One of the strange emerging factors of the current world is that higher stakes, larger dollar, fully custom projects tend to be messier and more disorganized than regular common transactions.

It makes sense, when you think about it -- a credit card company with millions of users can streamline, test, and design an interface to make their online payment and review near perfect. There's many competitors, it's easy to benchmark against what works and doesn't, and many people will use it.

As project scopes and dollar amounts get larger, the whole thing gets murkier. There's more ambiguity -- large custom projects, by definition, have unique elements to them -- but also less benchmarking (because people tend to be more confidential and not share their documentation, technology, and workflows) and finally, the scale just isn't there to invest heavily in to automate away small amounts of time and friction.

Thus, it becomes really easy to apply for and receive a basic credit card online, buy some ecommerce product online, and then link up your online banking to review to pay your credit card online smoothly in a nice interface.

But transactions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more are handled with a mix of physical paperwork which is custom and must be reviewed manually by multiple parties, and then a much less descriptive and less user friendly wire transfer.

High concept ideas are exciting, but they very frequently resolve to tedious details -- the mature* approach is to handle those details and continue focusing on the gains and outcome you want, and complete things before moving on.

Ideas from far away look exciting and interesting, and like they'd "just work" -- but there's very often those same types of details that crop up.

I say "mature" approach because it comes with time. For certain classes of smart abstract thinkers (you may be one of them), it's very tempting to jump into something else when the details become part of it. But finishing strong is key to reaping all the rewards; and if not, the next project will hit the details phase sooner or later anyways.

Focus. Finish.

There are moments where a single act of brilliance or heroism will make all the difference in whether you win or lose.

And those are the moments that stick out. We remember Caesar crossing the Rubicon and Washington crossing the Delaware. We marvel at brilliance and heroism.

But what put Caesar or Washington in a position to lead their troops and nations?

The balance sheet is pretty clear: a thousand, perhaps ten thousand smaller actions.

These little actions are not celebrated and most will never be known. But on a very cold winter's morning in Gaul or Virginia, the commander would have risen despite not wanting to, and on that day applied himself to working a little harder, training an officer a little bit more, writing just another letter or dispatch -- and certainly, if you remove many of these single very small heroic actions, the cause would have failed.

"To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement." -- Aristotle, 384–322 B.C., from the Nicomachean Ethics

Over 2,300 years ago one of the most important and widely studied philosophers in history argued against leaving the most important things to chance and fate.

Are you doing things intentionally?

I'd like to draw your attention to a really smart comment made on the recent Opportunity Cost post by Random --

I work with a lot of talented and ambitious people, both in my consulting and nonprofit work.

I see a pattern that absolutely kills people, that most everyone that's got is oblivious to.

It's rapidly adjusting to new successes, giving oneself minimal credit, and adjusting to that as a "new normal" -- and setting a new baseline of "required" performance off of that.

So let's say someone wants to be a writer, and they start to get in a groove and write 7,000 words per day. If you've got this mentality, you'll very quickly say, "Ok, I've done 7000 words per day. That's normal. Now, every day less than 7000 words is weakness and failure." No celebration, no reflection on the success, just ratcheting up the difficulty level.

The same thing goes in sales, business development, entrepreneurship, technology, all kinds of creativity, all kinds of training.

The link is here to read the details:

http://tour.givegetwin.com

The schedule is here, you can book tickets for free --

http://tour.givegetwin.com/schedule.html

There's going to be some amazing speakers. Zach Obront, Josef Wasinski, and Kai Zau are tentatively slated to be in every city, with lots of brilliant people here and a lot of amazing other local speakers in their own cities like Jason Shen, James Clear, Joshua Spodek, Ted Gonder, and many more.

If you crash a bicycle and cut your knee, it bleeds. You can apply pressure to the wound or otherwise aid in clotting it, but you can't fully control the blood. You can't think, "Body! I command you not to bleed!" Nor can you directly say, "I choose not to bleed" through pure will alone.

This is easy enough to understand. We don't have direct control over our blood. We can apply some measure of indirect to it -- taking aspirin might thin the blood, breathing deeply and relaxing might slow the pulse and the flow of blood slightly -- but we do not have direct and instant control over the flow of our blood.

That's our blood. It's quite a personal thing, when you think about it.

At the same time, there's a view that we have full control and choice over our actions in a given situation.

I no longer believe this to be the case.

Marcus Licinius Crassus was 62 years old. He was the richest man in Rome, decorated with honors, and a member of the secret ruling Triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus. But it wasn't enough for him.

In renewing his political alliance with Caesar and Pompey, they dealt out assignments and power to the members of the Triumvirate. Crassus would go southeast to fight and conquer the Parthian Empire.

Crassus was the classical expansionist. But he made the fatal error; he did not take his next opponent seriously.

As he marched his legions to fight the Parthians, he was bragging that after Parthia he would keep going -- maybe all the way to India.

He was ill-prepared for the Parthian mounted horse archers, some of the most dangerous in the ancient world. Even then, Roman allied and Crassus's officers alike recommended plans that would have saved Crassus's force if he hadn't blundered forwards.

I hesitate to write this because it sounds off. But sometimes, I try to turn off my excessive analytical thinking and put myself into... I don't know what to call it. "Trancelike" is what I'm going to use, but it's wrong. There's no word for it.

It's like, the mind is hit with a flow of thoughts and impulses. I'm sure your mind works at least a little differently than my own, but I often start analyzing and deconstructing all the thoughts, analyzing, thinking, pondering.

Sometimes I want that to go away. Drugs can do that -- I've done it with both recreational and performance drugs in times past -- but that's not what I'm talking about.

Even over and beyond that, I think a lot of drug use is a placebo.

I use "drug" broadly -- slammed a couple energy drinks in a row, lots of coffee, or liquor all can be used partially to induce this sort of work. But the chemical effects of these substances shouldn't take effect for at least a while as they metabolize. Slamming two big energy drinks in a row shouldn't have a dramatic effect on your consciousness, beyond just letting you make your own mental associations with the energy-drink-emboldened state of mind.