Week 8 - Keep it simple
I’ve used the same online handle since I was a teenager. It all started with a failed music project called “easy to kill” so I decided that I would be “easytochris.” Even though the project failed to launch, I joked, “it’s easy to remember because it’s easytochris,” so it stuck.
2 decades later, I still try to keep things easy, and I still go by easytochris. The basis of this whole education track that I’ve built is centered around the concept of “how can I keep it easy?” I wanted to keep friction points minimal so success was my most likely outcome. I knew that having a structured system would allowed me to look at education as something that didn’t resemble a chore, and that gave the entire process more appeal.
As I come into week 8 of this process, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the name of the third law listed in Atomic Habits. “Make it easy.” It was diving into refined theories around concepts I had been living for the past few years. As humans, we naturally gravitate towards the easiest route that takes us to our end goal, and as a species, we naturally struggle with adversity. When faced with the natural challenge of not knowing, oftentimes I find myself trying to take a natural inclination to make things easy, but those shortcuts don’t necessarily pay off in the end. When I developed my homework for this program, I needed it to be easy, so I set up a few rules.
I don’t want it to take up a lot of my time. The reality is that I am in an established career and I have a relationship that needs to be nurtured, so I can’t have this take away from either one of those. I can give an hour a night on my work nights, a few hours on my weekday off, and I am not giving up my weekends with my wife. Realistically, I am only spending around 6-7 hours a week on myself.
The second rule, was make the task requirements familiar. I wanted to lean into concepts that were familiar, reading, writing, editing, and video production, but I wanted more structure behind them. I’ve been blogging for over a decade, but I want to refine that skill into long form writing, and an opportunity for me to begin producing quality content.
The third rule, make feedback easy to receive and understand. Personally, I don’t do well with platitudes and niceties. If you have something to say, simply be direct and let me understand how I can improve. I built a rubrik that graded my writing and told me how it could be improved. Was I direct and to the point? Did I assert my opinion, or did I defend my claim? Constructive feedback can be provided if you’re simply willing to accept it.
How these three rules were built, determined the outcome of my workload. Monday is my day for reading, Tuesday is brainstorming and outline. Wednesday is writing these posts to get my baseline ideas out, while Thursday is for refinement and publishing. Once published, I must fill out the self evaluation on my essay, and my rubric grades it. Once I take my feedback, I spend Friday educating others through video production and creating my podcast, all in an effort to answer one simple question. "
“What did you learn speaking your lesson out loud that you had not yet realized while you were writing out your essay?”
When I talk to my clients in the barbershop, they say this is a lot of work, but I disagree. I actually think this is the easiest educational experience I have had in my life, because the design was built around an understanding of myself. It doesn’t require me to squeeze blood from a stone to capture a concept, it simply structured my interests within my time constraints, and gave me practical application of the concepts. And this, is the most important thing, the opportunity to have repetition with tasks that I want to have a stronger skillset with. I can wish and want until I'm blue in the face, but unless I’m actually doing the work that is required of me, I won’t find the results that are required in the identity I see myself as eventually embodying. In the past two months, I have recognized that I have already become more comfortable with my written voice, and I have started to develop a confidence on camera that wasn’t there previously. Keeping my workload and schooling structure simplified has given me the ability to make progress I wasn’t making previously, and while things are still early on in the overall process, I’m excited to see how far things go.
