Die Empty

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything-all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failurethese things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important

Brilliant work is forged by those who consistently approach their days with urgency and diligence. Urgency means leveraging your finite resources (focus, assets, time, energy) in a meaningful and productive way. Diligence means sharpening your skills and conducting your work in a manner that you won't regret later

Your legacy is built one decision at a time.

Can I lay my head down tonight satisfied with the work I did today?

it's tempting to keep pushing the same levers over and over again. However, this approach is often a fast track to mediocrity.

The key to long-term success is a willingness to disrupt your own comfort for the sake of continued growth.

Mapping is fairly straightforward. It's planning, plotting your objectives, and setting priorities. It's the "work before the work" that helps you ensure you're spending your focus, time, and energy in the right places.

Making is actually doing the work. It's creating value of any kind, including executing tasks, making sales calls, designing, writing, engaging with your direct reports, and tackling your objectives.

Meshing, is often overlooked because it is rarely tied directly to results. You don't get paid for it, and it doesn't show up on anyone's organizational priority matrix.

Meshing involves all of the "work between the work"

Whether or not your body of work is recognized for its true value is beyond your control.

Every brilliant achievement begins with a hunch.

over time familiarity sets in and some of the aspects that once seemed new and exciting become predictable and mundane. The tasks we perform no longer stretch us, and some of them we can even do on autopilot. We've lost the thrill of the challenge.

John Lennon noted-life happens while you're busy making other plans.

with more at stake, you can also begin to experience a fear of choosing poorly.

You may exchange your aspirations for more practical ones, or ones that fit better with the expectations of others.

satisficing. It's the combination of the words "satisfy" and "sufficing," and means selecting an option that is sufficient to meet enough of our ongoing expectations.

When you satisfice, the work that you secretly aspire to do remains inside you. It clogs up the inner workings of your creative process, and causes you to stagnate. You may even begin to lose your compass and overall sense of motivation.

if you aren't attentive you could fall prey to the very same dynamics as Julie did-doing work that others admire, but that you know deep down isn't your best.

Mediocrity doesn't always mean underperforming-it's a sliding scale and a state of mind.

Mediocrity is a compromise of abilities and potential; a negotiation between the drive to excel and the biological urge to settle for the most comfortable option.

when you stop growing, you start dying.

It is action that creates impact, not knowledge alone.

You have to define the battles that are important to you, and align your resources to fight them.

It's important to note that aimlessness does not mean the lack of a drive to succeed.

Aimlessness means a general lack of cohesiveness within your day-to-day activities.

The cure for boredom is intentional and applied curiosity.

stoking the fires of your curiosity will help you identify important problems you may have previously overlooked. Problem finding is increasingly more critical than problem solving.

the love of comfort is frequently the enemy of greatness

When comfort becomes the goal of life, we cannibalize future progress for the sake of temporary stability.

The key to overcoming the ill effects of a love of comfort is a commitment to continual growth and skill development.

out of comfort or overconfidence, stops focusing on developing their skills.

To add the value you're capable of adding, you need to cultivate self-awareness. You must have an accurate sense of skills, your weaknesses, and your core drivers. Then, you need to orient your daily activity around that selfknowledge so that you are building on a solid foundation rather than on wishful thinking.

Selfdelusion is a fast track to a life of wasted potential.

For some people, the stigma of failure is simply unbearable.

To countermand ego, you must adopt a posture of adaptability. This means being in a state of continual learning and openness to correction.

Fear thrives on the unknown. Its paralyzing effects are often rooted more in imagination than reality. The key to countermanding fear is to instill a practice of strategic, intentional, and purposeful risk-taking in your life and work.

Great work happens most consistently in the context of community.

when you isolate yourself from other people, you cut yourself off from some of the most valuable opportunities to grow and collaborate.

The solution to guardedness is to build a system of checks into your life to help you scan for relational outages, and to remedy them before they become destructive.

In a commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, the author Ann Patchett exhorted graduates that when life doesn't go the way they expect, it doesn't necessarily mean that life has gone wrong.

finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.

Success in emptying yourself of your best work each day depends on your ability to define the right battles, and do the small but critical tasks that will help you progress toward your true objectives rather than just the ones that others expect you to strive for.

Identifying a through line around which to devote your focus, time, and energy is a journey, not a onetime task.

You will eventually come to regret the times when you compromised your contribution for the sake of acceptance by others.

Give yourself permission to not know things. Some people see ignorance as a point of failure, but successful people see it as acknowledgment of reality and an opportunity for growth.

it's asking questions-even silly-seeming ones that eventually leads to "aha!" moments.

Note things that you don't understand, and rather than shying away from them, turn them into questions to pursue.

you may want to keep a "commonplace book," a term I first heard from Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist. With origins in early modern Europe, a commonplace book was a collection of quotes, recipes, or other items centered around a theme, and designed to help its creator recall important information.

