Null

Success, just like failure, can make you feel great or make you feel bad.

I imagine the difference is how proud you are of the effort you put in and how much you treated others according to your values while getting there.

And if you think about it, that makes the relevance of success or failure null.

Journey over destination.

Zeros and Ones

There are no 0s.

There are no 1s.

There are infinite numbers in between.

Even when you are at your highest, that’s never absolute, total, and permanent. Similarly, even when you are at your lowest, that’s never hopeless, useless, and irreparable.

Life is an irregular alternation of ups and downs, where ups and downs get continually redefined.

It’s in that space that we need to find contentment, not at the extremes.

Limiting

Prejudice prevents you from seeing the world in its entirety. It forces you within some boundaries and it reinforces your perspective by limiting doubts.

When prejudice is taken a step further it becomes righteousness. That’s when you aim at keeping others within the same boundaries built your own prejudice, and you allow them only one possible version of the truth.

Prejudice and righteousness are human traits. That’s why it’s important to remind ourselves of how limiting they are.

Work relationships

To build relationships in a work environment, particularly when you have leadership responsibilities, consider the following three things.

  1. Expectations, that is where what people expect of you meets what you expect to do.
  2. Communication, that needs consistency (i.e., frequency and repetition) and truthful content (i.e., say when something is wrong).
  3. Participation, that is a process that combines both a way for others to participate in your work and a way for you to set boundaries about what will get done.

Where are you struggling the most?

Thing done well

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

But it would be more accurate to say: if you do a thing yourself, you’ll probably consider it well done.

Because you are the only judge. You set the standard, you choose what “well” means.

Of course, that’s not practical and it does not scale. And so, at some point, you will have to work with others, who will bring a different perspective on what “well” is.

If you are open, that’s a way to progress and figure out that what you thought of as “well” was actually just “good enough”.

If you are closed, on the other hand, you will probably go on doing “good enough”, until it becomes obsolete.