I wrote a few years ago about the Samurai Walk, a great way to plan and achieve goals. I recommend reading that post. It's visual, so I did a video on it recently. Once you get it, I predict you'll use it, and I bet you'll find yourself getting more done with less effort, remaining more calm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irKDx6hIbr4
Everyone wants to find a passion---something that engages them so much they love doing it and working on it doesn't feel like work. Most of us hold back from trying because we aren't sure what we might feel passion for. We know we don't feel passion for anything now. Maybe this, maybe that. Unsure which, and afraid of picking something we'll later learn we don't feel passion for, we don't try. Teaching people to behave entrepreneurially, I see people hold back a lot. They don't realize they're holding back, protecting their vulnerabilities. They just feel like they don't know what they want. One of the students in my online entrepreneurship course, after doing all but the last exercise, realized he wanted to take a different…
An Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, "What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us," illustrated a perspective that will turn higher education into a dinosaur if it doesn't learn some new perspectives. It begins COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Do you see the dated perspective? The key words for me are "knowledge" and "activity." What's wrong with knowledge and activity? Aren't they good? Read on for a broader perspective, one that I hope and expect will overtake theirs. Regarding knowledge, centuries ago, when most were illiterate,…
The forecast for the day after tomorrow in New York City, for mid-February, is 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14.5 C)---beyond unseasonably warm, especially after a 72 degree Christmas Eve (!!), followed by the hottest month for the planet recorded relative to normal. You know the signs we're beyond the possibility of climate change. We're in it. My version of leadership means taking responsibility for your actions and their effects on others---all the effects, not just the ones you want. However much you think pollutions happens mostly from others, not you, you contribute to it. Which means you can change your behavior to reduce how much you pollute. Even if you think you're only contributing one part in seven billion, you're responsible for one hundred percent that…
I wrote about David Allen's influence before, in "'I am a freedom junky' -- David Allen's inspiring words that simplified my life," which describes how I implemented his system of getting things done. His words and advice regularly come to mind and help me. They did recently when an email that would have stressed and burdened me had I not known his system. I had his book and a camera handy and tell the story of my taking a risk offending him when I met him and, instead, learning more about the book and its purpose than I could have otherwise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLeaxT7I8p0 How to implement Getting Things Done Read his book for the full version, but copying the important parts from my earlier post: I…
After teaching, coaching, studying, and practicing leadership for twenty years, I announced my online leadership course, “Introducing the most effective leadership course available anywhere.†I’m hosting a series of free webinars on the most actionable, useful, effective, and exciting parts of the course. My webinars will always deliver exclusive, valuable lessons you can use that day and how to build for the long term. Attend my second webinar, free, this Sunday, February 14, 1pm Eastern Standard Time! All you need is an internet connection. How to Decide Without Regret ... in business and life Click to register! From the registration page: What You’ll Learn in The Webinar ✔ Why deciding is hard, and it's not what you think! ✔ How to make deciding easier, even…
My post today on Inc.com, “Avoid Taking a Job You Hate by Doing This in Your Interview," begins: You could have learned in the interview why you'd hate your job if you'd had this perspective. Learn it and make your interviews productive. If you ever left a job you expected to love, or endured hating it, these words likely ring true for you: "People join good projects and leave bad management." Leaving jobs is painful and expensive. You can learn about future managers in your interview, but few people do. If you don't know better, you'll choose jobs based on what the company does, your title, your pay, the company's growth, and other things that don't affect your daily experience. In other words, "good projects." Read the rest at Inc.com:…
If you read this blog, you know I care about leadership and how to improve yours---in business, personal, family, and every other part of your life. I presume you do too. As much as you've learned from the blog, you can learn more from doing. If you want to improve because you're moving up the corporate ladder, just finished school, starting your own projects, or any other reason that you have to lead people and teams, developing leadership skills from practice will improve you most effectively. Anyone can improve their ability to lead, and the most effective improvement comes from experience, not books, lectures, or case studies. Or even my blog. I created what I believe the most effective course in leadership you can find…
If persistence pays off, how far do you persist? How often do you persist (politely) until you've wrong an opportunity dry---absolutely, completely dry? As I wrote on Inc.com yesterday in "How to Build the Best Relationships With Both Leaders and Superiors," people appreciate helping others---if you behave like you deserve it, but not like you're entitled. A student of mine was applying to graduate school. She told me how she applied and had visited a few of the schools she was applying to. She had researched some professors she wanted to work with but hadn't contacted them---even in her number one choice school. While I recognized she had other priorities, like her current studies, I could tell she hadn't yet learned the value of persisting…
Does this sound like a reasonable question: "Do you do things in order of importance?" I don't think it is. I suggest the question gets things backward. Your priorities don't determine what order you do things in. The order you do things in determines their priority. What you do first is your highest priority, given all your values and constraints, and if you tell yourself otherwise, you're lying to yourself. If you say, "but the project will take an hour and this other thing will only take five minutes," you're still prioritizing the other thing if you do it first because you only have time for it. That's what I mean by "given all your values and constraints." If you play a quick game of…
You get chances to do cool things: classes to take, hobbies to try, relationships to develop, books to read, movies to watch, and so on. How do you decide which to do? Most people look at the new thing and ask if it's worth doing. I recommend not asking that question. There are many things worth doing in the abstract. Too many. I recommend instead asking what you'd have to stop doing to make time for it---a more discriminating question. Asking what existing things to get rid of forces you to evaluate the new thing against your values in terms of your time, your most valuable and irreplaceable resource. It prevents you from overloading your schedule. It practices "You have to say no to a…
When I got home from traveling last week, I found myself returning to many patterns and habits that traveling forced me to suspend. As I'm approaching middle age, I started to wonder if I was getting set in my ways. I want to stay young, vibrant, and effective. Could these habits mean I'm ossifying and becoming sedentary? While I could look at it that way, I find that I've found patterns that help me get things done, stay healthy, stay calm, and so on. They also relieve me of mental struggles, freeing me to solve problems that I care about, not trivial things like what to eat for breakfast. The novelty of seeing new things that comes with travel is exciting and can be fun,…
Jack Welch said that most of his work was keeping his company entrepreneurial, preventing it from ossifying with red tape and other bureaucracy. He was very successful, in his workplace as much as outside it. I call that stuff garbage. The waste we produce as side effects of what we want. I guarantee your work life has garbage you haven't been able to get rid of. Same with your personal life. You have relationships that aren't working for you that you haven't gotten rid of and the garbage is holding you back from forming new ones. You have old processes and habits that aren't working for you. You haven't gotten rid of them either and the garbage is holding you back from forming new ones.…
I can't tell you how exhausted I was when I got home yesterday. Traveling meant about five hours of sleep in the forty-eight leading to last evening's sleep. Telling a client about burpees and Sidchas recently, when I mentioned doing them when tired, drunk, or otherwise discouraged, he asked, "wait, you do them then too?", implying that for a long-term activity, you don't have to be a stickler for rules every time. After all, how much does one instance matter out of many? On the contrary, the value of the combination of the activity being self-imposed, challenging, and daily arises when faced with doing them when you don't want to. Anyone can do easy things, even some challenging things. Any one can captain a ship…
Think of your heroes and role models. How many of them reached their greatness by doing many things in many areas at once? All the ones I can think of reached greatness by excelling in one area. After greatness they may have branched into other areas, but they all focused with discipline at first. Most people I know spread themselves thin on many projects. They don't say no to good things and therefore don't have the resources to succeed on great things. They point out how hard it is to say no to things they like. I agree. That's why so few people qualify as heroes and role models. They didn't say no to anything, lacked resources (time, money, enthusiasm, etc) to excel on what…
Just back from an all-day networking event not just to meet people but for improving how you meet people I realized something new. Do you try to meet new people to improve your network? If you want to meet people who match with you more than people you already know, you have to free time from the people you know. In other words, you have to spend less time with people you know to spend more time with people who work with you more. Does that sound Machiavellian? I don't see an alternative, unless you can add more hours to your day. It's a simple result of your time being limited. You can spend less and less time with people you know until all you…
You have two options in life. Option 1 is to try, meaning actively trying at things that matter to you. If you try, things won't always work as you want and you will sometimes feel bad. Not bad like your fell and scraped your knee. Bad like what's-the-point?-Every-time-I-try-I-fail-so-why-keep-trying?-Why-bother-going-on-at-all?-I'm-a-failure-and-always-will-be bad. As far as I know, feeling that way is inevitable if you try. Option 2 is to eat cookies and ice cream and watch TV, meaning to entertain yourself passively. Your passive entertainment may come in many forms besides literal cookies and ice cream, as long as you don't have to try and make yourself vulnerable to pain. This route doesn't lead to feeling bad in the way the first option does. Some who favor actively…
