steadily.org

You are more than what you eat.  You’re what you read.  You’re the music you listen to.  You are what you watch.

Every thing that you experience, big or small, becomes a drop in the pool of all your past experiences.

The sum of these past experiences is the lens through which you interpret the world around you.  It’s the lens through which you view your own life, and how you interpret the world is a huge influence on the actions you take as a person.  Exactly how much your experiences influence your actions is one of the oldest debates in psychology today.

If the sum of past experiences is really that big an influence on your view of life, wouldn't it make sense to do everything in your power to experience only the best?

This is especially important if you do anything creative, because anything you make in your medium will be influenced by everything in that medium that you've been exposed to.

When I first started making music I was deliberately trying to imitate some of the few musical groups and styles that I was into at the time.

What's interesting is that, in hindsight, some of the music I was into at the time wasn't actually all that great.  I mean, it was fine, but there was a lot of better material out there that I could have exposed myself to and then patterned my work after.

The tricky part is that when you’re starting out, you often don’t have enough experience to know what good material actually is, let alone be able to find.

You can still learn a lot of the basics from the “just ok” stuff, but it can only get you so far.  You may also be picking up bad habits that you'll have to unlearn later.  Emulating mediocrity can never get you to anything better, but sometimes it’s part of the journey to learn what quality actually is.

If you're not able to expose yourself to the best, you can make up for it by having some variety.  Every genre has something positive to offer, it might just takes time to learn to appreciate it because it may not initially be something that you actually like.  Whether its hip hop, country, rock, indie or pop, every form of music can teach something different.  The more variety you expose yourself to, the more you have to draw from later.

Even though I talk about music a lot because it’s what I know, I imagine the same ideas would apply to any medium.  

If you want to make food, then eat really good food!  From all countries and cultures!

If you want to write, then read as much as you can!  Good books, good magazines, news articles, whatever you can get your hands on.

The most practical and interesting application of this idea however, is when you apply it to yourself as a person.

You can create a better version of yourself, if you want, by being around with people who are better than you, or as different from you as possible.

Physiologically, if you what you eat, then as a person, you are who you spend time with.

Why not spend time with those that you can learn the most from?  

Everybody is better than you at something.  Everybody has something they can teach you.  Especially if they’re nothing like you.

It’s usually worth finding out what that something is.

I was talking to a family friend at dim sum recently.  We were talking about her commute and she said something that got me thinking.

As an intern studying architecture, she worked long gruelling hours, presumably making scale models of buildings and gluing tiny trees onto miniature green.  Often ending late at night, she would take a long bus rides home.  The bus ride itself was usually uneventful, but what’s interesting was how she felt.

It wasn’t just that she’d be grumpy because of her long day and the commute.  It was her feelings towards about the other people on the bus.  

Besides the odd crazy person, at that hour the only other type passengers on the bus are those that were coming home after a night out on the town.  They were loud, perhaps a little drunk, but above all their most distinguishing characteristic was that they were happy.

That’s where it gets interesting, because my friend's instinctive emotional reaction was to wish that they would be as cranky as she was.

She was at a low emotional state, and she wanted everybody else to be brought down to the same state she was in.

Now I know that people feel this way, but i was never able to understand it.  Why would anybody want to bring down everybody else around them?  Sure, it might give you some company, but you’re still feeling bad.  And everybody else now feels worse than they did before.  

Nobody wins.  What’s the point?  

There has to be another way.

For me, my commute is a lot faster.  I walk to work from my condo, and the set of condos I live in happens to have a lot of dogs.  I happen to  like dogs.  Whenever I’m feeling down after work, on my walk home I’m bound to run into a small dog out for a stroll.  When I do, I make a point of looking at their stupid little dog faces because they tend to cheer me up.  

Maybe I happen to be around things that I like, or maybe I’m easily amused and tend to like a lot of things.  Or maybe I make a point to see things that I like no matter where I am or how I feel.  

Regardless.  Dogs cheer me up, they happen to be around, so i like to keep an eye out for them because I like being cheered up.

You don’t have to use your mood to influence the temperament of those around you.  You can choose to have your mood be influenced by your surroundings as well.  And the choice you make could actually benefit everybody around you.  

When you feel bad, and people around you feel good, you can choose to let their mood lift you up.

When you feel good, you can choose to let it show, and have it potentially lift up the people around you.

