‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferriss has the following for a quote:
Lifestyle design is based on massive action.
Once you find out what this thing is that you want to always be, or always be doing, every day, that thing that brings you joy and excitement and inner peace and gets you feeling comfortable in your own body at all times, once you get to this perfect flow, just sit on your ass.
Just kidding. Go be active in this state. Of course, you won’t have to remind yourself, since you’ll want to be engaging in your new found freedom, you’ll want to be creating and connecting. Until then, until you’ve reached this ideal lifestyle for you, you are… designing your lifestyle. And what better way to get there than to… rehearse? Act it out! ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne talks about essentially playing ‘Make Believe’, which in this context is a full-contact, no-holds-barred version of visualizing. So, start creating. Keep creating. Don’t stop believing creating. If you’re an engineer like me, and you enjoy abstract things like system diagrams, then there’s always gotta be an arrow pouring out of the block that is the system of you.
Outputting takes time and energy and focus. The opportunity cost is inputting. This is reading stuff, watching stuff, and generally ingesting stuff that is not directly related to outputting. Want more time to create? Spend less time watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on Netflix and reading the New York Times. (You come up with your own version, this one is for me.) Thus, I announce a media fast, for myself. No reading fun blogs or news, very little Facebooking, no Netflix. This’ll give me the chi to work on this blog, creating music, and otherwise working on my Sprint Backlog. Reduce input… increase output. Makes sense, right? (Yes, to ‘output’ feels clumsy to reuse as a verb, but I feel it is generic and abstract enough to cover whatever lifestyle we’re ultimately after; plus, it lends itself to an easy opposite to deal with, ‘input’, unlike to ‘create’. “Spend more time creating and less time… destroying.” Nope. Misses the point.)
What I’ve noticed via continued output, specifically sticking to the discipline of cranking out two posts a week for this blog, is that I find this is getting easier. I feel like my blogging skill is becoming refined. I’m finding my voice. When I started this, I worried I’d run out of things to say; however, through continually outputting, I’ve found I’m evolving this idea of ScrumOfOne. This activity feels better to me, which I take as a good sign.
Always Be Outputting – think of this as your personal version of Always Be Closing.