When I was a track coach, I designed most of my practices to focus on interval training. Instead of running the entire distance of the races my runners participated in, they would run only a fraction of those distances at speeds that would total a personal record. The idea is that you train your body…
Productivity
How Robert Mankoff Finally Found Success as an Artist
Robert Mankoff was rejected by The New Yorker 2,000 times between 1974 and 1977. He drew 2,000 cartoons during those three years and but didn’t stop drawing or submitting his work to the magazine. Finally, one of his cartoons was accepted. Then they accepted another one and another until he was invited to become a regular…
Picking Ideas Faster
I spent the last five minutes and sixteen seconds trying to pick the right idea to write about this morning. I typically spend 10-20 minutes writing these posts about what I’m learning so that five minutes was wasted time. I had these idea ideas in my head: Angela Duckworth’s expansion on the Warren Buffet goal-setting…
A Hierarchy of Goals
In chapter 4 of Grit, Angela Duckworth introduces the idea of a hierarchy of goals. She describes three levels of goals. Imagine a pyramid with one goal at the top, three mid-level goals, and seven low-level goals. The low-level goals “exist merely as a means to ends.” “The higher the goal, the more it’s an…
My End-of-the-Day Routine: The Daily Review
During the last fifteen minutes of the day I go through a routine to help me decompress and plan ahead for tomorrow. These fifteen minutes are probably the #1 reason I am as productive and happy as I am each day. For the last year or so, this has been the checklist I follow during…
