TLDR: Aim to reduce ephemeral work, but don’t be afraid to exist there — especially early on.

What Aeschylus and SEALs have in common

Basic SEAL training is one nonstop kick in the balls. Those aren’t my words. I first heard it described that way by an instructor. And most of us who have been through it agree.

As the kids say, that tracks.

Every day brings unique challenges, but you do a small number of things with insane frequency:

• Pushups

• Leg levers

• Swims

• Runs

• Obstacle courses

• Log PT —>

That video above shows one of the most exhausting parts of one of the most grueling evolutions in BUD/S:

➡️ i.e. sprinting up the berms during “Log PT.”

If one were to think about it way too much 🤔, he or she might ask:

“What am I really building with this 11th berm sprint?”

• Whether you succeed or fail, the instructors hate you.

• You’re not meaningfully more fit after doing 2 hours of Log PT than you were before.  

And worst of all, the act has disappeared into the past.

It only echoes in your memory.

You can’t use what you did to make future berm sprints easier.

It’s not giving you passive income. 💸

Yet, the successful SEAL candidate is connected with the end goal so intimately that the instructors would need to pry his bleeding hands off the log to get him to ring the bell that indicates a candidate quitting.

This is the difference.

Aeschylus knows he must keep pushing the rock up the hill.

But he’s fictitious, so his motivations can’t be trusted.

In contrast, we have the real-world example of ultramarathoners.

This is also interesting:

Successful people are invested in the long term so much that they can do things that seem pointless in the present to the average person.

They are building the habit.

Mile after mile.

Step after step.

This is what it takes. [1]

Here’s what gets you stuck

I create a ton of content as part of building my brand and business. So I think a lot about what’s ephemeral.

Barely anyone is looking at yesterday’s posts.

So it’s tempting to question whether creating so much that disappears so quickly is really worth it.

This applies to other fields as well:

• Fashion is notoriously short-lived

• Consulting and coaching are services, thus inherently unscalable.

• Mowing your lawn is as worthless as fighting entropy.

On that note: on a long enough time scale, everything’s ephemeral.

But obsessing about this reality leads to three problems:

1. Nihilism

2. A really, really rough life

3. Not helping anyone

(Yes, these kinda overlap, but let’s go with it.)

I’ll address Problem #2 here:

If you conclude nothing has permanence, then you won’t build anything. Life gets easier when you build things that solve problems, which we can call “life assets.”

No assets = rough life 

Once you agree with this, you still have a problem:

Building enduring things is very hard.

• It takes skills.

• It takes relationships.

• It takes mindset.

• It takes discipline.

• And often it takes capital.

Thus, sometimes you need to start by doing shorter-lived tasks.  Yet you resist doing them because they aren’t long-lasting.

It’s a Catch-22.

This doesn’t just apply to newbies. We all go through transitions.

You get stuck because nearly everything early in a new endeavor has some element of worthlessness.

A possible shortcut

Ironically, you can solve your dilemma by focusing on Problem #3 from the original list above.

You can find meaning in helping people.

If your content solves problems instead of just “building your brand,” then it is worth it per se.

But for the times that isn’t enough, we need a playbook, so here it is…

The 11-Step Playbook for the Ephemeral Quagmire

1. Revel in challenge: Build comfort with discomfort first. Good places to start are 100 Days Without Fear and this uberfamous TED talk about rejection-proofing. I haven’t read David Goggins’ book and probably won’t TBH given our similar backgrounds, but everyone I know suggests that also.
   

2. Strive for perfection (but not perfectionism): Focusing on your craft is vastly more productive than focusing on results when you’re in the ephemeral stage of a project or life journey. Fail and get better, learn and get better. Make this your mantra. Get joy out of a job well done vs. what it gives you tangibly.
   

3. Connect through to your vision: If you can’t connect what you’re doing to your vision viscerally, then you will more than likely give up.
   
   If you’re like me, forget the “Start with Why” stuff. It’s simultatenously obvious and unuseful IMHO.
   
