How MUCH Are You Going To Succeed Today?

I’ve noticed a recent change in how I feel about my performance during an ongoing day. Previously my emotions fell into one of two categories:

1. I feel good because I’m accomplishing everything I’ve set out to do.
2. I feel bad because I failed to do a few things and I give up entirely.

In retrospect it’s easy to admit that success and failure shouldn’t be viewed in such a black and white manner. However, in the heat of the moment it’s almost impossible to maintain that perspective, and I am starting to notice that it is not because of personal weakness. The real problem is how I have chosen to setup my model for success in the past. My model used to be the following: success is the ability to meet a specified goal and failure is everything else.

Upgrading this overly simplistic model of success happened by accident. I started using a TODO-list last week and when on Wednesday I was unable to cross off all my items, I looked at my list and realized that I had still accomplished quite a lot. This got me thinking that perhaps I was asking the wrong question. Maybe It wasn’t about whether I had succeeded or not, and it was more about how much I had succeeded.

Changing the question moves success from a binary choice to a sliding scale. Instead of thinking that accomplishing 80% of your tasks is a failure, you can actually see that you have in fact succeeded. The greatest effect of this way of thinking can be witnessed on days that start off on a bad note. There’s been many days since Wednesday where I’ve been able to salvage a bad morning by remembering that I can still succeed a little bit that day. All I have to do is start tackling tasks and not give up on the day entirely.

I’m not sure if this is of any relevance to you people reading this, but I hope that it will inspire you to rethink your model of success, and then modify your tools and systems to reflect the upgraded model. Anyway, that’s all for now.

TODO-Lists Are Your Friend Not Your Boss

I’ve found that getting TODO lists and schedules to work requires them to be realistic. Not only that but they should also reflect the kind of life you actually want for yourself. Do you want a life filled with nothing but work and chores? Maybe, but I certainly don’t.

One way I’ve tried to tackle this is by including things in my TODO list that usually would not appear there. Things like:

• Play the guitar for 15 minutes.
• Read a book to my son.
• Play with the cats for 15 minutes.

Now, obviously a hefty chunk of my list is filled with actual work but I have made the conscious attempt to try and make my TODO list reflect the balance of different areas in my life.

So if your TODO list suffers from all work and no play then try adding stuff in there that you genuinely enjoy and desire. The kind of stuff that gets you excited and reflects your values. Include your hobbies, health, and most importantly your friends and family. This will humanize your list and make it your friend who is trying to help you, not a crummy boss who is cracking the whip. Anyway, that’s all for now.

Ten Minutes Is All It Takes

I can do just about anything for ten minutes. Run around a track, do the dishes, hang from a pull-up bar, hold my breath… actually, I think that might kill me or send me into a coma. Regardless, the list of things that I can do for ten minutes straight no matter what my mood or level of enthusiasm is quite extensive.

Lately I’ve been trying to accomplish more around the house by coming up with little ten minute tasks that I do daily. These include tidying up the kitchen and bedroom, playing with and reading to my ten month old son, and many other things. Even though I have only been doing this for a week the results have been surprising. The compounding effect of tidying up the kitchen a little bit many days in a row has left the kitchen in a tidier state than it has been for ages.

Spending ten minutes intensely playing with and reading to my son does not seem like much. Regardless, if at the end of my life someone asked me the question: “did you spend at least ten minutes every day playing with your son as a baby?”, I would want to be able to answer that question with a confident and loud: “YES!”

The beauty of time-boxing your tasks is that they become manageable, flexible, and there is no specific end-state you have to reach. I mean what does “clean the kitchen” actually mean? Is it enough to sweep the floor or do I have to drive to the store to get oven cleaner? That’s the beauty of restricting yourself to ten minutes; just look around and do something that has a clear impact for ten minutes and then move onto something else.

Ten minutes isn’t a panacea and it won’t cure cancer but I have found it to be an immensely impactful and practical tool. It’s kind of like a sledgehammer that you can take to your todos list and smash that sucker right into the skull of entropy.

I highly recommend trying this out for a week. Spend ten minutes doing just about anything and witness how your efforts compound into something substantial. Anyway, that’s all for now.

Disclaimer: It did take me more than ten minutes to write this blog post.

Achieve More By Lowering Your Standards

I’m a perfectionist who has never achieved perfection. In fact, I have barely achieved anything that would even closely resemble perfection. My success rate for achieving my goals and aspirations is much closer to zero than it is to a hundred. Earlier this week I got much closer to meeting my goals than ever before by trying something radical… I lowered my standards and expected less of myself.

Here’s a little bit of my backstory. For the last three months I’ve been planning on waking up four hours before the baby to work on finishing my thesis. How many times did I actually do that? Zero. Pretty spectacular achievement, eh? So this week I decided to set my goal to be something far less. Can you guess what it is? Three hours before the baby? Only two? Surely not just one?!?

You’d be wrong with any of those guesses. I decided against trying to wake up before the baby since that had not proven to be successful at all. Instead I decided that I would spend at least ten minutes every day working on my thesis.

“Ten minutes?! You can’t accomplish anything in that time!”

