Lessons

Lesson Info

Your Body of Work Pt 2

when you're trying something new you're not gonna be is good at first, right? It's gonna take some humility to be willing to say I'm willing to try something I might be really bad at for a while because I know it's gonna be an important skill for me down the road. But once you get to a certain point in your life in your career, sometimes you would rather hold on to what you have, then risk giving that up and learning something new so that you can continue to grow. There's a period of just call it a period of suck ege there where you're gonna be really bad at something for a while. You just are. There's a gap contribution got their first season. But you have to be willing to do that discriminate enemy that your own process and learn new skills if you want to continue growing so their distinct things that are demanded of each of these phases in discovery phase, it's all about curiosity. What are the questions I have, what with skills I want to develop? What are the things that want to do...

to help me be more effective in my work An imitation face. It's all about grit. If you're learning how to play an instrument or you're learning how to do something, like take, make make great photographs for a while it's gonna be just about sheer gripped. Just learning the chords or just learning this. Just pushing through it. Pushing through the burn, right. If you learn how to run our you are any of you runners? Yeah. So, did you come out of the gate? Just loving to run? No, no. What was it? What was it like? What was your experience like, uh, short distances. Getting really tired really fast. Yeah. And it did. You have to kind of push through that in order to learn to love running. Continue to Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not. It's not like you just came out saying discovery. I'm gonna be anything. You know, it's it's You have to push through that. You have to get this the same thing with this. It just takes grit. You have to push through it. The problem is, some people push through that and they build a sufficient platform. It's kind, like is a runner. If you say okay, good enough I can run two miles. That's fine. Right? Close enough? Um, no. There's this kind of sense that I want to continue pushing myself and getting better what I do. But some people just grow stagnant in that phase. The third phase requires courage. I'm going to stretch myself. I'm going to try new things. I'm the experiment. I'm gonna find my voice. I'm gonna be contributed as I go up this curve. OK? The fourth phase of growth requires humility. Crisis phase requires humility. It requires you being willing to say the skills I have are no longer sufficient. Today's and tomorrow's challenges. I need to be self aware enough to say I've reached the top of my curve. I need to learn some new skills, which means I might have to be terrible for a while as I learned the skills and continue on the next curve. So the question we have to ask is, where am I in these stages? All right. Where am I? In discovery phase. Where am I in that sort of second kind of imitation phase, where my divergence and where have I maybe hit crisis phase in different areas of my life? And what then needs to be done for me to continue on the course of growth. And you will be in different stages in different places in your life. So there may be some place where you're like, Hey, I'm in the sweet spot here. I am contributing. I'm a massive growth mode. I am definitely in divergence. I'm finding my voice applying it to my work. That may be another place where, like, I'm in crisis right now, I need to learn some new skills about one to continue growing. But you have to examine those in each area of your life and make sure that you're not growing stagnant. Since, um, the fourth deadly sand is delusion, and we talked a little bit about this earlier. So you've got aimlessness, boredom, comfort and delusion. Do you guys watch American Idol? Yeah. No, not at all. On the only person you want to marry You. Okay? We have a couple people, right? We owe no only first. Okay, well, I will say that I typically only watch, like, the 1st 4 or five episodes of any given season of American Idol. And the reason I do is because you have the parade of people coming across the stage. All of them walk into the room and of course, they walk up on stage and they say, uh, you know, my name is Bob. I'm from Mobile, Alabama, and my mom told me I am the greatest singer in the history of the world and I'm going to be the next American Idol. And then they proceed to get up on stage and go way one great And everybody is silent and like, What just happened? What is this all about? And inevitably, the judges say, You know, Bob, singing probably is not your thing. Maybe you need to try something else. And what's their response? You mean, what are you talking about? I sing karaoke every Friday night, and everybody tells me I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. And my mama told me that I am the greatest singer since you know Freddie Mercury or whatever and all this stuff. And it's this delusion that people are living with this perception, this understanding of themselves that is false. They're living in a false narrative, the living according to Ah, false there and that false narrative, by the way, can play out