#59 - How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything
Keanu Reeves, Musings, and a Thank You to My Coworkers
BANG BANG BANG. KARATE CHOP. KEANU REEVES BREATHING HEAVILY. SUITS. GUNS. LOTS OF GUNS. KEANU REEVES ON A MOTORCYCLE. WHISKEY. DUELS.
This was what our evening looked like last week when my family and I decided to punctuate pizza night with a viewing of the recently-released John Wick: Chapter 4. I’ve long admired the John Wick series for its choreography, set design, pacing, and thoughtful use of its actors (Keanu Reeves barely speaks 380 words in the film, which implies that he made somewhere around $40,000 USD per word).
In the film, one of the main characters utters a phrase I’ve heard over the years, but that I hadn’t quite internalized so potently until this week:
How you do anything is how you do everything
I have to admit that I don’t typically love sayings like this. Why? Well, as a wannabe philosophy major (Humanities / Classics was close…), you can’t take this statement literally. What it implies is that you should do every single thing in your life with excellence and care, when that’s just not always feasible/wise. In other words, sometimes I just want to half-ass my run instead of pushing myself to channel my inner Usain Bolt.
Nevertheless, something about hearing this quote at this time in life resonated deeply. I found myself thinking about these words over the course of several days, and at one point my wife uttered them as well. Why did this resonate?
Here’s my working answer: I think the idea that you should do the very best you can in what you are doing is noble (reminder on the definition of noble: “having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals”).
It feels good to do your best, to take care in what we do, even when it’s something seemingly small. Here are some examples from the last week in my life… They’re not all “serious” but maybe you’ll get the point.
Fun: Petting my dog with intention. Not just patting him and signaling to him to go away, but stopping what I’m doing, making full eye contact, and giving ol’ Tycho a strong set of pets, behind the ears, on top of his noggin’, on the belly, and underneath his chin
Work: When sending out one last deliverable at work (which took me 10 minutes), instead of just sending it when I was done at marking it as a draft (“WIP”), I re-read the entire document, made edits, tested it for brevity and punctuation in ChatGPT, and then asked myself the question: “Does this feel like a very high-quality piece of work? Does it represent my best work?”
Personal Finance: In our household, we’ve been on a fun budgeting challenge for the last year. As our work situations evolved, we found ourselves spending too much, so we’ve been progressively cutting our burn rate every month. To do that, we review our expenses 2x per week, self-govern our spending, we cut out things that don’t have strong justifications / aren’t giving us some kind of value or real joy, and we actually take time every week to talk about it. We’re more thoughtful about travel, meals out, unnecessary fashion expenses, etc.
Note: this doesn’t mean we don’t spend. We do. We all do. But we really scrutinize ourselves before buying something. We make sure it’s something that brings us joy, and we intentionally delay things. Not because we need to, but because there is something powerful about delayed gratification
Gratitude for others: My letter #003 was all about this, and it’s now been over a year since I’ve revisited the idea. Essentially, you can just say “thanks” or “appreciate it” when showing gratitude. Or you can be more specific:
“Hey Wendy, I really appreciate that you not only took the time to proactively handle this issue, but that you took the time to make sure I was aware of the overall scenario”
“Hey James, it meant a great deal that you prioritized getting this done today. You getting this over quickly is going to allow us to get back to our customer even faster, and I think that’ll go a long way in helping us to keep the partnership on great footing.”
Essentially, are you going to half ass your gratitude for others, or are you going to take the extra 5 seconds required to go a level deeper?
For new subscribers, Exonomist is raw, minimal or no editing, so I will sometimes meander… Like right now: how shitty is it to only get constructive feedback all the time? When something goes wrong, you hear about it over and over and over, and it can feel just awful. Why don’t we spend more time appreciating the things that are going well? I challenge every person reading this newsletter to give more gratitude to those around you — I can almost guarantee you’ll feel great doing it, and I have to imagine that in most cases you’re “going the extra half-mile” might brighten someone else’s day, or cause them to reflect on what they did to get such recognition.
Alright, back on track here: I’ll update the quote with my own (certainly imperfect) version that I feel is more … literal. It borrows from another quote a colleague once told me (“you have to earn your leadership every day…”):
Before you do anything, consider how you could do it 1% better than you did it last time, and do it. Embrace the joy of having pride in all that you do.
When you’re on your run, you don’t need to go for a world record to feel good about it, but strive to do even juts a little better than you thought you could.
When you’re building that model at work and you think it’s done and you’re just so exhausted with the task, step away for a minute, come back and review it, and review it with the lens of, “how can this be 1% better?”
When the dishes are piling up in your house and you’re thinking, “god damnit, more dishes!?” (this is me every day), clean them and do one more pass on the plate or forks than you thought you needed.
When you thank your team for their work, instead of just saying “Thanks team, really appreciate the work here” take the extra thirty seconds to call out what you valued about how the team showed up and performed.
None of this is rocket science. It’s not that hard, and yet it can be so game changing for your mindset and for the environments around you. And if you’re not adding to the environment around you, then what are you doing?
Michael
P.S. Thank you to all of my Microsoft colleagues who took the time over the last couple of weeks to do exactly what I outlined in this letter. You didn’t just say thank you, you went a level deeper, and it gave me a whole new level of warmth in my soul. You never really know what you mean to people unless they give you some signal of what you’ve done for them, and I was overwhelmed with signals over the last two weeks. I’ll never take for granted that people took the time to give me feedback, and although it didn’t have to be positive, it most certainly was. So to all of you who gave me that, thank you for the gift. The gift of your gratitude and your thoughtfulness. I’ll never forget it, and I’ll take it with me on this next journey of building this awesome company.