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- 🌱 Firm on vision, flexible on details
🌱 Firm on vision, flexible on details
School vs education. Ultimate success. Open door policy.
Mitchell Cohen
November 17, 2024
Here are your 3 insights, distilled into bite-sized (and keto-friendly) nuggets.
Aka, the highest ROI of any 3 minutes of your week! (Bold I know. Let’s get it.)
🏫 School vs Education
Austin Kleon draws the difference between school vs. education.
“School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.”
When you think about it, you can make the same exact argument for your job vs career.
I think of it in terms of desired outcomes vs potential inputs.
Firm on the vision (outcomes), flexible on the details (inputs).
Musician Janis Joplin once said, "I love being onstage and everything else is just waiting."
That inspired Tom Petty to write “The Waiting” (chorus: “The waiting is the hardest part..”)
The inputs are the waiting. It’s anything and everything that is NOT the desired outcome.
Joplin and Petty loved being on stage (outcome), making the waiting (inputs) worthwhile.
Sometimes the inputs lead to the outcome you want. Sometimes they don’t.
But here’s the thing:
The waiting is the hardest part, yes. But it’s also the only path.
So why not get curious about the learnings along the way?
In reality, the path often looks like this:
So if “the waiting” is the hardest part, I’d argue “the learning” is the most important part.
What do you really want?
What are you doing right now to best drive towards it?
Then reassess after the learning.
🤷‍♂️ Ultimate Success
Morgan Housel has a great blog post on this but here are my favorite takeaways:
“The ultimate success metric is whether you get what you want out of life. But that’s harder than it sounds because it’s easy to try to copy someone who wants something you don’t.”
You do your best work and have the most fun when you’re not burdened by fear that someone else thinks you’re doing it wrong.
You measure your progress against your personal benchmarks, which can both push you to your potential and prevent you from chasing someone else’s.
The best strategy aligns with our unique personality and skills that only WE can know for sure.
🚪 Open Door Policy
By nature, humans are loss-averse, meaning more likely to avoid losses than to seek gains.
Which is why it’s easy to get trapped in inaction comparing opportunities.
As Alexander Graham Bell once described it:
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
Therefore the best open door policy is to make a rule with yourself: pay attention to which doors are opening, not closing.
Salud,
Mitchell