individually. Like in that case where you think you're good at something you're not. You'd rather live with the perception of invulnerability than test your limits and find that you might actually have some limits in your life, right? So people hover close to the middle or it can play on an organization as a sort of assumption I have about the way that work should be So, for example, if I have an assumption in my life that hard work is always rewarded fairly and then I go the work one day and I put myself Let's say that let's say that Sean and I are on a project together. And so, Sean, you and I were gonna attack this project and we agreed at the beginning. Yeah, that's the objective. We're going to do it. We're gonna present it in a month to the organization is gonna be great. And then the next day we show up for work and I say, Hey, Sean, I think you got this today it's going to take the day. I'm gonna go play golf today, right? So I think you got it. You got to cover it. I know you can handle is your great. Okay, See it by right? The next day, I come in to say Sean. Hey, how's everything going? Everything good? Okay, great. All right, so So I have another meeting I need to go to. But I want you to keep working on that project, and this goes on and on and on for three weeks, OK? Every day I come in and I do that. And then the fourth week comes and we're gonna get up in front of the company, and we're gonna present this to the company. This this bold new initiative that we have been working on all this time is that we get up on the stage and you start the present, and I say, Yeah, thank you. Everybody. Let me tell you about this great thing that Sean and I have been working on for the last month. And here's an idea that I had for it. And here's how this is going to go on. Whatever. And then we get offstage rousing applause. Everybody is really excited. I think you would probably feel a little perturbed, wouldn't you? Yeah, of course. And on the back end, of that. What if our boss came to us and said, Hey, guys, awesome job. I'm gonna give you guys equal bonuses for your work. You guys did an amazing job. Congratulations. Would you be a little perturbed? Yeah. Why? I mean I mean, we accomplished our objective. We did. It was the thing that we're supposed to get. I accomplished it, accomplished it, right? Yeah. There's a narrative playing in your head that says, Hey, that's unfair. It's unjust. It's not right, right? Hard work should always be rewarded. I mean, in this case, we accomplished our objective. Were nobody said what The division of Labour was supposed to be right s. So I took advantage of a loophole and the expectations. Of course it's unfair. Of course it's unjust. But in a similar way, there could be other narratives that take root in our life. Like I will always be noticed for my creative work. I will always be recognized when my work is superior to someone right the or Or if I'm not, then there's something personally wrong with me. In some way. There could be these narratives that we live with in our lives that inform and direct our work and prevent us from bringing our full engagement because we're living with these kind of diluted understandings of what we should be getting from work. Right? In that case, you were correct. I was a total jerk. But in some cases, these these perceptions of working these narratives, we tell ourselves, can be really sinister. And so we have to be careful to define our ethic, which means defining the work that we do that is important to us and the way that we will engage in work with how of of what we dio. So for several years of my life, my ethic was it was four letters. People talk about value statements all the time. They talk about the importance of having a values statement, importance of you. But but values, it's making things like family. I value family. Well, that's not very actionable, you know. What does that mean? I value family. Does that mean I should go the work 80 hours a week so I can provide for them? Does that mean I should slack off from work 20 hours a week so I can spend more time with what does that even mean right or I value mental development. What does that even mean, Right? So several years ago, I sat down and I decided I'm going to establish a code of ethics X. And that code of ethics is an actionable way that I will approach my work every day. It's the It's the essence of who I am of what I want to bring to my work. And you could do this in an organisational setting as well and say What are we going to bring to our works of having those placid mission statements that are plastered on the wall that mean nothing to anybody develop a code of ethics? So for me, it was four things A c h e um, I can thoroughly accidental that it was felled something. It wasn't intended artistic, curious, healthy energizing. When I go into a meeting, I'm gonna be artistic. I'm gonna be looking for the meaning behind the meeting. That's what I'm always gonna be doing. I'm gonna be asking the questions that caused people to think about the deeper reality of our work. Curious. I'm gonna ask more questions than I answer. I'm always gonna be asking why are we doing this healthy? I'm going to ensure that I bring health to the organization. Whatever that looks like. I'm gonna bring. I'm gonna be a person who brings health to our organization