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If You Try To Do Everything, You Won't Do Anything - RyanHoliday.net
If You Try To Do Everything, You Won't Do Anything - RyanHoliday.net
In 1956 Harry Belafonte placed a call to Coretta Scott King. With her husband arrested once again, he wanted to check in with her and see how she was doing and what the movement might need. Except they could barely carry on a conversation, because Coretta kept being pulled away from the phone to attend to one of the children, to check on dinner, to answer the door. Sensing she was doing this—and far too much at that—all alone, Belafonte politely asked why the Kings did not have any help at home. Well, she told him, Martin simply would not permit it. Not only because it was financially prohibitive on a minister’s salary, but also because he was worried what others might think. That he was self-important, enriching himself at the expense of the cause, living the high life while millions of blacks suffered. “That is absolutely ridiculous,” Belafonte replied. “He’s here in the middle of this movement doing all of these things, and he’s going to get caught up in what people are going to think if he has somebody helping you?” Then he informed Ms. King that from this moment forward, their life was changing. He was going to personally pay for staff—and that Martin had absolutely no say in the matter. This wasn’t just a nice gesture to an overworked family. It was also a strategic move. What Belafonte was buying Martin and Coretta was time. It was peace of mind. He understood that with this help, they would have more energy, more focus for the cause. The last thing he wanted Martin to be thinking about as he marched for peace and justice was whether his kids had a ride home from school. It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do them well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your own lawn or answering your own phone. A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. It can come from a good place, as it did for Martin Luther King Jr. We feel obligated. We feel bad spending money. We feel guilty asking for help. It doesn’t matter the source though, because the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down. You have to be able to pass the ball…especially when somebody is open and has a better shot. I was fortunate to learn this early in my career. One of my first jobs as a writer was as a research assistant to Robert Greene, who not only trained and showed me how the writing process works, but taught me an even more important part in the process: That even someone great and talented and self-sufficient doesn’t do it all by himself (this is also in The 48 Laws of Power, expressed more ominously as “Let others do all the work, take all the credit”). When I started having some success as a writer myself, one of the first things I did was hire a research assistant. I have been quite open and up front about this (my current researcher is Billy Oppenheimer—he has a great newsletter you can subscribe to) and yet still people ask how do you put out so much content? How do you juggle it all? How do you do it all? The answer is, I don’t. I have a team. Just in the way that I don’t do the international edition of my books, I have people who help translate what I’ve done into different mediums. This article itself is an example. I tell the Belafonte story in Discipline is Destiny, I’ve written about hiring help in Daily Dad emails (which you can sign up for here), and I’ve talked about my team on podcasts. So my research assistant gathered all of those pieces, strung them together, which allowed me to spend my time polishing and tweaking it before I put it out in the world. Yes, cumulatively, it has become quite expensive to pay for help (literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at this point). But the true cost would be the quality and quantity of content I couldn’t have created, the time I wouldn’t have had with my family, the energy I wouldn’t still have to do what I do. While this all might sound a little privileged, I am not saying “Oh everyone should have an enormous team behind them”—though in a fair world that would be great. If you can’t afford to hire someone, the good news is there is a much cheaper option, something that successful and busy people also do. It’s called: Automation. Some people hire an accountant or a financial advisor to handle their retirement and savings accounts. Just as easily, you can use the automation features in something like Wealthfront. Some people have a personal assistant manage tasks for their business or social media for them. Just as easily, you can use software like Buffer or IFTTT to automate routine tasks for you. Some people complain about what a pain their inbox is to manage. Just as easily they can set up filters and folders or use tools that block their spam or unsubscribe them from marketing emails. Some people spend hours a month opening mail, paying bills and doing administrative paperwork. Just as easily they can sign up for paperless billing, or auto-schedule payments. Almost everything we do as responsible adults in the world is set up inefficiently. By improving our systems, we buy ourselves time and energy. And then with this time and energy, we are able to be better at what we do, to get more done, to be more present for the people who depend on us. It doesn’t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to delegate and automate. You have to find [...]