Absorb the energy of what’s around you, or use your own energy to influence your surroundings.  

Which one will you choose?

There isn’t much that’s simpler or more powerful than a habit.  

Save and invest a few dollars every day, compound it annually, and you can end up with a million by retirement.  Smoke a cigarette every day, compound it annually, and you can end up with lung cancer instead.

For better or worse, small actions done regularly lead to big changes. 

The thing about habits is that the good ones are hard to maintain, and the bad ones are hard to break.  However, I do believe there are certain times in your life where this will be easier to accomplish.

Habits, once set, are part of your regular day-to-day grind.  One way to break unwanted habits is to first find a way to break that overall routine.  When you ramp your routine back up and “get back in the swing of things”, you’re pretty much starting again fresh.  The new routine doesn’t have to be the same as the old one.  

You don’t have to start the bad habits back up again.  You can start new good ones instead.

Oddly enough, our schedule-driven lives actually offer two built-in mechanisms to disrupt these routines completely.

They’re something you’re very familiar with.  You probably get them every year.

It’s the time you take off for vacations and illness.  

Vacation time and illness time are the two things that can disrupt and break your regular routine, because both of them usually last long enough and are different enough from your regular life to have an impact.

On vacation, you’re going to be doing something with a totally different schedule to whatever you would have been doing in your normal life.  Probably travel.  It’s almost like living a completely different life for a limited time.  

When you’re sick, even though you’re not physically going anywhere your regular daily activities have been replaced by rest and recovery.  Your routine is non-existent.  Instead of spending 8+ hours in the office, you’re spending 24 hours in bed.  Like a vacation, you’re living a completely different life temporarily, except this one happens to be terrible.

Now with your routine is broken, you can start a new one fresh.

You may not know this about me, but I do enjoy the odd cigar.  I also have a penchant for activities that involve sipping and rye.  When living alone without restriction, in the summer, with a patio, walking distance from an LCBO, it’s quite easy to indulge in the things you enjoy that might not be that great for you.  It’s quite easy for your indulgences to occur a bit more frequently than you were expecting.  Nothing actually bad or dangerous, mind you, just a bit more regularly than you’d like.

And then I got sick.

When you’re sick, whiskey and cigarillos are the last two activities you want to partake in.  

Since I’ve gotten better, I’ve simply made a point of not getting around to starting those back up again.  

Problem solved.

You can even apply this strategy to good habits that you’ve been wanting to start.  After being away for a few weeks in Hong Kong, I had almost forgotten how to live my "normal" life after coming back in January.  It was almost like starting over.  I figured if I was starting over, I could start it over any way I wanted to.  If i had to get back in the habit of waking up in the morning and going to work again i might as well get in the habit of doing a couple other things as well.

At the start of 2013 right after that vacation, I had a regular cleaning schedule, a daily workout routine and some eating limitations.  Now that it’s the start of Fall, I’m living proof that starting some habits is much easier than keeping them.

The only exercise I now get is my walk to work, and the condo is on average only marginally cleaner than it was before.  But the dishes are now always done.   And I kicked my nightly ice cream habit.  Some things do stick.  Change is possible.

Still, habits are a tricky thing.  It’s hard to stop the bad ones, and hard to start the good ones.  Hopefully this technique makes it a little bit easier.

Now vacations can be even better for you, and maybe getting an illness isn’t such a bad thing anymore.

The next time you want to change up your habits and break your routine, take a trip somewhere.

Or you could just get sick.


Tiny Action: Next time you take a trip or get an illness, when it’s over take it as an opportunity to start a good habit or break a bad one.

I've started playing golf recently.  Rarely can one find an activity that lets you alternate between deep satisfaction and intense frustration as quickly and easily as golf.  If you step back a little though, the game of golf conceptually is actually quite fascinating.

Think about it.  You are trying to get a tiny ball into a tiny hole that is hundreds and hundreds of feet away. 

Using a few clubs.  In 3-5 tries.  

That's crazy.

What's interesting is that no matter how far or close you are to that tiny hole, every stroke of the ball counts the same.  

If you're hundreds of feet away and your first drive veers to the right, you might need another stroke to get back on track.  If you're only a few feet away and you miss a putt by an inch, you will need another putt.  

Both your long game and short game are crucial to your overall ability to golf.  Inches or feet, every mistake counts for one stroke.

Then I thought about it some more.  It seems that having a good long game and short game can apply to a lot more than just golf.  

