Fate will take from you and I that which is most precious to us: loved ones, careers, offspring, partners, or ability. You and I might not be prepared for Fate; and we can’t fully prepare. You can remind yourself that your life, or the lives of those you love, can end at any moment. You can imagine to yourself that you will respond with equanimity and stillness. You might be preparing yourself in the wrong way - you might be intellectualizing your fear. To intellectualize our fear, is to break apart the future into little parts and examine them as If we were living that future right now. That’s not possible. Instead, what if we visualized ourselves submitting to Fate and to our experience? Visualize a moment in the future that you fear - say the loss of a loved one. How might you see yourself radically accepting that news? When you think about yourself fully experiencing that moment, what kinds of emotions do you imagine you might experience?If I have learned anything from the pandemic it is this: we will never truly know ourselves until we are forced by Fate to walk in our own shoes.

You made a series of decisions that produced outcomes that you may, or may not, have learned from. The real question is, where will we go from here?

Do you know people who pack their calendars tight with meetings? They are likely the people who say they get their work done at night. How effective are these people in the long run? The most important work you do today are born from the decisions you make now. If you want to improve your decisions, you must invest time to think. If your calendar is packed with meetings, when, where, and how do you invest that time?Here’s a tip - take time to write. Writing clarifies your thinking.Clarified thinking leads to effective decision making which leads to producing more work that matters.

Do you have a hard time achieving long term goals? What’s the smallest step you can take now to help you reach your goal? The smallest viable step. For many of us, perhaps you, taking the step is easy but staying consistent is hard. If you are like me, you know that struggle. What to do? Take a spoonful of sugar. Making work fun, or sweet, incentivizes us to do more work - to take more steps. If we take enough steps, we eventually hit our goal. The hardest part about achieving longterm goals is keeping the journey fun! Perhaps the question you ask yourself is not, How do I stay focused on reaching my long term goals? Perhaps the question is actually, How do I make my journey more fun? How do I make the smallest viable step a dance and not a dirge?

Tabula rasa means blank slate, and you should have one for one simple reason.The best time to make lasting change is at the moment when the past and the present have a clean break. New Year’s, birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, new jobs, graduations, unemployment, divorces, death, birth - when the life you knew dies and a new life begins. Your tabula rasa does not have to be January 31 nor on a Monday. For me, it’s every day when I sleep - I remind myself that I might not wake up and ask what I might do differently If only I had a second chance. But what about at work - how can you leverage the tabula rasa at work?Your clients/customers/students/etc - they all have moments that they would consider their tabula rasa. How might you leverage those moments to influence change? Find your tabula rasa, love it, and leverage it.

You can be the most talented at what you do and still fail.It’s not your talent, grades, intuition, or divine providence bestowed upon you that wins the day.What wins is your ability to avoid and/or reduce mistakes. Eliminate and un-learn bad habits first to win more.

Scientific philosopher, Sr Karl Popper, shared his thoughts as to what makes science versus pseudoscience. You can read Popper’s thoughts in the book Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. In the book, which I’ve yet to read, Popper lays out seven conclusions. The first is what I find deeply curious: “It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory–if we look for confirmations.”Do you know people who walk around complaining about the world? It’s almost like they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those people say things like “see, I told you this was going to suck.” That person believes they have a keen and infallible intuition that can’t be wrong. Popper’s first conclusion speaks to those people.Popper would argue that if we truly want to test our theories, then we should stop trying to prove them right and instead prove them wrong. As Popper says, “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.”Nowadays, we must be on guard for claims and ideas that can’t be tested and refuted. We must guard our minds and souls against theories masquerading as facts. Remember, our minds may routinely betray us too.

In Book 6 of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Marcus writes:All of us are working on the same project. Some consciously, with understanding; some without knowing it. Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things - they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well. So make up your mind who you’ll choose to work with. The force that directs all things will make good use of you regardless - will put you on its payroll and set you to work.”Whats’ the project we’re working on together? What’s the thing that all of our collective energies are poured into? Service.If you are in any type of occupation - including rearing little humans - you are serving another. The return on your service can be money, hugs, kisses, friendship, family, career development, you name it! Some times we see the ROI today. Some times the ROI comes years in the future. We are all doing our best to serve someone else. And if we complain, it just means that we are frustrated because we can’t serve as well as we want. As Marcus suggests, you get to choose who you serve and what problems you solve for them. You get to choose.

I learned this lesson a year ago, and I’m giving it a re-think.What did I miss last year? What wasn’t in my field of view then but now I see?The benefit and curse of hindsight is that we see with 20/20 vision. And, if our hindsight might shape our intuition, then we should better rely on our intuition. That said, intuition is not a fleeting choice or a knee jerk reaction.

I still have Meditations on my desk - it’s centering for me. I opened to a random page and read this passage which you’ve likely seen written by me multiple times.In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us - like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacles to our action.The impediment to action advances action.What stands in the way becomes the way.- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Book 5, #20.You likely have read the “impediment to action advances action, w hat stands in the way becomes the way” quote multiple times from multiple sources; it’s a popular Stoic quote. After re-reading Marcus’ entry, I think we are missing a key part of the idea.We can adapt and accommodate. We can = have the ability, have the option, have the skill, capable of executing.You have the ability to choose to adapt and accommodate to what impedes your action. You can also get frustrated and decide to give up. But, when we give up, all that we’re doing is denying ourselves the opportunity to do good for others. When you next hit that brick wall, or when life throws you lemons, or when your job is on the line - accommodate and adapt. See the beauty in that new constraint. Don’t let anything get in the way of you serving others.