Daily Spark

Metrics are a powerful way of knowing if you’re achieving or have achieved the outcomes you care about — they draw a fine line between conjecture and truth.

You are allowed to be happy while doing your best to address whatever challenges and problems come your way in life.

Failure has a flip side worth celebrating. 

Delivery is an art form, not an afterthought. 

To calibrate your energy & ensure that it's being spent in the right places, ask yourself: what's the solvable problem?

In times of crisis, perspective can make all the difference. 

Knowing where to work hard matters much more than hard work itself.

While accepting that you’re having a bad day doesn’t magically make the day better, it does give you space to embrace the possibilities that tomorrow and every other day of life has to offer.

Take your interests & passions seriously — there’s never been a better time to go do your thing, to do the work that excites you, and to be able to share it with an audience that finds value from it.

If there’s one principal worth diligently following at home, in your community, and in the work place, let it be to simply focus on caring for the people around you.

You and your team shouldn’t have to work hard to work hard.

There’s the feeling that you’re starting something, and then there’s actually starting something. Being able to know the difference is important.

Being able to focus in an era of growing daily distractions is a super power that can help you achieve your most important goals. 

It’s not enough to resolve to be focused, but you have to be specific about how you will put it into practice and then do it.

When you cultivate joy and happiness you are improving your well being, the well being of others, and increasing everyone’s collective ability to do important work.

With enough tenacity, time, and focus it turns out that people are very good at figuring out how to do “impossible” things.

You are not obligated to live your life in the way others expect you to.

An uncommon idea could be a bad or idea, or it could be uncommon sense. 

Empathy + hard work = impact.

Rest isn't lazy, it's restorative: it's what gives you the energy to sustain the work that you care about the most.

Stress can be a very powerful asset when it comes to performance, but first you must cultivate a mindset that views stress in this way.  Research referenced in today's Daily Spark: https://stanford.app.box.com/s/cxpeacuhamihnzzwko746iaek6mu6sl6

Developing the discipline of looking for and applying leverage is how you make substantial increases in your ability to solve problems.

A firm belief in possibility of creating something valuable is what teams rely on during the most trying parts of the journey. Without it, it becomes all too easy to feel burnt out and to quit just as you're on the cusp of producing something great.

If you’re able to go through the exercise of upgrading your limiting factors to enabling factors, the benefit is two-fold and well-worth it: you get more effective operations and, perhaps most important, room to breathe and a renewed sense of sanity to ensure that you and your team are able to continue doing the work you believe in.

Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy when it comes to taking on challenges to foster growth.