Committing to the cut
Every year at New England Warrior Camp, we have the opportunity to do tameshigiri, or live blade cutting. A bamboo mat is soaked in water, rolled up, and put on a pedestal. Martial practitioners then take a sharp sword and attempt to cut it in half.
Learning how to perform a cut with a sword is only part of the picture. Once you learn the mechanics of making a cut and how to operate a sword, the next hardest part is making the commitment to cut. Many people are hesitant to put their full weight, momentum, and force behind their sword cut, and as a result they get through half the mat at best. Some nearly bounce off of it, making only a surface scratch.
Tameshigiri illustrates this lack of commitment in a very visceral, obvious way. If you don’t commit to the cut, you get an exceptionally poor result. If the tameshigiri target were an actual attacker, you’d be ineffective at best.
Why do you hesitate with a katana? Why don’t you commit to the cut? Sometimes it’s lack of confidence in your knowledge and ability about how to use a sword. Sometimes it’s outright fear of the sword – understandably so, since most people don’t routinely use a four foot razor blade regularly. But sometimes, it’s a deeper fear of committing and putting your full force behind anything at all in life that holds you back from even something as simple as swinging a sword.
Once you make that personal breakthrough, once you get some knowledge, overcome your fear, and commit to giving it your all, the sword cuts. The target falls, lopped in half, and you walk away amazed at yourself, amazed at what you are capable of. Despite your lack of confidence, despite your fear, your willingness to commit, your will to act, pushes you through to victory and success.
Ask yourself this:
What in your life are you seeing lackluster results in?
What in your life are you seeing lackluster results in because you are hesitating to commit, and how would your life change for the better if you pushed past your fear, pushed past your hesitation, and committed to the cut?
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Game changer?
Is being a game changer all that important?
Do you get to play at all if you declare that the rules should change to benefit you, or are you told to take your toys and go home while the big girls & boys play?
Or is the game to be changed your game and the skill with which you play it?
What’s the real game change?
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The will to focus
Over dinner with some fellow Blue Sky Factory employees, a question came up: how do you get more done? How do you be more productive? The answer is deceptively simple (and of course, the usual reminder that simple is not easy):
You need to cultivate the will to focus.
Focus is relatively easy. Turn off everything except the one task you need to be working on, and get it done. Power off your phone, shut off Twitter, etc. (unless of course those are the tasks) and burn down whatever needs to get done.
The will to focus is different than focus. It’s much harder. The will to focus is the self discipline needed to willingly shut off and keep shut off all those distractions that take us away from what we know we need to do. It’s the little notifications we’ve eagerly accepted into our lives that tell us new mail has arrived, friends are chatting, buzz is happening, all holding the promise of something interesting or exciting.
There’s a lottery-like element to it that makes it especially compelling, and there’s a scientific basis to it. Is it junk? Is it a note from a friend? A tweet from that guy or girl you met at a conference? That extra bit of randomness adds an almost game-like quality to the notifications, increasing their addictive power (as any casino operator will gleefully attest to).
How do you develop the will to focus? Practice. Like breaking any behavioral habit, it requires you to practice doing it, first in little steps, then increasingly in length and frequency. Start with a simple minute of meditation a day, but as part of that, take the time to turn off things. No one will miss you for a minute, and you won’t miss anyone or anything for a scant 60 seconds. Develop that initial reflexive habit to shut things off for a minute a day, and then work up from there.
After a while, the will to focus will become second nature and your friends, colleagues, coworkers, and acquaintances will be baffled by how productive you are.
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When is the best converting time for your marketing?
Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog you’ll find a tutorial about how to set up Google Analytics to tell you when the best time to send an email is. The little note at the end is actually the biggest benefit of all: the method works for every marketing source, medium, and channel you have out there, not just email. Know when to tweet, when to blog, when to email, when to anything that you can track with Google Analytics. You’ll know your audience better than they know themselves and reap the rewards for it. Go read it.
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The deadliest question of all
Grab the beverage of your choice, a quiet place to contemplate, the writing instrument of your choice (paper, pen, iPad, whatever), and ask yourself this very serious question. So serious it’s a deadly serious question, because the wrong answer might literally kill you.
What price will you pay for success?
What are you willing to put on the line to succeed? More important, what boundaries will you not cross, what sacrifices will you not make in the pursuit of success before, as CC Chapman puts it, minute 16 arrives?*
Matthew Ebel said it very succinctly at PodCamp New Hampshire: time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. Everything has a cost, because every minute you’re spending doing one thing, you’re not spending doing something else. Every moment you’re at a conference, you’re not reading a bedtime story to your child. Every moment you’re at the dojo, you’re not working on a new business or strengthening your existing business. Every day you skip the gym because you’re busy is a day you’re taking an investment of time from one area of your life to another.
Are you putting things on the table that shouldn’t be? Are you sacrificing time with the people who love you, resources that can’t be recovered easily, or even your own health? Those long hours and poor nutrition slinging code are unsustainable in the long term, and health is like loansharking in that the final price you pay is usually much, much higher than you think it will be.
If time were currency, ask yourself right now if you’re spending it as you want to be in these areas like an investment portfolio:
- Physical vitality
- Mental health
- Emotional health
- Spiritual strength
- Professional growth
- Financial strength
- Family and community wellness
How does your portfolio of invested time balance? Are you stealing from some “funds” in one area to pay for questionable ROI in others? Is it time, as investment advisors often counsel, to rebalance your portfolio? If so, write down and make a commitment on your day planner to allocate whatever time you need to rebalance as a daily task, and lock out other areas so that you are properly investing where you need to be. Most of all, commit beyond a shadow of a doubt to holding firm on those investments of time!
* a reference to everyone having 15 minutes of fame.
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