Tag: work

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Stay or Go

Don’t lose the lesson

We lose.

Worse still, sometimes you understand you’ve lost when there is more “time on the clock.”

I’ve heard in sports that you learn a lot about a team’s mental strength when time is running out on the clock.

They often say if they stay and play tough, then they are mentally strong.

I agree.

I also am going to veer a little left of conventional wisdom and say the team that quits is mentally strong as well. It takes guts to know there is nothing left to gain and to stop wasting time by keeping the game going.

Whatever you do, make sure you do so thorough.

Whenever you play yet want to quit or quit yet want to play, you aren’t learning anything.

You don’t learn anything because you’re focusing on doing everything, aka, the void of halfway. Instead of playing the game and giving your all or dedicating energy to leave in a positive way, you do both, and that makes for problems.

Nothing is free. The cost of playing both sides is twofold: unfocused playing prevents learning and continuing to play uses up energy.

Fact: when you play both sides, you’re wasting your time.

If you want to stay, stay.

If you want to quit, quit.

Don’t be half pregnant,here. The only person you hurt is yourself.

 

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Expectations, Screwdrivers, and Running Uphill

Making something is hard.

When you do it enough, you face failure, and usually, a lot of it.

We think if we just get one thing to work, then it’s all downhill from there.

Eventually, if you keep showing up, something works. 

Now you have a reputation. 

With a reputation, you realize that it isn’t downhill, it’s uphill.  It’s not easier; it’s harder to work.

Before, people didn’t know who you were, and now, there is an expectation. You have to fight the initial barrier to creating while making sure you don’t succumb to the weight of “expectation.”

You have to deliver! You made it happen before, do it again.

Hiding is easier because of the shadow of expectations.  

However, there is an opportunity for growth with expectation. We gain muscles by working against resistance, not with it.

When there is the expectation, you can grow.

I think of expectation like a screwdriver. Like the screwdriver, the expectation is never far from any do-it-yourself (DIY) job because it gets things done. However, screwdrivers pike up. They are useful and small, so if we misplace one, we grab another to take its place. Many toolboxes have too many screwdrivers taking up space because they haven’t cleared them out. 

We overload ourselves with expectations that we haven’t cleared out. It is worth the time so you can lighten your load.

After that, use the right screwdriver (expectation) to knock out the job (creative project).

Then get a bigger project.

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Don’t Let Work Give You a Place to Hide

Our brains crave focus.

With focus, our brains work faster and better. We have limited energy. Focus enhances it.

The question is, can we focus and think?

No. Brains do one thing at a time. Our brains function as single objects.

How does that tie into our month’s theme, hiding?

We can subconsciously work to hide from our thoughts.

That all-consuming feeling you get focusing on a project? It is useful when you don’t want to think. Going into “workaholic” mode causes the world to fall away.

That is why it’s important to ask yourself if the work matters and if you’ve given yourself time to think.

It’s easy to hide.

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Confidence Creates Authority – Lead By Doing

confidence-creates-authority-lead-by-doing

Have you learned how to take orders?

In top-down organizations, leaders work with “the stick.”

The “stick” relies on the largest threat: “you’re fired.”

“You’re fired” means that a worker has to decide if the leader has enough authority to tell them what to do, as well as learning if the leader can actually fire them.

These decisions mean that it comes with mental overhead. If you, as a worker, have to think, “Will this get me fired?” You aren’t as effective.

This style has a point,though if you lead. If compliance means more than creativity, which is true at most gigantic organizations, it works.

Taking that style anywhere else, however, relies on a situation or the environment.

The bad news, if you depend on that style to lead, is that those situations rarely occur naturally.

What other method exists?

We can learn how to execute for others.

We love completion and root for finishers. So, execute and build confidence.

As a result, gaining that confidence allows them to believe that you lead effectively. That trust means people listen, and once they listen, they follow. Furthermore, your confidence creates authority.

Those who often execute by example become the ones who lead by it.

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Make Decisions: Write it Down

Make your decisions on paper before telling them to others

I once heard that there is always 10% more “good” work than you can do.

Why?

Life comes at you fast. We have a ton of inputs that shapes our decisions. There is always something to do and a process to change.

If we allow it, we can change our minds until the cows come home, because we want to do impactful work.

Change seems to make this possible.

