Do it daily.
The cumalitive qualities of a daily practice.
It’s Monday morning. My shirts are folded, even though I’ll hang them up shortly. My undies are stacked and my socks are rolled. This is a quiet, regular, love note from my beloved wife. This is a thing she does and does without expectation of reward. It’s a practice.
Where she’s rhythmic and stable, I’m erratically passionate. I’m the kind of person who puts a lot of emphasis on serendipity and spontaneity as the true gauge of authenticity — too much emphasis. For years I didn’t understand my wife’s faithfulness in folding as a deeper kind of faithfulness to me and our mini-Smiths. She’s much wiser than I am; I married up.
Through some sage counsel, I’m starting to take seriously the practice of shuffling the trash out every Wednesday night, or being certain there are never any dishes in the sink when my wife starts her grueling workday from home with the kids.
Chores are obvious service, but choosing to take time to set my compass spiritually every morning is more removed. Reading adventures to my boys every-single-night so that they can dream big and dream smart can feel like water boarding after a taxing day of work, but its cumulative, it’s adding up. One day they will be the giant army of memories that back up my words when I say to my wife and my dear children: “I love you”.
The same daily practice is crucial in our work. My passionate opinions aren’t necessary for all my colleagues to hear, they need to see the fruit of my daily persistent passions doing work for our company. It’s not enough for me to tell our team what Steve Jobs is famous for saying:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
No, instead I need to actually show them how when I said no to 1,000 things it gained genuine market share for our company because people chose us over our competition — because we valued simplicity as service.
These are hard lessons to learn. It’s much easier to be loud-mouth delegator than to be a good-listening daily leading guide who does more than speaks, and who inspires more than critiques.
#WorkInProgress
