Brain Food – No. 570 – March 31, 2024
Not subscribed? Learn more and sign up.
Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives).
FS
“If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.”
Insights
1.
“Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.”
— Brianna Wiest
2.
“When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.”
— Geoff Colvin
3.
“I once believed, as most do, that if arguments are to be won, the opponent must be pummeled into submission and silenced. You can imagine how that idea played at home. If, in accordance with such a definition, I won an argument, I began to lose the relationship.”
— Gerry Spence
Tiny Thoughts
1.
What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.
Anyone can nourish their most important relationships when life is smooth, but the effort you put in during the rough patches matters more. When you’re motivated, eating healthy is easy, but your choices on your toughest days can undo your progress. Keeping your emotions in check is easy when things are going well, but managing your emotions when the world isn’t cooperating sets you apart.
Push through the grind and maintain the momentum.
2.
Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent.
3.
When you know what’s coming, prepare. When you don’t know what’s coming, position.
If you have a presentation on the calendar next week, you can rehearse. If you have an appointment, you can easily factor in travel time so you’re not late. If you know the bill is due next year, you can save the money this year.
When the future is uncertain, you can position. No one knows what’s going to happen with the economy, but you can position yourself against potential loss by spending less than you earn. You don’t know what’s going to happen to your health, but you can strengthen your position against disease by exercising. You don’t know when you might need your friends, but you can be in a good position to ask for their help by being the kind of friend they can count on.
Being well-positioned enables anyone to come out ahead no matter what obstacles the unknown may present.
(Share Tiny Thought one, two, or three, on X).
TKP Podcast
Dr. Julie Gurner on the difference between discipline and motivation:
“Oftentimes people get the advice that you have to rely on discipline. … one of the things that I find is that discipline requires a lot of push, right? “I’m very disciplined about my workout. I’m really going to push it.” Motivation is a pull. It is something that is internal that fuels you, that drives you. A number of the people that I tend to work with are very obsessed. You don’t have to push them to go to a meeting.
[…]
I think that oftentimes discipline is very useful and I think it’s useful in a few different cases. If you want to get back on a virtuous cycle, maybe you’ve fallen out of your exercise routine and so you need to get back into it and you really do have to push yourself that day to get back to the gym. … But I feel as though discipline is often really… I think it’s talked about because it feels tough to do. We’re doing the hard thing. We’re slogging through. But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged.”
— I keep chewing on this episode. It’s full of earned secrets from someone who works with top performers. Listen to the entire episode (Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript ) or dive right into the start of the excerpt above on YouTube.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.S. How many ways can you figure it out?
P.P.S. Join me in May to unlock your personal and professional leadership and position yourself for the next step. Only a few seats left.