That is why we have to write our decisions down when we get to a possible conclusion.

There are several benefits:

Colin Powell once said you should act when you reach 70% of the information because 100% is a pipe dream.

I agree.

Get things out of your head to make things happen, because if you let a decision live there, you’ll spend more time working it out there than in the world. 

 

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Commit – Think About It and Go

commit-think-about-it-and-go

When you take a chance, do your due diligence, and go.

Chance comes along. There is no rushing or delaying it. When it happens, make a choice.

Go. Or don’t.

If you do decide to go, take it on. Don’t hedge.

Do the work. Understand the world you are walking into, know who the players are, and don’t trip over yourself – make sure you do the research.

Once that is over, if it still makes sense, go. 

Most plans don’t fail because of failure being inevitable. They fail because the “fear of failure” makes people believe failure is inevitable. 

Don’t let the fear suffocate the possible. 

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“Drop Dead” And Get Things Done

Complexity and Utility

Let’s make it happen

The last two days we talked a lot about closets. I use the closet not only as a practical example but also a metaphor. Drop dead conditions are ideal for all sorts of things, ranging from decisions on products to where you want to eat for dinner.

How are we putting the drop dead condition(DDC) into action?

Before we use it to decide when we are going to launch our next initiative, let’s stick to our closets.

Exercise:

  1. Block out at least 30 minutes to review your closet with a pen and a pad.
  2. Review each item in the closet. Each one gets 10 seconds, no more! I’ve found that our emotions don’t change after 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, we tend to rationalize.
  3. If you like it, NEXT!
  4. If you don’t like it, jot down the reason.
  5. Bonus points! Remove it immediately from your closet. There’s no reason to keep something you hate. Coordinate a gift donation with a local not-for-profit. Get that thing out of your house, for real.
  6. When you’re done reviewing your closet, you now have a list of DDCs!
  7. Place this list in your wallet. Look at it every time you go shopping.
  8. Schedule a DDC action three months later. You will review your closet’s contents and toss what no longer serves you.

This exercise an easy way for you to get comfortable with this framework.

 

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Ignition + Vision = If You Complete the Mission – Lessons from July 2016

Starting small delivers big value

This month began as a mystery to me. “Starting small” is a general term. I mean different things to different people. This month, I engaged with that generality and got some interesting conclusions.

First, however, is what I knew coming into the month:

When preparing those ideas, I realized there were several aspects of “small” that which we have to deal.  Things, like the small chunks of time that happen between meetings, the little mistakes that we ignore, and a little context all affect us.

These things change us in ways we don’t imagine, both for better and for worse.   Taking the time to think about and prepare for these events don’t just make us feel better, but make us smarter for doing so.

We aren’t alone, nor are we robots. We get in our way. We don’t know everything.

But, through working on what we do, and taking things one day at a time, we can do great things.  All it takes is patience, and the ability to breathe. 

From there, much is possible. Two minutes is enough to start. 

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Keep Swinging If You Can

Home runs come from the same place as a single

There is a great quote from Jeff Bezos, CEO, and Founder of Amazon about baseball and business:

“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs… baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

I think this applies to life as well.

Our opportunities in life happen by chance, circumstance, and want of trying. In this quote, opportunities are “swings.”

Chance and circumstance rely on nature or other people, but our want is internal. We have some control over it. >We can take as many “want” swings as, well, we want.

The best part of the quote to me is in bold.

Life has no truncated outcome distribution, meaning that there is no artificial cap on what a swing can do. A home run clears the bases. In life, there are an unlimited amount of bases.

So, keep swinging.

 

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Do it Free

It’s often cheaper than you think

Once you decided on that idea after two minutes and figured out what’s next, the next thing to do is to experiment. I can think of no better place to do that than the internet.

Whatever you want to try, there is a platform to test the idea out and “kick the tires.” Most of them don’t need much “social credit” (meaning you can do stuff anonymously). You can run as many experiments as you can handle, and learn while doing instead of pondering or thinking.

Once you think about something and put some words around it, you can get the “task” done, usually at cost.* There are a ton of services out there that are a Google search away from solving whatever hurdle you face.

At cost pricing means, experimentation is cheap, often free.

Some places you can use to carry out experiments:

Try one today.

*Internet companies aren’t good at pricing, so the SKU’s skew to the cheap side.

 

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