The Spin Cycle
Or- Prioritizing your priorities
Think.
My other substack, Ruck the F*ck Up comes out on Monday mornings. This week the title was Balance is Bulls*it.
I was making the point that in order to be the best at anything you have to go all in. If you want to win an Olympic medal, or the Script’s National Spelling Bee, you don’t balance, you cut away almost everything to focus exclusively on your goal.
Predictably, across social media some people took umbrage and let me know the value that they place on maintaining balance.
Perhaps it is a matter of semantics, but I believe in prioritization over balance.
Every decision we make is one of prioritization,
What is the most important thing for me to spend my time on right now?
Balancing implies that we give all things equal weight, and that doesn’t make sense.
We need to apply resources: focus, time, or money in the amounts needed to accomplish our goals.
If you have big goals, you need to have fewer things to prioritize.
If you want to be the best at something, you need to eliminate a lot.
One way to think of it is like a plate spinner (A popular form of entertainment from the last century). The plate spinner was constantly running back and forth to keep the plates and bowls spinning on sticks.
Watching them run back and forth to keep everything from crashing to the floor was amusing, (those were simpler times) but the frantic pace isn’t sustainable in the long run.
The fewer plates you have, the easier it is to keep them spinning.
That’s what we will be talking about this month.
Read. Being a Dad is Hard as F*ck
By Michael Venutolo-Mantovani
Michael is a friend and I’ve recommended his writing before, but it is especially apropos this month. Michael talks a lot about the decisions and priorities of being a dad.
Write.
I’m a big believer in buckets. By deciding on a handful of buckets to hold the things we fill our days with it becomes easier to examine how we spend our time. And as Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Your writing prompt is to come up with your buckets.
Let me know how it goes.
Repeat.
Words of wisdom from those who said it best.
It is in quiet that our best ideas occur to us. Don't make the mistake of believing that by a frantic kind of dashing around you are being your most effective and efficient self. Don't assume that you are wasting time when you take time out for thought.
— Napoleon Hill
In case you haven’t heard, I now have a YouTube Channel where I post a Sunday morning Ruck Rant that you might enjoy. Check it out here:
If you enjoyed this week’s T.R.W.R., please consider sharing it with a friend. Thanks!
See you next Thursday!
I got a good chuckle out of this line: "Watching them run back and forth to keep everything from crashing to the floor was amusing, (those were simpler times)"
I completely agree though. Anyone who is truly the best in the world at something is fanatical about it. Take the classic Michael Phelps example of not missing a day in the pool for 10 years or whatever it was.
Now maybe you don't want to be the best in the world at something, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not a goal of mine. Maybe a better question, as popularized by Kevin Kelly, is how you can be *the only* in the world at what you do. Nonetheless, becoming "the best" or "the only" will require insane dedication and ruthless prioritization, identifying the high leverage tasks and ignoring just about everything else.
As it goes for buckets, I currently have three: 1) Writing, 2) Exercise/Fitness, 3) Relationships
thanks for the shoutout, John! appreciate it, as ever.