“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether his is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

- Francois A. R. Chateaubriand

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“Who are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo.”

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You used to read the paper with breakfast at the kitchen table.
You used to make to-do lists with Sticky Notes.
You used to book appointments in your DayTimer.
You used to write letters on paper, sitting at your desk.
You used to send email from your computer.
You used to watch movies in the den.
You used to listen to music on the stereo.
You used to read paper-bound books.
You used to take pictures with your camera.
You used to manage projects with flow charts on the wall.
You used to check your stock portfolio just at month-end.
You used to watch the news on TV.
You used to get the weather from the radio.
You used to do research at the library.

Now, “all you do is play with your fucking phone.”

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1. Selective Ignorance

Technology is changing our expectations of writing and it’s a change for the better. The immediate access that the Internet, cell phones and fast food have conditioned us to expect is lowering our tolerance for the historically slow, painfully dry, academic approach to writing. I’m glad for the change.

When I was in school, every essay needed to have an introduction, expand on the first idea, then the second, then the third until slow, painful mental atrophy set in like quick-dry concrete. I suspect that tenure-laden professors still bore their students with this approach today.

When I buy a book, and find that stale approach inside its pages, I get angry. I don’t have the time for it. My stack of unread books is twice as tall as my stack of read books. I have a family, two businesses to run, a new child arriving in October and an obsessive, time-consuming love of rock climbing. I suspect that I am not alone. Readers today don’t have the time or the desire to read where you got your book idea, who inspired it and who you want to thank. Save it for the back-page index.

The new rules for writing are…

1. Introductions must be 500 words or less and add value to the reading experience; a drawn out synopsis of the book is indulgent and unnecessary. Introductions are as antiquated as the roman numerals that mark their pages. If the design firm you hired to pretty up the cover isn’t good enough to communicate the idea in a glance, find another designer.
2. Acknowledgments are important to the writer and the people they thank, but no one else cares. Please place them after the index just before your bio.
3. Layout the meat-n-potatoes, bullet-point, 45-minute speech version of the book in the first chapter. Someone should be able to read chapter 1 and know what is in the rest of the book. It will increase the readers desire to continue.
4. Don’t hide behind feel good case studies and anecdotal statistics, especially if it’s a how-to book. Don’t hide your consulting business behind a vague theory.  Step-by-step implementation is what your readers are after. Have the confidence in your material to know that if you lay it all out there, people will want to hire you to implement it because of it’s value, complexity, and the demands on their time to implement it that they don’t want to commit to.
5. Lastly, and most important, make the book as short as possible. Don’t follow Malcolm Gladwell’s example by putting in enough filler to make the book 5″ x 7″ x 1″. His publisher is wrong. Do it right, do it well. Don’t waste words.

Less is more. That reality is old, permanent and needs no introduction. Hopefully your book will be as strong.

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1. Why Consultants Suck
2. Why She Hates Your Smartphone

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

— Alison Gopnik, talking about her book, The Philosophical Baby

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1. From 5.12 to 5.14

Last July, I justifiably blasted a book called Why Work Sucks & What to Do About It. The authors, trying to sell more of their consulting services, gave a shiny-happy, absent-of-detail description of what it’s like to work in a Results-Only Work Environment. Since that time, and with no help from the aforementioned book, we at our office have successfully adopted a work environment free of a defined schedule and by being entirely results-focused.

But today’s the day that I give it a pragmatic, grown-up name. I call it “Working on the F.A.R.M.”

“Why ‘working on the F.A.R.M.’?” Because a successful farm is practical. Because a successful farm focuses on the farm’s needs, and then indirectly, all the farmers benefit. If the farm does well, the farmers do well. If the animals are fed and the crops are seeded, fertilized and watered, then there’s no need for make-work projects. And if the work is done, then it’s fine to do other things. Work first, play later.

Most importantly, a successful farm is based on nurturing natural principles. You can’t harvest (i.e. benefit) if you miss the weather window to get the seed in the ground. You can’t harvest if you don’t fertilize the seeds. Your crop will be ruined if you don’t harvest it at the right time. You reap what you sow; you can’t harvest lentils if you plant wheat.

“Working on the F.A.R.M.” encompasses five elements, “Working” being the first… The remaining four are:

• Freedom of choice;
• Accountability for choices;
• Results as the only measuring stick; and enjoying the
• Motivation that comes from focusing on freedom, accountability and results.

Freedom of Choice

Everyone at our company decides when they come to work and when they go home. They decide what to work on and when to work on it. They decide when they’re accessible to their co-workers. If they’re going on vacation, they decide to either be accessible or have all the necessary information available for others to successfully work in their absence.

Accountability for Choices

Every choice has a consequence. So all choices should be made in light of those consequences. In our work environment, are my choices in line with the owners of the company? Am I working on prescribed priorities? Am I meeting deadlines and budgets? If I’m falling behind, am I compensating in order to catch up? If not, it’s up to me to make it happen.

Results as the Only Measuring Stick

To focus on a number of hours worked or on face-time or on playing office politics are all a waste of time. Such people are the first to go in an economic downturn. Just like on the farm, it doesn’t matter what I intended — God’s not gonna bail me out because I really wanted to plant those seeds… — it only matters what I accomplished. Successful farms only pay for results; they don’t pay for effort.

