Entrepreneurial Leadership | Success Secrets Revealed

Day 15 – Achieve a Peaceful Calm State of Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:36:00 +0000

“After a storm comes a calm.” — Matthew Henry

Your Outcome: Quiet the buzz in your mind. Achieve a “peaceful calm” state of mind that is relaxed, responsive, and ready.

Welcome to day 15 of 30 Days of Getting Results, a series of posts where I share with you a simple system for meaningful results from my book,Getting Results the Agile Way. In day 14, we learned a key way to master time management by carving out time for what’s important. Today, we learn how to quiet our mind and achieve a “peaceful calm”. From this vantage point, you’ll see things with more clarity, you’ll feel “centered,” and you’ll think your best thoughts. You’ll also find it easier to quiet your mental chatter, and just be in the moment. You’ll direct your attention with skill.

A “Peaceful Calm” State of MindIf you aren’t sure what it’s like to feel a peaceful calm, the best way I can describe it is it’s like looking out over the Grand Canyon for the first time. Your mind just takes it all in. There are no worries about the past, the present, or the future. Your mind is fully absorbed in the moment.

For that brief moment, your mind is captivated by the experience. Your mind is empty, but fully alert, fully aware, and not distracted by any mental chatter or any of your head movies. Instead of replaying scenes in your mind, you are the movie.

Relaxed, Ready, and ResourcefulWhile the world might be a jungle, fight-or-flight mode can limit our best thinking. To think our best thoughts or create our best ideas, or solve our problems in the most resourceful way, we need to operate from a place that’s “centered” and serene.

When I think of “peaceful calm”, words that come to mind are: tranquil, centered, serene, and peaceful. I also think of a series of “R” words including restful, resourceful, relaxed, responsive, and ready.

An empty mind is a powerful one. It’s ready for action. It’s relaxed, ready, and responsive.

When your mind is relaxed, you can take in information with less distortion. You’re connected to your emotions, but rather than being overwhelmed or randomized, it’s more like using your emotions as input. When your mind is ready, you are responsive. You are able to easily see the situation and respond with skill instead of react out of fear or anxiety. When your mind is resourceful, you are able to easily think the thoughts that serve you. Your creative mind is ready to solve problems with you instead of work against you.

3 Ways to Achieve a Peaceful CalmHere are three actionable things you can do to achieve a peaceful calm state of mind:

Dump your brain. Put it all down on paper. Just dump it all out. When it’s on paper, you can better decide what’s worth worrying about and what’s not. Otherwise, you’ll stew in your own juices.
Have a time and a place for things. Schedule a time for things that you really need to make time for. Simply by having a time for things or a place for things, you can free up your mind. If you know that your carved out an hour for worrying about your problem, than whenever it pops up, remind yourself that, “Now, is not the time” and more importantly, you have a specific time and a specific place for it. It’s when you don’t make time for things, that they will keep harassing you. You can also create a block of time to consolidate things and deal with them in a batch. One example is to schedule a worry break, where you can worry all you want, but only for a limited time. This way, whenever something to worry about comes up, instead of just saying you’ll worry about it later, you actually have an appointment!
Change your focus. Direct your attention with skill. Don’t just tell yourself to think about something else. It doesn’t work. Instead, ask yourself a different question. You can change your focus by changing the question. For example, if your immediate response in a situation is to start figuring out everything that’s wrong with the situation, you might ask yourself, “What’s right with this situation?” If you find you get stuck in your head, ask yourself, “What did it feel like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon?” To experience a “peaceful calm” state of mind, you want to focus more on feeling, sensing, and experiencing, than on your mental chatter or analysis. It’s a balance and a blend of your senses and your mind, where your mind is empty of racing thoughts, mental chit chat, and worries about the past, present, or the future. It’s relaxed, ready, and responsive. Play around with the questions you ask yourself to find what works for you. One thing that works very easily for me is simply to remind myself to, “remember the feeling.” That’s a trigger for me to recall when my mind is in its best state.

One thing that I will point out is that if I don’t eat well and sleep well, that takes away from my “peaceful calm.” I’ve also noticed that if I have too much caffeine that takes away from my “peaceful calm” too. What happens is that my mind has to keep analyzing and making sense of that feeling from the caffeine in my body — is it the caffeine or is there something to be worried about. It’s a distracting loop.