Before I write each this blog post, there’s a long game I need to go through.  I need to have a clear point that I want to convey along a rough idea of what i’m going to say and how.  Once that’s done though, the short game of actually pulling words out of the ether and grinding out sentences that sit well next to each other is equally if not more important.

In your work and career, you should have a long game view of what you want to eventually do, and a rough idea of what moves and experiences you’ll need to take to get there.  You also have to do the job you have right now, really really well.  Your short game current job is just one step in your long game career.  Even if you have a good long game career vision, you need to do well in your current job to get to the next step.

In business, there is a long game view on strategy, and a shorter game view on execution.  Having the vision of where you want the business to be is very different from having to be the poor guys responsible for making sure you’re actually able to get there.

And then there’s Starcraft.  I don't play it, but a lot of my male, nerdy, Asian demographic does.  There’s a concept of “macro” and “micro”,  which speak to the long game of managing your overall economy and the short game of managing individual units in battle.

For all of these games, there’s a long and short aspect that needs to be considered in order to play the game well.  

What’s interesting is the long and short games are often very different from each other.  

Putting is not the same as driving.  Having a good blog post idea is not the same as being able to communicate it in writing.  Career planning and networking is not the same as being good at your job.  

With different skillsets, and often different rules, the long and short games are almost completely different games on their own.  You need to be good at the mini-games if you want a decent score at the main game. 

if you want to get really good at anything, you’ve got at least two different things to master.

And if your golf score is anything like mine then there’s still a lot of work to be done.


Tiny Action: Try to figure out the long and short game of whatever it is you want to gain competence in.  Once you’ve figured that out, focus on the one you’re weakest at.

To live life with no regret, you need to first understand what’s truly important to you, and then prioritize the rest of your life accordingly.

Life is messy though, so this can be difficult sometimes.  There is however a way to separate the things that truly matter to you from the clutter.  

It’s quite simple, although it may seem a little morbid at first.

Pretend that you're really old, lying on your deathbed.  You know that the end is near, but that's okay, because you've led a full and fulfilling life.  Looking back on that life, for the most part, everything went pretty well.  At the end of the day you would have done it all the same.  

Except for that one thing.  

That one thing that you've always wanted to do, but didn't.  The one thing that now, on your deathbed, looking back at your life, you wish you had made the time to do.

Do you know what that one thing is for you?  

If you do, then why aren't you doing it?  

After all, you've just proved to yourself that you'll seriously regret it if you don't.

It’s the Deathbed Regret Test.  And that’s really all there is to it.  

By picturing whether you will regret something in your final moments, looking back on your life, you can easily determine how important that thing is to you.  Apply this scenario to any big decision it should boil down to a simple yes or no answer.

I feel like it adds clarity to situations that are potentially too big and complicated to fully grasp or analyze.  

It’s like a litmus test for major life decisions.

This idea of a deathbed regret is not really a new one, but I’m not sure if it’s been used as a life-decisioning tool.  Want to take an extended trip to Europe right after graduation?  Want to quit your job and follow that crazy dream of yours?  If you don’t do it and see yourself regretful when you’re old and dying, then yes...you should do it.  If not, then deep down it probably isn't that important to you.  That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but if something else comes up that does pass the test, you can prioritize your life appropriately.

I used to think that music was really important to me.  I would always have something music-related on the side that I would be working on, something I used to pour all my spare time into.  Recording, producing, songwriting, everything.  I had always thought I could work on it on the side, and if things started happening in that area I could consider doing it more seriously.  That was until recently. 

When I first stumbled on the idea of the Deathbed Regret Test, I applied the test to my passion for music.  Much to my own surprise, it failed the test.  Like, right away.  

I was shocked, because I always believed that music meant a lot to me - but clearly not as much as I thought.  After the initial shock however, i was glad, because now i knew the truth.  I wouldn't regret not pursuing music.  I can now prioritize it as a hobby.  I still love it, but if something more important came along, something that I would later regret not doing, well, I'd know what to do.

Then I thought about something I always assumed I'd eventually have, but never really thought too deeply about until recently.  I thought about having kids.  I applied the test, and the answer was an immediate and resounding yes.

Leaving behind a body of work or accomplishments, musical or otherwise, is much less important to me than leaving behind a family that I’ve raised.

By picturing what you'd regret when you're near the end, you can figure out what's really important to you now.  