Motivation

The reality is that “working on the F.A.R.M.” is a more honest acknowledgement of real life. In the 21st century, business and personal lives are a fluid combination; trying to separate them is an outdated, ineffective and unproductive idea. Work, play and family can’t be neatly canned into specific time slots. We all need focused time for each area, but most of our lives are spent blending from one into the other. Ignoring that reality short-changes all of them.

For many people, their business lives started blending into their home lives decades ago. As long as the work is still getting done superbly well, why shouldn’t our personal lives be allowed to blend into work?

The result that comes from acknowledging the business-personal reality is not a reduction in productivity, but an increase in it. Suddenly people are motivated to do things faster. Work becomes effective. Most importantly, work becomes fun.

Working on the F.A.R.M.

It’s worked for 10,000 years. Why wouldn’t it work now?

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1. How Many Hours Should I Work?

“Still, a man hears what he wants to hear,
And disregards the rest.”

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After reading The Suck Factor, several friends asked me if I was depressed. No. Far from it.

Getting discouraged, probably even depressed, comes from under-estimating the effort required to make something happen. When the reality is harder than the fantasy, people often get discouraged. If you think it’ll be damn hard, then when it is, it ain’t. The battle may even become fun.

A lot of unrealistic expectations in the general public come from two main sources: our fast-food, zero-inconvenience, immediate-gratification commercial systems and, even more so, those stomach-turning “you can do it” books and tapes. Let me help:

1. You can do it.
2. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
3. Two bodies attract one another in direct proportion to their mass. (In space; not at the bar.)

Believe all those? Good. Now let’s move on.

Worthwhile pursuits aren’t rosy or easy, nor should they be, and that’s what makes life f&^%ing awesome. Far more motivating than anything Tony Robbins has ever delivered to the world is a little movie called Fight Club. By far one of the most-inspiring movies in a LONG time. “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” Translation: You’re going to have to bust ass to get it done, and not every day is gonna be shiny, happy and easy, nor should it be. What could be more inspiring than that?

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If there were only one thing that were crucial to success, I think it would be this: the devout acceptance that everything sucks. You cannot escape The Suck Factor.

Whether you’re a professional athlete, actor, writer, banker, lawyer, teacher, photographer, guide, trucker, you can be guaranteed of two things: 1) You will always have days that suck; and 2) The sucking is a test — a threshold guardian — that, if passed, will deliver you to a higher state of functioning. Of course, if you quit, well, then the Suck Factor won.

I’ve had several discussions lately along the lines of, “I’m really not psyched with where I am right now. What do you think?” While wanting something better is always worthwhile and a great driver of continuous improvement, I don’t think true progress can happen over the long-term without the happy resignation that nothing is perfect and it takes a f&^% load of work to make it fantastic.

When I was between 18 and 25, I think I was a pretty normal person, searching for “the perfect [insert noun here].” However, now 34, I’ve accepted that pretty much anything can be made fantastic so long as I accept the Suck Factor.

Sure, the Suck Factor of working in a coal mine in Siberia is pretty high. So would being famous enough to make the cover of People, not to mention gun-in-the-mouth embarrassing. The Suck Factor of being a novelist with ten bestsellers, I guess, would be pretty low, but that fantasy ignores the truck load of work it took to write the first two. The trick is to either find something with a tolerable Suck Factor, or to accept a higher Suck Factor now, for a lower one later. Most importantly, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the Suck Factor can be escaped.

Toward that end, I think there are four important ideas that can help:

1. Be Prepared to Endure. Positions in life with apparently low Suck Factors will be in high demand. That means competition will be fierce. Thus, the initial Suck Factor will be HIGHER than average — writing and sweating and crying before any of those books become bestsellers, for example. “You are NOT a beautiful and unique snowflake,” so accept the fact that you’re going to have to work your ass off.
2. Momentum is Your Greatest Ally. Need to make a change? Do NOT hit the brakes and start pedaling in the opposite direction. That wastes all of the potential energy you had while heading the wrong way. Instead, pedal harder and SPEED UP. Wait for the exit, and then accelerate into it. 
3. Ideas are Nothing Without Execution. Just like hitting the brakes kills momentum, waiting for direction before pedaling only leaves you camped at the intersection while other cyclists yell at you for blocking traffic. START PEDALING. The direction, at first, is irrelevant.
4. Don’t Trust the Psych. Passion is for beginners; inspiration is for amateurs. Kill the fantasy. Fairy tales are for kids. That initial excitement is from novelty, not this-is-for-me truth. Passion is feverish and free; love is calm and hard-earned.

It takes, on average, almost ten years of hard beatings to get your black belt in Brazilian Jujitsu. That is a rather high Suck Factor in my opinion. But can you imagine the joy of learning and knowing something so intimately? Do BJJ students, intent on their black belt, run and skip onto the mat every day? I think not. The Suck Factor is part of the deal.

A real black belt in anything will be just as difficult. If it’s worthwhile, it’ll be the hardest thing you ever do. The Suck Factor will loom, perhaps daily. Accept it.

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1. Positive Pessimism

…is thinking that principles of success are pursuit-specifc.

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