Sometimes interesting ideas in my life have a habit of showing up again and again until I finally decide to engage. Stoic philosophy has taken on this role most recently in my life. I don't quite remember when I first heard about Stoic philosophy, maybe it was from my Dad or some class in school but in the last few years it has made its presence known pretty loudly. The recent re-introduction of Stoicism got me thinking about how to structure my life to better focus on the important things and to leave behind the unimportant ones.

The most important part of this re-orientation has been adding some clarity around how to measure if I'm focusing on the right things. This comes down to figuring out if what I'm looking at is leading or lagging. This sounds obvious when written down but it is much trickier to nail down in practice. Most markers of what people consider success are lagging measures, in some cases extreme lagging indicators. This makes them functionally useless for figuring out if you're working towards the important things in your life.

All of the sexy, flashy, accomplishments are lagging measures of success. Every awards show, recognition, work bonus, all of them come well after the work was done that lead there. This is one of the reasons why it seems like the more you focus on attaining these status symbols the less likely they are to happen. Focusing on the laggin reward and recognition is almost guaranteed to lead to failure. You're focusing on the wrong thing!

Not a single person that has achieved those coveted awards focused on the award itself as a measure to get there. They discovered important leading factors that eventually lead them to those lagging recognitions. The secret is that leading indicators are almost always the most boring ones. They're gritty and un-satisfying from the outside. Ironically almost the antithesis to the lagging recognition that is so often equated with success. If you really want to find that same success first you must figure out what the leading indicators are that lead to those outcomes and throw yourself at those. These are the things that will put you on the path to that success. You can't know the exact circumstances that will lead to the recognition but focusing on the leading indicators will put you in the correct position when that time does come.

As I've gotten older I've found that this is what people really mean when they talk about "out working the competition". I don't think that phrase is quite as literal as it seems but it's really trying to get at not just the amount of work but what is being worked on. Specifically putting more time and effort into the leading indicators vs focusing on the wrong things.

If you do one thing today, go find you leading indicator and put all of your energy into it. You'll be surprised at how far it'll take you.