This one starts with a an admission of failure, quickly turns into a celebration of being winning out over doing and then evolves into offering a solution to the curse of mediocrity which seems to have become a default setting for so many people.
When I decided to create Out Beyond Ideas, I had a plan. Like a good IT professional I sat down and created a backlog of stuff I had to do. I put it on an electronic Kanban board to organise it, created my MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and built the site. There is more to add in time but the essentials are there. The plan worked 👍
But the technology was the simple bit. The challenge was the content. So I did another plan with a separate Kanban for ideas for what to write about. I had a minimum number of posts needed to publish the site and a posting rate of one per week. I plumped for Sunday morning was a good time to post. It seemed like a good time for subscribers to take 5-10 minutes to read it, before that S'Monday feeling started kicking in and they focussed on the week ahead. I also planned to have a backlog of written articles ready - maybe 3 or 4 - so that I was always ahead of the game. Then, if life got in the way, I wouldn't miss a Sunday.
That part of the plan was good in theory, but not great in practise. I want people to be inspired by the posts on here and that means I need to be inspired when I'm writing them. I soon found that out and, with the exception of when I've been on holiday, I've have been writing a post each week for that week. This has worked well since the blog was first published in September 2025. Some weeks things were a little tight and the posts were written on Saturday, but they were still there in subscriber's inboxes on Sunday morning.
But last week I failed. It is Monday 23rd February 2026 and I'm drafting this post, when it should have been published yesterday. Not a massive failure in the great scheme of things. No one died as a result. The stock exchange didn't crash. President Trump didn't feel the need to rant about my failure on truth social and a big thank you to Andrew Mountbatton Windsor for hogging the newsfeeds and distracting the world away from my little slip.
But my failure last week did make me reflect on why it happened and I had a good excuse. I was a bit busy last week. There was a lot of stuff on and I just didn't find the time that writing a decent blog post requires.
I could have just knocked something up quickly and scheduled it to go out on time and I'd have ticked the box. I could have used AI to generate some slop, tweaked it a bit and passed it off as my own. It wouldn't have been great, but it would have been ok and you'd have hopefully forgiven me and kept on reading future posts.
But that would go against all of the values that Out Beyond Ideas is based upon. The AI slop option is a non-starter and the same goes for knocking something out quickly to meet an arbitrary target. Plus I realised that I actually had the best excuse in the world for missing the deadline:
I was busy BEING !!!!
As someone who has spent a lot of his life being busy doing, last week was a great achievement for me, because I was present for so much of it. Two meals out ! Town on Saturday to meet school friends and watch the rugby (I haven't watched it for 40 years but it was about the school friends) ! Two sessions of D&D with my best buddies from University ! A very loud concert (Mogwai) with my best mate ! That is a heck of a lot of people-ing for me for one week and it was both fabulous and tiring. The bits in between were for recharging my social batteries, so though there was time to write something, my mind didn't have the energy and inspiration to do a decent job.
But it made me think about life in the 21st century. I get the feeling that a lot of us are just box ticking a lot of the time:
There is so much to get done each week that something's got to give and that is usually quality. And that can be ok some of the time, but if it's all of the time there are consequences.
In my old life in IT, the consequences were tactical solutions that became technical debt and legacy services. They're ok until they bite you in the bum and organisations across the globe are riddled with them. In big business doing the right thing only applies to shareholder profits and we have seen so many stories about it being cheaper for companies to pay the fines rather than fix the problems. We seem to have made being a little bit sh1t the norm rather than the exception.
But if we let that become our standard and we apply it to our life and our relationships, things soon start to unravel. Life becomes a tick box exercise. Life becomes a little bit sh1t. We're alive, but are we really living ?
I've always tried to live by this famous prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and Wisdom to know the difference
Though it is phrased as a prayer to God, don't let the faith part of it put you off. Just drop the God bit out of it if that works better for you. Use it as a simple but powerful reminder to focus on the things you have control over rather than wasting energy on the things we can't change.
But there is a catch with the last line. It assumes that we know the difference, or we have the wisdom to know the difference. That can be the challenging bit sometimes. Not because we are stupid, but because the wisdom mentioned above isn't always obvious until it's pointed out to you.
That's what Out Beyond Ideas is about. Every post on here points out the obvious that maybe isn't that obvious. It's about presenting things in a way that makes you realise that it is within your power to change. Everything we do is about giving you the wisdom to know the difference.
But there is more. We're also big on simple and practical actions that will help you make the changes. So, hopefully, every post on here will also give you some practical advice on how to go about making the change, which in turn will give you the courage to do it.
I'd even say that by helping you clarify the stuff you can change, it makes the stuff you can't change clearer. That clarity will give you the serenity to accept the stuff that you don't have control of. How cool is that ?
Unlike other posts on here, I gave you the top tip for today in the title:
Do it better than you have to !
It doesn't really need any explanation or guidance beyond that. In a world where box ticking and mediocrity seems to be the norm, you can make the choice to do everything better than you have to. Now, there is an obvious downside - it will take a bit more effort across the board. But the upsides are massive:
But the one that is most important is the one that people neglect the most:
Do it for yourself.
Focus on doing less and being more. Build those habits that support your personal wellbeing. Do the things you need to do to get the best version of you to show up every day, whether that be forming habits, taking time to reflect, exercising, reading, sleeping. Do it because you are worth it and you deserve it. Do it because the people around you deserve to experience the best version of you.
If you like the idea of doing it better than you have to, it's important to take it a bit at a time. If you try and do it across your life, all at once, it is likely to overwhelm you and reduce your chances of success.
So start big in a small way. Start with you. Start focussing on you more than you have to. Put more effort into forming good habits, reflection, sleep, exercise etc. Starting there will give you that capacity and capability to do the rest of life better than you have to. Family comes next. they're already benefitting from you focussing on you so you're over halfway there already.
By the time you've focussed on you and your family, doing it better than you have to will have become a habit. You're friends and colleagues should be feeling it already, so you might just need a few tweaks at work and you're sorted. Before you know it you'll be doing life better than you have to and inspiring others to do the same.
The world will still be doing mediocrity. There will still be potholes in the roads, wars, and fake news, but all of that will just be background noise for you and the people around you. Just because you chose to make doing it better than you have to your default. It may not change the world, but it certainly will change your world and the worlds of everyone who meets you. And if the people around you start doing it and the people around them start doing it, maybe those things we are being serene about will change 🤔
Mike xx
