When the Brain Lies about Important Work.

Leadership is not about waiting until you “feel it.” It’s about acting in alignment with vision when resistance is loud and comfort is tempting. The real work begins when you override the inner critic and braid vision, intention, and means together — especially on the days you least want to.

I’m not “feeling it” today.

If your work or active project this week has you feeling like that… this is for you.

Work is personal.

I mean it requires something in you to come out. And that isn’t always easy.

Point in case: All the newsletter articles challenge me, they are not easy to create.

I face The Resistance every time I sit down to write these.

My process is messy.

I can tell myself this is art and I only see a blank canvas every time I open the document to write. I can tell myself this is not a good time, and I don’t feel inspired. Classic examples of The Resistance in action. I stare at the blank document and ask myself what’s the point?

I look at the clock and wonder when I should start.

The time ticks by. To the point where I finally look at the clock again to justify that now it’s too late to start. I wouldn’t even be able to finish if I tried. So why even start?

I dilly-dally and dawdle.

I feel a little dopamine hit from this wording despite how little value it gives you. It “feels good” to say that clever phrase instead of just admitting that I am procrastinating. I put it in anyway.

To burn the clock even more I entertain thoughts on “dilly-dally and dawdle” and do a google search or two on these words and reflect on being a kid and transcribing an abridged dictionary ‘for fun’… Doing this is not productive, but it has a feeling of control and pseudo-productiveness.

“I can do what I want.” I tell myself. The clock doesn’t control me nor does the blank canvas.

“I can just stop right now, no one will ever know.” It’ll just be another day that I didn’t send an email.|

"My inner critic tells me to delete it all."

Boom. Digital dust. Gone.

Starting over is not even required, just delete… and stop.

And to further my justifications, like a cherry on top of my excuse Sundae, I replay times I have shared my writing with others only to be told nobody cares about my thoughts and ideas, or even if they do, they are too busy to read all this. 

“300 words of a nothing burger served up so far” I think to myself. Just delete it.

“A person’s attention and time is the greatest gift they can give” I think to myself, doubling down on how this is just a waste of your time and my time.

It’s painful. And there are pieces of truth in all this.

But.

I know that Sundays are the days when I write to you with my PS.

The PS is a “personal story”.

It means it is in fact, personal.

My hope is that you will slow down and chew on it. 

Ideally you will ask yourself; What is he trying to tell me? Why does this matter?

This is the day I take something out of the emotional vault of my body of work, not just the intellectual “know how” stuff I share other days of the week. Things I have wrestled with that are the personal and leadership stories tied to getting stuff done.

The personal story is intended to encourage you.

The personal story should be applicable to a situation in your life right now.

The personal story should reveal a pattern just beneath my specific details. After all my story is just icing on the cake, my sprinkles may differ, but the cake itself is universal – right?

The personal story should entertain to some degree, and help you see the real unvarnished me.

But, ultimately, the personal story should help you GSD.

Ha! GSD – getting stuff done, especially when it’s hardest. That’s The Path of a Leader.

I can’t help but chuckle as I share some of the principles that guide my Sunday writing process.

The irony is not lost on how I ‘need’ to GSD and yet I am doing anything and everything but GSD.

Until.

I come back to the reason for all this.

I have a vision.

Leadership is rarely about feeling ready. It’s about taking meaningful action even when your brain begs for comfort. This is where vision must step in. Because I have a vision, which I define simply as something that is attainable, sustainable, and compelling, I have a reason picture of a thing in the future I want that does not yet exist but should. It is others oriented and helpful, it is meaningful.

In this way, when I’m doing what I am doing right now… in the fog of war or the swirl of self-centeredness or the ambivalence of ambiguity, I can pause and take stock.   What is the vision?  Ah yes.  That is my reason for doing this.  You have a vision too, don’t you?

To make sure a vision is real, and not a dream, you must have two other elements.

Intention and means. 

A vision alone really is just a dream or a fun idea to play with in your mind. 

The intention is simply defined as your willful action of what you will do and most importantly what you will NOT do.  It almost always forces prioritization and tradeoffs. 

You simply can’t do everything, therefor what is the one thing? Intention isn’t just a concept its action. 

I need to trade off and move away from passivity into action. 

Opening my document and writing here is acting out that intention.  Not just “having a good intention” but moving forward with intention.

I would like to do something else instead.  My little caveman brain tells me other things would be better.  My brain is a liar. Yours is too.

Thankfully we have a higher level of thinking that is creative, logical, and smart. 

The universal success pattern has three ingredients… not two.

Therefor with vision and intention, we must include means. 

