Think about how you’ve spent your last 24 hours. How much time did you spend on building something rather than on maintaining something that already existed? Most of us spend the majority of our lives in maintenance mode, whether it’s professionally or personally. We are hired to maintain a system that someone else invented, we maintain our relationships rather than leading them, or we reactively do what we have to in order to get the work done but we don’t spend much time thinking about building capacity for future work. We live lives of obligation.

The shift from obligation mode to opportunity mode is critical for any creative who wants to be prolific, brilliant and healthy. We must be thinking regularly about how we are investing in our capacity to do better work in the future. We must be personally accountable for our own growth. We must build practices into our life that make us effective rather than obsessing on efficiency.

Are you living your life for obligation or for opportunity? I’d challenge you to do something today that is forward-looking and increases your capacity to do brilliant work.