Additional Ways to Center Yourself and Achieve a Peaceful CalmHere are some additional ways to help you achieve a peaceful state of calm:

Take away the threat. If there’s one thing that can keep eating at you, it’s the threats in your life. If you take away the threats, you solidify your foundation. You either have to decide what to do about it, or let it go, or decide it’s not how you’re going to live. One of the best ways to deal with a threat is to reframe it as a challenge and take the bull by the horns. Another way is to assume the worst case scenario and deal with it. For example, lets say your threat is losing your job. Then assume you’ll lose it, and make the preparations – get staffing companies on your side, build your network, and create a winning resume.
Make a map of what’s important. This simple step will add clarity for your mind and a place to focus your thoughts, when they might seem random or all over the board. Map out your priorities and outcomes. See Hot Spots – Map Out What’s Important.
Find your why. By finding your why, you simplify your life down to a driving purpose. It gives you a simple way to prioritize and evaluate what you will spend your time or your energy on. See Discover Your Why.
Learn to pause. By taking a brief pause, you can respond over react. It will help you stay centered in more situations and respond more effectively. See The Power of the Pause.
Reset your mental model. Ask yourself, “Who do you want to be?” and “What experiences do you want to create?” Do you want to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off or do you want to show some self-control, confidence, clarity, and deliberate action? Simply by doing a reset, when you find yourself off-kilter, can help you center yourself with skill.
Focus on your breathing. You’d think we do this well, given how much we breathe all the time. Well, usually we don’t. It’s easy to get stressed and then breathe high and shallow instead of deep and full. If you want to center yourself, then focus on your breathing. Key tip – don’t treat it weird or act like it’s a magic ritual. Simply feel the flow of your breath in, down, and around, then back out. Pause when it’s fully in, and simply notice what a full, deep breath feels like. Simply enjoy your breath. Then have another, it’s on the house.
Visualize with skill. This is particularly effective if you tend to be very visual. You can simply recall some of your favorite scenery or scenes from your life, where you felt a “peaceful calm.” This will help you remember the feeling, and it will give your mind a quick way to focus on something that it already knows.
Remind yourself that things can always be worse. They really can. If you need examples, you can find them easily. Somebody is always worse off. If you adjust your frame of reference, this can help you keep things in your own life in better perspective. One thing that sticks out for me here is a line from Navy Seals try outs that goes like this, “The only easy day was yesterday.” And of course, yesterday, was an absolute nightmare … but by comparison, it’s a walk in the park.

Today’s Assignment

Get a good mental picture that you can use to get to your “peaceful calm”. Remember a time when your mind was at it’s most relaxed, ready, and resourceful state. Really get a good picture in your mind of this experience. Notice what it feels like. Walk your five senses one-by-one (site, hearing, touch, smell, taste): What do you see? … What do you hear? …What do you feel? … What do you smell? … What do you taste?” For example, if your image is on the beach, you might sea the waves lap against the shore, you might hear the seagulls, you might feel the sand between your toes and the warm sun on your shoulders, you might smell the boardwalk, and you might taste the salt in the air. Simply walking your senses will dramatically improve your ability to fully remember the feeling. The more you practice the better you get.
Write down everything that’s buzzing around in your brain. Whether it’s things that are bugging you or ideas that keep floating around. Just empty it and keep emptying it until you’ve got it all down. Breathe a sigh of relief. You’re looking at your mind on paper.
Make a time and a place for things. For the things that you really have to deal with, create an appointment with yourself, add it to your schedule, and whenever the issue comes up, reminder yourself that you have an appointment to “deal with it.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 14 – Carve Out Time for What’s Important

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:32:00 +0000

“Things which matter most, should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” – Goethe

Your Outcome: Make time for what’s important. Spend more time in what really matters in YOUR life, and spend less time in what does not. As one of my friend’s puts it, “time is all we have.”

Welcome to day 14 of 30 Days of Getting Results, a series of posts where I share with you the art and science of getting more effective results from my book, Getting Results the Agile Way . In day 13, we learned how to triage our action items with skill to chop our backlogs or overflowing plates down to size. Today, we learn a vital key to successful and effective time management. We learn how to make time for what really matters in our life, a day at a time and a moment at a time.

