Rob's Notes 2: My personal goal: "No Excuses"
Hello friends!
I’ve heard people say that when they look back on their lives, they want to be able to say that they lived without regrets. Even though no sufficiently broad and abstract goal is consistently attainable, I really like the idea of having this *type* of goal.
Of course there are always going to be regrets. Fairly recently I realized that were I to adopt a broad life goal like this, then it would be: no excuses. "No ifs, ands, or buts”; no excuses, no conditions, no reservations. Even though I find positive “towards”-type objectives or goals preferable to calling out things to be avoided, I still like “no excuses”.
Regret looks at a past decision point and it often implies a longing to return to that point, perhaps to take a different path. There’s a sense of a mistake made, bad luck endured or both. It’s passive and sad about a past that has passed. On the other hand, when I avoid making excuses and instead take responsibility, I feel active and that I have agency. I own my decisions and I own the pain and joy those decisions brought and will bring.
My dad passed away 9 years ago this month. His oft-repeated advice to me was “anything worth doing, is worth doing well.” It seems that many of the best things in life are hard. Easy to start, hard to finish; or tough to start and impossible to finish - projects that are worth doing well, are usually also really hard. But...
Nobody cares that something is hard. Does using that word imply that you want to get a discount on your execution thereof? “It’s difficult” is just an excuse, it seems. So own the hard.
Ben Horowitz in his excellent book said: “Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic.”
As Seth Godin put it recently: “You don’t get to say to the coach “show me how to run a marathon without getting tired”. No one can run a marathon without getting tired. So instead you say to the coach: Show me where to put the tired. Show me how to do this while I’m still tired, not to make the tired go away.”
A meta "Hard Thing" is to grasp that much of the world will never understand or appreciate what you suspect to be some of your and your team’s biggest achievements. Thus realize: if you you are great at putting out small fires before they become big ones, you may not be rewarded or recognized for it. We humans are terrible at valuing crises averted or disasters prevented.
When asked what their best ever saves were, some of soccer history’s greatest goalkeepers explained that some of these tremendous saves didn’t even involve them touching the ball! The right positioning by the goalkeeper can make an attacker take a different shot, or bring a defender back into play. Of course, the aforementioned keepers had to make their share of flashy saves for us to recognize them as “great” and bother asking them about the saves we didn’t notice…
Seth Godin again: “Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.”
I’ve made plenty of mistakes and I’ll make many more. But if you ever hear me making excuses about those mistakes (or droning on about how hard things were), please tell me!
Rob