Have you ever noticed that when there’s something you really, really love and really speaks to you that when you look at the backstory for it, the person that created it said that they “selfishly” just made it for them?

Here’s why selfishness, like the comfort zone, gets a bad rap it doesn’t really deserve

Transcript.

Selfishness, like the comfort zone, takes a lot of crap.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

The Surprising Power of Creative Selfishness

Have you ever enjoyed the work of someone else and thought, “Man, this this really speaks to me. I I love it’s like perfect for me. It’s it’s really well done.” Or you think, “I I couldn’t like this more.” And that can range from anything like a a creative work or movie or or a book or even the way somebody took care of your plans. Have you ever noticed that more often than not when you follow up on this stuff, you hear someone say the phrase, “Well, I kind of selfishly did it for me the way that I would like to have it done.”

A Side Quest: Building a To-Do List App for Myself

So, let me go off on a side quest and continue. So, I had been thinking about the to-do list, and I have a lot of holy grail quests myself, and one of them is the to-do list. It’s one of those things that not sure if you can ever attain the perfect to-do list. It’s something everyone needs. It’s something everyone uses in one way or another, whether it’s on a piece of paper or planner or digitally or in their brain. I missed the days of having a Franklin planner in which you would have this little book and you’d have your to-do lists among other things and then at the end of the night the ones that you didn’t check off you would flip the page and you’d transfer those to the next day and then you would actually sleep through the night. Having recently created my behavioral mapping software that I can use in really cool ways that’s currently patent pending, I had the confidence to sort of do something else. So, I thought, I’m going to make a to-do list. So, I did. I made a little app for to-do list that looks great on my phone and and my desktop. I thought selfishly, what do I want to do since I’m the only person that’s going to use this? I want to do color coding. I want it that when I check something off, it automatically doesn’t go to the next day. I want everything to go to the next day that I don’t check off to be super easy and super frictionless to use. No real login and blah blah blah. So, anyway, I did all that. I ended up showing it to a couple people and a few of them were really interested in using it. So I built it in such a way that multiple people can use it. Every time I described it, I said I selfishly made this for me. Selfish, selfish, selfish. I kept saying that because it was with me and only me in mind. Now is it extremely usable for other people? Yes. But it was made for me selfishly. And once again, it felt like one of those projects or things that someone does that people say, “Wow, that’s really great.” and it’s because it was done selfishly. Do you think that’s counterintuitive?

Applying ‘Good’ Selfishness to Your Profession

So, getting back off of our side quest, if you’re in corporate America, you may not have a lot of opportunity to do something selfishly. If you’re a probate attorney, you’re not going to be doing it with a lot of flare. If you’re laying down asphalt, there’s probably a specific way you need to do that. And plumbers going to plum. However, if you’re a probate attorney doing probate for your grandmother, you might spend a bit more time on something or you might throw out a rule and say, “I know that’s best practice, but not in this case.” If you’re a plumber, you may allow x amount of time because of a price to do something in someone’s bathroom. But if it’s your bathroom and your wife is going to be using this, you may spend an inordinate amount of time to make sure it’s absolutely right. You will selfishly do it. And not because you’re afraid your wife’s going to yell at you, because you could say, “I’ll just patch this up. It’s just it’s just family. It’s just my wife.” But because you enjoy the validation that you get for being good at your job and the validation you get for showing your loved ones that you are so good at this sort of thing and you take pride in it.

Why Selfishness and the Comfort Zone Get a Bad Rap

Selfishness like the comfort zone takes a lot of crap. There’s a lot of bad PR about both of those things that’s kind of undeserved. I understand what people say about comfort zones and obviously if someone is just simply selfish, yes, that’s probably a bad thing. But there are elements to both and you can check out the episode on comfort zones if you want to learn more. Feel free to pause now or listen to it after this. There are some really good things to learn on not avoiding something that has some really positive aspects. And this kind of selfishness is is one of them. I would ask you if there’s something in your life that you do that you avoid being selfish in the way that you do it. In other words, you don’t do it to absolute perfection or the way that if you’re doing it for yourself, you would do it and you get paid for that.

Ask yourself what the reason is that you don’t do that. And like my examples, you may say, well, look, it’s just not it’s not profitable in any way for me to spend 3 hours on doing something that I can typically get away with doing in 1 hour. And if it’s something you love, you would sort of do that anyway. And you’ll counter and say, “Well, yeah, Mark, I can’t go to the grocery store and say, I did something selfishly and I didn’t get paid for it. Can I have some bananas?” And they’ll say, “Well, of course, no. Please leave.” But there is sort of you’re sort of trapped between the book end of I really do enjoy doing this and gee, I really like eating. Right? And obviously there’s some variance in there. Obvious you get to a point with certain things where it’s all just a lot of gravy. And do you want more gravy or less gravy or or how much time and effort and time, energy, and perhaps resources you want to put into something to get it done the way that you like doing that.

The Artisan Approach: How Artists Embrace Selfish Creation

We see people who do something for a while and they really start to adopt this attitude. The attitude of well I’ve kind of learned the way that I really like to do things and people really like the way I like to do things. Now a perfect example of people who are pretty much untouchable in this and can adopt that attitude from day one are people who are artists and when I mean artists I mean what people think of as an artist. Somebody who’s who paints, right? Someone who works in that medium. They they just they do what they do and that’s their style. Period. End of discussion. No, I’m not going to paint differently because you’re my sponsor. We don’t ever question that. We know that’s just the way this person paints. When it comes to books, movies, other creative endeavors, jobs, and so forth, well, we sort of become a bit more skeptical on that. We’re a bit more critical on that. But it is where words like artisan come from, right? We know it’s somebody who took their time. They did it the old timey way, and it’s going to be done well. and we’ll probably have to pay a lot more for it. Like the places you go for your craft beer and your $35 hamburger, your 3ml metal container of ketchup.

Using “Good” Selfishness as a Creative Guide

It’s an interesting guide, isn’t it? If you allow this selfishness to guide your productivity and your creativity, it may take you in a very interesting direction. It may start to be selfiltering. You may say, “Well, the things I really want to do the way that I want to do them are not particularly profitable. So, I have to find a different way to do it or I have to get people to pay a lot more for this.” You may end up actually forking in the road. It’s really none of my business. And having your standard way of doing things and then you have your selfish way of doing things and you may throw on a label like premium or elite or or you only do that for a handful of clients or or whatever, right? But you may actually have two different ways to do something. That’s not a bad thing. That’s an explorative fun thing that you can do with your skills and should. It can be the same way for you moving up the ranks in what you do. You’ll get better and better at somethi...

Why selfish productivity may be the best productivity