A Lesson in Life for the Best of Your LifeOne of the most crucial lessons in life that many people learn the hard way is this:

You don’t have time, you make time. If you don’t make time for what’s important, it doesn’t happen.

You’ll never get off the treadmill or stop treading water, unless you decide to. And that’s what this series of posts is all about … helping you get results, enjoy the journey, and make the most of what you’ve got … with skill (versus just hoping for the best or trying harder or wishful thinking.)

Put in the Big Rocks First
This is a story I first heard from Stephen Covey a long time back that really stuck out for me. As the story goes, a teacher fills a jar with rocks until no more would fit. He then asks the class, “Is the jar is full?” The class says, “Yes.” The teacher reaches under the table, pulls out some gravel, and adds the gravel to the jar. The gravel fills the spaces between the rocks. The teacher asks again, “Is the jar full?” Some nod their head. The teacher then adds sand to the jar filling up the remaining spaces. The teacher asks, “Is the jar full?”

The class is on to him now and says, “No.” “Good,” the teacher replies, and he proceeds to pour water into the jar until it’s filled to the brim. The teacher asks, “What’s the point of this illustration?” One of the students replies that no matter how full your schedule is, you can always fit more things in. ”No,” the teacher responds. The point is this:

If you don’t make room for the big rocks, you’ll never fit them in.

Make Room for Your Big Rocks Today, Each DayThis is where The Rule of 3 helps. Are you spending the right amount of time today on those three results or stories that you want to accomplish? The default pattern is to try and fit them in with all your existing routines. A more powerful approach is to make time for your three results today and optimize around that.

This might mean disrupting other habits and routines you have, but this is a good thing. The more you get in the habit of making time for what’s important, the more you’ll get the results you want. If you’re not getting the results you want you can start asking better questions. For example, are you investing enough time? Are you investing the right energy? Maybe the approach is off.

Just maybe, a different thing happens. Maybe you start accomplishing the results you *thought* you wanted, but you don’t like what you get. The grass is NOT always greener. Now you can step back and ask whether you’re choosing the right outcomes or stories for what YOU really want or really need in your life right now.

What are You Rushing Through For?Covey teaches us, be efficient with things, but effective with people. Whenever I see somebody rushing through something or it feels like it’s a drive by dump or exchange, I have to ask:

““What are you rushing through for?” …

Sometimes it’s because people are late. Sometimes it’s because they are more focused on the goal, than the journey. A lot of times, it’s because they simply didn’t allow themselves to be here now, where this moment is the one that really counts.

It doesn’t mean being slow, unless slow makes sense for the situation. In fact, I can’t help but to think of John Wooden’s saying, “Be quick – but don’t hurry!” For me, it reminds me to be deliberate and mindful on how I pace myself. I can be quick without haste or rushing through things, as if something else is always more important, somewhere else.

3 Ways to Carve Out Time for What’s ImportantTake the time to step back and reflect on where you spend your time on a regular basis. Here are three ways to make time for what’s important:

Reset your day. You can do a reset for your day by stepping back and asking yourself, “What three results do I want for today?” For example, one of my outcomes today is, “Enjoy the nice day outside.” I’m not going to let something else get in the way of missing our fleeting sunny Summer days.
Reset your schedule. You can do a reset for the week by stepping back and asking yourself, “What three results do I want for this week?” … or “What three stories do I want to light up in my life or make happen for the week?” You can then fit everything else around that. You can also simply check whether you’ve made enough time in your schedule on a weekly basis for the things that really count, for you, in your life right now. It’s not all-or-nothing, and there’s always a way to spend a little more time here, and a little less there, but you might have to get creative. If you get stuck here, pair up with somebody and ask for their help … you might be surprised how this simple act gives you clarity on your calendar, and how another pair of eyes can really shine the light on ways to get more of what you want.
Invest in your Hot Spots. However you define your Hot Spots (mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun), you can very deliberately map out what’s important in your life, and you can deliberately invest in your Hot Spots. I found the single most important factor here is to make time on my weekly schedule for my Hot Spots. If I’m not getting enough time in a bucket, then I schedule more time. If I’m putting too much time into one bucket, and not another, then I adjust it. Once I have enough time in the right buckets, then I make sure I’m investing my best energy and best mindset. I never want to be in a scenario where I’m always rushing through, because I didn’t make time for it.

