Ideas In Reserve

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a yearly review. Basically setting aside time and mental space to reflect on the past year and allow that to inform how you think about the coming year. I’m especially fascinated by the patterns that would emerge, and what you could learn, if you answered the same questions each year.

Every year I consider doing one. I want to do one. But I’ve never set aside the time. This year I’m trying to work my way through a slight variation of Stephan Ango’s 40 Questions over the course of this month. For some reason answering a daily prompt or two feels easier to swallow than finding a half-day to work my way through them.

A few bonus mentions:

• Tim Ferriss’ Past Year Review
• Austin Kleon’s One Question
• The Focus Course’s Plan Your Year (paid, but I’ve heard good things)

Many think work is being active and rest is being inactive.
Work is activity for the purpose of being productive.
Rest is activity for the purpose of being restored.
What activities restore you?
Jeremy Pryor

I once asked a few students “How would you spend your time if you had an entire day dedicated to rest?”

Half of their answers took on some form of lounging (Netflix, video games, sleeping, etc.). The other half were more active (riding bikes, fishing, hunting, etc.). The room wrestled for a minute with how both of those lists, particularly the more active one, could be considered rest.

Jeremy’s explanation captures it perfectly “Rest is activity for the purpose of being restored.”

I think for many people when we get to the end of a crazy day, we’re looking to essentially check out. Whether this means binging your streaming service of choice or doom scrolling to your heart’s desire, we default to activities that require nothing from us.

I’m sure there’s a healthy place for mentally checking out and lounging, but if those activities don’t actually restore us, we’re short-changing ourselves. We trade being restored and reenergized for a brief respite.

What activities leave you feeling restored, rested, and ready to reengage?

I came across Siegfried & Joy and can’t stop watching and smiling. They found their own goofy space between David Copperfield and amateur child magician. The pure ridiculousness of it is what makes it so good. What goofy antics could you pull to give someone a smile?

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If you keep doing what you are about to do today for the next five years, will you end up with more of what you want or less of what you want?
James Clear

When I was in college I had a mentor I really admired who was in his 30’s. He had a strong faith, a solid prayer life, was a great husband and father, had solid Biblical knowledge, communicated in such a compelling way, and had great leadership skills. I remember thinking I want to be like that guy when I’m in my 30’s

Somehow it dawned on me that he did not turn 30 and magically become that person. While he was in my shoes, he consistently took small steps towards becoming the person he was in his 30’s. We don’t magically arrive, but we consistently show up, and our actions shape who we become.

It’s worth asking yourself “If you keep doing what you are about to do today for the next five years, will you end up with more of what you want or less of what you want?”

Family Teams is built on the idea that God put your family together as a multigenerational team on mission. On your family team, everyone plays different roles, brings their different strengths to the group, and God’s placed each person in your family to help accomplish what the team’s set out to do.

They put together what they call a Family Scouting Report. It’s a really simple worksheet with questions that help prompt you to discover how each member of your team is wired and how you might best work together as a family.

If you’re a parent and haven’t thought much about the makeup of your family and what each member brings to the table, I think this could be a really interesting activity. Like any good set of questions, you stumble upon things you might already know, but hadn’t put to words yet.

I stumbled across the music of Josh Garrels the other day (Apple | Spotify | Youtube). Somewhere on my trip down the rabbit hole, I found a documentary about him called The Sea In Between. It tells the story of him and his music, and documents a number of his songs preformed live by him and some accompanists out in the wild of Mayne Island, B.C.

What I found most compelling about the whole thing was that it was funded by someone who found his music and essentially said “I really like this thing, and I want there to be more of it in the world.” So he contacted Josh, found Mason Jar Music and bankrolled the journey, the creation of the documentary, and allowed the work to be released for free.

I love that! When faced with something good, enjoyable, and beautiful, he asked himself some version of “what could I do to make more of this exist?” or “What could I do to help others enjoy this?” He came up with his answer, and made it happen.

Is there anything good that you wished there was more of? What’s one thing you could do with your time, energy, or resources to bring more of it into the world?

Focusing requires saying no to things you actually want to do.

I stumbled across an interview with Jonny Ive sharing something he learned working with Steve Jobs. From the interview:

“You can achieve so much when you truly focus. One of the things Steve would say – I think because he was concerned that I wasn’t – he would say “how many things have you said no to?” And honestly I would have these sacrificial things. Because I wanted to be very honest about it “I said no to this, and no to that” but he knew that I wasn’t vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. So there was no real sacrifice. What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on everything else.”

He acknowledges, like I imagine many of us would, that sacrifice is a good thing. There’s something noble about sacrifice.

But I love his admission that sometimes he kept around ideas that he didn’t care about, so he could appear focused when he dismissed them.

To achieve Jonny Ive’s or Steve Job’s level of focus, you need to get to the point where you’re eliminating things you actually want, in favor of what’s essential. You cut and cut all the way into and past the good ideas until you get down to what’s great.

One of the makers of Field Notes Notebooks, Coudal Partners, in preparations for their Clandestine edition notebook, shared a brainteaser that supposedly hails from Albert Einstein. Einstein claimed it could only be solved by 2% of the population.

You’ll solve it by using pure logic (and maybe a piece of paper or excel doc). It’s a fun exercise for anyone who enjoys solving something by thinking their way through it.

It goes like this:

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The question is– who owns the fish?

Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

There are no tricks, pure logic will get you the correct answer. And yes, there is enough information to arrive at the one and only correct answer.

Their original post which includes links to a couple of hints and a PDF version of the puzzle can be found over at Coudal Partners.

How true.

In the context of launching a new product:

“1.0 is not all your ideas, it’s simply what made the first cut. Which is one of the most frustrating things about a 1.0 – it’s not *everything* you wanted to do, and you can’t wait to dive back into build more stuff. Always a wild mix of excitement and frustration.” Jason Fried

I find this to be a really interesting way to think about managing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. The goal is to make sure that where you are now is the foundation for where you want to be. You don’t have to get it all right, you just have to get the RIGHT thing right at first.

A couple of questions this sparks for me:

Where are you now and where do you ultimately want to be?

If you had to get there over the course of several “versions”, what would make it into the first one? What would make it into the next?

How do you identify the right first thing?