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 th...