And, of course, you can always simply ask yourself, “What are you rushing through for?” and do a reset, at any moment, at any time.

Today’s Assignment

Make time TODAY for something you really want to spend more time in, that’s important for you. Maybe it’s as simple as feeding the ducks. Maybe it’s spending time with an old friend. Maybe it’s spending more time learning about Getting Results the Agile Way Who’s to judge? You’re the judge. Just remember, you’re the one that lives with the consequences of how you choose to spend your time … each moment, each day, every day. Be the author of your life, and write your story forward. No regrets, just choosing your own adventure from here forward.
Step back and ask the tough question, “What are you rushing through for? If the answer is nothing, then just kick back and enjoy doing whatever you’re doing right here, right now.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 13 – Triage Your Action Items with Skill

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 05:43:00 +0000

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Your Outcome: Learn how to deal with a barrage of incoming action items and demands on your time.

Welcome to day 13 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 12, we learned how to use Productivity Personas to analyze and improve our results in any situation. Today, we learn how to “triage” an overflowing plate of action items and tasks.
Triage is a Healthy Process of Sorting, Sifting, and Selecting

“Triage” is a process of sorting, sifting and selecting what to work on. You might have heard about doctors “triaging” their incoming patients in emergency settings. When I first joined Microsoft, “Triage” was a common practice our team used to deal with our incoming issues. It helped us sort our backlogs and queues of issues into more meaningful buckets. We couldn’t just do everything at once and we couldn’t keep up with our flow of incoming requests. Triaging helped us more effectively make the most of our time, energy, and resources we had on hand at the moment against our incoming actions.

Triage in Practice
I’ve used triage successfully to deal with everything from dealing with email, to dealing with a flood of incoming tasks, to dealing with aging backlogs of action items, both at the personal, and the team level. When I lead a distributed team, I use email triage as an ad hoc and lightweight way to get the team’s eyeballs quickly focused on an issue. I’ve also used triage to clear my email inbox and to keep my email at zero inbox for years, and I’ve shown many others, including teams around Microsoft, to do the same (and we have a lot of email at Microsoft.) I affectionately call this approach, The Zen of Zero Mail.

For things that you need to act on, prioritize, or get off your plate, “triage” is a healthy process of sorting and selecting in a mindful way.

Do It, Queue It, Schedule It, or Delegate It
You can triage an incoming action item to either do it, queue it, schedule it, or delegate it:

Do It – Do it if now is the time: it’s the next best thing for you to do; now is the most opportunistic time; or it will cost you more pain, time or effort to do it later.
Queue It – Queue it, by adding it to your queue if it’s something you need to get done, but now is not the right time. A queue is simply a list of action items.
Schedule It – Schedule it by adding it to your calendar if you need a block of time to get the work done. Only add things to your calendar if you truly need a reminder or if you really need to block off a chunk of time to work on it. Remember that if you schedule it, it will happen, but if you don’t, it won’t. If it’s really important, then make time for it. If it’s just something to do “later,” and it won’t really happen, then just let it go with skill.
Delegate It – Delegate it if it’s something that should be done by somebody else and it makes sense to do so, and you have that option. When you delegate, try to match it to another person’s learning opportunity or passion. (There’s a difference between delegating and dumping.)
3 Steps to Triaging Your Action Items
Here are three steps for triaging your stack of action items:

Consolidate your action items. Dealing with them in a batch really shows the benefit of this approach, because you can quickly whack your stack down to size.
Triage each item. For each item, determine what the best plan of attack is: Do It, Queue It, Schedule It, or Delegate It.
Repeat the process. Repeat the process until you have a manageable set of actions and you feel that things are appropriately in the right places, either in your list of actions, your queue, or your schedule, or off your plate. If you end up spending too much time triaging, and not enough time doing, then establish a timebox or time limit to pace yourself and to know when to stop.
Really what you’re doing is setting the stage for your success. By having a time for things, and having them on your calendar or in your queue, you can focus on what you have in front of you with more confidence, clarity, and conviction, knowing that you’re making the most of what you’ve got. You can also more effectively prioritize with MUST, SHOULD, and COULD.

Questions to Help Guide You
Here are some questions I find useful as a checkpoint:

What do you want to accomplish?
Does it matter?
How important is it?
What’s the impact?
What’s the next best thing to do?
You can always check your actions against the bigger picture and what you want to accomplish: This is just a starting point and you’ll want to create and test your own questions to see what works for you.

