Reality Laughs

How to get your life under control incrementally:

1. Don’t let things get worse.
2. Make things better.

Meaning . . . don’t add to the mess you’re dealing with. That’s first. Then, hack away at the mess in front of you.

Another VGR idea.

You can’t see past the next identity-altering thing in your future that’s keeping you in suspense. The most “what happens next” thing.

Implication: if you can identify this thing, run like hell toward it because beyond it lies clarity.

@vgr on Twitter.

“I came here for me. I didn’t come here for you.” Bob A.

A Cernovich tweet made the point that destiny is fundamentally made by character.

My further thoughts on this: Luck etc happens all around you but character determines the direction you take. Character helps you filter the luck (you see what you see based on the character you have) and adapt as necessary (you choose and act based on your character).

Don’t want to. Doing it anyway.

Strategic behavior is not hard.

1. Think about where you want to go.
2. Think about what you are doing right now.
3. Ask yourself if what you’re doing right now is likely to take you where you want to go.

In other words, just think. Take the time to think about your life. After all, your life may be important to you. 😀

Then, critically make a decision and do whatever looks right to you. The thing you do is a tactic. The thinking process and the decision you make is strategy.

What if your strategic thinking is wrong? Hey, no problem. Keep thinking. You will see, soon enough, that (2) is creating a trend line as way from (1). You make adjustments and change either (1) or (2).

This is on my Power List for the next month.

This is an idea triggered by memories of Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints.

First things first

If you want to make improvements in a process, you must address the most important bottleneck first. If you fix a less important bottleneck first, you just increase the backlog behind the most important bottleneck.

If you find things getting worse as you do your process improvements, you’re not addressing the critical bottleneck, but you have identified it.

What should I do first?

This is an experiment for 30 days to see what my mind tells me is the most important bottleneck at work.

The “output” we are trying to maximize is the speed (or profitability?) (both?) (something else?) of conversion of a unit of human attention (by us) into a final statement of “thank you” (by the customer) following delivery.

This definition of desired “output” (i.e., “What is your Quest?”) is likely to change in the next 30 days.

How to?

LFG.

Daily Reminder on my phone to answer this question. Daily answer in a folder in Apple Notes. A review and synthesis on Day 31.

Postscript

This is a cunningly-created (accidentally) “five whys” exercise. I hope it will help me dive deeper into the reflexive answers I give myself because they make me feel good about myself.

As usual, well-curated internet-grazing reveals the obvious.

@visakanv has a Google Doc of a book-in-progress that referenced Tiago Forte blog posts talking about the theory of constraints.

Theory of constraints

Tiago Forte wrote some good blogposts about this. It’s a pretty old concept but it’s always relevant and it continues to be underappreciated. I’m a little lazy to get into this right now I’ll edit it in later maybe.

In a tweet: The only meaningful improvement you can make in any system is at its tightest bottleneck. Progress at the second tightest bottleneck is still constrained by the tightest bottleneck, and it can actually make things worse, because of congestion.

Less Unstrategic (a sure-to-be ephemeral Google Doc of a book in progress by @visakanv

Yeah I’ve done that reading. And I’ve buffed that information off the Great Mental Blackboard (I guess “these days” it’s a whiteboard, no?) As my friend Tom says, I have a superhero living in my head: Eraserman. 😀

If you ain’t doing it, you don’t know it. so I get no credit for reading Goldratt—except!—and this is an important exception!—that it prepared the mental soil for planting the seeds and growing the crop. (I’m proud of that janky sentence and I will leave it as-is.) (I am also proud of the fact that I have no fixed method of punctuation for sentence-ending quotation marks or closing parentheses. Do they go inside or outside the sentence? Yes.). (Heh.).

The point is . . .

I have not been operating with the theory of constraints in mind. I pick random bottlenecks to solve, based on attention (“Oh, look! A bottleneck! Let’s spend total time and attention on that bottleneck.”) rather than importance.

As noted above in the quote, this can make things worse: increasing rather than decreasing pressure at the number one important bottleneck. And I wonder why the load gets heavier over time . . . .

This will now become a daily question on my Power List.

“If I could solve one thing (in a given domain, e.g., health, a relationship, work) for maximum impact, what would that one thing be?

Me, asking myself a question

I rather suspect that the answer will come where vague, edgy discomfort lives. So . . . Let’s aggressively search out discomfort.

In Workland: the hard conversations are starting already. This is good. they happened even before the “theory of constraints” insight.

The reason we can’t do more, better (and doing more, better work is where the fun lives—trust me on this—it’s like a game at the top level) is because we lack skill. Work harder, put in the reps, get strong, get smart. There is no substitute.

The reason we can’t do more, better is because we don’t have the money for resources, especially to hire more, better people. Work harder, pick your customers better, pick your projects better, and work harder to absolutely master those projects.

Work harder. You think you work hard. You don’t. “Work smarter, not harder” is invoked by the person who doesn’t work harder, and is genuinely alarmed by the prospect of hard work.

So I have finally stopped being a co-conspirator in underperformance for the team (and myself, frankly, because I am an underperformed too by allowing those around me to underperform) and have set market-level performance goals for them. To their genuine alarm, I might add.

It’s not market-level of performance that is the important marker for achieving a dream, though. One of the people on the team blurted out a small piece of guarded truth-dream: to achieve black-belt level mastery in our domain.

I started to feel that way after a decade of very long hours and many many mistakes. Six and seven days a week of work and repeated, discouraging failure.

