Bring Your Ideals to Life

Kevin and Sharif, OptimalWork co-founders, discuss how to "materialize your ideals," that is, how to bring them to life: into reality, into your actions. The key to this is the practice of order, intensity, and constancy: three ideals that you can perfect in each hour of work, and that ultimately shape your practice of any other ideal.  An example we discuss in the video is kindness. How can you bring kindness to life? First order: think about how you're going to practice it, what situations; get a good picture of what it will look like. Then intensity: apply yourself in a particular situation with your whole attention. Then constancy: challenge yourself over the course of, say, a conversation to look for more opportunities to practice kindness.  This is key to understanding a saying we like to repeat: the way you work is the way you live.