Putting It All Together
Let’s take a quick step back and do a rundown of what you’ve learned so far during 30 Days of Getting Results and how this fits in:

You can use The Rule of 3 to avoid getting overwhelmed.
You’re the author of your life and you can write your story forward, one moment or one day at a time
You can use three stories to drive your day and and light up your day by connecting to your values (Daily Outcomes).
On Mondays, you can use three stories to drive your week (Monday Vision).
On Fridays, you can use Friday Reflection to celebrate your wins and find your personal success patterns.
You can map out what’s important in your life using Hot Spots to create a meaningful map.
You can let things slough off with skill … no more straws breaking the camel’s back .
You can create space in your life to renew and recharge by setting up boundaries and buffers.
You can dump your brain to free up your mind.
You can prioritize more effectively by using MUST, SHOULD, and COULD.
You can feel strong all week long by spending more time in your strengths and less time in your weaknesses.
You can establish glide-paths to simplify your day and make your routines friction free.
You can analyze and be more productive in any scenario using productivity personas.
By adding triaging to your belt, you now have a simple mental model for dealing with incoming action items more effectively.

Agile Results is a simple system for meaningful results that you can use to support you for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. The beauty is not just that it’s simple or that it’s proven … it’s that each day you get a new chance at bat – a fresh start. Each day you wake up is another chance to ask the question, “What are three things you want for today?” … and so you write your story forward, one day at a time.

Today’s Assignment

When an incoming action item comes your way, triage it and decide whether to Do It, Queue It, Schedule It, or Delegate It.
Triage one of your stacks of things to do to whack it down to size.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 12 – Productivity Personas – Are You a Starter or a Finisher?

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:27:00 +0000

“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your Outcome: Become a “productive artist.” Find whether you are a “starter” or a “finisher” and improve your success in everything you do.

Some people are natural “starters.” They live for the creative beginning of projects, but not the day-to-day execution or the detailed follow up and follow through. Some people are natural “finishers.” They like the day-to-day work and the routine execution. When “starters” and “finishers” pair up, everybody wins.

Welcome to day 12 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 11, we learned how to reduce friction and create glide paths for your day. Today, we learn how to figure out our strengths and weaknesses when it comes to productivity using Productivity personas. The beauty is that you can Productivity personas to get a better lens on yourself, your situation, or people you work with. With this lens, you can be more effective and get better results in any situation, whether it’s a one-man band or part of a team.

Starters and Finishers
One of my friends is great at starting things. Just don’t expect him to finish. He would light a lot of fires in a lot of places and then he’d be on to his next big idea. Trust me, unless you want to just fade away, you want fire starters around. They light things up and create value and possibilities out of thin air. He’s a natural “starter.”

Another one of my friends is great at finishing things. He is a master at knowing the details and being complete. Words that come to mind are “thorough,” “attention to detail,” “responsible,” “sees things through,” … you get the idea. What he lacks in getting things started, he makes up for in bringing things to close and going the last mile. He is a “finisher” at heart.

When a starter and finisher pair up … look out. Great things happen. The fastest way to suck your life force out of anyone is to always play the “finisher” role when you’re a starter, or always play a starter role when you’re a finisher.

Why Productivity PersonasYour personal success at getting results is clearly a place where a little knowledge goes a long way. By adding the lens of Productivity Personas to your tool belt, you will be better equipped to deal with any productivity issue, whether it’s for yourself, helping a friend, or leading a team.

If you’re feeling drained or like you’re spinning your wheels or simply not making the impact you know you can make, this might just be your ticket to faster, simpler, and better results.

3 Ways to Use Productivity PersonasHere are three ways you can use the Productivity Personas to your advantage:

Know Yourself. Use the Productivity Personas to know yourself. If you’re aware of the personas, you can use them to your advantage. For example, don’t let your inner Critic or Perfectionist get in the way of your Doer. Ask yourself, “When am I at my best? Am I more of a Starter or a Finisher? Am I more of a Maximizer or a Simplifier? Am I more of a Thinker or a Doer?”
Team Up. Use the Productivity Personas to pair up with other people and improve your own effectiveness. You can also use the Productivity Personas to create more effective teams or to optimize teamwork. Ask yourself, “Who can I team up with to get results? How can I build more effective teams? Who should be paired up on the team for best results?”
Improve the Situation. You can imagine how some behaviors work better with others and how some can create conflict. Swap out for more effective personas based on the scenario. For example, if you really need a Starter for the situation, but you can’t break out of Finisher mode, then see if you can find somebody who can play the role. Ask yourself, “What are the best behaviors for the situation?”

