Protect the Core
Last week on Sunday Success I was noodling on the topic of removing your greatest obstacle. This week I want to flip that completely and talk about protecting your core.
First off, what does it mean to protect your core?
In martial arts, you are taught to guard your centreline. Your greatest vulnerabilities lie on your centreline, so your most important defense principle is protecting it.
In chess, the middle of the board is more powerful, so you seek to control the centre in order to control the game. Or so I’m told, I’m not a chess player.
Recently, through the China induced insanity in the market place, my company has literally adopted as one of its key principles to “Protect the core.” To guard and fortify those aspects of the business that are most critical for our ongoing success.
What is Your Core?
So, then, what is your core? Of late, I’ve been expanding my horizons. You know the expression, “Stay in your lane?” Taking a page from Scott Adams (actually several pages, from his book Loserthink), I’ve been swerving out of mine. Copywriting, time management, writing about nutrition and success. Developing my first course. Working on starting a podcast. None of those are in my lane, but I’m working on all of them.
The problem is that I still have a job, and a family to feed. In the end, that is my core, feeding my family. As I move into other lanes, develop new skills and attempt to create a new income stream, before anything else, I do my job, and I get paid.
Daily Publishing
But what else? Forget the job for a moment. In the context of all those outside interests, including this little site, what is my core? I’ve had some time to reflect on that over the last few days and I’ve come to the conclusion that right now, my core is daily publishing.
Every day for the last couple of months, I’ve researched, written and published…something. Over the time I’ve been doing this I’ve gained a certain amount of clarity, and noticed a lot of change.
I started out all those years ago writing about posture. That lead to back pain, which lead to fitness and healthy living. Ergonomics, and then stress relief and nutrition were natural outgrowths. This latest foray into success came from finding ways to push myself a little more, to get a little more out of my time.
The core was putting something up daily, and continuing the streak took a life of its own. Which is great, because in continuing the streak, in protecting my core of daily publishing, I can’t write the same thing every day and I’m forced to dig deeper and to keep swerving out of my lane.
In continuing to protect my core of daily publishing, I’m developing new skills for my stack, new interests and new knowledge for this site. I’m forced to test, hone and refine ideas for my course. In short, in protecting my core, I’m pushing myself to increase the odds of success.
So what about you? What is your core?
Find it.
Defend it.
