Don’t Try to Be Interesting

Aug 5

Here are 3 recent ideas I’ve been thinking about that I’d like to share with you.

I. Mastering the boring parts of your life massively improves the interesting parts. I’m talking about sleep, self-discipline, money-management. The “not-sexy” stuff.

Boring and mediocre shouldn’t be mixed up. What we often associate as mediocre is the result of doing the boring things poorly.

Don’t try to be interesting, just worry about doing the boring things really well and there will be interesting consequences.

II. Stop worrying about luck.

We’re obsessed with luck. Luck, however, is subjective. Without the bigger picture, it’s impossible to really know what is and isn’t good fortune. Who are you to see the bigger picture? None of us have a clue.

The Zen proverb “Maybe so, Maybe not” illustrates my point.

Don’t make things harder on yourself, place your attention on what you can control (stoicism in a nutshell, right?). That includes attachment to outcomes. For the record, I’m still figuring this out and will be for the rest of my life. If you feel like you’re struggling with this, I can promise you that there is at least one other person (me) in the same boat.

III. If you are unsure of how to tackle something – a challenge, a new project, a relationship - a good starting place (for me) has always been to consider things in terms of systems. We get the results that we get because of our systems.

When I study people that I consider successful, I make it a point to study how they approach what they do. We all come from different backgrounds and live in different life circumstances, but systems can be learned from and replicated.

There are a million quotes out there that say something along the lines of: we fall to the level of our systems/preparation/training. Here’s another way of putting things that I like even more (quote from Norman Schwarzkopf):

“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

We all have areas of our lives that we feel like we could improve upon. What if you looked at things in terms of your systems (or lack thereof)? It’s a little less overwhelming and a little more action-oriented.