Remember to use the Productivity Personas as a lens. The labels are for behaviors, not for limiting or boxing in personalities. Anybody can demonstrate any of the behaviors at any time.

Productivity Personas at a Glance“Starter” and “finisher” are just one lens. Here are some additional Productivity Personas to give you some more lenses:

Persona	Notes
Starter	Starts things but doesn’t always finish. Their energy comes from thinking up new ideas and kicking things off. Love prototyping an idea, but once they’ve figured it out, they’re ready to move on to something else.
Finisher	Brings things to closure. Effective finishers, complete things and move on. Is a fit and finish type of person. It’s finished when they say it’s finished.
Thinker	Is an “ideas” person. Thinking is what they do best. Analysis is their game, but doing is somebody else’s game. They don’t have to act on their thoughts to enjoy them.
Doer	Does their job. They tend to get their job done. They may not come up with new ideas, but they have a preference for taking action.
Simplifier	Finds the simplest path. Strips things down to the minimum. Good enough for now is OK in their book.
Maximizer	Finds the maximum impact.
Critic	Finds the faults. They’ll find ways why you can’t or why it’s wrong. They’ll critique themselves, their work, or their ideas. Anything is fair game.
Can Do	Finds a way. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and they’ll find it. It may not be the optimal solution, but they’ll find a workaround.
Opportunist	Finds the opportunity in any situation.
Perfectionist	Treats everything like a work of art. Quality is their name, finishing isn’t their game. They’ll be done when it’s done. It will be done just as soon as it’s perfect. Whenever that is.
Details	Loves the details and will want to see things through. Dots the i’s and crosses the t’s. They’re passionate about spreadsheets.
Big Picture	Sees the forest from the trees. Likes the big ideas and doesn’t want to get lost in the minutia.
Facts and Figures	Is a numbers person. They want quantifiable measurements. Like Details, they too like spreadsheets.
Controller	Likes to control things. This could be the Doers, the project, or their world.
Tinkerer	Likes to tinker. The world is their sandbox. Dabbles here, dabbles there.
Marketer	Communicates the value. Knows how to sell ideas.
Achiever	Likes to accomplish things.
Randomizer	Turns their latest priority into other people’s problems.
Daydreamer	Likes to dream up better ways for better days. They’d rather dream than do. They don’t have to act on their dreams to enjoy them.
Procrastinator	Finds way to put off to tomorrow, what they really should do today. They only send belated birthday cards since they know they’ll never send them out on time.

Simply familiarize yourself with some of the various Productivity Personas so they can help you when you need to make sense of a productivity challenge or scenario, as well as to learn more about yourself. The key is to be aware of the preferences, for yourself and others, and to choose more effective behaviors as well as to optimize yourself and others in any situation.

Your Assignment

Identify your natural preferences in terms of a “starter” or “finisher.”
Identify the most common Productivity Personas or roles that you play in your day to day.
Find one simple thing you can do to complement your natural productivity pattern.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 11 – Reduce Friction and Create Glide-Paths for Your Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:23:00 +0000

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci

Your Outcome: Simplify your day by getting rid of the hurdles and personal obstacle courses that are in your way throughout the day. Doing your daily chores or common tasks shouldn’t be a jungle gym. It should be a glide path.

Make your day a whole lot easier by eliminating or reducing the friction in your day. Establish “friction-free” glide paths that support you throughout your entire day. By reducing the friction and simplifying your daily routines and common tasks, you make it easier to glide through your results.

Welcome to day 11 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 10, we learned how to feel strong all week long. Today, we learn how to reduce the friction in our day, and make it easier to do the common things we do. This way we spend less energy on little things getting in our way, so we have more energy and focus to tackle the big things.

Don’t die the death of a 1000 paper cuts throughout your day!

All the little friction in our day can wear us down. Especially if it’s things within our control. Don’t complain about the stuff in your way … do something about it. Your glide paths will really help you on days when you’re run down, or you’re running late, and you really need it most.

