Batching and stacking are strategies that help you work more efficiently. Batching is the process of doing similar kinds of work in a contiguous stretch of time. Stacking is the process of doing dissimilar kinds of work in the same stretch of time.

Picking your guides is less about the external interactions you’ll have with them than priming yourself with their worldview. Sometimes it’s literally asking yourself how they would discuss your challenge or question that does all the work.

“Active projects” makes you commit to projects that you’re actively pushing forward as opposed to those that you’re just thinking about, queued for the future, or are hanging on to but aren’t actually doing anything with.

you have to address the parts of your life that are keeping you from doing it.

When we properly identify lack of courage as what’s keeping us from doing our best work and thriving, it allows us to ask more powerful and pointed questions about how to go forward.

Awareness is required to know what your best work is and to notice how your emotions and presence shift when you’re doing your best work.

creative constipation, or the pain of not doing your best work. Creative constipation is exactly what it sounds like. We take in ideas and inspiration that get converted into aspirations, goals, and projects, and at a certain point, if we’re not pushing them out in the form of finished projects, they start to back up on us.

There’s an important corollary here: If you don’t finish your best work, your beneficiaries will be worse off.

Projects are mirrors because they reflect back to us what’s really going on in our inner and outer worlds. Showing some specific piece of work to the world shows us where our passions and fears lie.