How to enjoy doing the hard things

Hey friends,

I.

I’m officially 2 weeks into being 30 years old. I had a fun moment of realising that this morning – I’d made myself a coffee (using the Clever Dripper, my favourite coffee implement), and I needed to dispose of the coffee grounds. So I opened the kitchen bin, and saw that it was full. My normal response under these circumstances would’ve been to empty the grounds into the full bin anyway, and trust in my future self to deal with the fallout. But this morning, I paused. I thought: “I’m a grown-ass 30-year old man now… so what do I want to do right now?”

And so, I decided to not empty the grounds into the already full bin. Instead, I propped open the bin, took out the bin bag, tied it closed, took it outside, inserted a new bag into the bin, and dropped the coffee grounds into the new bin bag. And I felt great for the rest of the day for doing the adult thing.

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II.

I started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation this week. It’s really good. He’s a social psychologist and a very good writer, and makes a pretty convincing case that social media in the hands of kids and teenagers (especially while they’re going through puberty) is the major cause of the mental health crisis we’re seeing all around the world.

Big whoop right? Doesn’t everyone know this? Well, I thought I did, but seeing the graphs and data in the book made me think: “Holy smokes, I had absolutely no idea that things were this bad” and “Holy cauldron, I can totally see how social media is a weapon of mass destruction that’s directly caused all this bad stuff to happen to kids and teens!”

Also, now that I know what goes into writing a book (btw, please leave a nice review for mine if you haven’t yet 😉), I also found myself thinking: “Damn Jonathan Haidt is a really good writer, I love how he’s constructed this argument, and the vibes and personality with which he’s presenting things”.

III.
I was invited to give a talk this week at marketing and entrepreneurship conference, AdCon 2024, about how to use organic long-form video on YouTube and LinkedIn to drive leads for your business. As usual, I left preparing for this to the last minute, and after spending a couple of hours struggling to figure out what on earth I was going to say, I decided to try a little experiment.

Instead of pushing through, I decided to sincerely ask myself the question: “What would this look like if it were fun? Instead of trying to add value to the audience, what if I just focused on my own enjoyment of doing the talk?”

Well, if I were focused mostly on my own enjoyment, I wouldn’t bother with slides. Those are boring to go through, and preparing slides is a lot of work. Instead, if I were genuinely trying to have fun, I’d poll the audience at the start using Mentimeter (my favourite way of presenting slides these days), and then I’d have a massive whiteboard on stage. Based on the results of my audience-polling, I’d construct a talk on the fly to cover the points that the audience wants to know about.

The talk happened earlier today, and based on what people were saying when they came up to me afterwards, the audience loved it. I’ve never had more fun giving a talk before, I was way looser and more relaxed than I would’ve been had I “prepared” for it, the audience laughed at (almost) all my jokes, and I genuinely think I delivered a way better talk in this format than I would’ve done if I’d spent 10 hours preparing slides.

This is yet another piece of data in my own ongoing experimentation with the philosophy of Feel-Good Productivity: that when you’re enjoying the process, productivity takes care of itself. And it’s further corroboration of what my friend and executive coach Joe Hudson says: “Instead of trying to make it better, instead just focus on enjoying yourself. By doing that, you’ll probably make it better than it would’ve been if you’d tried to make it better”.
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IV.

On that note, this issue of Sunday Snippets has been one of the most fun for me to write. Why? Because as I was staring at the blank page thinking “what on earth do I write about this week?”, I thought to myself: “Huh, well what would I write if I didn’t try to write something good, but instead just tried to enjoy myself”. So I decided to open with the pointless story about taking out the trash.

Then, when I had nothing to segue that to, I thought: “Well, what would I do if I were focusing on enjoying myself?” The answer was: “I’d just share something interesting I’ve read recently without worrying about having to write a transition, ooh great, let’s talk about the Anxious Generation book”.

Then I thought: “Ooh this is a fun format I can try! Instead of feeling like I have to write a coherent single piece that says just one thing, why don’t I just split the email into a few different parts, which don’t have to relate to each other? That would be fun, and it would make the process so much easier!”

And now here I am, 903 words in, enjoying the process of writing, feeling like I’m in flow, and if you’re reading this far, maybe you too have enjoyed reading this email. I guess sometimes changing up the format of the way we’re doing things, and giving ourselves permission to do it in a different, more enjoyable way, can sometimes lead to good stuff.

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V.

Thank you to everyone who sent in life advice for me when I put out the call for it a couple of weeks ago. Still working on putting it all together into a coherent format… although as I write this, I’m thinking to myself: “Huh, what would THAT look like if it were fun?”

Have a great week!

Ali xx