Maybe, with luck, when we finally are on our last few breaths, we can look back on our lives with nothing but satisfaction.



Tiny Action: Apply the test to something you think is important to your life, and see how important it really is.

Internet popularity.  Likes and Retweets and pageviews.  If you’re putting content online, these are key metrics of success.  But what kind of success is this?  What kind of love is internet love?

We know that there’s no substitute for direct human interaction, that part of the message is lost when hiding behind technology to communicate.  Email, messaging, and social media can’t convey tone of voice, body language, and all that other good human-y stuff.  Just remember that this also applies in the context of mass popularity.

Popularity in most mass media can easily be devoid of heart.  You know your work is doing well, because you can see it in your analytics, your metrics, your TV ratings, whatever.  Some kind of number goes up.  There may be a certain satisfaction in knowing that this number has increased, but I doubt there is an emotional reaction.

A hundred likes, a hundred retweets, or a hundred views is no substitute for a hundred people standing up and clapping.

But people online can do other things online to express appreciation.

I made a website and youtube channel some time ago.  The idea was to figure out popular songs on piano, (mostly of this guy), post up performance videos, and make sheet music for it so that others could play as well.  

The intent was that it would give me an excuse to do more of something that I enjoyed doing (play piano), and attach it to a sense of purpose and and an end result (video and sheet music).  I also hoped to make a few dollars through advertising.

Over time, the site and channel did decently well.  Youtube views, page views and a bunch of other numbers went up.  I made, quite literally, a few dollars.  It was kind of nice.

Then something happened which I wasn't expecting.  People that had seen the videos and downloaded the sheetmusic were starting to make their own videos playing my arrangements.  Even for piano recitals.  Stumbling on these videos was much more than nice; it was actually kind of touching.   I knew people were downloading the sheets and likely playing them, but it’s different when you’re actually able to see it happening right in front of you.

Being able to actually see the effects of something that you've done, watching those videos, reading some of the comments, is so much more powerful than just knowing that it’s happening out there somewhere.  It can actually make you feel something.

A lot has been made of Amanda Palmer’s TED talk about the Art of Asking.  Some of it good.  A lot of it hasn't been great.  The parts of her talk that stood out the most for me were all her stories and thoughts about  making individual personal connections.  

“Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance.  But the internet is taking us back.  It’s about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough.” 

A lot of times we hide behind the internet, like you’d hide behind a wall.  It’s so much easier to type away a conversation with somebody’s avatar, instead of finding new ways to speak to their real faces directly.

The Internet could be used as a faceless aggregator, with your popularity can be rolled-up numbers on a dashboard.  But it can also be a tool to help communication on an individual basis.

Why not use the internet to facilitate those fewer, higher quality connections with other people?

We’re in a world where we really don’t have to see each other anymore.  

But it’s always better when we do.


Tiny Action: Next time you text a friend, set up some time to meet up with them.

I think that the search for happiness is truly a never-ending quest.  Not so much because it is difficult, but primarily because the search is for the wrong thing.

Thinking of some recent memories, all the happy ones were very specific.  A good, well timed joke.  Moments alone in a peaceful place.   The way a loved one looks on at you.  A good cup of coffee.  The first sip of beer after a hard week’s work.  Other people smiling.

These are all specific perfect moments.  Searching for a perfect moment, the exact combination of elements that make a moment special, is as futile as trying to recreate it.  

You can’t search for happiness any more than you can search for a perfect moment.  There are just too many factors at play to be able to put a perfect moment together on purpose.

Moments like happiness are not a destination.  It’s not a thing that’s there to be found.

Happiness is something that happen to you on your way to something else.  

Stop trying to chase happiness at work.  Stop trying to find happiness in money or in possessions.  Stop trying to chase happiness in your relationships.  All those things are means to another ends. 

Work might give you fulfillment and satisfaction.  Relationships can give you love and companionship.  These may actually be your real goals, or maybe your real goals are something else entirely.  Just remember they are not the same as happiness, and that happiness shouldn't be one of them.

Try instead to make the absolute best out of any situation you’re in.  Try your hardest at a job you dislike and you may find something within it that you enjoy.  Put down your smartphones when you’re out with people, and you can actually be present when the conversation gets interesting.  Be fully engaged in whatever you’re doing.  