3 Steps to Creating Friction-Free Glide Paths
Here are three steps to creating friction-free glide paths.

Step 1. Walk your paths. Simply write down your common routines and common tasks you throughout your day. If you don’t know where to start, write down breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Chances are you have a lot of recurring activities each day that you can choose to tune.
Step 2. Identify the friction. Identify the things that create friction throughout your day: What slows you down? … What hoops do you have to jump through? … What’s always in your way or what are you constantly moving out of your way to get to something else?
Step 3. Simplify your paths. Declutter and reduce the friction for your common scenarios, routines, and tasks. Most of the ways to do this will be obvious to you now that you’ve listed your common tasks and points of friction. Brainstorm ideas for making these routines less complicated and less friction.

10 Examples of Friction-Free Glide PathsHere are some examples of friction-free glide paths:

Get rid of the clothes on the top of the hamper. Tip – If you want clothes to go in the hamper, then don’t have clothes on top of it. Nobody should have to lift the hamper lid with a bunch of clothes on top. If the lid keeps turning into one more shelf, then remove the lid.
Clear your workspace. Keep your workspace clear and ready to go. You can clear it the night before or you can do a quick sweep right before you use it.
Put your sneakers by the bed. If you workout in the morning, have your sneakers and gym clothes ready to go. This is one less excuse for not working out on a day when you don’t feel like it.
Put garbage cans where you need them.
Create checklists for common routines. You won’t have to try and remember what to do next and you can make it easier to follow your routine.
Put things where you look for them. If you are always looking for something in the wrong place, then make the wrong place, the right place and put it there.
Make space on your bookshelf so you don’t have to stack or balance things or squeeze with all your might to get that very last book to fit just right. Pulling books off your shelf shouldn’t be a chore, and neither should putting them back.
Put your calendar where you can see it at a glance. Make it easy to quickly see what your schedule looks like.
Make it easy to look things up. If you regularly look certain things up, consolidate them and put them in easy reach.
Remove anything that you have to step over or walk around. Pave a simpler path and make it easy to go wherever you need to get to on a regular basis.

There are many, many ways to create glide paths in your day. These are just some random ideas to get your started. Get creative. You probably already know what you need to do, you just have to decide to do it. This is worth making time for since it pays you back throughout your day, and it pays you back everyday .. with interest.

Your Assignment

Identify your worst friction points in your day.
Create three glide paths to simplify your day. Pick any routines or common tasks that you want to make easier for yourself.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 10 – Feel Strong All Week Long

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:18:00 +0000

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” — Hilary Cooper

Your Outcome: Get ready. YOUR world’s about to rock. You’re about to become a powerful force of one. We all have strengths and weaknesses. It’s time to shift from spending more time in your weaknesses to spending more time in your strengths. By spending more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses, it’s like a combination of simultaneously uncorking your abilities and drinking from the fountain of youth. Finding your vital few set of strengths and spending more time in them is the single most direct way to crank up your energy and your passion, enjoy what you do, and create unique value to your world.

Welcome to day 10 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 9, we learned how to focus and prioritize using MUST, SHOULD, and COULD. Today we learn how to refocus the time and energy we already spend away from the activities that make us weak … to the activities that make us strong. It’s time to unleash our possibilities. For some of you, this post will sing directly to your heart, as if it’s exactly what you need, right here, right now. Your going to change your world in your most powerful way ,,., you’re going to change how you spend your time and you’ll have a new lens for unleashing your best.

If there is one thing to remember as you read this, it’s this … Give your best where you have your best to give.

Get on Your Strengths PathWhat if there was one thing you could focus on that would help you get exponential results in all areas of your life? Well there is. It’s getting on your strengths path. When you are spending more time in the activities that make you strong, you automatically do great work, you renew and rebuild your mind, body, emotions, and spirit, and you dramatically accelerate your learning and growth. Fighting to get on your strengths path is one of the highest ROI (Return on Investment) battles you will ever win. It pays you back daily.

If there are so many benefits to being on your strengths path, and spending more time in your strengths, then why doesn’t everybody just do it? Because it requires self-awareness and you have to own it. Nobody comes along and puts you on your strengths path. YOU have to own it. YOU have to continuously find ways to spend more time in your strengths. Only you know truly what makes you strong and what makes you weak. You have to decide you want to spend more time in your strengths and you have to be deliberate about spending less time in your strengths.

