Tasks you can complete do you the smallest amount of good. Don’t let them distract you from spending time on the work that never ends.
Work
Play your own game
Even though it’s possible for a professional basketball player to play baseball, you don’t typically see them doing so.
They spend their careers developing a way to play one game that is uniquely their own. Trying to translate that to another sport leaves them without an identity and at the beginning of a journey where every other player has a years long head start; even Michael Jordan was a rookie in a double-A league when he played baseball.
If you’ve spent years becoming undeniable at what you do, honing skills and building relationships while collecting useful experience, it’s ok if you want to try to play a new game.
Just don’t be surprised when people catch you making rookie mistakes.
(H/T JP)
Send another email
It’s important to you, this message you’ve crafted. The attention you want.
You’ve thought about just the right thing to say – it isn’t too long, or too short.
The timing has to be right, because the data shows that the best time to send an email is at 4am on Tuesday. Of course only suckers do that because everyone is sending their email at that time – so you’ll do it Wednesday.
Sending this email is work. It’s productivity. It’s marketing. It means you’ll be busier, and busier means you’re doing your job well.
The email is saying “there, I tried – I thought a lot about it too. I did it at the time I was supposed to, at just the right length. Just like everyone does.”
So you click send. And then you wait.
You wait because you don’t know the person on the other side or what they care about. But I’ll give you a hint: it probably isn’t getting more email from strangers.
The opportunity
The opportunity that you’re imagining has parameters that all fit your life at the right time, in the right place, for the exact right amount.
You expect it to be obvious; a no-brainer that allows you to keep being the same person tomorrow as you are today: a house in the right neighborhood that’s the right size, a job like the one we have now but with a bigger paycheck and a better boss, a business idea that’s so unique and so compelling, it’s a guaranteed success.
So when we look for opportunity we have this tunnel vision, and rather than recognizing that we are limiting our field of vision to a perfect situation (one that is unlikely to ever come along), we think there just aren’t any opportunities.
But the problem isn’t lack of opportunity, the problem is that the opportunities available to you don’t look exactly like what you expect.
The house is a little small or stretches our finances, that job means relocating and a long distance relationship, that business idea means just being the most customer-centric veterinarian.
That’s why it’s hard to buy low and sell high. That’s why it’s hard to time the housing market. That’s why your career change is stalled. Because in order to do those things, you have to do something that is different from your expectations.
Seeing opportunity requires us to be flexible, to pay attention to adjacent disciplines, to talk to someone different, to behave in new ways, to be a little uncomfortable, to shine the light of our unique perspective in different directions. If we can do that, we open our aperture and can see that opportunities are everywhere.
The best part is that my opportunity isn’t yours. You’re different than me. We know different people. We see different things and we are moving through life in different stages. We have different experiences seen through different lenses and are comfortable with different degrees of risk.
When we look for an opportunity to help, to build, or to grow, we use all of these differences to be able to identify an opportunity and understand what it means for us.
So when an opportunity presents itself, know that it won’t be exactly what you’re looking for at exactly the right time. But pay attention to the ones you notice, they might be trying to tell you something.