If your hair is on fire (and you’re in survival)

If you are only interested to be loved, instead of loving

If you are looking for someone that’s funny, smart and wealthy (perfection)

If you’re looking for a permanent solution to your emotional, financial and sexual problems

If you see relationships as transitions

If you haven’t accepted your flaws (and hence can’t share them)

If you don’t want to be vulnerable and unwilling to be in uncertainty

If you can’t enjoy being alone (and you’re looking for an escape)

Maybe just maybe, you haven’t loved yourself.

And that’s where love begins.

I don’t know any babies going around with a list of priorities. Why do adults need them?

We can get a lot done by trying. Whether it’s sales, tennis or cooking, when we show up and do our best, things get done.

And so, we get greedy. More impact, more sales, more results, less time, less money, less effort.

As we seek to do more with less, we discover that powering through is simply not enough.

We get stressed. Day after day, this compounds to a long-term feeling of coming up short. And so we run even faster, squeezing water out of rock. And finally, our body goes to a stop.

Prioritising is taking a hard look at our lists of desires. And deciding what is more important than the other, in this moment, season and month.

Ranking our desires.

The next time we are running short, we can look at this list of priorities and know what’s next.

Not run faster in circles.

Art is creating something new, that might not work, to change people for the better. What change do you seek to make?

It’s not art if you know it’s going to work. That’s management. That’s a manual. That’s people at Daifun, China who paint copies of Picassos.

It’s not art if there’s no intent. When you do it because you feel like it, that’s a hobby. A hobby can produce artefacts that look like art. And it could even make you rich and famous, that’s luck. That’s not art.

As you can tell, the way I define art have nothing at all to do with painting or sculpture.

A chef who wants to change how people look at sandwiches, by playing with flavour, pricing and business model. They are making art. That’s could be David Chang, Danny Meyers or your 15 year-old son.

The scientists who banded together during the pandemic, found the vaccine and gave it for free. That’s art.

A receptionist who gives you the inside scoop on the person you were meeting. So you feel prepared and relaxed before you walk in. She’s making art.

An entrepreneur, a sever or a barber. They can all be artists.

You too, if you choose to.

Objections are healthy. But if you learnt the wrong lesson, it could turn into a massive waste of time and effort.

You won’t get to add the right feature that’s keeping your prospects from saying “yes.”

You won’t get to pivot and pursue the right market.

You won’t get to tell the right story to gain the trust you need.

Here’s a neat question to avoid those costly mis-learnings, “If I can give it to you in this ___, would you pay for it right now?”

And if the answer is “No,” or another set of objections show up, you just learnt the difference of an excuse (your prospect is “being nice”) from a useful lesson.

How long did it take you to create your LinkedIn profile?

“This is how I look. This is how I can be useful. These are the topics I like.”

But that’s not entirely true, is it?

We grow into a career, titles and the stories we tell ourselves.

And so we fall into a trap. We believe this is who we are. We are fixed.

In the face of a disruption, we are blind to opportunities because it doesn’t resonate with the person we are in the moment.

One way to define our identity is as someone who is fixed. Another is to violently refuse any labelling because deep down, we know that we are flexible. We contain multitudes.

The online profile that says who we are, it’s simply shorthand for others to know how we might be useful at this moment.

And when we decide to change how we want to show up, we simply update our profile.