Using authority to lead may achieve your goal but it creates unintended side-effects, nearly always counter to your goals. To you personally too. This scene in Lincoln illustrates how the side-effects can last centuries. I long wondered why people resist accepting the Civil War. Why wouldn't they celebrate ending slavery? When you motivate someone through authority, you are making them do something they don't want to do. You're threatening a worse outcome if they don't do it---firing, a bad grade, a spanking, jail, garnishing wages, etc---implying that being with you can be even worse. What are you presenting about yourself? Leading through authority motivates people to undermine your authority and resent you. This scene dramatizes Lincoln's strategy of passing a constitutional amendment to institutionalize his…
"Nice guys finish last." Alone, this thought has probably condemned many men and women to abandon being nice. Accurate or not, combined with another belief, that the alternative to being nice is to be a jerk, further condemns people to being jerks. Jerks---people with one type of poor relationship skills---even when materially successful, seem likely to face emptiness in intimacy, what many consider the most important parts of their lives. We don't like jerks around us, so we don't want others to consider us jerks and shun us. But if the alternative of finishing last seems worse, we feel rational in choosing it. Whether nice people finish last or not, you can't much control. After you try your best, competitive outcomes depend on many factors,…
I adopt new technologies slowly, often not at all before the trend passes. If you've ever thrown away something you felt you needed when you bought it and now can't give away, I believe you'll find doing so helps you enjoy life more. If you know that the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from land, has garbage polluting it, I suggest you consider slowing your adoption too. I'm not afraid of new technology. I helped build an x-ray observational satellite that's orbiting the Earth. I helped build neutrino detectors. I teach entrepreneurship to engineers. As a kid I bought an Apple 2e as soon as I could save up the money. I have six patents and built million-dollar displays with teams of engineers I…
The reader I responded to Saturday also wrote the following: in the meanwhile i am writing to a medical doctor who is also a fitness expert so that i can meet her and set up a program that looks at both nutrition and exercise She's doing what a lot of people do, especially well-educated businesspeople who have developed habits to analyze things before acting. I do so too on many things, but you can also tell when someone knows what they should do and are analyzing to delay action. While I believe she's looking for a program, I'm confident she could start before talking to the doctor. We all know substituting vegetables for sugar, alcohol, and other empty calories or some similar way to cut…
The sting of jalapeño on my skin after chopping it always reminds me of my dedication to playing ultimate frisbee. Lately the farm supplying my vegetables this summer has delivered a lot of jalapeños. I'm enjoying them. I like spicy food and I enjoy their flavor more than cayenne pepper. One afternoon in my junior year of college, it was time to get ready for frisbee practice. That year the team made it to the finals of nearly every tournament and won a few. We took it seriously. Everybody made every practice, at least among the first-string players. Packing my bag drilled a short mnemonic into my thoughts that I still think when packing to play: "lights, darks, cleats, contacts," meaning bring a light shirt…
Academia has some serious problems. I give a lot of talks to graduate students on what they can do after graduate school, though the following applies to undergraduates too. Many of them are worried about finding jobs. I grab their attention every time with this question: When I was getting my PhD in physics, I thought the only fields I could go into were academia to become a professor, industry to work probably on something military-industrial, or wall street. I didn't want to do any of those. I felt trapped. You've all heard about people who drop out of school, maybe to start a company, and succeed? With more education, shouldn't you be better prepared than they are? So why do you feel worse prepared…
This summer's #1 bestselling business book, Triggers, by Marshall Goldsmith, describes how not to worry about things not worth worrying about. I'm going to improve what he wrote. He created an acronym, AIWATT, which he rhymes with "say what," short for the first six words of this question: Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? If you are not willing to do anything about something and you are aware that you aren't willing to act, then you will see no point in worrying about it. Instead you'll concern yourself with things you can act on. If you're willing to act but also realize your actions won't make a difference, or if they'll make…
My colleague and friend, Tim Francis, whose online course I took and loved on moving a business online, told me about how simplifying his life is improving it. I sent him a link to my post, "Less, please," which got him looking at his bookshelf. In a few minutes he went from describing the books' value to questioning it to seeing value in the freedom of not books and putting them back in to circulation for others. Everyone goes through the usual questions and protestations of "But what if I need to look something up?" and "But how will my friends know the awesomeness of my reading history?" Ultimately, only by getting rid of a few books do we realize the freedom of not books.…