Alignment, Trust, and Companionship
The weekly American variety show Saturday Night Live first premiered on 11 October 1975.
Creator Lorne Michaels once said, “Generally when people talk about the best cast I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school.’ Because in high school you have the least amount of power you’re ever gonna have. … Staying up with friends later on a Saturday is great, and people attach to a cast.”
I think that’s true.
There’s no time when the show had a bigger impact on me than high school.
Adam Sandler hosted this past weekend and paid tribute to his old castmate, Chris Farley, who died in 1997:
Apart from the heartfelt song, my favorite sketch was for Ramano Tours, which is a spoof on the Perillo Tours ads that broadcast around New York.
On the one hand, the commercial tries to sell you on the idea of vacationing in Italy.
On the other hand, it is also a cold-blooded reminder that getting on an airplane does not make you a happier person: “… that’s a job for incremental lifestyle changes, sustained over time.”
Today, in his newsletter, Cody Shirk shared a blog post by Swen Lorenz where Swen looks back on his 44 years and shares some advice:
“Always focus on the process, not the outcome. This isn’t necessarily an easy one to get your head around. Most of us have been brainwashed to focus on outcomes, and I have come to believe that’s why most people fail at most things. Unless you focus on the boring, tedious task of doing/practicing/improving something each and every day, you’ll never be great at it. Another way of putting this is, commit to the craft! And if you don’t feel like committing to it, you aren’t doing the right thing and should change what you spend your days on.
Celebrating micro progress is rocket fuel for your progress. To get through the boring, tedious tasks that are required to achieve amazing outcomes (see the previous point), it’s incredibly useful to get into a mindset of celebrating the small, incremental progress that you can achieve on a daily basis. Every day that I make progress with something, I reward myself. A cookie, a beer, a hot bath. Let everyone else celebrate their big wins, for you it should be much more powerful to celebrate the small ones.
Make one big move per year. For each year of your life, define ONE big thing you aim to achieve or do, and the path to get to it. I only started doing this actively and consciously a few years ago, but it’s already proven to be one of the best moves I have ever made. It also puts a great spin on talking about ‘2018 was the year when…’
Do a “Life Audit” once a year. Make it your birthday, New Year’s, or a random date. But do sit down once a year and create an overview of how you have been doing in the past 12 months. Force yourself to be honest about possible needs for change. Even if you spend an entire day on it, it’ll only be 0.27% of your year but set the tone and the direction for the coming 364 days / 99.735%. A regular Life Audit will have incredible leverage in your life.”
When venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote about one of his investing mentors, Bliss McCrum, he was reminded of one simple piece of advice:
“What I really wanted to know was the underlying reason for more sellers than buyers. Did the company post weak earnings? Did a competitor enter their market? Was the CFO fired?
But Bliss would never take the bait.
Just ‘more sellers than buyers.’
His point, I think looking back after thirty years, was that markets are markets and you need to treat them as such and respect them as such. They are not always rational but the supply/demand for the stock doesn’t lie.”
For better or worse, none of us are ever going back to high school.
Along the way, we’ve found a way to cultivate friendships with good people:
“Friendship gives flavor to life. Rather than treating friendship as a nice-to-have luxury, reserved for people who have their lives in perfect order, we should cultivate friendship intentionally and treat it as the necessity it is. We need to be intentional in our pursuit of it, especially as we age.
Like a marriage, the best friendships require investment, compromise, and sacrifice. By creating shared alignment, trust, and companionship, strong friendships nourish the soul and make life more vibrant.”
But, if we ever could time travel back to high school, I might want to go to North Bergen, New Jersey, where its students staged the movie Alien (1979) as its Spring play, and it looked awesome:
