Author: alearningaday

I’ve been heads down on a couple of all consuming projects at home and at work in the past 6 months. I observed 4 trade-offs I made during this time –

(1) Exercise was sporadic. I’m not as fit as I’d like to be.

(2) I chose short-form reading over long-form reading. So, I’ve read fewer books this year than most. I also found myself more sucked in than usual to casual browsing on the phone.

(3) I did a poorer job setting boundaries. There was a lot of work and little downtime.

(4) I was more sleep deprived than usual.

Over the past decade, I’ve cultivated an annual ritual of taking extended time off in the last ~3 weeks of the year – to rest, recharge, and reset. As I begin that process this year, I thought I’d start by taking stock of the trade-offs I’ve made in the past months.

As both projects are in a healthier place, I’m hoping I’ll be able to make fewer trade-offs in the new year. But, healthy habits won’t magically reappear on January 1st. It will take intention, thought, and focus to reset.

And, a big part of the starting that reset process is being honest about what hasn’t worked in the past months.

We don’t have to work too hard to find something broken around us.

There’s always something to worry about, to be annoyed about, or to be frustrated about. Always. If it isn’t in our personal or work lives, all we need to do is turn on the news.

We can choose to focus on that. Or choose to redirect our energy and focus onto fixing what we can (when we can) and onto things that give us joy.

Always our choice.

We hosted a few folks over recently. As it was outdoors, this was dependent on good weather.

And we had good weather.

But, here’s the thing – we didn’t make a big deal of the fact that we had good weather.

If we had bad weather, however, we’d have talked about it a lot more and likely remembered other instances of bad luck.

It reminded me of the fact that we are good at keeping track of our misfortunes.

Here’s to getting as good at keeping track of all our lucky breaks.

There are days when the wind is in our sails and days when it is not.

The secret to making huge amounts of progress in the long run is to put in the effort regardless of the direction of the wind.

Seth’s posts resonate so deeply so often that I sometimes take their regular awesomeness for granted. This one from last week hit home.

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This is an absolutely terrible acronym for a really important idea.

Use Your Best Judgment.

Don’t wait for someone else to take responsibility. Don’t wait for perfect. Don’t wait to find this exact situation in the manual or in history.

Use your best judgment.

My preferred abbreviation is: Go go go.

Not with a guarantee.

Not with someone to blame.

Simply because we need you to lead us.

Attempts at succinct communication – especially to executive audiences – regularly fall apart thanks to our tendency to “show our work.”

This tendency is hardwired into us from our time in school. Showing our work => showing our process => we get a partial score even if we get the answer wrong.

At work, however, those assumptions don’t hold. We’re trusted to run a good process (unless we prove otherwise) and the folks around us are interested in the end-product of that process.

Ergo, the note to self -> resist that urge to show your work. Lead with the answer and index on simplicity and clarity when explaining the details vs. comprehensiveness.

“Now sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. When you find that you’re down, well, just look around. You still got a body, good legs and fine feet, get your head in the right place and hey you’re complete!” | The wise Jackalope in Boundin’

A wonderful reminder to take stock of the many things we have when things don’t work… and just “bound, bound, bound and rebound.”

PS: If you haven’t seen Boundin’, I think it is an excellent use of 4 mins and 42 seconds.

The more specific our ask, the more likely it gets done.

My biggest takeaway from Dan Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” from 8 or so years ago was that we overestimate how bad we think we will feel if things that are important to us right now go wrong.

It is an idea I’ve thought about from time to time because of how true it is.

Unless we get in our own way, our ability to adjust to a new normal and bounce back from adversity is top class by default.

One way to think about how well a weekend went is to measure how often we did three things – rest, laugh and hug.

If we did these, we likely took care of ourselves and had a good time with people we cared about.

There often is little else that really matters.

And, the best part is that getting these metrics up is completely in our control.