"Stimulus Queue," which is a list of all of the interesting books, films, or articles that I come across throughout my day

If assumptions weren't challenged, innovation would cease.

You get to the gold only if you're willing to dig through the rubble to find it.

source of block is a lack of clarity about the true objectives for the project.

executional block is the result of a simple lack of knowledge, which leads to stasis or paralysis.

Identify your knowledge gap and work to resolve it.

As Walt Disney once said, "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

I am biologically wired to stay within a certain zone of comfort and to avoid the seemingly unnecessary pain that comes from stretching beyond it.

As you take ground, it can become tempting to preserve and protect what you've already conquered rather than continue to press on into the unknown.

As far as work is com cerned, those experts who were happiest about their careers can point to a decision where they were tempted to say no, where staying the course was more comfortable and less risky, but they finally decided to give it a go"

Are you gravitating toward the safest option at the expense of growth?

When we say yes we hand over some measure of control, because we're venturing into the unknown.

You may be hesitant, but you have to enter and turn on the light to see what's there. Sometimes you immediately turn off the light and walk back out, but you never know if something truly valuable is waiting to be discovered if you never enter the room.

Growth is painful, messy, and very uncomfortable, and occurs only when we are willing to stretch ourselves in order to accept new challenges.

"I started to feel a little too comfortable, and part of me wanted to experience the uncertainty of what would happen next if I made a move. I wanted to focus more on possibility than on certainty."

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, developed something he called the "Regret Minimization Framework." Because he was planning to leave his job in the middle of the year, he was going to forfeit a healthy bonus, which he wasn't sure he wanted to do.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

Don't allow short-arc comfort to convince you to compromise your long-arc goals.

"Excellence isn't about working extra hard to do what you're told. It's about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing,"

The stretch goal is the objective, but step and sprint goals are the building blocks.

If you don't define the battles, you will be defined by them.

You cannot pursue greatness and comfort at the same time.

Make a list of people you admire and commit to reading at least four biographies per year as a way to explore their lives and glean traits you'd like to emulate in your own life.

He recommends setting an alarm to ring each hour throughout the workday as a prompt for evaluating the work you're doing at the moment. When the alarm sounds, Bregman says, he asks himself whether what he is doing is truly aligned with what he thinks he should be do ing, and whether he is being the kind of person he aspires to be.

"Know yourself first, then act on what you see."

The first steps, however, always involve a willingness to step naked into uncharted territory.

Something resonated, and he got the sense that all of his previous work experience was somehow pointing him to this opportunity.

"I was thirty-nine years old before I discovered that my real gift is storytelling, but I think that all of my experiences early in life helped me uncover that."

It's rarely a linear path, but instead is the culmination of a lifelong process of observation, course correction, and risk-taking that eventually leads to the recognition of a valuable contribution.

Imitating shows that were already popular would have been the safer route, but instead they chose to blaze a new trail by infusing unexpected audio effects, and interviews that featured quick cuts back and forth between the interviewer and the subject.

Despite the turmoil of all of this public experimentation, much of which Abumrad now calls "embarrassing," it was a necessary step that eventually enabled its founders to stumble down the path that has since put Radiolab in its own elite class.

It was the willingness to face the possibility of rejection that eventually led to a discovery of something unexpected and incredibly valuable.

You will never do your best work until you learn to hone and trust your instincts, then develop the courage to take small steps in the right direction.

Great work results when you stop doing only what you know you can do and instead begin pursuing what you believe you might be able to do with a little focused effort.

Don't worry that society tends to celebrate stories of overnight success even when there's no foundation to sustain it.

"It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these beautiful stones."

To be effective, we must resist the urge to censor the conversations-no matter how tense-that might lead to breakthrough ideas.

We may be slightly off course much of the time, but if we are intentional, we will eventually get to our destination.

You cannot do everything at once or you will do nothing well.

Brilliant work demands dedicated time on your calendar.

Make sure that you're nurturing your process. It's the only thing you can truly control, and it's the thing you'll always have regardless of where you end up.

The pain of the journey is what allows you to sustain your success on the other side.

Don't worry about being great in the eyes of others; focus on excelling at your work.

quitting should be a strategic choice, not one made out of fear or discomfort.

You should be moving toward something promising, not just running away from your lack of comfort.

there is always a delay between planting and harvesting.

"My definition of failure became 'not trying,' not the outcome."

fear of failure is one of the most frequent sources of paralysis.

the comfort of what's known wins out over the discomfort of uncertainty. When faced with potential failure, our survival instinct pushes us to default to that which is most certain.

"Never commit to anything that you can't give your all to. Hustle overcomes nearly every shortcoming."

"The Living Years" by Mike and the Mechanics. To this day, the final line of the chorus is etched into my mind: "It's too late when we die to admit we don't see eye to eye.”