   After all, if we all obsessed about “why,” then we’d all be curing cancer or feeding the hungry. And you can also forget specific goals, as they can be overwhelming. Your vision does NOT have to be a result — it can be a picture of WHO you become.
   

4. Give up hope: No, that’s not a typo. If you grasp at a result for each task, you’re doomed. The essence of the ephemeral stage is that you are highly unlikely to see results.
    

5. Run up the score: The New England Patriots under Bill Belichick were notorious for running up the score. This was intentional. He valued the focus on success at all times, and it paid off. The lesson for you is to build on every completed task by following up with even more (after maybe a break to celebrate). 

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art tells a writer neighbor that he finished his first book. His neighbor says something like, “Start the next one today.” Bottom line: Build and keep momentum. 
   

6. Be present in the process: If your mind is impatient or is full of negative self-talk, you need to slow down. Imagine you’re in some Rennaissance studio as an apprentice, where people live short lives but long days. You have a bust created by the master next to a block of stone. Your only job that day is to look at what the master created and to take a chisel and start to try to create the crown of a head. That’s it. Enjoy it. This is your craft. 

   

7. Batch: Try to group tasks that are ephemeral. You will build a mini-period of momentum, and you might find economies of scale. 

   

8. Build a buffer: If you try to do ephemeral tasks “just in time,” you will be stressed out and tempted to quit. If it’s within your control, get ahead and build a buffer. 

   

9. Be prolific: Find new channels for your work once you build momentum and a buffer. Identify as someone who is prolific. That word has such a ring to it, and we don’t think of prolific people as having done something time-bound and worthless. 

   

10. Do things other people aren’t willing to do: This is from Gary Vaynerchuk, and it really resonates with me. Go above and beyond. Most people on LinkedIn don’t do video. So do video. Etc. 

~Warning~: Do this gradually. If you try to do it all at once, you’ll get overwhelmed. And when you’re not the next Mr Beast overnight, you’ll conclude that all that extra work wasn’t worth it. But if you go the extra mile, you’ll start to identify as “that person” who has a high standard. Other people will eventually notice. 

    

Identify things that ARE lasting: Sure, you might be making posts every day that people forget, but you are building a following. You might be making sales calls every week that don’t convert, but you are building relationships. Which brings us to…

Climb the durable ladder:

The idea is simple. You can reach stages that allow you to create more lasting results. I call these things “durable.”

Each stage allows you to reach a more durable one if you apply yourself. They are like rungs on a ladder.

Keep this in mind when you’re slogging it out at the bottom. It gets better.

Leaders — Do all of this with your team.

It’s super easy for middle managers to feel like they’re just spinning their wheels. Connect them to a compelling vision for the business, customers, the team, and themselves.

All the way wet

(aka the footnotes)

1. “This is what it takes.”

Michael Fassbender’s “The Killer” describes obsession with elite performance and results in a way that is freakishly on point.

Beware, it’s much more of a slow burn than the trailer makes it seem.

But it pays.

2. Enter “Ephemeral Dataproc”

My last full-time job was running Product for an AI platforms team. Our job was to make tools available that helped technical employees do their jobs faster and better.

Despite the fact that metered cloud compute has allowed developers to pay only for what they use since the mid-2000s, somehow this novel concept still eludes certain areas of business.

A tool that was highly requested from our team was “Ephemeral Dataproc” from Google. I heard those words from our own team so much that they still ring in my ears.

Apparently the engineers and product managers loved the name so much that they started calling stuff that we built in-house “ephemeral.”

2a. Advice on naming things

There are multiple ways to name things well and many more ways to name things poorly.

Here’s one way to avoid naming things poorly:

Don’t use buzzwords solely on the basis of them “sounding cool.”

1. They go out of fashion too fast. 👗

2. More than likely, you’re forcing a meaning that doesn’t really apply. 🤷‍♂️ 

3. You sound like a tool. 🔧

Here’s my Medium article about a different example of such nonsense:

2b. WTF is Ephemeral Dataproc?

If you really care, and I doubt you do, here.

You’ve been warned.

Outro

Cheers

Find me at thewarriorpoet.com and on LinkedIn.

Get unstuck, and crush it. Double period.