When you’re losing your hair, many years from now, when you’re eighty-four, what will make you proud?
You can expect the easy life, and end up with precious little of either, or you can embark on a journey of service and adventure. When you’ve arrived at the end of your journey, which of the two are you gonna be more proud of?
ROOTS
Service and adventure consist of finding places where it’s not working and then fix the root cause so that it won’t happen again, as opposed to fix the symptom only.
According to Peter Drucker “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all”. Avoiding the useless is a first step, but you can do better by finding places where something’s going wrong and asking how and why, then fix the root cause for it to never happen again.
When you make it a habit of not just fixing the symptom but of fixing the root cause instead, that, my friend, is the secret to your operational and financial success.
If you can get your work to where you enjoy half of it, that’s outstanding because only a few word-users ever achieve it.
OVERHEAD
Everything comes with overhead — with pieces that you don’t like. You could be a supreme court justice university professor and still dislike parts of your work. Every job coming with pieces you don’t like is just part of it, nothing you can do about it. Don’t even think resent or minimize those pieces of your work.
There’s this false perception that senior executives are under the most stress, but the opposite is true. The senior executives are under the least stress because when you’re the chief you decide, you execute. Why don’t you delegate stress? It’s your decision. Any chief’s job is to figure out their journey so they can minimize the things they dislike and delegate them to other people. Near as I can tell, everybody is the CEO of their journey.
CONTROL
Word-users don’t dislike hard work, what word-users dislike is being out of control. Like when we can’t control our environment. When this happens, word-users get overscheduled.
I don’t enjoy being overscheduled. I want some time to be able to think, free myself, ride my bike, jog in my favorite forest, laugh with my family and friends.
Energy we do manage, but time is given to us. Nothing has more time than anything else, and when you become successful, one of the things you start is getting overscheduled — this event to agree to and attend, and maybe last night you wanted to be with your family instead. Circum dances and things happen. It’s up to you to ensure it’s not a waste of time. I like freedom of movement rather than having every minute of every day scheduled.
GIFT
A young word-user should find something they’re passionate about doing. You’re never gonna be great at anything if you don’t love your work.
When I was young, I made this mistake too — got fixed on my gifts. Everybody has gifts. Maybe you’re extremely beautiful, good at mathematics, or other things you’re extremely good at too. Because these are gifts, they can confuse you. Because they’re not the things that determine your journey.
YOU DON’T MAKE GIFTS, YOU MAKE DECISIONS
It’s your decisions that determine your journey, not your gifts. You can be proud of your gifts, happy, and celebrate them. But they were given to you, you didn’t earn them. You can only be proud of the things you earn.
As I get older, I realise I’m not proud of my gifts. School was easy. I got A’s, was good at math, and the rest of it, and I thought that’s who I was. But it’s not true. Those are the things that are gifts. What was hard for me was deciding to use my gifts in certain ways, to challenge myself to doing things that I didn’t think I could do, to put myself in uncomfortable situations.
I would say to a young person that you can decide a life of ease and comfort, or you can decide a life of service and adventure. Which of the two will you be (more) proud of when you’re losing your hair, many years from now, when you’re eighty-four?
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