or to my life and my family or whatever e energizing. I will always bring Mawr energy to an environment than I suck out of it. I will aspire to be the one who brings energy nothing. One who drains energy. So I would challenge you to sit down and think about for you, for your work, for how you approach your life, your work. What are those four things? What is that ethic for you? You know? And how, then is that going to define your engagement? Because you can sit down before meeting and you can say a C A G? How am I gonna be artistic in this meeting? How I'm going to be curious and this means how many to be healthy, how many of the energizing and mine has changed over time. But that sort of you, the principal applies. So what is that for you? A question you can ask Related to ethic is what am I doing right now? that doesn't seem like me. What in my life am I doing that doesn't seem like me. Is there anything that sort of outside the bounds of where I should be? Um so aimlessness, Boredom, Comfort, delusion, Ego. Um, none of us in this room struggle with ego. By the way, it's gonna be clear about that right myself, including other. The struggle with the ego ego does not necessarily mean the bombastic person charging into the room saying, Look at me, Everyone look at me. That's not necessarily what you go is. Um, it can be that ego is any place. You put yourself ahead of the work or you put yourself ahead of the value that you're contributing. So again, it's not. Work is any place you add value that where it didn't previously exist. So it's not just your job. It's your relationships, your family. It's all these, your friendships, the places you spend your money. It's all those things that's part of your work. Your body of work is any place you contribute value. Ego is any place you're putting yourself and your needs ahead of that, so sometimes it looks like, um your ego says I can do no wrong, Right? Confidence says I can get this right. There's a difference there. So sometimes it looks like I believe that my way is the right way, regardless of dis confirming information. And I would rather drive the ship to the bottom of the ocean, admit there might be an iceberg in front of us that sometimes what you go looks like ego can also look like. Okay, fine. If you're not gonna choose my idea, then I'm gonna take my marbles, and I'm gonna go sit in the corner. I'm going to go home. I'm gonna go play by myself. I'm gonna go play the victim in my life and in my work. That's another form of ego because it's putting yourself ahead of the work. You're becoming inflexible because of a kind of self protection. And do you think you could do your best work that way? No. No, of course not. You're putting yourself ahead of the work Now there's some self sacrifice involved. When you refuse ego, you refuse self protection because there are people who will want to take advantage of you. You have to be confidently adaptable. Those are two things ego makes us inflexible is a principle that Jim Collins talks about in how the mighty fall he calls it hubris born of success. It's when we experience success and we become inflexible because we make the assumption that past successes indicative of future success, my friend Dad Cockrel says successes in permanent and neither is failure. Neither of those two things air permanent. We get to choose which is which, right. But when we become driven by ego, we become in confident. We become inflexible, and a lot of times that inflexibility prevents us from engaging fully and our works. We have to be confidently adaptable again. Ego says I can do no wrong confidence says I can get this right. There's air, entirely different mindsets. But when we fall into the ego driven mindset, we become inflexible, were unable to explore areas where we might not necessarily be up to snuff, right, we might actually fail. We're not willing to do that. We have to be confidently adaptable. So the question we have to ask is, where have I become inflexible because of ego, where his ego caused me to become inflexible in my life and in my work? No. Yeah, I know Where? Of course. Not. Like I said, none of us struggle with you. Go right now. I mean, either. No, but I will. I will. Fully. No. In all seriousness, I will fully admit I spent a couple of years of my life in an organization playing the victim. This happened, you know, earlier in my career where I said, Fine. If you're not gonna like my ideas, I'm gonna take my marbles and go home. And it wasn't really that overt. I obviously say that to anyone, but I can definitely tell you that there were times when because my pride was hurt. My ego was hurt. Where I I withheld Probably my best effort, you know, because I thought, Well, they're not gonna choose my idea anyway. So why would I want to do that? Right? Well, that's a crazy way. Live. That's a silly way to engage your work and the thing at the end of my life. If I look back, if that had become a pattern in my life, I guarantee you I would have had regrets. Guarantee you would have had regrets about that. All right, so we have to be willing to do the things again that are uncomfortable, like not falling prey, that you go on becoming inflexible and instead pushing ourselves to continue on a path of contribution. Um, f is for fear Dirty four letter word. And we talked about fear earlier. Fear is