Making things

Do I need more patience, or more action?

August 20, 2026

We know good things take time. But in practice, time feels a lot longer than that maxim lets on.

Exercise feels long because it’s hard on the body. Before you start, “good things take time” sounds true and useful. Halfway through the strain of actually doing it, that maxim doesn’t help you much at all.

So it can be genuinely hard to know: is the reason I’m not hitting my goal that I need to push harder, or wait longer, or change what I’m doing altogether?

One answer is just to do it a little longer. But you don’t want to run the same action with no results for too long either, because you’ll run out of playing time.

The real trick is the balance between more action, different action, and more time. Like a good cake, if you get the ratio right, it comes out delicious.

Cause and effect

August 19, 2026

Cause and effect is important to notice. They say if you don’t measure it, it can’t improve.

Some things are easy to measure. How many words you wrote on a page. How much weight you can lift at the gym. Other things are harder to pin down.

But if we can figure out a way to quantify the things we actually want to improve, to measure them somehow, we start to see the cause and effect of our own actions. When I do this, this happens. And once you can see that, you can adjust.

So what do you want to improve at? And how can you measure it, so you can actually improve it?

Learning backwards

August 7, 2026

“How do you learn all those lines?”

Actors get asked this all the time- and honestly I don’t know the answer!

But here’s what I’m trying…

I started learning the script from Act 2. Then I worked my way backwards through Act 1.

Why?

Act 1 Scene 1 is too loaded.

Even in the line learning phase, it’s hard not to imagine, dry mouthed, pupetting yourself out onstage for that first moment of the show.

I’d also end up going over that section over and over again if I started there.

So I just mixed it up. Actor’s are time travellers, anyway. We don’t relate to sequence, we relate to emotion; that’s our only timeline.

Is the order you’re doing something in helping or hindering you?

Acting is a tapestry

July 27, 2026

I’m preparing for an upcoming play and part of that process is to examine every line with a fine tooth comb.

In doing this, I realised that so much of my job as an actor is this part: it’s having an intellectual, emotional, visual and three dimensional understanding of the words.

The words infer an entire world of this character. As I work with each one; taste it, see it, try it and live it… I’m building an intricate network of threads that will eventually make up the whole piece.

Acting is this tapestry. It’s not showing up on the day with all your might and pushing a performance out. It’s weaving it and investing time, energy and heart into it in the lead up.

Then when you show up, you merely wear the tapestry you’ve created.

But you can’t wear it elegantly without putting the time in on the front end.

I wonder where else we mistake giving our ‘all’ on the day with simply doing the work before hand and letting the complexity live?

The one thing

May 25, 2026

It’s really easy to list all the things you could do that would move the needle on your goals.

It’s a whole other skill to pick the one thing that you will do.

Forget the 10 outcomes for the day, what is the ONE THING that will make this day count?

Pour all your energy into that today.

Then do it again tomorrow.

You’ll probably get more done over the next ten days than if you tried to squeeze them all in.

Go slow to go fast.

The little things

May 4, 2026

They are the ones that matter, and we know this.

We know that great things come from culminative efforts.

We know that in order to eat an elephant you take one bite at a time.

We know that nothing great was built by changing everything at once and doing everything in one day (or even a week).

The truth (that we know) is that it’s the little things, done over and over again that get you there.

The choice, then, is to select the right little things to get you there.

Reading an inspirational quote each day mightn’t help you write your book…

…but writing a sentence each day might.

Choose the little thing and one day you’ll get the big thing.

What and when

May 1, 2026

The scattergun approach is doing a lot of something in the hope that something will work.

The precise approach is to carefully consider and plan the action before execution.

Both have their place…

A broad approach when you need momentum, fast.

The precise approach when you know the mission and exactly what you need to bring to it.

The real skill is knowing which to use and when.

Not on the day

April 29, 2026

I love the practice of creating every day.

But one thing that tripped me up was mixing that up with publishing every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we should publish every day too.

WHAT!? I hear you say.

Here’s the difference- create daily but give some time between creation and release.

So the thing you publish today you didn’t also make today.

Work on something today but publish something else.

I did just write this though…

The cake

April 27, 2026

At the end of the day, the cake gotta taste good.

You can market it, wrap it and talk it up all you like… but it has to be good.

The greatest artists and creators of our time understand this. They become obsessed with the ingredients. The best of the best. The cake that makes people rave for more- there’s no substitute for it.

Sure, you have to know how to sell the cake.

But you’ve got to make it brilliant first.

Too much too soon

April 24, 2026

It’s new years day and you have a big beautiful piece of paper in front of you. It’s got scribbles in different colours with words and sentences of all different sizes; this is you LIFE PLAN.

It’s so exciting! You can see it all there in front of you. The energy of the fresh cup of coffee coupled with the momentum of the first day of January has hit you hard and this grand plan represents your entire vision.

This was me on new years day- I had the added inspiration of being on the beach at Oakura Bay in the north of New Zealand. My inspiration quickly turned to overwhelm. I had no trouble getting all my visions and goals down on the page. But just a few hours later I looked at the page again. What was once a battery pack that charged me up with energy now seemed like the opposite- I felt drained and daunted by what lay in front of me.

Inspiration isn’t enough.

Being inspired feels great, doesn’t it? New Years Day does it, but we see these moments in other bursts throughout the year too. The beginning of term or the start of a new flashy program at school… these ‘launch’ moments have a tendency to burn bright and burn fast. The problem isn’t the vision, we need a clear direction. The problem is too much too soon.

One of the grand goals I had was for the kids I was teaching to have a full Te Reo exchange with me at the beginning of class. I barreled into our first session together and began laying out a multi-step greeting and conversation exchange… It felt exciting and new and I got some great initial progress. But the next time I went in, the kids had forgotten and each subsequent lesson I had to start from scratch. The kids were over chunked; it was too much too soon.

Out of frustration one day, I decided to drop it. So I just did the opening greeting. Some of them remembered it… cool! I drilled it again for those still not confident. The next few lessons I just did the same.

What I’d hoped would take me one lesson actually took more like six- but I was stoked.

I learned to use the moments of inspiration as the ‘lift off’ and chunk down the subsequent bits. It doesn’t all have to feel like the raging fire of a rocket taking off.

Sometimes it’s just striking a match.

And when you strike enough of them, you get a pretty bright light.

JUSTIN ROGERS

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