Book of five rings?
Doing a book reading of this nature is too pedantic. Posing my essays here is may just bore everyone to death. So I am pivoting. I am going to change the way in which I do the reporting on my reading projects. This means that you will be able to download the essays from my drive if you wish to read them, this also removes the heaviness that comes with discussing the finer points of this book.
Cycles
There are things that keep a car going, like making sure it gets fuel, making sure that it has enough water and oil. There are some secondary things that also need to be done like periodically checking on your tyre pressure and taking note of the weird noises that it makes. There is on major thing I have forgotten to mention though and that is the service, where you replace the spark plugs, the air and oil filters, as well as draining out the old oil and putting in new oil. sometimes one also has to drain the brake fluid, and depending on the wear and tear you will have to work on the suspension aligning the wheels and replacing the shock absorbers.
Life can be very similar to this. To take the comparison to analogy territory, the major things are your critical success factors. Paying attention to the noises is tracking the important things you have to pay attention to, while dealing with wear and tear is crisis management. The service and driving are the two things that I want to unpack:
Driving is the planning and acting ratio. proper driving means that both of these things happen at once. This is akin to a marksman tracking a moving target and shooting it and then moving to the next target and the next. If there is no overarching goals you will become busy, where you are completing tasks but not actually getting shit done. If there is continuous planning you will just pile yourself under guilt and shame for not getting anything done. Either way you are getting nothing important done and this is akin to driving in circles. If you find yourself here it may mean that you do not want the goals you said you are aiming for, or you are too scared to act - which means you have to employ a different strategy
The service is how you keep yourself accountable, now if you do not want what you have said that you wanted no amount of accountability is going to convince you to do it. But this is a problem, you see it is not as simple as wanting to change. Our brains do not like change much. Because it costs a lot of energy - there is a way to show your brain that you are serious about change and I will be getting to that tomorrow, so stay tuned -
If you want what you are aiming for accountability is the easiest way to force yourself to do what is good for you. Because when something become necessary we will act, necessary means a couple of things , and the more legit reason you lay onto an action - whether positive or negative - greatly increases your chances of following through.
The way I am applying this right now comes out of the book the compound effect, Darren Hardy makes mention of a long time friend he calls up every friday where these two hold a meeting concerning their peak performance partnership. Now I met Nathan through a mutual friend, and all three of us showed interest in doing things that will impact our budding country of South Africa. Our mutual friend decided to do this through the media as a newspaper journalist, while Nathan and I set our aims on disrupting the entertainment industry around here - it is much the same the world over, governed by cliques that hold access to all the fancy places.
We have been building an events company for years, and it is only now that he has wormed his way into the higher echelons, while I am honing my content marketing craft. Although there is a critical factor that both of us need to attain and that is the subtle skill set that allows a person to "run the room", on top of this there are certain steps that need to be taken before things really take off. This has to do with the deals he is crafting on his side, while I am on this side building up the frameworks that will facilitate the creation of our brand.
Nathan is the guy I chose to be my peak performance partner. We have an hour long meeting on Saturdays at 9am, where we report on what we have decided to work on over the past week, in the framework of a three month focus. Right now both of us are focusing on becoming more charismatic and a lot more persuasive as well as building up our individual cash flow.
It is important that you place a reckoning into your workflow, and it is important that this reckoning come in at intervals where bad news is small mistakes rather than catastrophic failure. This cycle for me and Nathan is weekly.
what is yours?
If you do not have one, and want one, when are you going to set it up?