when the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success, fear keeps us in the corner. Fear is the thing that stands in the way of us making the contribution that we're wired to make. And we have to countermand fear and the way that we countermand fear is again. We talked about this earlier. We have to be aware of where my artificially escalating the stakes. So where in my life and my imagining consequences that probably don't really exist or if they do exist, at least I'm aware of them. I know what the true consequences are. And then the other way that we countermand fear is we notice and then we act. Um, we have to find our voice. We have to engage in that third phase of growth. We talked about a bit ago. Die virgins The way that you find your voices through purposeful action, noticing what you observe when you act and then redirecting based on what you observe. You guys listen to Radio Lab, the radio show. Yeah, brilliant show. Absolutely brilliant show. So Radio Lab. There's a story where Jad album Rod He's one of the founders of radio labs, telling a story of how they discovered their voice as a shift. Radiolab is an NPR show, and they dio It's kind of mix up of discussions about science and technology, but it's all in story form, and they choose is really off the wall topics. And then they we've to get a little bit like this American life, but not really, because the way it's it's crafted its this sort of audio soundscape, right? That it's kind of this this hour long audio soundscape of story intermixed with hard cuts and all this. It's it's really amazing what they dio, but it didn't start out that way. Jad album Rod tells the story of how they found their voice, how they discovered who they are. When they first got the opportunity to do the show, he was asking who I want to be. I want to be like IRA glass or you want to be like Terry Gross. You know, what kind of host do I want to be, who I want to be As I'm doing this show. He's kind of playing with all these options, and they experimented a lot. And I think he even said in the early days, like unless you were within two blocks of the radio station like you couldn't pick up the show, you know, it was like this really limited test audience. Um And then he said one day he was playing around with some audio files, and he comes from an audio editing, background, music and audio editing background. He was kept playing around with some audio files, and as he was weaving together these files, he invented what became the tag line for Melanie. And you listed this show. So it's like that this is radio, elaborate. The little thing that they played the beginning. He sort of stumbled on that. And he said it was like the moment of clarity, for he said It was like an arrow had dropped down from the heavens and had said, Follow me, right. It was a sign that said, This is a direction you should go. It suddenly resonated with them and he said, Oh, OK, we found our first point of traction here. It's gonna be something like this. And he said, the whole process of finding their voice has been the Siris of following these little arrows that have dropped from this guy Wanted a time and just saying, Oh, I need to follow 1990 to follow this. Okay, now I need to follow this. It's not like he woke up one day and said, Oh, I have a clear vision for the next 10 years, right? It was this gradual, unfolding processes marriage, I think, even on the share that when they first got their big break filling in for fresh air for a week on NPR, we just kind of a big deal, you know, it's like prime times whether he said the hate meal that they got was palpable. You have ruined public radio. What do you do? It was so different. But over time they gain traction. They gained a loyal following, and now it's incredibly popular. Um, so it was this process of following those little signs. Another person who actually the neighbor money is awesome. Got him Lauren Long. He is a Children's book author, but he didn't start out that way and it illustrated. He started out actually as an illustrator from magazines doing work where he was kind of illustrating publications look Muslim, local publications. And then he started getting invitations from big Nationals from big national Publications to do these really cool illustrations for them. And his agent said, Hey, you know, we've got some some picture books that are some some young adult books that need cover art. Would you be interested in, And maybe reading some of these stories and experimenting with them and seeing if you can come up with some cover, are sure? Yeah, I'll try that. You know, I mean thinking, OK, what is going a little side thing, not thinking it was gonna be anything major, because you're still doing his, you know, work illustrating magazines and whatnot. And so he started getting these young adult novels and illustrating, and he thought I love story. He had never made the connection before that He loved story and taking these stories and turning them into something meaningful visual. He had never made that connection until he had this opportunity. So he started doing more and more of that. And pretty soon you start thinking, Well, I love stories so much maybe I could start creating and illustrating my own picture books, my own Children's picture books. And that led to him creating this whole series