Environmental Control and Time Horizons

Salutations,

Writing has been very difficult this week. Typically, I will hear or read a topic and my little brain will be abuzz for a few days, and then voilà a newsletter appears.

That has not been the case this week. Been pretty flat. Does that mean I skip a week? Wait for the right thoughts to cross my brain? No! I have 35 loyal readers who need their weekly email.

So how do we muster up an idea? You don’t. You create the environment that you do that task in every day, week, month, etc.

This week we are going to blend two psychological ideas to serve the point that I am trying to make (don’t tell APA).

First, we are going to talk about environmental design, popularized by James Clear in Atomic Habits.

Second, we are going to talk about Parkinson’s Law, an idea from Cyril Northcote Parkinson (I added his name because that’s a powerhouse of a name).

By now, if you haven’t heard of the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, you are the weird one. In this Triple Platinum Book, James Clear talks about habits and how to form them. One of his key behaviors to help cement a habit is to build your environment to help you accomplish the habit that you set out to build. Motivation is never enough to build a habit that sticks. You need to build your environment to give you the best chance to accomplish your task.

Parkinson’s Law states, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” or as I like to say, “The amount of time you have is the amount of time it will take.”

Now that we know our independent ideas, let’s put them together to help Kyle write his newsletter.

What is the nature of the environment in which it is easiest for you to write? Create that to the best of your ability. When is your next meeting? 12:30 p.m.? Okay, you have an hour and a half.

Fun fact, I have a green bankers lamp next to my desk and I turn it on when I write. There is plenty of natural light in the room. I just like having it on when I am writing.

If you receive this email before 12:30 p.m. PDT, you will know I successfully completed my task.

The Hero’s Journal

In April 2022, Nick, Kyle, and The Hero’s Journal Team moved out of The Hero’s Headquarters. It was about 19 months in the building and it holds some of the fondest moments of my life. But we had to move on.

Nick and I, not ready to end the roommate business partner game yet, decided to spend a month in Austin, TX. It was there we launched our third storyline, The Galaxy of Istoria.

I have a lot of notes about this release that I will hopefully get into in future newsletters, but for today, I want to focus on the new environment. Nick and I had grown accustomed to having a YouTube studio in our house to make promo content, to livestream, to talk to our audience. Now, we were in an Airbnb in Texas without any of our creature comforts or the environment that we were used to producing content in.

The impact of this wasn’t felt on the release of GOI, but I do think it took a toll on a larger scale. The harder it is to start making content over time, the more energy it takes to just begin, meaning over time you will just do less of it.

You expand that over two years, and what you find is people who are worn out not doing anything near what they used to because the setup is so dramatic that it makes the output feel not worth it.

On top of that, if Nick and I decide that I need to film something and we live together, he can just stare at me until I do it. But if we live states apart, the time restraint doesn’t feel as real. It still is, but it doesn’t feel like it.

All of this to say, over the last three years, not having a dedicated environment has made it very difficult to spark good days.

We needed a lamp we could turn on to start the “work.”

Atypical

Trey is kind of the opposite. He kind of loves the hard work. The harder it is, the more it makes him want to do it.

When we go over the projects for the next 18 months, I have to help him slow down more than I need to inspire him to pick it up.

It reminds me of coaching high school track. There are typically two kinds of athletes: ones you have to inspire to do more, and ones you have to inspire to do less.

Trey is definitely the latter. Sometimes, recovery is the best antidote.

I say he is the opposite because he needs a space where he can turn the lamp off.

Reading

This week, I did a little reading, but nothing stood out to me as much as the Huberman podcast with Stuart McMillan. They talked about plyometrics, longevity, and the power of being yourself in sport and creative endeavors. It was really powerful, worth a listen.

Coffee

My stepmom is coming to visit me next week! I got her some fancy decaf coffee, so hopefully there is fun news to report.

Conclusion

Starting is hard, the middle is hard, and finishing is hard. The parameters we give ourselves surrounding the task, like our time horizon and our environment, help us have success in getting through each stage.

If you are more like Trey, where you have a hard time turning it off, I have a quote for you from one of my friends, Izaic Yorks. He ran professionally for a number of years and is an accomplished writer. He told me, “Professional runners aren’t paid to train, we are paid to rest.”

Everyone can do things. A lot of people even do a lot of things. But if you don’t build an environment around recharging and forcing yourself to take time to recover, you won’t be able to allow all the positive momentum to materialize.

So there you have it. James Clear, Parkinson’s Law, and Izaic Yorks coming together to help us achieve great things.

I hope your weekend,
Kyle