Directives

Inspired by Derek Sivers (https://sivers.org/d1), I keep a list of Directives in a text file on my computer. They’re quick rules that help me decide what to focus on and how to operate my business.

Here, if it helps you, are the directives on my list as of September 14th, 2022.

1. Do less.
2. Treat yourself with love.
3. If it works, then keep doing it.
4. What if it were easy?
5. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
6. You will become known for doing what you do.
7. Changing yourself to satisfy the expectations of others will destroy you.
8. Be willing to no longer recognize yourself on your journey.
9. Do it now. Don’t wait. Don’t procrastinate. The winners in this world are not the ones who find the greatest excuses to put off doing what they know will help them grow. The winners are the ones that prioritize deliberate + intentional action and seize the day.
10. Be aggressive. Act like you have one year to make it work before you give up and try something else. What haven’t you done? Where aren’t you being aggressive enough? Go do it and embarrass yourself with your pushiness — after all, you’ll be doing something else in a year anyway, so who cares what people think?
11. 99% of the brain’s thinking consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. 100% of the things the brain spends 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.
12. Make decisions with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.
13. The most important thing you can do when faced with adversity is to stay focused on deliberate + intentional action (’stay on your grind’).
14. Breaks are rare; Take them while you’ve got them
15. Any teaching should serve to (1) establish your credibility or (2) increase the student’s awareness of the problem your fix solves.
16. Be the first to celebrate your own successes. “If I ain’t cheering for me, why would anyone else?”
17. Direct response (marketing), copywriting, ability to write, and public speaking are all superpower skills. Learn one along with a career skill and you’ll be in demand. Learn two or three or four and you can become massively in demand.
18. The race to the top is how do I become the most trusted, how do I become the most distinctive, how do I become the most ethical? If you do those things, you win, but it’s not obvious how to get there. You need to think hard.
19. You have to say, “How do we make it different from the others so that it is remarkable?” Then you say, “How do we make it for the smallest possible audience?” That part takes discipline.
20. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
21. Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them?
22. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
23. Play to win; don’t play to not lose.
24. Use the off-the-shelf solution to save time. That should be the default solution.
25. Think of your time and activities like this: Is this $1/hr work, $10/hr, $100/hr, or $1000/hr work. Focus on declining the $1/hr work, delegrating the $10/hr and $100/hr work, and

And if I had to pick three directives, these are the three I’d pick:

1. Do less.
2. Treat yourself with love.
3. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

What’s a directive you live by in business or life?

Excelsior!

Kai