called Oh This, which has been wildly successful. He illustrated Madonna's Children's book when she can be illustrated President Obama's Children's book. You know of the eye saying, I think it's called when it came out a couple year, he was the illustrator on all of those those projects, and he's had this massive success. But he didn't set out to do that. It was paying attention to those little arrows along the way. And I think sometimes we come out of the gate thinking we need to know where our work is going, like if I don't know today, then you know, I don't know if I'm ever gonna do anything valuable or meaning for productive in my life. The truth is that all agree bodies of work are built as people act and then notice and then redirect and act and notice and redirect. And after and know this and redirects Steve Martin in his autobiography about his stand up days. He said I spent 18 years in stand up comedy, 10 of them learning my craft, four of them perfecting my craft and four years in wild success. He said that I set out for comedic genius, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plotting than heroic, right? He didn't set out to become a famous comedian. It happened to him. It was in the process of following the air literally in his case, following the arrows but following the arrows and figuring out OK, who am I? What do I have to bring to the market? That's unique. It was following those arrows that led him to where he landed. So what are some of those arrows that we can follow to get really tactical about this? What angers you? What angers you? Um and I don't mean by the way Oh, somebody cut me off in traffic. I am so angry about that. I'm gonna run them off the road. Not that kind of anger. I'm talking about compassionate anger. Where do you notice and injustice? Where do you know that somebody who's being shorted Where do you notice again? That were passion, Passion to suffer. Com passion to suffer with Where do you see something you're willing to suffer on behalf of in your work, right. That is a definite sign. What angers you? What fills you with higher when you see it? That could be fuel for your most productive work for your most valuable work, Curtis Martin. To go back to that example, he was angered by all of these kids who weren't gonna have a stable environment. And so football became the platform. But the compassionate anger that drove him was this injustice of these kids not having a place to call home Ray or a safe and stable environment. So that was what drove him. So what angers you? What makes you cry, or guys, what makes you feel like you have something in your eye, right, That's a little better for you. What moves you emotionally and you really valuable exercise to Dio is to sit down and look at the places in your life where you've gotten most emotional. So, for example, look at the movies you've watched where you've gotten emotional I did this a couple of years ago, and I noticed that the movies that it's I'm not really like a sports guy. I don't watch a lot of sports, but the movies that seem to move me emotionally the most were movies like Rudy right where you got this, like young guy, who's the underdog and he's not really supposed to be on the team. But somehow he works into the good graces of the organization. And then he or Hoosiers, you know where it's like the small team from nowhere, and they're not supposed to be in the big leagues. And yet here they are and they win the state championship or the pursuit of happiness. You know what you said right here in San Francisco, right about you know, this guy who's like down on his luck and nobody believes in him, and yet he's determined to sort of company that started looking at that. Those are all movies, and there were several more. Those are all movies where I got really emotional. It really they really moved me. The narratives that move us tell us something about who we are. So those narratives really movement started asking the question. Why, Why Why did they move me? And I realized those air all stories about underdogs, those air all stories about people who were looked down upon who felt like they weren't contributing, you know, their full value. But they knew that they could get their they knew, answered, realizing That's what I do in my work. I come alongside people who feel like they're being there in an organization that maybe feel constrictive to them or their creatives who want to do better work. And they know they can do better work. But they just need a platform and these tools. That's why you know the arms dealer for the creative revolution thing, right? That's kind of that's what drives me. So I have funnel that into my work. That's the productive passion for me in my work. It's following those arrows. That's what moves me emotionally. So what is that for you? Can you identify some of those points of traction? What have you mastered? What is obvious to you? The other people look at and like, well, that's that's really great and you say That's not great. That's obvious. That's just obvious, you know, getting Derek Sievers, who started a company called CD Baby, and he said that he wrote in the book called Any Anything You Want. He wrote in this book that you once upon a time you used to look at other people and say, Um well, I could never do what they do What they do is so