Brain Food – No. 568 – March 17, 2024
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Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives).
FS
“Rather than focus on what will change, focus on what stays the same.”
— Why Focusing on What Won’t Change is Key to Long-Term Growth
Insights
1.
“If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, and they spread themselves out. … Greatness isn’t easy to achieve. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices. It requires your loved ones to sacrifice, too. So you have to have an understanding circle of family and friends. People don’t always understand just how much effort from how many people goes into one person chasing a dream to be great. There’s a fine balance between obsessing about your craft and being there for your family. It’s akin to walking a tightrope. Your legs are shaky, and you’re trying to find your center. Whenever you lean too far in one direction, you correct your course and end up over leaning in the other direction. So you correct by leaning the other way again. That’s the dance. You can’t achieve greatness by walking a straight line.”
— Kobe Bryant
2.
“Nearly all the great fortunes acquired by entrepreneurs arose because they had nothing to lose. Nobody had bothered to tell them that such a thing could not be done or would be likely to fail. Or if they had been told, then they weren’t listening. They were too busy proving those around them wrong.”
— Felix Dennis
3.
“I love metaphors, and for me hustling is the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggles: the struggle to survive and resist, the struggle to win and to make sense of it all.”
— Jay Z
Tiny Thoughts
1.
“It’s easier to get a smart person to do something hard than to get them to do something easy that doesn’t matter.”
2.
“When you know what needs to be done, inaction increases stress. You feel a lot less stress when you do the things within your control that move you closer to your objective. Action reduces stress.”
3.
“A lack of routine causes more problems than poor choices. Routines turn desired behavior into default behavior.”
(Share Tiny Thought one, two, or three, on X).
Positioning
In my conversation with Todd Herman, we talked about approaching everything with a long-term mindset:
“When you think long term, it prevents you from doing a lot of short-term behaviors naturally that either lead you astray, take you off the path of long-term thinking, or otherwise get in the way. If I have a problem with a co-worker, how I address it will be very different if I think I’m going to have a relationship with them for 10 years versus if I think they’re only going to be here for a few months. And if I treat them like it’s a transaction, they will behave like it’s a transaction. And then when they behave like it’s a transaction, it will reinforce my view that they’re not committed, that it’s just a job to them—it’s not a career—and it will change how I interact with them in the future. So this little thing can make a huge difference in how you treat other people, but [also in] how it spirals beyond that moment into something much larger.”
— The entire conversation contains rich insights you can use in work and life. Listen (Apple Podcasts | Spotify | FS) or go directly to the start of the excerpt above.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.S. Oddly fascinating.
P.P.S. This matcha is the best I’ve had outside of Japan.