…is what I would have said to myself before this experiment. But present-day-englightened-me looks at that goal and knows that it’s actually something I can realistically accomplish. Even on a really awful day, with little-to-no sleep under my belt and zero motivation, I know that I will be able to find the willpower to sit down and work for just ten minutes, even if that means that I get zero words down.

The beauty behind setting my bar this low is two-fold. Firstly, I’ve gained momentum by actually succeeding to meet my goal for the first time in months. Secondly, I’ve accounted for the bad days that are bound to hit me much more often than I’d care to admit. Setting a minimum satisfiable goal that you can meet even on a bad day will leave you feeling pretty good about yourself, especially on those days that your life decides to turn into a royal sh*t-show. To contrast this, on a really good day you will naturally want to outdo yourself by pushing further than the goal that you have set for yourself.

Let’s say that my goal had been to spend an hour on my thesis instead of ten minutes. After the twenty minutes of writing I did today I would have looked at my goal and probably said the following:

“Damn it! I’m only one third of the way there! I hate my life! FUDGE this thesis, FUDGE my degree, and FUDGE my life! I QUIT!”

Instead, having set my target on ten measly minutes instead of a full hour I thought the following after my twenty minutes of writing:

“Booyah! I can probably do another ten minutes today and triple my daily goal!”

The beauty of lowering your standards is that you actually end up meeting higher standards in practice. So think to yourself, what is the smallest possible goal that you could stick to even on a really bad day. The key to this is actually imagining a REALLY bad day. Like a day when your car doesn’t start in the morning because the battery is dead which leads to you showing up late to work. After showing up late to work your a**hole boss very kindly decides to scream at you in front of everyone, and once you finally get over to your desk you somehow manage to knock a cup of steaming hot cofee all over your keyboard. Yeah… imagine arriving home after a day like THAT and think about what you’d actually be capable of accomplishing.

So there you have it. Try lowering your standards for a few days and let me know how it goes. Anyway, that’s all for now!

The Strict “What” and The Flexible “How”

We all know that micromanagement doesn’t work but when it comes to planning our own schedules we micromanage like nobody’s business. We come up with strict, inflexible plans that work only as long as everything in our lives remains stable. The second you get sick or something unexpected happens our rigid plans bend and snap, and everything falls apart.

The way to fix this problem is to make sure that you establish a delivery goal that is strict but allows for a wide range of flexibility in how you deliver that goal. You separate the what from the how and make sure that you have enough wiggle room for every situation. 

Saying that you’ll work out two hours every day is too strict. Saying that you’ll do some form of physical activity even if it’s just stretching or taking a walk is flexible and something that you can delivery on even when you get sick.

Case in point, I’ve had a bit of a minor sinus infection the last few days and I’ve had to ease off my daily routine of waking up at four in the morning to write these blog posts and songs, but that’s just how life is sometimes. The important thing is that I haven’t given up on delivering what I said I’d deliver.

In order for this to be possible you have to get things right in the goal setting phase. If your goal is defined in a way that sets strict requirements on how you do things then you’re bound to fail. You should pick a delivery goal that’s always doable and scalable.

With my daily songwriting challenge I can write a full-fledged track or I can slap together a little sketch—it really doesn’t really matter. The only goal is that every day I have to sit down to write something that’s complete enough for me to upload to SoundCloud even if it sounds like trash and I hate it with all of my being.

Be strict with your what and flexible with your how.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Sensitivity of a Butterfly, Hide of a Rhinoceros

Today, I’d like to share with you the best video that I have ever come across on writing and being an artist. It’s a conversation between New York Times bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz and his old professor at Harvard, Dr Jordan B Peterson. What I love about Gregg is that he strikes a balance between being disciplined and remaining open to artistic expression.

The conversation is two hours long and I don’t expect you to sit through all of it, so instead I’ve cherry-picked some of my favourite points from the exchange. I hope that you find them to be as insightful as I did.

I meet a lot of people who want to be writers but very few who actually want to write. I love writing and the actual writing process and if you don’t then don’t do this. For people starting out, one of the things that I say is pick a certain amount of time that you write no matter what and force yourself to put stuff on the page.

To be a writer you need the sensitivity of a butterfly with the hide of a rhinoceros. You need to be so sensitive and attuned to things and also so willing to accept rejection and bad reviews. There’s a trick to trying to maintain all of your openness and also be tough as hell. It creates a constant tension that’s moving.

I never took a writing course or read a book on writing. The way you learn to write a novel is you read two-thousand novels and then try to write one and you screw it up. That’s it. Same with screenplays. First you watch a million movies and love the thing itself. For my first book I wrote a disastrous first draft; the end of each chapter was better than the beginning, literally from what I had learned while writing the chapter. But again, don’t be afraid to fail and don’t be afraid to embarrass yourself.

There’s always going to be a dozen things more pressing to do than to write. Always. If you don’t decide to make that time holy and protected, nobody else will do that for you. I need the same amount of space for writing that I would have were I an accountant, psychologist, doctor or lawyer. I have to make that time holy and sacrosanct.