brilliant. It's so amazing. All the stuff I'm doing, it's so obvious and what they're doing is so brilliant. And then one day somebody came to him and said, Hey, this thing you're doing is really brilliant He said, That's not brilliant. That's just obvious. And he was thought, Click. Wait a minute. What's obvious to me isn't obvious to everybody else. So one of those arrows that you can follow in finding your voice is what's really obvious to me, that other people come to me and look at me and say, Hey, how do you do that? But it's just obvious to me, right? That's an arrow that you can follow to funnel energy into your best work. What gives you hope? What is the thing that fills you with hope for a better A better tomorrow might be stretching it a bit rate. But the thing that you say I could do something about that I could create change there. And it's the thing that you hold on to against all odds that you could do that would create value in the world. We talked about this earlier. What terrifies you? What are you afraid of? A lot of times again to talk about Steve Press Field, he says resistance stands directly in the path that you need to go in. So what is it that terrifies you in your working? How can you use that as a key and arrow that you can follow to do better work? And then what changed you crave? What is the delta that you hope exists at the end of your life because of the work that you're doing so again, Those are just some points attractions and little arrows that you can follow to help you find your voice and to continue up that curve toward contribution instead of getting stagnant in the place of invitation back here from our folks online. When you are post those questions, Todd, I mean, Korin said injustice moves May. That was a very interesting one. Some people did talk about films, documentaries, etcetera, current again, went talked about home and the life showed the dream in Vegas, which I've not seen people taking risks every seconds, apparently. Yeah, but design Devery like this much. The connection moves me when people come together and meet where meet each other. It's where authentic and heart centered come together. Outstanding. That's great. Well, you know, it's funny, because again, this is sort of the touchy feely part of creative work, right? And we don't talk about this stuff because it doesn't feel very productive. But this is the deep stream that we have to tap into if we want to bring the best of who we are to what we do. And we don't want to end up in a place of regret. We want to look back on our life and say, What did I spend my life on? What did I spend My focus, My ass. That's my time. My energy on it wasn't something. It's reflective of who I am. So we have to be disciplined, indulgent, about tapping into these and following these arrows, taking this kind of strategic risks, there's ah great story about Jeff Bezos when he founded amazon dot com. You know, when he was a liberal in those when he was starting Amazon, he was actually in a pretty a pretty good role. He was working on Wall Street, you pretty good income. And he was singing about starting this company moving out West, and he was gonna forgo a huge bonus. In order to do that, he's gonna have to leave in the middle of the year. And he thought, All right, So is it worth leaving this bonus in order to go try to do this amazon dot com thing he created as only Jeff Bezos would create what he called the regret minimization framework. And the thing that he did is he said Okay, so which of these projecting myself out the age 80? Which of these two choices will I regret the most? While I regret walking away from $25,000 or will I regret not having tried to participate in this thing called the Internet that I think could be really big. And he decided that at the end of his life, he probably would regret mawr not having taken the chance on this opportunity rather than the 25 grand Amour ties over the next 50 years of his life he chose. He probably would regret the the the Internet thing Mawr. And if you ask people who are later in life, the things that they regret the most about their life are those opportunities. They didn't take advantage of the things they didn't say yes to the risks. They didn't take the intuitions in the hunches they didn't follow because of fear because of other people's opinions. All of those things. If we want to live a life of brilliant contribution, we have to be willing to go directly in the place that we're afraid off because we're afraid of what people will say you. But we have to be willing to take those risks if we want to be brilliantly contributed over the long term. The final deadly send guardedness and this is when we close ourselves off the others and we talked about this throughout the day. The importance of relationships is staying connected to others in our work. It's really easy. The more successful you get to become closed off the others and to not want information from others not want opinions of other people, the more successful we get in our life and in our work again with the Kirkegaard. Sorry. But, he said, By forming a party by melting into some group, we avoid not only conscience but martyrdom. That's why fear of others dominates this world. No one dares to be what genuine self everyone is hiding in some kind of togetherness. In other words, it's easy