Means is simply the time, talent, money and resources we can put to bear.  As you know, nothing gets done when it has no resources regardless of how important it is. 

So, here I am. Time, Talent, and some software all being focused meaningfully and intentionally on this article.

“More than 800 words, I’m losing them” is what I say to myself right now.

“This is too meta and self-referential” I tell myself. My fear is you are in a hurry and I’m a bad host not giving you those pleasure signals in the brain.

“If you confuse, you lose” I remind myself. People abandon what is confusing.

So what?

I’m telling you this is life.

What we do.

What we will do but haven’t done yet. 

What we will do, but not do yet as we justify ourselves for the one day in the future that never comes. 

If we punch out when its confusing, or its hard, or it’s not a straight line - we never make progress. Things don’t get built. Discoveries don’t get made. Personal transformations do not occur.

“No one cares about this thread you are pulling on” I think to myself.

“This is to abstract”.

Some have a lot more of “this”, some have less of “this”. 

Any by “this” I mean the inner critic, the justification and excuses, the passivity and being complacent.  

I have it. But I don’t always trust it.

Why should you care?

Because your work matters - and it’s hard. Your brain is happy to lie to you. And you often reward the brain by giving in to it.

The way to overcome this is with VIM; vision, intention, and means.

You have to braid these three strands into a strong cord. So it can’t easily be broken by the lying brain or the outside challenges.

Vision + Intention + Means naturally produce GSD. 
There is no GSD when there is no vision, intention and means.

“It’s about 1000 words to get to the point, I have to chop all this down” is what I’m thinking right now. I know you are laboring through this.

But that is the point.

Scroll up and Slow down and chew.

You are like this too. 

I’m just showing my work.  Not for me, but for you. Your project, your business, your hard thing.

There is no business case for that new product line, there is no highly effective demo to a prospective client, there is no systems improvement project or strategic growth plan without facing the inner critic and the blank canvas.

That blinking cursor is unforgiving. And those cell phone notifications are so tempting. Aren’t they?

We use templates, frameworks, maps, and plays in the playbook to bypass a blank canvas.  We love paint-by-numbers and despise the blank canvas.

Fine, go grab one if that’s what it takes. 

It’s easier to edit than create. 

But The Path Of A Leader says that we need to do the right work, the things that are valued and valuable.  This is the stuff to get done. 

We have to do the interior work of thinking and then doing. 

We have to do that work with a purpose. 

We have to do it without being overly critical because we can’t be perfect.  Which means we have to iterate. 

Iteration is a draft, a sketch, a bullet list, an outline.  Iteration is incremental, thinking on paper, wrestling with something fuzzy and shaping it. 

So the point here is this.

The thing you want to do. 

That thing that is valued and valuable.

If it was easy, you would have already done it.  

To do the hard work needed for valuable things is for you to push through with action. 

But that action must be a clear expression of vision, intention, and means working together otherwise you will stall out.  You may start, but you won’t finish. 

This is how my earlier personal stories on the tough customer turned $1M success, or the two-year sprint from sales rep to manager in a $9B company, or the discount card fundraiser all happened.  I mean how they got done, not just started.

And I haven’t even talked about the invention and Kickstarter, or the $100 bars of soap, or the 10,000 books in under 90 days, or the 2x growth of a SaaS in 22 months, or the other countless stories of value creation and GSD.  

Becoming a leader that gets stuff done is skill development and repetition.  It is not the easy stuff, it’s the repetition on the hard stuff. Getting past the inner critic, getting past the excuses, getting past the blockers.

And all of it stretches you.

Without tension and disruption there is no growth and no breakthrough.   

Today’s personal story is about vulnerability and progress not perfection.

Instead of me ditching today and not “feeling it”.

I want you to know that it’s ok to feel that way too.

But don’t let it guide you.

Instead be guided by:

• your compelling, attainable and sustainable vision.

• your intention as expressed through willful action and priority.

• your means as time, talent, money, tools, and all manner of resources.

And bring them all together to override the obstacle in front of you.

It is very easy to quit.

There is so much more to life when you push forward and do the right work and get (the hard) stuff done.  VIM through the hard stuff, not just the easy stuff. 

And if you need to, just do what you can do, not what you can’t.

Today’s an example of that. 

This is what I can do. Because doing nothing isn’t how leaders lead.

Be encouraged:

That thing you have a vision for – it has things you need to do next.  Put some intention and means into those next things this week.  And do the hard work.  The blessings are on the other side. I promise.

#ThePathOfALeader
#GSD

I appreciate you,

Justin