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Category: Thinking Clearly

Own Your Future

Published on December 10, 2023

If you’re given an opportunity to perform/ create/ express… to show what you’re made of… to put your spirit on full display… and you choose to give it an average effort…?

…The future consequences of that… the regret/ the fewer opportunities/ the reduced impact… is on you—not anybody else.

Remember this: we’re wired to hold back. To stay comfortable. To take the easy path. To not risk failure or embarrassment. Which is why seeing people do the opposite—in any arena—is so captivating and inspiring.

And if captivate and inspire is something you aim to do…

…You have to choose to do that. To rewire your system. To rewrite your defaults. To reject the status quo and what’s grossly accepted as the norm. To give the opportunity presented to you your greatest effort… without hesitation, self-consciousness, or egotistical concern…

…And own the fact that the future… your greatest future… is always a series of choices that can be made only by you.

P.s. In case you missed it, you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.

Enough Thinking For Today

Published on December 7, 2023

…That’s what I tell myself when I collapse into my bed at night.

…And I open a book and start reading as soon as I can manage.

My thought is this: we spend every waking moment of our day thinking… trying to stay one step ahead of what’s next; solving problems; avoiding distractions and staying productive; imagining future possibilities; reflecting and learning from past experiences; keeping our priorities prioritized; remembering to eat enough food and drink enough water; entertaining stupid random stuff that we can’t help… etc

And collapsed in bed, exhausted, shouldn’t be another time for us to keep doing all of the above.

In fact, continuing to think critically and solve problems from your day before you sleep is an excellent way to lose sleep and wake up more tired the next day leaving you with less energy to solve the very problems you thought thinking about in bed would help.

Here’s the strategy: don’t tell your mind to stop thinking—this doesn’t work. Just like trying not to think of Pink Elephant doesn’t work. Give your mind something to guide it. Something that can carry it forward on a ride and relieve it of its incessant nature to problem solve and replay experiences. Books do it for me.

…Until your eyes are so heavy that you can’t help but put the book down and pass out.

Collapsed on your bed = enough thinking for today. Try it.

P.s. If something randomly pops into your head that I don’t want to forget, I write it down or record it on a note app. Trying to remember things before you sleep will stimulate you back to a wakeful state.

Rebalance The Week

Published on December 2, 2023

When it comes to priorities and life balance, I’ve written a lot about thinking in terms of days.

If Sleep/ Work/Recreational Time are priorities, split each according to the hours of your day (e.g. 8 hours each).

If Family/ Friends/Health are priorities, split each inside the 8 hours of “recreational time” you have (e.g. one hour meal time with family, one hour happy hour time with friends, one hour exercise every morning).

If Growth and Contribution are priorities, maybe block out 20 minutes to read, 20 minutes to write, and 20 minutes to help somebody just because.

And then there’s four hours left inside your “recreational time” to account for commutes, screen time, fun, snoozing, procrastinating, spontaneity, etc.

I like the idea of daily because every day we do the things that are priorities… it’s a good day.

It’s usually on the days when we aren’t able to hit our top priority areas that we feel like the day is a wash.

However…

It never plays out as simply as it’s laid out, does it?

Life gets in the way.

And when it does, a simple solution to keep your life balanced and in tune with your priorities is to shift from daily to weekly thinking.

…Put more time in at work than you planned? Subtract it from another day or deliberately block time for the missed priority on your more flexible days.

…Get caught in another media rabbit-hole and lose some high quality sleeping hours? If you can’t add it to the morning, ban yourself from even viewing media at all the next day or two.

Rebalance the week if/when you can’t rebalance the day.

Hair-Pulling Issues

Published on November 29, 2023

I’ve been experiencing some hair-pulling email issues over the past few days.

