Category Archives: productivity

Shaping The Light

Think about a lightbulb. Soft, white, diffused light. It speeds in all directions, illuminating the room. Unfocused.

Now, place a mirrored cup around that same light, point the cup’s opening at a specific point, and now you have a spotlight. Focused in one direction.

Now, start to constrain that opening. Shape it as a cone. You have a beam. A laser. A beam powerful enough to burn a hole in any object it is directed at. Extreme focus.

Same energy. Just shaped in different ways. And, once shaped, its strength, intention, and purpose is changed.

This is you. This is your time. This is your attention. This is your energy.

The same energy that you currently spread amongst the many tasks you are now doing, can be focused to put a real, deep, burning, hole right in the center of the one thing you should be doing.

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Best Laid Plans

When I woke up this morning (as I write this), our furnace had stopped working again. It's been doing this intermittently recently, despite the fact that it is only a couple of years old. We will go to bed at night with it working just fine. But sometimes, at some point throughout the night, when our Nest Thermostat adjusts the temp down, it never comes back on. When this happens, I spend a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot the issue. I reset the Nest, toggle on/off the master power to the furnace, toggle on/off the little switch for the blower motor inside of it, and all combinations of steps thereof. Eventually, I give up. I call a furnace repairman and schedule a service call. I drag a space heater down from our unheated third floor office. Then, in all the cases this has happened before, just a few minutes later the furnace magically starts working again. Almost as if the threat of repair or replacement has scared it into compliance.

Just a few minutes ago I scheduled the service call again. So far, it is still not working.

Then, just as I was doing the furnace restart shuffle, I got a call from Beatrix's school. She ended up vomiting shortly after arriving. I, of course, went and got her right away and brought her back home. She has been nauseous and continuing vomit off and on since. She has a bit of a fever and it seems to be rising. Meaning a trip to the doctor is likely if this continues.

In the mean time, the furnace guy has shown up. Now I'm double tasking between him and her. Oh, also, I have appointments I'm trying to reschedule due to these sudden unexpected events. I'm trying to get some critical work done in every moment I can steal. Basically, any plan I had is now out the window. And, due to the rescheduling and shifting, it is likely to throw things off for days to come.

It is reasons like this that when one makes a commitment to posting to a website, or doing anything for that matter, daily, it is important to do all that one can to be prepared for such times. It is reasons like this that having posts written a few days in advance matters. Because, hey, guess what? I likely wont have time to get anything else done today. Possibly tomorrow either.

Yet, that is OK because, thanks to planning, I don't have to break the chain or choose between some life emergency or my blog (the blog will always lose). The best way to pay attention to what really matters when they matter most is to have a plan for how you are going to manage and reduce the attention given to the things that matter less.

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Your Dream Job

Your dream job will only exist if you get out there and work your nethers off and build it. No one can give it to you. You can’t be hired for it. There is no interview process and it won’t magically appear one day. A dream that is your dream can’t be taken or provided. If you want your dream job the only one that can will that into existence is you.

You may be saying, “Hey, my dream job is to drive a dump truck. Surely, I can learn how to drive one and get hired doing that for the rest of my life.”

Sure. This is true. But if you are being hired to drive someone else’s truck dumping someone else’s loads for someone else’s dump truck business then it is not your dream job. You just happen to be doing the job of your dreams for someone else. Your dream simply fit well into someone else’s bigger dream.

That’s OK. There is nothing wrong with that if it makes you happy and pays you well for the rest of your life. But, that is not your dream job. That is a dream job that you were lucky enough to be hired for but a dream that can be snatched away from you at any time. And any dream that can be taken did not belong to you — was not yours — in the first place.

Want to turn it into your dream job? Work hard, save money, buy your own dump truck, build out a model for sustaining customers that need loads hauled and dumped, and charge a price that will allow you to live comfortably and save a little extra for the rainy days, and figure out how to do that for the rest of your life or until it no longer fulfills you and makes you happy. That is the only way to make a dream your dream.

Only you can dream your dream. Only you can make your dream reality. Only then can it never be taken away. It can fail. It can falter. It can remain fantasy for ever. Or it could be the most successful in human history. But that’s all on you.

I’m a writer. Writing is how I make this world better, friendlier, stronger place. This is my dream job. If these words improved your day, please let me know by contributing here.