·ryanholiday.net·
If You Try To Do Everything, You Won't Do Anything - RyanHoliday.net
✍️ Be the Million Monkeys
✍️ Be the Million Monkeys
Or, How You Can Turn a Horrific Meme into a Terrific Means - It's hard enough to battle imposter syndrome, but now we have to worry about a million monkeys outwriting us, too? Here's how we can turn the tbles and get the monkeys writing for us!
·towritewithwildabandon.com·
✍️ Be the Million Monkeys
Visual Hierarchy, Gutenberg Diagram, F & Z Pattern
Visual Hierarchy, Gutenberg Diagram, F & Z Pattern
According to different studies, including the publications by Nielsen Norman Group as one of the pioneers of this field, UXPin team and others, there are several popular scanning patterns for web…
·lineindesign.medium.com·
Visual Hierarchy, Gutenberg Diagram, F & Z Pattern
How to plan?
How to plan?
How to plan? How hard could it be? 4k words scribbled down on a sunny October afternoon for people in tech observing the Season’s Traditional Annual Planning Process, inspired by a recent interview question (and 25 years of variously painful planning processes).
·kellanem.com·
How to plan?
On Vampires and Method Writing - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
On Vampires and Method Writing - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to
·calnewport.com·
On Vampires and Method Writing - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
How I'm Creating a $1,000,000 Personal Brand - Tim Stoddart
How I'm Creating a $1,000,000 Personal Brand - Tim Stoddart
When Ethan and I started recording our podcast, we did an episode about the newsletter industry. In the episode, Ethan showed me the step by step framework that almost every newsletter brand uses to grow profits and scale. When he taught me the model, it completely changed the way I am growing my personal brand […]
In this week’s issue, I want to pass on to you what Ethan passed on to me.
with notes
·timstodz.com·
How I'm Creating a $1,000,000 Personal Brand - Tim Stoddart
The Imperfectionist: How to get out of a rut
The Imperfectionist: How to get out of a rut
​ ​ ​ How to get out of a rut It strikes me that a lot of advice on how to get things done is borderline useless, at least for me personally, because I'm so rarely in the right ...
·ckarchive.com·
The Imperfectionist: How to get out of a rut
Dating Other Task Managers
Dating Other Task Managers
I've a confession… I've been seeing other todo lists. I don't have great reasons. It started because I wanted to have the option of freedom from Apple despite having invested a ridiculous amount of time and automation capital into the ecosystem. ...
·evantravers.com·
Dating Other Task Managers
3 ideas to brand yourself
3 ideas to brand yourself
​ ​ ​ ​Click here to read this on the web​ Hey everyone This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative entrepreneurs. We share lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates ...
·ckarchive.com·
3 ideas to brand yourself
登录 Twitter,关注Denis Shatalin
登录 Twitter,关注Denis Shatalin
“You can add $13 000 in revenue in 1 week. The best part? You can do it without even touching your product. Steal my pricing tactics that have brought easy sales for 50 startups:”
·twitter.com·
登录 Twitter,关注Denis Shatalin
The Secret To Avoiding Burnout - RyanHoliday.net
The Secret To Avoiding Burnout - RyanHoliday.net
Two years into writing my latest book, Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall. There is no word other than “despair” for what I was feeling. Doubt? One always has that. This was deeper. No, this was a fear that the book would not come together. That I had chosen the wrong topic. That I had used up all my material. That I did not have what I needed, that my momentum had run out. At my lowest moment, before I had really even begun, I was facing the necessity of calling my publisher and asking for a delay. I was also tired. Just so tired. Coming up with the idea for a book is a creative pursuit, actually creating the book is effectively a work of manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence—a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It’s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical. For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons, but 12 of them, back to back to back. That’s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I’ve published, articles I’ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period. To say I was burned out was an understatement…at a moment I could not afford it. This tends to be exactly how it goes. Which is why the best organizations and entrepreneurs and athletes solve for that problem before it happens. In 2012 the San Antonio Spurs were coming off a six game road trip. It was their fourth game in five nights and this game was just 24 hours after their victory over the Magic and 72 hours after a double-overtime victory against the Raptors. More than that, two of their stars Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker had come off long summers playing internationally, while Tim Duncan was in his 16th season in the