In my opinion, utter mastery comes only through intentional indefinite immersion. The willingness to put in market-level hours (for the market-level cubicle-dweller, not the master) is just the table stakes for mastery, for walking through fire with anti-gravity boots and heat shields while juggling tennis balls—because it’s fun!—while helping someone solve a life-changing dilemma.

I owe it to myself and to my team to hold the standard high and help them reach it—if they so desire. And if they don’t, that’s fine, and they should understand that black belt achievement for them is not in the cards.

This is the one constraint I, as a manager/leader/whatever, have refused to address. Reason: I felt it was unkind to say “work harder.” As a result of wanting to be nice, as a result of some misguided view of “work/life balance” (what a pernicious lie that phrase is!), I have avoided the hard conversations with the people around me.

Including my kids, to my shame. I have not been as straightforward with them as I could have been. And the results are visible. There are some fundamental misunderstandings of cause/effect in the universe that they don’t get. At all.

In time, they will have understanding thrust upon them, unbidden. Or the universe will kick them around like a soccer ball and they will have erratic lives, as if controlled by The Gods. But of course The Gods are not the cause of random misfortune. If you don’t understand the concept of rain and sometimes you get wet and sometimes you don’t? Well, that’s not the rain’s fault.

I’m now having the hard conversations (in a kind way) with team and my children. “No, this is what you need to do if you want to achieve your dreams.”

That’s my constraint: my unwillingness to talk honestly with those around me, thinking that they won’t like me, or they will be offended, or some other bullshit.

And that’s what I’m attacking head-on right now.

Well, not “head-on.”

From the Fourth Way reading I did long ago, I remember that the worst way to help people is to show up in their face and say “You know what your problem is? It is X!”

Trust me. They know. By putting your finger precisely on that pain point you make it more likely that the person you’re trying to help will in fact immediately throw up a permanent defensive barrier. All future communication is futile.

Be indirect. The Way of the Fox. Bring them to the realization themselves.

Sometimes direct communication is needed. “If you do X you will die.” Well, an uncle told me that and I persisted with X for another 15 years. I didn’t die but otherwise pretty much laid waste to my life. I was bankrupt in every other department of my life.

Only after I went splat was I able to hear other people give me the same message. But they would alway couch the message in a “Why don’t you think about . . .” or “Why don’t you try . . .” or “I suggest . . .” way.

But I digress.

Point taken: the current bottleneck in life is me getting over my weakness. What is that weakness?

I am of a certain age where, let me just say, people are starting to shut down. Mindsets are fixed. Physical prowess is slowly declining with age. Careers have reached an apparent limit. People use the “r” word: retirement.

Yet I feel as though I’m growing like a weed. My mindset has never been better, whether in clarity or optimism. Physically I feel better than I have in a couple of decades. (Thank you, 75 Hard). Horizons have never been broader and possibilities have never been so abundant.

My wife is at the same place. I’m so lucky to have her along for the Ride.

I am fairly sure I know why I am here and “they” are starting to crawl into retirement bunkers and get small. I know the actions I have taken, and have seen enough cause/effect to say there is causation and not mere correlation.

It’s so weird to have my brain keep yelling at me, gleefully, “Let’s fucking gooooooooo!” and have no comrades (except my wife). It’s even rare to get people 25 years younger than me to see the possibility that they, too, can “gooooo!”

I am thankful. Beyond grateful. I could die today and it would be a good life. But there is so much more to come, if I just LFG my life.

That picture came from Twitter somewhere. Sorry I can’t give attribution for it because I grabbed it and saved it to my phone a while ago. But that shows a tiny bit how I feel right now and the optimism I feel for the future.

Memo to self: come back here and read this the next time you’re discouraged. You were optimistic and energetic. You can be there again, within a single day. Yesterday I was mopey driving to work and I made a Deliberate Decision that changed my mindset in a day. I recovered the LFG mindset literally within hours. You can do it again, anytime you need to.

(Note to future self: the Deliberate Decision was to stop the “maintenance mode” 75 Hard routine, which is 1 workout a day and not being hardcore about the water, back to Full Tilt 75 Hard standards for everything. I am between Phase 1 and Phase 2 so I’m not technically trying to hit defined 75 Hard program benchmarks. My self-set standards dropped and so did my mindset. The change was instant. Decision in the car driving to work. By the third pint of water at the office, I was rocking. By lunchtime, I was wearing my anti-gravity boots again.)

(In other words, I stopped being half-assed and went all-in again, even though I don’t have to be running in full-ass mode and I don’t have anything to prove to anyone else or even myself.)

I am between Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Livehard program. These are the phases that come after 75 Hard.

I allowed myself to dial back to one workout a day + the reading + maintain my diet rule (no desserts, no sodas).

My state of mind has suffered. I’m down in the dumps and mopey and the future is doomed etc. “Life is too hard and it’s endless hard work and woe is me.”

This is now the second time I’ve done this (voluntarily taken my foot off the gas pedal) and had the mopey reaction.

I’m starting back on the full program today. Workouts, water, everything. The only hitch is the hernia work that will be coming up so that will limit what I can do now — and obviously after the surgery, too.

Phase 2 starts in a couple of weeks officially but I’m restarting unofficially today. I was going to postpone Phase 2 until after a big trip, but fuck it. Life doesn’t give time-outs so I’m just going to crank on Phase 2 while I’m in Milan.

It is scary how fast momentum is lost when I get complacent and give myself permission to coast.