Are your outputs bad lately? Do you find your work is not up to the same grade they used to come up to? Are you finding yourself struggling to maintain good relationships with others? Maybe you find you aren’t taking care of yourself the way you used to? If your outputs are not great lately, I recommend you look at your inputs.
Simply put, if you have bad inputs, you will have bad outputs. Anyone who runs a well run machine will tell you that. It’s also true for you.
First of all, you are living in a pandemic in the middle of winter as I write that. Some of us are in a lockdown. Just that alone is one big bad input into every day. Part of your pandemic life may be that you don’t get to see and meet people who at one time would give you a lot of positive input. A deficit of good inputs can be as bad as a surfeit of bad inputs. If you find you aren’t sleeping properly, or eating properly, or doing other things to take care of yourself, then those too are bad inputs.
Some of us can do well with even meagre inputs. But few can thrive that way. If you want to do better, you need to improve your good inputs and reduce your bad inputs. To do that, I want to point you to this piece I wrote about it some time ago: Motivational Jiu-Jitsu: Staying Positive in the Face of Negativity & Indifference – Adobe 99U
There’s some inputs you can’t change. But you can tune some of them out, just like you can amplify some of your good inputs. If you do, I can assure you that you’ll get better outputs.
P.S. For more on the importantance of inputs on outputs, see: Austin Kleon – Posts tagged \’input and output\’
Smart People I Know 