Not only will you get the most out of your experiences, but you’ll have greater awareness when happiness does happen to you and around you.

Happiness comes in moments, and moments are fleeting.  They happen, and then they are gone.

All you can do is be aware of when these moments are happening to you, and cherish the memories after the moment has passed.

Regardless of what else is happening in your life, everybody smiles from time to time.  But not everybody remembers the last time that they smiled.


Tiny Action: Instead of focusing on a search for happiness, focus instead on whatever you're doing now and being completely present.  Let happiness follow you around for once.

Some birthdays are considered milestones.  On these birthdays, you turn an age that is known to mark the beginning or end of certain chapters of your life.  

On these birthdays, I have a tendency to panic.  

I had a panic around the time I turned 20.  I had one again when I turned 32 in early April this year.  It wasn't the aging that got to me though, (as 32 really isn't that bad,) as much as what it represented.

You see, I want kids.  I want at least one, ideally, before I turn 35.  I always thought 35 would be an appropriate age to have your first kid, especially if you want more than one.  35 is also a nice round number.  It's a milestone age.

Even though I had a milestone, I didn't have a plan to support it.  I figured I’d want to be married and have a home before having a child.  When I finally did the math however, I realized that to do all that by 35 I'd pretty much have to be engaged, literally right now.  And I am not.  All those pretty girls you see out there with rings on their fingers?  None of those rings were put there by me.  I will not have a child by age 35.

That’s why you need to have some sort of plan, not just a random milestone.  A plan tells you what needs to happen and by when, to actually hit your milestone date.  If you don't do the planned steps at around the planned time, you know you likely won’t meet your milestone.  This is literally my job at work.  If I was the project manager for my own life I would have fired myself. 

Aside from starting this new chapter of life late, I also hadn't thought about the implications of ending the previous chapter.  Once I have a family and child, I fully expect to be devoting just more than all of my time to them for the foreseeable future.  I don’t expect to have time for myself.  I don’t expect to be able to properly pursue my little side projects.  I'm not sure if I'm ok with that.  Am I satisfied with what I’ve accomplished there to date?  I’m not sure if I am.

That’s the other problem with not having a plan.  If I knew that at a certain point in my life I would not be able to do some of the things that are important to me, maybe I would have pushed harder on these things earlier.  Maybe it would have made a difference.  Maybe it wouldn't have.  Now i’ll never know.

Then again, there's another reason I'm not having a child just yet.  It's because I haven't yet found the right girl to have one with.  Good girls are hard to find, good future moms even harder so.  You can put yourself out there, meet lots of awesome people and amazing women, and still sometimes things don't work out, or just weren't meant to be.  Some things you just can't force.  I just don't think I had found the right person yet.

As much pressure there is to meet a deadline and be on time, sometimes it's more important to get things right at the expense of being late.  Right now, it's more important for me to find the right person, than it is to settle just to have kids on time.  Right now, I’m glad that I don’t have kids yet because it wouldn’t have been with the right person.

And so, for good reasons that were out of my control, even if I had a plan I wouldn’t have been able to meet it.  However, because I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t know just how limited my time was to focus on the other parts of my life.  Because of that maybe I didn’t push myself as much as I should have.

You need to plan.  The act of planning gives you an idea of where you want to be at certain points in your life, so you can properly prioritize the things you’re doing now.  At the same time, you need to be comfortable with things not going to plan because so much of life is out of your control and unpredictable.


Tiny Action: Next time you plan to do something - anything - think about the steps you’ll need to get there.

Everybody has a dream.  But is your dream the same one that it used to be?

Has your dream ever changed?  I'm sure is has at least once.

Think back on when you were a child, and what you dreamed of becoming then.  Maybe you wanted to be a policeman, a fireman, or an astronaut.  Perhaps a famous actor or actress.  Now, how many of you kept your childhood dream into adulthood?  A few perhaps, but probably not many.

What happened to the rest of us?

Well, we grew up.  We learned more about life, and our dreams gradually changed or evolved.  

Some dreams we pursued.  Some dreams we abandoned.

All of these old dreams of ours can teach us something about ourselves.  We can even learn from the dreams we never chased.

All you have to do is think about why you dream the dreams that you do.

Maybe these dreams are just the manifestation of a more fundamental need or desire.  Maybe if you discover the things about yourself that drive your dreams, you can satisfy those needs directly.

Maybe the dream itself is just the first layer of the onion.

