☕️ saturday mornings #23
being on good terms, focus and creating a great life
Good morning all,
Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering, learning and exploring over the past few days.
Thanks for taking the time.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.”
— Honoré de Balzac
📰Article I’ve been pondering:
Warren Buffett: “Really Successful People Say No To Almost Everything”
This article is one of the best I’ve come across in a while on really capturing the idea and importance of focus, using Warren Buffett’s career as a case study.
The word “focus” gets thrown around a lot. Some people are led to believe that being focused means taking study drugs and working for 5 hours straight without distraction, staring intensely at your laptop screen.
Drugs aside, part of focus comes from the ability to engage in deep work - blocking out 3-4 hour time periods to work on a difficult but high impact task - but the forgotten part of focus is the ability to ruthlessly prioritize the few essential things and say no to everything else. (See saturday mornings #15 for a proven method for completing deep work).
In fact, Buffett has a 3-step process he uses to prioritize his life:
Write down your top 25 goals on a piece of paper.
Circle the top 5.
Take the 20 goals you did NOT circle and put them on an “avoid-at-all-cost” list.
Focus is concentrating your time and energy on the things that matter most: the 20% of actions that drive 80% of the results.
It means realizing that the more you divide your focus, the more each endeavor can suffer from your lack of attention. It’s consciously choosing if you want to go an inch out in a million directions or a mile in one direction.
Credit: Essentialism, by Greg McKeown
When you peel everything back, the underlying logic is simple: you’ll have a happier, more successful and more impactful life if you can invest 99% of your time and energy into the things you really care about and want to achieve.
However, choosing is difficult. It requires a trade off, a closing of doors, accepting that you can’t do everything. Making these types of sacrifices is uncomfortable. It’s a lot easier to continue trying to do everything for everyone.
But, through accepting your limitations, it then frees you up to comfortably say “no” and double down on the things that really matter.
Prioritization is a skill and, like any other skill, requires time and practice. It requires the ability to resist the urge to lunge at every opportunity because other people are doing it.
To prioritize you need a clear idea of what matters to you and what you want to achieve, in both the short and long-term, and then scheduling time to clearly lay out your priorities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Every time I’ve said yes to an opportunity that wasn’t aligned with my values, because I thought it’d look good on a resume or I’d create some façade of success, I’ve always regretted it and wished I had the time back. (And I’ve done it more times than I’d like to admit.)
💡Idea I’m exploring:
Defining a Great Life
A lot of my life, I thought about the idea of a “great life” as some vague and far-off destination. Something I could eventually get to through decades of developing myself, working tirelessly, and making a lot of money (perhaps acquiring a vacation home in Barcelona in the process).
But as I’ve read more, I believe it’s a lot simpler than that. I’ve come to realize that the real measure of a good life is “How happy and satisfied am I with life right now?”
The key to a great life is simply having a bunch of great days.
Individual days are what life is made of. Through stacking a bunch of great days on top of each other, the end result logically has to be a great life. Rather than some obscure concept, I can think about having a “great life” one day at a time.
And this realization was a huge paradigm shift from my original thinking of “if you suffer today and do a bunch of stuff you don’t enjoy you’ll eventually get to that great life you want … because of delayed gratification”.
However, suffering now doesn’t safeguard you from suffering later and the secret of delayed gratification is that it can always be further delayed.
The argument to have bad days today to have great days tomorrow makes even less sense when you consider the time value of each day. Tomorrow is never guaranteed for you or the people you love. All we have is the present.
The challenge then becomes: (i) finding the levers to pull on a day to day basis to have “great days” and (ii) making conscious decisions about lifestyle design.
The first point is specific to the person. For me, a great day starts with waking up from a good sleep, eating good food, some hard work, some laughs, connecting with a close friend or family member, reading a good book, some physical activity and writing down what made the day great and I’m pretty much there.
The second key is to then make decisions to have more of the “great” stuff in your life and less of the fluff. On a day to day basis I often ask myself: “Is this contributing to me having a better day - today - and if not, is there anybody in the world who has managed to design this activity out of their lives and still succeed beyond my level?”
“You can do so much in 10 minutes time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”
― Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of IKEA
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
And, as always, please give me feedback by replying to this email. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a restful weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas