You don’t learn to Juggle by learning to Juggle…
Throw. Throw. Catch. Catch. You don’t learn to juggle by learning to juggle — that is the outcome. You learn to juggle by learning to throw then learning to catch — that is the process.
You need to be clear about and focused on executing the process in order to get the outcome that you want. Seth Godin gives the example of the process to improve your children’s writing. Writing better is the outcome, the process is just to write. And write. And write. Do lots of bad writing. Don’t worry about the structure or spelling or punctuation — they will come as an outcome of lots of good process.
Another saying — people who have lots of good ideas, have a lot more bad ideas. If you don’t have many good ideas then you need to start writing down anything and everything. Get into the habit of writing lots of ideas — they will likely be bad, but some where through the scraps, slowly, you will begin to accumulate a couple of good ideas. The process — writing down ideas — leads to the outcome — finding some good ideas.
James Altucher explores this further by suggesting you write down 10 ideas everyday.
if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with 20 ideas.
Extending the theme of trusting the process Cal Newport writes in “the Empty Sky Paradox” how
the path to becoming a standout includes a prohibitively difficult step. It’s this step that limits stars, as most people simply lack the comfort with discomfort required to tackle really hard things.
In other words, the discipline of learning to throw and learning to catch. And taking the time to executed this flawlessly. Newport continues:
… there’s no way getting around the necessity to clear your calendar, shut down your phone, and spend several hard days trying to make sense of the damn proof.
I can’t recommend Seth’s Akimbo podcast highly enough — and the Q&A on the following one
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