For a long time I thought that my dream lied in music.  Writing, recording producing, all that good stuff.  I thought I would regret not chasing that dream to it's fullest.  Gradually, however, things started to change.  Some of my musical endeavors started to feel like work.  And slowly I stopped recording.

I realized I didn't love music the same way that I used to.  It's still one of my biggest passions, but it was no longer my dream.

However, I’m still the same person.  I’m still driven by the same things.  My dream may have changed, but the things about me that drive my dreams have stayed the same.

I can apply those characteristics about myself to anything.  I can find myself a new dream, that satisfies what drives me.  Or a new dream will eventually find me.

Or I can use my knowledge of what drives me to find fulfillment in something that I’m already doing.

Project management was one of the last things I imagined that I would be doing.  In recent years however, i found a lot about this role that was personally satisfying.  There are lots of problems to solve, a lot of opportunities to apply creativity, and there’s a lot of listening.

Any aspect of myself that I found wasn't fulfilled by my job, I sought out on my own.  Like writing in this blog, for instance.

Sometimes an old dream has to die to make way for another one.  

Will you choose to hold on to a dream that in your heart you know is dead? 

Think instead about why you love the things that you do, and think about what you’re doing now.

Think about whether any of those things you love can be found in what you are doing today, no matter how small they may be.  These slivers of fulfillment may be tiny at first, but after time these slivers will start adding up.

Maybe you’ll find a new dream appear right around the corner.  Or maybe you’ll discover that you’ve been living your dream all along, and it just never occurred to you.


Tiny Action: Think about what drives your dreams.  Try to find these things in what you do every day.  Keep an eye out for what could be your next dream.

You may be considering project management as a career path.  You might also be wondering why anybody in their right mind would want to.  Either way, let me tell you what it initially feels like to be doing this kind of work.  

In some ways, it feels a bit like playing Tetris.  In some other ways, it feels a bit like how the One Ring felt to Bilbo Baggins.

In Tetris, random objects rain down from the sky, each one with a different profile.  If you don't assess, prioritize, and deal with each one quickly, they will pile up and kill you.  

In the first Lord of the Rings movie, Bilbo speaks about what it’s like being with the One Ring.  ”I feel thin”, he says, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”  

That pretty much sums it up.

Both these analogies describe the feeling of going from a position of depth to a position of breadth.  You generally start your career at a job requires a deep knowledge on only a few key areas.  You do most of the work on those items, become a bit of an expert on them, but don’t see too much outside of your realm of expertise.

When you first move into project management or an equivalent first-level management position, it really does feels like you’re being pulled up and spread thinly across a surface.  You are responsible for a lot more, but you do much less or none of the actual work.  

One of the challenges of this is that you are often no longer the expert that you were before.  You not only need to make sure the work is happening, but you often have to do so with minimal knowledge about that field of work itself.  

The time you would normally spend doing the work is spent instead on understanding, communicating and managing other people’s work as it relates to the bigger picture.

I did a lot of thinking before I took my first project management role.  In the end, there were two reasons which pushed me to do it.  The first, was because it scared me.  The second was because I believed it makes you develop skills that make you a more effective human being.

Corny, I know, but I still think it’s true.  To be an expert on one thing, you are able to get that one thing done with a high level of excellence.  But to have the skills to juggle multiple things, to understand quickly, and to communicate?  With the help of others and a bit of coordination you can get lots of things done.  Which one seems to have the most utility?

It’s not that getting really good at the one thing isn’t important.  It is.  Depth gets you credibility. You can create great things on your own.  At the very least, it teaches you what it means to get really good at something, and the kind of dedication that it takes.  There are days where I miss the juiciness of “real” work.  

The thing is, being an expert in a field is only of use when applied to that field itself.  Once you’ve developed the skills to manage breadth, you can really apply them to pretty much anything you encounter in life.  Your IT project at work, or a renovation project at home.  A gathering of a few friends, or running an event with hundreds of people.  Anything.

Managing breadth is the ultimate transferable skill set.  I went into project management because it forced me to develop these skills, so that I can apply them in other parts of my life.

But after all this time I’m still terrible at Tetris.


Tiny Change 1: When opportunities come up to manage breadth, take them!  Even if it’s something simple like organizing a social outing.

Tiny Change 2: Be curious about the things you don’t know.  Everybody is an expert at something.  Listen to others and ask questions.