to just kind of melt together with the group than to ask for the genuine opinion of others and a lot of times out of shame. A lot of times it's because we don't want to know the truth. We don't want other people in our lives to tell us what they see. But we have to be willing to have those conversations like we talked about earlier the five conversations, the importance of having those conversations consistently to make sure that we're keeping everything transparent. That's one way of saying, Put the guns on the table right in the Old West, there was kind of an ethic in the Old West where whenever you walked into a saloon, the first thing they would say it's all right, Everybody guns on the table when you're playing poker, Put your guns on the table. Why would they put the guns on the table? They didn't want people getting shot under the table, right. Nobody wants to get shot under the table. They want to make sure that people weren't getting shot if they had a better hand like, Hey, I've got, you know, a full house while you're dead. They didn't want that. So they would say guns on the table. So everybody knows where the guns are. In organizations, there are people who are packing heat. There are people who carry guns, and they have the ability to shoot you under the table. If you have a bad idea, right, we need to be putting the guns on the table and having conversations that create a culture of permission. And also a culture of accountability is we talked about earlier. You need both of those things liberty and responsibility together because what liberty comes responsibility. So, to that end, we need mirrors in our life. We need other people who can reflect back to us. What? What they see. If we have established an ethic like we talked about earlier. You know, like I talked about a C h e. If we've established that, I think we need other people who can reflect back to us. Hey, you're not really living up to that right now. You said you want to be energizing. You spent that entire meeting sucking energy out of the room. What's going on with that? But we need other people in our life to speak truth to us. So do you have people in your life who have full and free permission to say the things to you that they need to say in order to keep you in the course of productive growth and contribution? And then we talked about circles about the importance of having other people in your world who can, um, keep you inspired, keep you fresh and help you stay engaged in work that matters to you. All right, so aimlessness, boredom, comfort, delusion. Ego fear Guardedness A B C D E f g again. Sorry. The seven deadly sins that lead to mediocrity. And, um, I think the deeper question that we have to ask and this is really kind of how I want to close this day is why. Why do this? Why build practices? Why worry about the elements of rhythm? Why worry about the seven forces, you know? And why not just go to work and shoot from the hip? And why even do this? Why is this important? And I was Smitty. This about more than just doing a little better. Work is about more than just feeling feeling better about your work. I think at the end of the day, this is really about something significantly greater, which is finding your sweet spot right. And your sweet spot is that intersection of passions, of skills and of experiences, passion, skills. Experience is the sweet spot lives right in the middle of that and the way that you get there. The way that you identify that sweet spot by the sweet spot on the Baseball Bat Golf Club is the part of the bat where if you hit it with the same amount of effort, it will go. The ball will go far greater distances. And if you have even marginally off the sweet spot with the same amount of effort, right, it's the sweet spot for a reason. If you hit it there. It's gonna go a lot farther. Same with a golf club. Well, I believe that you have a sweet spot and I have a sweet spot. We have a place where if we're operating in that sweet spot, were way more effective than if we're operating even marginally outside of that sweet spot. But we don't just come out of the womb knowing what that is. We have to be intentional. We have to observe, we have to act. We have to redirect. We have to be willing to venture into those uncomfortable places We've been talking about all day looking for looking at what we see and then acting on what we know this. That's how we find our sweet spot. Unfortunately, a lot of people were willing to just kind of settle in settling. They achieve a little bit of success and they say, Close enough, close enough. I love how one my favorite thinkers, Thomas Merton, talked about this, he said. There could be an intense egoism and following everyone else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruined saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they're in such a hurry to get it. They cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that they're very haste is a species of integrity. They want quick success, and they're in such a hurry to get it. They cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness upon them, they argue, they're very haste is a species of integrity. In other words, well, the pressure was on. The pressure was on me. I had to settle. I had to compromise. I had this satisfies. I had the settling that hadn't do go for