Do Less, But Better

read time: 3 minutes don’t feel like reading? listen to the audio version here The best productivity hack I’ve ever stumbled on isn’t a To-Do List. It’s a To-Don’t-Do List. A man asked his gardener: “How do you make your plants grow so beautifully?” The gardener replied: “I don’t force them to grow. I simply remove that which stops them.” Michelangelo said something similar… When asked how he carved the statue of David, he said: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is NOT David.”…

read time: 7 minutes listen to the audio version here (if ya don’t feel like reading) Nine years ago I found myself up a creek, without a paddle, and in a boat I had no clue how to pilot. I blame my buddy Ryan. A couple months before, he’d asked me to help him scale his little manufacturing business that produced polyurethane rock climbing holds and imported hardware from China. Thing is… I’d been a professional rock climber in a past life, so I knew a thing or two about rock climbing holds……

I think I am officially “too old for this shit”. Last week I turned 42. And despite all my best efforts, after all these years circling the sun, I still can’t grow a decent beard. To add salt to injury, the hair I can’t grow on my face seems to be having no problem sprouting in my ears and on my back. Fuck me… Life is hard. And here’s the real kick in the knee: It only ever gets harder. With every year that passes my body seems to collect a new nagging injury like it’s on a Pokemon hunt to…

There is a place that holds more wealth, more brilliance, more potential than all the bank vaults, libraries, and universities on the planet. It’s the cemetery. Every grave is a repository of unwritten books, unlaunched businesses, unspoken words, and unexplored lives. There are two people in each grave, though only one body…The person they were and the person they could’ve been. The sad truth is that the one was certainly buried years before the other. See, more dreams have died than have…

Thinking ain’t easy. Which is why most people don’t actually do it. And yet your decisive advantage as a human over every other human is your ability to think. The quality, depth, and quantity of your thoughts is the single greatest predictor of what your life becomes. Not your intelligence. Not your network. Not your circumstances. Your thinking. The problem is nobody ever taught us how to think. Sure, we had classes that required thinking, but I don’t know about you, but nobody ever sat me…

Hey Legend, There is a room in your mind you never clean. You walk past it every morning. You know it’s there. You can feel the weight of it. From that room there’s a sound… barely audible. A low, constant hum. You hear it behind every conversation, every meeting, every quiet moment where your brain should be resting but isn’t… Because that door is always left slightly open. And inside there’s a pile of things that keeps you from entering that room. Not of things you’ve done wrong. Not of…