You can solve lots of problems in life and work and it does not have to be a herculean effort. In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn says if something is broken, fix it. Don’t wait until it becomes a disaster.
Rob Artigo: Ray, April 28th, 2026, you wake up in the morning ready to do the tough things first, but don’t set off on that adventure. I’m doing a commercial here. Don’t just set off on an adventure until you’ve checked in with today’s entry in the Zen of Zinn Daily, page 59.
Let’s talk Zen of Zinn Daily, your new book. It’s fantastic. In this book, you wrote, “When you clean up your act, you polish up your life in a way you will be genuinely happy with your performance. Let your act be one that you will be proud of.” I paraphrased that last part. It’s pretty much what it says. I just made up my own words there for a second. It happens.
Your response to that, which Zen of Zinn Daily does, it takes writing that you’ve done before, and then you write a response to it. And the response here is, “Traditionally, this relates to a person who makes a lot of mistakes, is unreliable, and could be more productive if they would only get things together. But you’re not one of those people.” That would be the listener or whoever’s reading this book. “Because you chose to read this book, which endeavors to help you improve and smooth out your rough edges. You probably are generally viewed as a good-act type. Today, polish your life, and be mindful that you will be judged. Always strive to improve your act.” That’s the end of that response.
Ray, in this writing today, you said, “Clean up your act. You polish up your life in a way you will be genuinely happy with your performance.” What does cleaning up your act look like in practical, everyday terms for a leader or entrepreneur who is already generally viewed as a good-act type?
Ray Zinn: Well, doing the tough things first is a start. If something is broken, fix it. Don’t wait until it becomes a disaster. The polishing up your act is what real performers do. Having been a performer at different times in my life, having to give talks and teach classes and otherwise give advice or writing a book, there’s a polishing-up part.
I’ve written six books now, and we always have to correct them. We have to clean up either spelling errors or grammatical errors. That’s polishing things up when we review them. I’m sure the listeners have seen a book and said, “Oh, they misspelled such and such a word,” or that the grammar’s not proper or that they didn’t use the past tense or the future tense. And it bothers you. When you see somebody making a mistake, either the way that they’ve taken care of the way they look or the way they act or the way they write or whatever it is that they’re doing … Could be an athlete. You can tell if he has not polished up his act or her act. That’s the key.
The key is polish up that act. Don’t let it become rusty or bad. Clean it. Take care of it. And don’t wait until it’s too late.
Rob Artigo: One of the things I do is I read a lot of books on Kindle, which is an Amazon app, so I’m reading it electronically. And it happens so often in writing books that there are errors that make it on the page. No matter how many times you look at it, somehow or another, there’s going to be something in there that doesn’t fit. The misuse of a word. Just the spelling. It plays right like there and their. They’re two different spellings, and they mean two different things, but they look the same on the page. Sometimes your brain doesn’t connect with it, and somehow it makes it there. In this Kindle app, you can actually highlight something and then send a note that says, “In this digital version, this is incorrect.” I’ll bet you it happens a lot. If they’ve got it as a tool in the app, then it must happen quite frequently. And that’s what happens in our lives. And what we have to do is smooth out those rough edges.
You noted that the person reading this book is not the kind of person that makes a lot of mistakes or is unreliable, but yet some things do happen. Someone actively working to smooth out those rough edges, how do even the high-performing leaders identify those subtle rough edges that still need polishing so they can be truly proud of their performance?
Ray Zinn: It’s preparation. I’m currently getting my driveway redone, and I noticed that they’re spending a lot of time in the prep side of it. And I was curious about that. And I was asking the contractor. I says, “Boy, you guys are spending more time in the prep than you are actually putting down the asphalt.”
He says, “I know from experience that if I don’t do the prep work, that I’m going to come back and have to redo the job again.” He says, “It’s measure twice, cut once, as you would.” And that’s that prep thing. Measure twice, cut once, because otherwise what you’ll do is, if you just measure once, you’re going to be cutting two or three times.
Preparation is the key to having a successful outcome, and that’s this polishing up that we’re talking about. Polish up your act. Clean it up. Get it right. Do the prep work, and then you won’t have to do that cleanup later.
Rob Artigo: And your prep work in doing the books has been a lesson in attention to detail and really getting the right things on the page as well, the right points, and that’s polishing up the book. That’s polishing up your life. I mean, that’s an example of how to do that. I was going to ask you about a couple of concrete ways a person can polish up their life and learn from Zen of Zinn Daily, but you clearly answer it there. Because let’s put it this way. I guess I’ll end with this, and then we’ll wrap it up, which is this applies whether you’re working at a job where you’re kind of working by yourself a lot, but your results matter to a company. It could be your personal interactions. It could be your personal habits. It can also be the things that occur at home, right?
Ray Zinn: Yep. Again, we’re all fallible, and we do make mistakes. In writing my books, I’ve read them and had others read them five and six times before we set ink to page as you would. And I always find errors. I always find something that I overlooked, I missed, so you can’t over-prepare. As they say, preparation is the key to success.
Rob Artigo: Your sketch should always be in pencil, not permanent marker, because you can’t get … I love the story about your driveway because that is absolutely right. You put something down that hard to remove, and it’s wrong. You’re going to have a major issue.
Join the conversation at toughthingsfirst.com. Your questions and comments are always welcome. Follow Ray at X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And of course the books we’ve talked about already, Tough Things First, The Essential Leader: 10 Skills, Attributes, and Fundamentals That Make Up the Essential Leader. And as you know, the Zen of Zinn series one, two, and three now includes Ray’s new book, Zen of Zinn Daily.
Thanks, Ray.
Ray Zinn: Thanks, Rob.