I realised early on that the one thing that I could control absolutely was discipline. You have to wait for luck and you never know when that luck is going to come. I thought that in terms of work ethics, if I flapped my wings as hard as I could, where I’m bumping along the ceiling all the time, then the one moment that the hatchet opens and the lucky break comes, I’ll be ready to fly right through it.

In case you’d like to watch the entire interview, I’ve also put that below.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

The link between theory and application

I’ve spent a lot of time brushing up on music theory and I’ve been trying to put it into practice but the results have been lacklustre. That’s because there is one crucial step in between theory and application that I was missing — examples.

The world is full of great art and we know this firsthand because we wouldn’t be trying to create anything had we not been moved by art in the first place. Once we dive into the craft and have our noses deep in the theory books, there’s a danger that we stop experiencing and paying attention to great art.

When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger.

Confucius

Since I’m trying to write good music it would seem logical to start by listening to some good music and trying to imitate it. I’ve always liked Lana Del Rey’s first release so I dropped one of her tracks from the album into Ableton Live and began to dissect it.

I started by mapping out the drums in the track and that lead to quite a shocking realisation. The beat stays pretty much the same throughout the track and it’s played entirely on a kick and snare. That made me scratch my head and I figured that there had to be more to it, so I listened closely.

Upon listening to the track again I noticed that there’s lots of sound design elements and samples that augment the drum beat. Now, I’ve never used samples or effects in any of my tracks but since I was in the imitation business I decided to try them out. The result was quite shocking; the beat actually came alive.

Perhaps there is a course out there on music production that teaches this but I’ve never come across one. Great art exists in the world even if there was no theory to explain its inner workings. By all means, study theory but let great art itself be your greatest teacher.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

The combination of small and simple things can create magic

In today’s track I decided to keep trying out some of the ideas I talked about in yesterday’s post on writing longer progressions by systematically using simple short progressions as presented in a blog post by Gary Ewer. I’ve also been reading a bit about contours and motifs in melodies which in the past always seemed to be too vague and simple to have any real application.

I decided to try out a motif where the rhythm of the phrase stays the same and where the contour of the melody falls in pitch. The notes themselves change on the context of the underlying chords but the rhythm and contour of each phrase is the same. I was surprised by how effective this ended up being and I think that the melody is one of the best I’ve come up with.

The basic concepts used in songwriting are pretty underwhelming on their own – when I first heard about chord inversions I was baffled as to why anything so simple could even be considered a worthy concept. After having experienced the difference that chord inversions can make, my opinion on their importance has changed forever. The same can be said about chord progressions, modes and motifs – they’re extremely simple and on their own don’t amount to anything. It’s the tasteful combination of all these tiny concepts that ends up creating something worthy of being called art. Anyway, that’s all for now.

Internal structure of verse progressions

I came up with today’s track by trying out a tip for creating verse progressions from Gary Ewer’s recent blog post. Essentially you come up with a three chord progression, which in my case was I – iii – IV – I. You then use the same movements but starting from the vi chord, which gave me a vi – I – ii – vi progression. Let’s name the progressions A and B, respectively – the idea is to create a 16 bar verse by playing the progressions in the following structure: A – A – B – A. 

It feels like in this technique we’re applying something that resembles a song structure into a verse. It might be interesting to try out other block-like structures, such as A – B – A – B and A – B – B – A to see what kind of ideas they produce. I really like the A – A – B – A structure because it gives enough time to repeat the first progression and then changes the progression a bit before it gets too predictable and boring.

I spent a lot of time playing around with different inversions to get my chord progression to sound balanced and I really like the way that it turned out in the end. It’s really easy to run out of mileage with looped three chord progressions and this was an awesome trick to elevate the whole verse and make it more special as a whole.

This ended up being quite a technical post this time around but I suppose that’s alright. Anyway, that’s all for now – I hope that you like the track!

 

You don’t have to do it alone

Figuring out why creating new habits succeeds or fails is a complex issue. Whenever you’re integrating anything into your life incompatibilities can be caused by virtually anything related to your life. The last half a year or so has been the best streak I’ve had in years and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I can’t know for sure, but I do feel like there’s one thing that could be a major contributing factor and that is my girlfriend.

If I look back on the times when I’ve had positive growth there’s almost always been a community or a support group surrounding me. In the military there were the fellow conscripts, at the beginning of university I had a group of peers and at work I had my colleagues. A few years back, I was essentially wallowing in loneliness and that’s when nothing seemed to stick. After meeting my girlfriend it’s as if my streak of bad luck had come to an end, and my efforts to make change happen were getting rewarded.

If things aren’t working out for you, then ask yourself if you have any friends or people surrounding your new ventures. If you’re trying to get in better shape, do you any workout buddies? If you’re trying to get better at songwriting, are you networking with fellow musicians? Struggling alone is difficult; there’s no accountability and no peer group where you can unload grief and share knowledge.

I’m a huge proponent of self-reliance but ultimately my loyalty lies with what produces the greatest growth and fulfilment. Sometimes you have to let go of your ego and accept that support from others will benefit you. Anyway, that’s all for now – I hope that you enjoy today’s track, peace!