of many scrawny-kid jokes in high school turned into an advantage. I’m 5’7″. I weigh 136 lbs. I’m neither tall nor strong — but my power-to-weight ratio is excellent.
I can easily do 50 push-ups or pull myself up some ledge. As it turns out, this kind of balance is exactly what you need when you’re trying to go from one set of tiny knobs to the next on a six-foot slanted wall.
After some basic, first-level trials and picking up the rules, I managed to climb some second- and even third-level problems. That’s nothing compared to expert climbers gliding up the impossibly-flat-surface elements of a level 12 wall, but, for a beginner, it’s not half bad. Still, my arms got tired after about 90 minutes, and it was almost time to go. Almost.
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Tomorrow Can Be a Good Day
The last note on Avicii’s phone reads: “Spread positivity through my music and message.”
Robin Williams once remarked that, “Comedy is acting out optimism.”
In his last speech to fans at a concert, Chester Bennington said: “The one thing that can’t be defeated is love.”
I’m a writer. Every day, I structure my thoughts and emotions. Each session is therapy. The articles are just the reports. I take the result of my self-treatment, package it how I think will be most helpful, and release it to the world.
I wish everyone could do this. I wish it’d work for anybody. Sadly, that’s not the case. For Robin, Chester, and Tim, one day, the therapy stopped working.
Even before I started typing, I’ve always held this one belief. I’ve known it for as long as I can remember, and I don’t have any other lens to view life through. It’s as simple as it is powerful, and I can describe it in one sentence:
Tomorrow can be a good day.
If I had to erase everything I’ve ever written, if I had to go through my archive, pick one idea, and decide that’s the only one I’ll leave behind, this would be it.
Tomorrow can be a good day.
I can’t tell you how desperately I want you to believe this. I wish I could hold your hands when you feel at your worst, look you in the eye, and say it:
“Tomorrow can be a good day.”
When I was six, I fell off my bike and tore my chin. We had to wait at the ER for hours. A guy was wheeled in on a stretcher. Motorcycle accident. I don’t know if he made it. But as I was licking on my ice cream, I wholeheartedly believed that — both for him and I — tomorrow could be a good day.
When I was 13, a girl broke my heart. Then again at 14. And 15. And 16. It happened again and again and again. Sometimes, I thought I’d die alone. That I’d never find a girlfriend. I cried over it. But I always believed that, no matter how sad the music I was playing, tomorrow could be a good day.
When I was 26, I lost faith in myself. I wasn’t sure if I could go on working so much. If I could complete both my degree and get my business off the ground. I was burned out, desperate, and didn’t see the point of it all. But I still believed that, even if it all went to hell, tomorrow could be a good day.
I know these are laughable stories. They’re nothing against rape, war, drug addiction, abuse, and depression. I don’t know what those feel like. I can only imagine, and I know imagination doesn’t quite cut it. But I think daring to imagine without having lived through it is exactly where my strength is.
If being free of life’s heaviest burdens allows me to spread positivity, act out optimism, and remind you that love can’t be defeated, then that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. The only thing I will do. The reason I was put on this earth.
Tomorrow can be a good day.
Writing it makes me tear up a little. I believe in it so much. I can’t tell you how it works. I can’t tell you where I got it from. I just know that, as long as you want me to, I will be here. Repeating it for you. Again and again and again.
When your boyfriend breaks up with you, I’ll tell you that tomorrow can be a good day. When your doctor says you need surgery, I’ll tell you that tomorrow can be a good day. When your boss fires you, your landlord kicks you out, and your dad won’t lend you 50 bucks, I’ll tell you: Tomorrow can be a good day.
Please keep going. Just a little. One more day. One more night. One more time. Sunshine is coming. No matter how dark it feels right now, the light is not far away. It might be right around the corner. Keep walking. Talking. Take one step at a time. One step is enough for today. And tomorrow?
Tomorrow can be a good day.