There’s a story from Jim Afremow’s The Champion’s Mind that I’d like to share, as related by Anson Dorrance, who is the women’s soccer coach at the University of North Carolina:
“He was driving to work early one morning, and as he passed a deserted field, he noticed one of his players off in the distance doing extra training by herself. He kept driving, but he later left a note in her locker: ‘The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching.’ The young woman, Mia Hamm, would go on to become one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.”1
I’d also like you to consider bestselling author Cal Newport. In addition to writing incredibly insightful books like So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In other words, he’s a very busy guy. How does he do it all? Surely part of the answer is that he doesn’t have social media.2
Lastly, let’s look at the story of my own brother, Nick Loper. Fresh out of college and working a well-paying job for Ford, Nick opted to spend his nights and weekends building an online shoe business. Eventually, this became the launching pad for his online entrepreneurial empire: Side Hustle Nation.
So what do these three examples have in common?
Last week, Seth Godin offered an answer:
“Remarkable work is usually accomplished by people who have non-typical priorities.”3
While her teammates were prioritizing comfort and sleep, Mia Hamm prioritized becoming a better soccer player.
While most people prioritize keeping up with the newsfeeds from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Cal Newport prioritizes doing “deep work” – the sort of mental labor that leads to innovative ideas and completed manuscripts.2
And while most people in his position would have prioritized relaxing or having fun after work, my brother decided to prioritize earning his freedom.
Conventional priorities are reflected by conventional behaviors: television, junk food, scrolling through newsfeeds, alcohol, keeping up with the Joneses. These may be the norm, but they won’t help you get where you want to go.
Reflection
What Godin and others have noted is that ‘not having enough time’ to do something is almost always code for ‘not making it a priority.’ And if we’d like to accomplish something remarkable, we’d be wise to examine our priorities. Here are some questions you might ask yourself:
What do my choices say about my priorities? How much time am I really spending on the things that matter most? And how much time am I spending on things that aren’t really important to me?
What am I doing to move forward on the things I care most about? Am I aiming for the intersections of the Ikigai diagram? Am I doing my shoulds before my have-to’s?
What does my calendar say about my priorities? Paraphrasing from Brendan Burchard’s High Performance Habits, Nick Loper notes that “If you can’t discern from your weekly or monthly calendar what major moves you’re working toward, you’re not optimizing your time.”4
What does the layout of my home environment say about my priorities? Are books, musical instruments, art supplies, or athletic equipment taking up prime real estate? Or is a big, flat-screen TV the centerpiece of my home? Am I using the surprising power of 20 seconds to make what I care about easier to do?
And if I truly believe that something is important, but I’m not doing it, what’s getting in the way? Am I afraid of being weird? Am I letting the short-term, seemingly urgent things take priority over the long-term things that actually matter?5
Distractions
One of the most insidious things that gets in the way is distractions, and the modern world has no shortage of them. If you allow distractions to permeate your life, you’re sending a clear signal to your brain that you don’t really care all that much about the important work you’re struggling to do.
And the pace at which these distractions are offered is astounding. How many TV shows are there for you to binge? How many social media platforms with endless newsfeeds to scroll through? How many sensational news stories come out each day? How many movies came out this year? How many new video games? How many new styles of junk food came out this year (available for a limited time only!) Did you try them all?! You can never hope to keep up, but, if you’re like most modern people, you’ve experienced some anxiety about everything that you’re missing out on.
However, as Brian Johnson recently pointed out, the fear of missing out (FOMO) can be replaced by the joy of missing out (JOMO).6 If you know that skipping all those “normal” but unhealthy options allows you to do meaningful work, then you get to feel happy about not participating. Let’s embrace JOMO as we remember this:
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” –Krishnamurti
The simplest way to avoid a huge chunk of these distractions is to spend more of your time in airplane mode. That way, you’ll at least have to choose to engage with them rather than being bombarded by distractions at all hours. If you find it hard to let go of the desire to ‘stay on top of everything’ – the news, social media posts, the latest episodes of popular shows – then consider that getting to the bottom of things is actually a better priority. This doesn’t have to mean skipping out on those things entirely; it just means that you don’t start there, and you choose to do your important work first.
My Unconventional Priorities
At the foundation of my personal program of becoming better is an unconventional priority that I wish more people would adopt: brain health. I’ve come to understand that my brain is my #1 asset, so taking good care of it is among my highest priorities. This is why I don’t drink alcohol or use other drugs. This is why I avoid sugar. This is why I start every day with a self-care routine that includes exercise, wisdom, and meditation.
I also try to prioritize my future well-being over my present enjoyment. For example, instead of choosing entertainment, I often choose self-education in order to accumulate career capital. This isn’t easy to do because virtually everything about our instant-gratification culture encourages us to prioritize how we feel in the here and now. But if we want to accomplish anything great, we’ll need to put our current desires aside and do the work we don’t feel like doing. You might find it helpful to remember that your future selves are many, while your current self is just one.
I make time for creative projects, such as Ngaej.com, that don’t have a guaranteed payoff but which might produce huge results. If my priority was a sure thing, I would just put in more hours at work, but it’s not, so I take the risk. People who start businesses and write books take the same sort of risk.
So what do you want more?
Choosing between the conventional and the unconventional really comes down to choosing between what is easy and what is hard. Do you want the pleasure and comfort of doing what most people do? Or do you want the extraordinary results that can only come from choosing the road less traveled?
1 Afremo, Jim. The Champion’s Mind: How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive. Rodale Books, 2015.
2 Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.
3 Godin, Seth. “Time and money.” Seth’s Blog. March 7, 2019.
4 Loper, Nick. “My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each.” Side Hustle Nation. February 14th, 2019.
5 Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Fireside, 1990.
6 Johnson, Brian. “JOMO vs. FOMO.” Optimize +1.