Things that were supposed to happen when somebody opts in to get my daily or weekly emails, wasn’t. The plugins and forms that were supposed to fix the problems, weren’t. And when I invested $800+ for a Cyber Monday deal to switch to a new email service provider… I quickly realized that they came with their own set of new, hair-pulling issues that I’d have to resolve. And so it has gone so far this week…

But then…

I heard that one of my students’ mom got her finger broken by her autistic daughter…

And that one of my coworker’s sisters was in the hospital…

And that one of my students’ dad passed away…

And that another one of my students’ mom passed away which lead him to drop everything and fly to the other side of the planet to be with his family…

And I remembered…

Email issues are laughable issues in the grand scheme of things.

When you’re feeling like you’re about ready to pull your hair out over the issues you’re facing in your life… try zooming out from your micro perspective and soaking in issues from a wider lens.

…Not because we want to think about bigger, badder, more heart-wrenching issues… but, because we want to gain perspective.

…So that we can ease our way back into our lives with a deeper sense of understanding and so we can revisit our “hair pulling issues” from a new head space.

…One that maybe puts “hair pulling issues” in air quotes and no longer has them bolded and underlined.

The Cost Of Old Thinking

Published on November 26, 2023

When I first started building MoveMeQuotes.com in 2010, I was all about fancy and cool.

…Until speed came onto my radar as being a vital component of a search engine friendly website.

When I first started speed testing my (fancy/cool) website… I was pulling 15+ second load times.

…Which was/is AWFUL.

Thus starting me on the journey of simplification, optimization, and code cleaning… which eventually lead me to AMP.

AMP is a protocol that essentially strips your website of all complex code and boils it down to its most essential/clean version.

The problem is it often strips your website of so much code that it often breaks the site—like buttons, forms, comment section—nothing works breaks… like, bad.

But… if you stick with it and diligently fix the code, rework your layout, download the right plugins and get clever about how you do things… the benefit is lightning speed.

I opted in, spent hundreds of hours getting it to function properly as an AMP-based website, and eventually got it loading sub-second.

The problem was the ongoing work never got easier. Everything kept taking 5x more work than it otherwise should’ve/would’ve and simple things like allowing comments were ongoing issues.

But, I always kept my head down, put in the 5x more work, and told myself the speed was worth it.

This weekend, however, I finally decided to challenge that belief and reverted back to an updated (faster) version of an old website-theme I used to use.

And lo-and-behold… sub-second load times.

The lesson today is this: challenge old beliefs from time-to-time. 5x more work might not be the current reality our old thinking is making it out to be.

A Reminder From The Universe

Published on November 18, 2023

Driving home the other night, I got stuck behind a car that had its hazard lights on.

There wasn’t anything evidently wrong with the car, the driver probably just parked it on the side of the road to run inside their (or someone else’s) house, do something quickly, and put the hazards on so they didn’t get a ticket.

…Understandable enough and something I’ve certainly done before.

It didn’t, however, stop me from feeling a quick rush of frustration as I waited for several cars to pass in the opposing lane… delaying my journey home by an appalling 10-ish seconds.

…Here’s the crazy part though.

Just as I was passing the car, about 10-ish seconds down the road in front of me, a cat BOLTED across the street.

Like, unhesitatingly from behind a car, completely unseeable from the road until it was already in the road, full blown sprint… kind of bolted across the street.

And it was an instant reminder from the universe that sometimes… things happen for a reason.

And sometimes… you just need to chill the heck out and trust it.

Channeling Your Inner Golden Retriever

Published on November 13, 2023

The group I’ve been playing basketball with on weekends has grown as of late.

And a lot of the additions to the group are much better than me.

If I’m not careful, this could make me want to stop playing.

But, if I’m mindful, this will continue to have zero impact on my playing long-term.

Because what I have to remember is that I’m not there to be the best basketball player (I gave up that dream when I got cut from my middle school basketball tryouts decades ago). I’m there for the killer plyometric workout and connection.

And so I use the presence of increased talent and experience as motivation to practice and learn… and do my best to channel my inner golden retriever the rest of the time and run around, jump up and down, and just be happy to be there.

…An excellent strategy, I must say, when learning anything new while in the midst of talented and experienced practitioners.