league. Collectively, the four players had played upwards of 3,000 professional games between them, consistently going deep into the playoffs, nearly every year. So their coach Gregg Popovich decided to rest them, to not play his stars in a nationally televised game against their most hated rivals. “We’ve done this before in hopes of making a wiser decision, rather than a popular decision,” he told a reporter. “It’s pretty logical.” Logical, yes. Easy? No. And definitely not popular. In fact, the NBA would fine them $250,000 for daring to do it. But the concept of ‘load management’ was there to stay. As someone who is disciplined and driven, I have struggled with this myself. When we are committed, when we are driven, self-discipline isn’t always about getting up and getting to work. It’s easier to workout than to skip a workout, easier to write than relax. The problem with that is that if you want to last, you have to be able to rest. I remember I had Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney on the podcast while I was working on Discipline is Destiny and she told me a piece of advice she had gotten from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” they asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race? “The indiscipline of overwork,” the writer John Steinbeck wrote, “the falsest of economies.” When I say that self-discipline saves us, part of what it saves us from is ourselves. Sometimes that’s from our laziness or our weakness. Just as often, it’s from our addictions, from our excesses, from our impulse to be too hard on others and ourselves. It makes us not just great at what we do, but best, in that fuller sense of the word. Aristotle, who wrote so much on virtue, reminded us that the point of virtue wasn’t power or fame or money or success. It was human flourishing. What is more important than that? As I struggled to write Discipline is Destiny, I tried my best to improve in another area of my life—how my work and self-discipline manifested itself at home. Several years ago, after I sold a project, my editor called my wife, in part to congratulate us but also to apologize. She knew what this meant for my wife—what it would do to me, who I became in the dark depths of a book. However this book does, even if it makes a difference for a lot of people, what I am proudest of is who I was while I wrote it. There weren’t any apologies necessary, even when it felt like it might not come together. Did my kids even notice? I’m not sure they did. Even that moment where I felt like I might need to delay the book, I remember thinking: And? So what? Sometimes things have to be delayed. If that’s what it takes to do things right, so be it. A less disciplined me, a younger me? I would have been wrecked by all this. I would have acted out. I would have been consumed. There was no ‘calm and mild light’ for me when it came to my work. There was little balance. I was all ambition and drive…and when something got in the way, I was indomitable and aggressive. It helped me accomplish things. It also made me unhappy. It would not have served me well on this project. Worse than that, it would have made me a hypocrite. So yes, as I finished the book, I was still tired. Every writer is tired when they get to the end of a book. Yet, I also felt wonderful. Life is for the living. We are meant to be up and doing. If books came naturally, without effort? Everyone would write them. And for [books], you can plug in whatever it is that you do. It’s good that it’s hard. It’s good that it can be discouraging. It’s good that it breaks your heart, kicks [...]
·ryanholiday.net·
The Secret To Avoiding Burnout - RyanHoliday.net
Extensions and souvenirs
Extensions and souvenirs
When a brand is successful, there’s often a desire to extend it. Disneyland was an extension of Disney movies. It reflected some of the magic of the movies, but created something new and valu…
·seths.blog·
Extensions and souvenirs
50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good.
50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good.
I realized—many years ago—that when I behave generously, I feel rich. I like to feel rich. So I choose to be generous. Behaving generously doesn’t necessarily mean “donating money” or “giving away your last cookie.” Those are two options, sure, but there are plenty of other ways to be generous. You can share knowledge freely, instead of hoarding it. You can send a handwritten note, instead of a text message. You can make eye contact, instead of checking out and staring down at your phone. You ca
·youcangetitdone.com·
50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good.
Birds and Frogs in Physics - 3 Quarks Daily
Birds and Frogs in Physics - 3 Quarks Daily
by Ashutosh Jogalekar I shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific…
·3quarksdaily.com·
Birds and Frogs in Physics - 3 Quarks Daily
Tiny Gains. Massive Results.
Tiny Gains. Massive Results.
Big dramatic changes don't work. If you want to improve, tiny gains over an uncommonly long period turn into massive results.
·fs.blog·
Tiny Gains. Massive Results.