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- How you do anything is how you do everything.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
How You Do Anything
is
How You Do Everything
How do you behave or act when nobody is looking?
Answering this question says a lot about who you are and where you are going.
By paying attention to how we do even the smallest things, we can gain insight into ourselves and become more mindful and intentional in our actions. We can see the standards of care and discipline in our work and can even see the enemy that is average creeping into our lives.
Deep down we know that it is not what we have achieved, but who we have become that matters in the journey of life. To change who you become, you must raise your standards and expectations for yourself.
Elevated standards create elevated results.
You notice this whenever you work with an outlier. The bar they set for themselves, and others is beyond what most people can imagine. You too can be an outlier if you so desire. Change what you will tolerate in yourself and how you operate to elevate your own results.
Change the work on which you work.
Standards apply not just to the quality of work you produce, but the opportunities or projects that you work on. If you accept substandard work from yourself, you'll only get average work from others. If you say yes to average projects, you'll have no time for exceptional ones. And by working on average projects that do not require you to rise to a new standard for yourself and others, you will be seen as an average producer.
Raise the bar on both what you work on as well as how you work to raise the results in your life.
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”
-Mark Twain
Who Needs Book Suggestions?
I’ve taken to reading as much as I can which includes a diet of newsletters, curated news from newsletters, other magazines, and sources of interest.
On books, I've been especially focused because you can take advantage of a lifetime of lessons in one book — this is powerful leverage for your own life. When you read 100s of books you are capturing the lessons of 100s of lifetimes.
At my current rate (though I’m trying to increase the rate), I read about 30-40 books in various ways (eBook, audiobook, actual book) a year. So, extrapolating out 40 years, I will only have time to read about 1200 more books. The take home lesson here for all of us is:
QUALITY MATTERS!!!
When there are only so many books you can read it is important to be selective aka raising the standards. To that end, I’m moving toward more foundational books, biographies, science, and high-end literature (though it is very rare for me to read fiction).
I’m trying to increase the quality of my inputs to increase the quality of my outputs.
To catalog my reading as well as the suggestions I receive from others I have a note in my phone where I track both. Once a year I publish the reading list I got through as a jumping off point for suggestions for others.
So, if you want to see which books I have recently read, please check out my blog posts where I document the prior two years of books I read here:
Post from 2022: Readers are Leaders
Post from 2023: Increase Your Quality Inputs
Good Articles Worth Sharing
Deskilling on the Job. This article discusses how automation and augmentation are creating situations of deskilling on the job . . . this is highly related to our email subject today: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
The Biggest Way to Improve Your Life. The science behind why sleep matters more than we first thought. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HEALTH-SLEEP/mopakyjmnpa/
Subtract. Good article that reiterates what we all know: subtraction and not addition is the key to life. I said the same of entrepreneurship. Learn more here.
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