Ducks (Not) in a Row

Photo as a metaphor for life. There’s always one out of place.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

A Zen proverb to keep in mind as the new year comes and brings with it the ambitious resolutions we always seem to make:

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

A Christmas Quote

The Christmas season has a tendency to make me feel like a kid again, no matter how old I get. Dickens seems to have had a similar feeling:

“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.” – Charles Dickens

It’s good to be a kid again, even if just for a few weeks.

Thank You, Veterans

Thank you to my grandfathers, my uncles, my stepdad, my wife. Thank you to all the veterans who signed up and, whatever their motivation, risked it all for the security of our country. Thank you, especially, to those who didn’t make it home.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween, from this little monster lover.

The Tragedy of Monsters

“Monsters are tragic beings; they are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, they are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy.” – Ishiro Honda

Library Wildlife

Libraries are surreal places. Thousands of worlds waiting on the shelves to be explored. Maybe the only places left in America that don’t care if you’re buying something.

Ours has the added magic of peacocks.

How I Keep My Inbox Clean

I’ve recently set up a mailing list as a simple way to keep readers informed on new releases. Putting it together, I started thinking about how I deal with newsletters, marketing emails, and spam on the receiving end.

I use Gmail, and it does a fine job of sorting out spam by its definition, but my definition is far broader, and I want that junk gone, too. The company that just bought my address from a third party? Banished. The flood of marketing emails I got from buying a single shirt from a new store? Trashed. I hate it all, and I bet some of you do, too.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share my method, simple as it is, in case you like spam as much as I do. Which is to say, like a splinter under a fingernail.

Be Ruthless in Unsubscribing

This first pointer is the most effective, and I use it daily. Look at every email you receive and ask yourself, “Is this adding value to my life?” What value means is up to you to decide, but if the email isn’t adding it, hit that unsubscribe button at the bottom. Your life is far too important, your time far too valuable, to waste staring at your inbox.

Filter the Rest

Next, I create a filter for the rest. Every email service I’ve ever used allows you to create filters or rules dictating how to handle incoming mail. This isn’t a productivity tutorial kind of site, so if you’re using Gmail, you can get the steps here. Otherwise, just search whatever email service you use and the keyword “filter” and you’ll find a tutorial I’m sure. (Of course, I don’t want to leave you hanging, so if you’re still stuck after the tutorial, hit me up at justin@justinwilliams.com and I’ll help you out.)

When you create your filter, set it up to grab any email that includes the word “unsubscribe” anywhere within. That’s how you get ’em. I’ve used this feature to set up a rule that sends those emails to a special folder, which I’ve labeled with the incredibly clever name: Filtered.

This pulls all my newsletters and sets them aside to read at my convenience. It also grabs all those miscellaneous emails I mentioned before, and about 99% of the ones I can’t even think of to list out right now. It keeps my inbox nice and clear of junk, allowing me to address it when I’m ready.

If I Haven’t Chased You Off…

Now, with all that said, if you want to sign up for that email list I mentioned and get the pretty good and very free short story I’ve attached as an incentive, you can do it here. I won’t spam you. I hate spam, probably more than you do, and I’ll be damned if I end up on the sending side. If you want, use that filter I described above to keep me out of your inbox. Or, if my story doesn’t earn me a place in your reading life, smash that unsubscribe button.

You are far too valuable to waste your time in a junk-filled inbox.

Header photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash

Kaizen

Every little improvement adds up to great things.

When I was a kid, like, single-digits kid, I had a neighbor who was both a teenager and the coolest guy I’d ever known to that point in my life. He knew karate. He had a Nintendo. He had a computer. He even had email… in the eighties.

Most importantly, he had boxes upon boxes of beautiful and perfect comic books. He even drew his own and submitted work to Marvel, DC, etc.

And they wrote back!

I wanted to be just like him.

I started drawing more, practicing art, trying to improve. I practiced my storytelling, too. Someday, he would run his own comic company, and when he did, I would work there. That was the plan.

Then he told me the only way to get as good as him was to ignore everything else and draw constantly, even during school. “What about my grades?” I asked him. “You can’t worry about grades if you’re going to get good enough to be a professional artist.”

I was crushed.

I liked earning good grades.

I even liked my teachers.

Enter one of my first secret rules: I would never be good enough at art to make it a career.
That secret rule held for about 30 years.

Then I started trying again.

And not by sacrificing everything else important to me, but just by realizing it’s ok to practice just a little every day, to try and improve just a little every day.

I eventually started learning karate, too. Not because of my old neighbor, but because my own kid got involved in a great dojo and I wanted to share that journey.

Our sensei often talks about the concept of “kaizen”: basically, constant (little) improvements that add up to great change.

Now I try to improve a little bit every day, making small sacrifices for time, sure, but not giving up on the most important parts of my life. Will I become a master overnight? Of course not. And honestly, neither did my old neighbor. If he’s the kind of artist I want to be, he’s still out there learning somewhere, still finding the little tweaks in his work to make it even better. He’s still trying to be just a little bit better every day.

I try to practice kaizen now in all areas of my life. The result isn’t flashy. It doesn’t make for a great Instagram post or YouTube video, but it’s there, and it’s building a solid mountain of progress over time.

In the meantime, I just keep trying to be a little better than yesterday, leading to being a good deal better than last month, and miles ahead of last year. I’m slowly building to success—my vision of success—and instead of racing to get there I’m enjoying the ride.

And I can wait to get there.

Life goes by too quickly because we rush it.

I’m going a little at a time now, enjoying myself along the way.

Constant improvement.

Kaizen.