Musicians know three important things:

1. Talent is vastly overrated.
2. Getting better at anything difficult requires daily work. Not weekly, not when you feel like it. Daily.
3. Repetition isn’t enough—improvement requires what psychologists call deliberate practice: focused, systematic practice at the outer limits of one's current ability.

In short, musicians know that talent plays a minor role in success. It’s daily deliberate practice that takes a person, slowly but surely, from “Chopsticks” to Chopin.

I’ve got a three-year-old daughter, which means the movies Frozen and Frozen II are a big part of my daily life. They’re solid kids’ movies—good, not great. Being a 90s kid, I can’t help feeling that they don’t hold a candle to The Lion King. But the plot of Frozen II is built on a wonderful concept, one that comes up again and again throughout the film: “just do the next right thing.”

A longtime reader wrote me recently, and we talked a bit about perfectionism and how hard it is to ship: to put one’s work into the world. Every finished project involves compromises, band-aid solutions, and deviations from the original plan, and those changes can paralyze us if we see them as flaws. My friend put it beautifully:

But when I took a look at one of my recent projects that I did start and see through to completion, I realize that there [are] always iterations and changes from the “perfect”, and the end result is a different kind of perfect. It’s reality.

It’s true that our finished work is never the same as the ideal we held in our heads when we first put pencil to paper. But that ideal never really existed—not really, anyway. It was perfect in concept but completely imaginary. Our finished work may be imperfect in concept—even held together with Scotch tape—but it is perfectly real.

Our lives are like finely-tuned machines: different components drift out of alignment over time. Our physical health, our mental health, our relationships, our careers—some area will always need attention. There will always be problems to solve.

What’s important, though, is that we actually get around to solving these problems instead of just planning to solve them. To that end, we need to schedule time on our calendars—appointments with ourselves—to think through and address the big issues in our lives. I like Think Days for this purpose, but even a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon is a good start.

In January 2019, I was a panelist on a Turkish international news show, talking about minimalism. Having written just a little about minimalism, I was surprised to be asked, but it was far too cool an opportunity to turn down. There was a downside, though.

The show was taped in London, at 11 AM GMT. That’s 5 AM US Central Time. Which meant I had to get up at 3:30 AM if I wanted to shower, grab some breakfast, and generally get my head together before spouting off opinions in front of lots and lots of people.