Being vs. Doing

In Ryan Holiday’s book, Ego Is the Enemy, there is an excellent section called “To Be or To Do.” The idea is that you can easily get lost in being when you should instead focus on doing.

Being is the trappings. Doing is the work.

Looking back on my law career, I see this in myself. As a young lawyer, I was hung up on the trappings of lawyer-ism. I bought a leather briefcase and a fancy raincoat that, after nearly 30 years in Southern California, still looked new when I gave it away a few years ago. I had a miniature statue of the scales of justice in my office. No, really, I did. When I look back, I cringe.

At this point, with decades in this racket, I know what makes a good lawyer (or a good MacSparky, or a good husband, or a good whatever). The answer, in hindsight, is doing the work.

To be a good lawyer, I needed to “do” a lot of lawyering. To be a good MacSparky, I need to do a lot of MacSparky-ing. The briefcase never mattered.

I have been trying to remind myself of this lately by changing some of my internal verbs and nouns. In my head, I don’t think of myself as a lawyer or a MacSparky, but instead as someone who helps people overcome legal challenges or someone who teaches people how to use Apple technology to serve their purpose in life.

I focus on the action. It may seem like a subtle change, but it is an important one. By focusing on my actions as the craftsman, I stop making assumptions about my abilities or purported entitlements.

Instead, I force myself to prove it through my efforts. This is how I judge myself, not by the result but by the work. This alternate mindset, by its existence, removes the possibility for me to assume anything I make will be worth a damn simply because of who I am. Instead, I need to prove it every time.

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

Less than a year after escaping concentration camps, Victor Frankl gave a lecture series in Vienna where he talked about resilience and embracing life. You can now buy the transcript, and it’s something you should read.

I’m not done reading it and will post more on it in the future, but I’m far enough in now to easily recommend this one.

My Six Month Planning Wallpaper

I talked about planning wallpaper recently on Focused. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and find it a good way for me to keep my big projects rolling. All of these items are already in my calendar. I know these dates in my head. I think about these plans all the time. Nevertheless, the reason I go to the trouble of putting this on my desktop is to give me a nudge when I need it most. As part of my monthly review process, I open the file, delete the past month, move the others around, and add a new month to the end so I’ve got an updated planning wallpaper heading into the new month. I have multiple monitors but just keep this on my iMac, center screen.

The quote at the top is from my friend, Merlin Mann on one of his podcasts. (I have no idea which one.) I first saw it in a wallpaper designed by Chase Reeves (but I can’t find it anymore). Regardless, it still inspires me when I’m feeling the resistance. Merlin does have a knack for words. I used a chisel because I felt that was the tool that best represents the sentiment. If you wanted to modernize it, a jackhammer could also work. Grin

Several folks asked me to share the wallpaper so here is a version of it. I’ve included the OmniGraffle project below. If you spent a little time on it, you could recreate something like it with Preview, but it’d be more work. Rather than make this a full sized desktop wallpaper, this is actually much smaller. I just center it on the screen and then, on my Mac, match the background color of the rest of the desktop to match the background of the text. Enjoy.

Planning Wallpaper OmniGraffle File