the quick idea had to go for the quick fix. I had to go for the quick solution to the problem. They settle in and they justify it as a species of integrity. I had to do it because I was being paid to do this. But they compromise their very self in the process. They can't take time to be true to themselves. It doesn't happen haphazardly requires discipline and effort and focus in a building of practices, capacity building practices in our life since the beginning of our company, we've had the same cover. Bands don't change the world. And the cover band is a band that plays other people's music. And you know what? Cover bands fill clubs. They dio and cover bands make money. They do cover bands, actually make good money. But what happens when somebody comes along who plays a slightly better version of that cold place all or that U two song right there out of a job because they weren't contributing unique value, they were just imitating the value that somebody else had already created. They had never taken the time to find there. Voice. There was just being a government. The marketplace is full of cover bands full of imitators, full of people who are just trying to gain quick success. But they're in such a hurry together. They cannot take time to be true to themselves. This Thomas Merton said, So I want to challenge you. Don't be a cover man. Do what's necessary to build practices to explore those areas where you could be uniquely contributed to find your sweet spot that add the value that only you can ask. I want to leave you with one final and then jumped in the chat room and see what's going on there. A couple of years ago, I was in the meeting and the friend was leading the meeting and he asked Really out of the blue question. He said, What do you think? The most valuable land in the world and, uh, have a weird question was valuable in the world. What you mean? Okay, we'll play along. Right? So, uh, diamond mines in South Africa, right? Gold mines in South Africa, wrong oilfields in Middle East Made had, um, waterfront in San Francisco. So we're going through all these things and finally was like televisions tell us what's what what is. It was the most valuable, Either way, said the most valuable in the world. I believe friends is the graveyard because in the graveyard are buried all of the unlucky businesses, all of the unreconciled relationships, all of the unwritten novels, all of the things that people said. I'm gonna get around to that tomorrow. I'll do that tomorrow. I'll start on that tomorrow. And one day they're tomorrow's ran out, and they took all of that value to the grave with um it was buried with them in the grave because they didn't have the discipline in their life to act on it. Today, that contribution was lost to the world, forever buried with them, dead in the grave. It's a friend of mine, Brian likes to say. You know, the death rate is hovering right around 100%. It's the one thing we're all going to experience in our life. And so it provides a bookend. We will die at some point. The question is, will we spend our life building a body of work? We can look back on with pride. Well, we spend our focus, our asset, their time or energy in a way we could be proud of later. That's the question we all have to wrestle with. So that day I went home from that meeting and I wrote two words on an index card that put them on the wall of my office and put them in my notebooks. And they become the defining ethic really of my life for the last several years. And those two words would die empty because I want to know what the end of my life when I lay my head down for the last time, I can look back on my life and I won't have any regrets about where I spent my focus, my assets, my time, my energy. And by the way, I hope I die with more ambition, more ideas, more insights, more things I want to do. Then at any point my life, I hope I get better and better and better and better. Like a great wine, right? I hope I get better over time, but what I do so I die with more ambition than I had the day before. I hope so. Doesn't mean I'm gonna get everything done. What it does mean is I will die empty of regret about how I spent focus, assets, time, energy that I can point to a body of work and say yes, that represents me. That represents what I care about. I don't have any regrets about where I put my time, my energy, my focus, my assets and I can point to that body of work and say that represents me and only does it represent me? I can say I am proud of that of worry, and I'm going to my grave without any regrets. Aiken die empty, all right? And so I hope that all of you and I hope that all of you watching on the Web I hope you will do everything you can in your power to structure your life purposefully boat practices in your life To unleash the creative process toe watch out for the seven deadly sins. Aimlessness, boredom, comfort, delusion, ego, fear garden structure your life so that you're not growing stagnant Media's Oh, Chris. But you continue up the rugged mountain And someday in the far, far, distant future Hopefully for all of us, the farthest in future. When you lay your head down for the last time, you can look at your body of work the delta and you can say yes. That represents me. That represents what I care about. I am proud of this body of work and I can die empty of regret.