You’re the architect of your life. Build a firm foundation. Design how you spend your time effectively. Spend your time on your strengths. Limit your time on your weaknesses. If you get knocked down, get up again. Stay the path. Focus on finding your strengths and finding ways to leverage them. Expect a learning curve, but know that this is the high ROI path.

Whenever you get rundown or feel overwhelmed and drained, there is a great chance that you are not spending enough time in your strengths and you’re not on your strengths path.

Grow More in Your StrengthsTo look at it with another lens, many people mistake the path of weaknesses as the growth or opportunity path. What they don’t realize is not only are they robbing from their energy, their best contribution, and their sense of fulfillment, but they are taking away from their greatest source of growth. You’ll grow faster in your strengths. In today’s world, you have to outpace your problems and give your best where you have your best to give, to succeed in any situation, flow amazing value to yourself and others, and find a sustainable way for getting results in everything you do. If you spend the bulk of your time in your weaknesses, then you are stacking the deck against you, and even if you improve your weaknesses, you will never achieve the powerful force of growing your strengths.

What are Your StrengthsTo keep this very simple, here are the keys:

Your strengths are your natural talents. Your strengths are what your natural patterns for how your thinking, feeling, and behavior.
Your strengths are NOT what you are simply good at. Unfortunately, many of us are good at things that make us weak or drain us, so we spend more time in those. So yes, we are good at them, but no they are not strengths that give us energy or that we exponentially improve at. True strengths are your natural talent for thinking, feeling, and behavior, applied to a context..
Your strengths are what you find easy to do. The things that other people struggle with that you find very easy to do are your natural strengths.
Your strengths give you energy. You can spend time in your strengths all day and actually have more energy at the end of the day than when you started. Your strengths catalyze you. They make you strong.
Your strengths are where you get better faster. Your strengths are a place where you can accelerate. You grow faster in your natural strengths than in any effort that works against your strengths.

Give Your Best Where You Have Your Best to GiveYou’re an individual with a unique set of strengths, weaknesses. I think the key is to find a purpose that lights up the following statement:

Give your best where you have your best to give.

When you find that, it’s your unique contribution to the world, and when you spend time in your strengths it’s your growth, renewal and passion in action. Of course, the trick is to find something where you can be the best in the world at, and the trick there is … it’s YOUR world, since it’s all relative.

Here are some key points:

Light things up your way. I’m a fan of be more of yourself with skill and give your best where you have your best to give. It’s all about bringing yourself to the picture and lighting things up the best way you can.
Amplify your results. It lines up nicely with what I’ve learned to be true … drive by your why, live your values, and play to your strengths … and give your best where you have your best to give.
Renew yourself and lift others up. I think it’s important that you give your best where you have your best to give, otherwise, you can drain yourself. I think renewal and downtime and taking care of your own basics builds a firm foundation for lifting others up.
Focus on the vital few activities where you can really give your best. Focus on strengths over weaknesses. You’ll get more results by improving your strengths than improving your weaknesses.
Spend less time in your weaknesses. Limit the time you spend in your weaknesses. Find ways to off load more of your weaknesses so you can spend more time in your strengths.
Fight to spend more time in your strengths. Don’t let the changes around you, cause you to lose sight of the activities that make you strong. Don’t let yourself get caught up in activities that weaken you.
Get back on your horse. Sometimes we get knocked off our horse. We may not have realized how beautiful the ride was or how well we were riding. We were caught up in the ride and it was great. But something changes. The ride no longer feels right and we no longer feel strong.

Find Your Sweet Spot
The secret of amplifying your impact and getting exponential results is finding the “sweet spot” which is the overlap of your talent, your passion, and value.

Value is in the eye of the beholder. You can flow value for yourself or for others or for your company. The key thing here is that you find the strengths that give you juice and that flow value.

Finding Your Strengths
There are many ways to find your strengths. The key is to find the activities that you look forward to, give you energy, and lift you up. Another key is to get specific. For example, maybe you can write songs all day. Maybe you can write content all day. Maybe you love to interact with customers. Maybe you like to brainstorm. Maybe you like to solve big hairy challenges. For me, I like to make sense of meaningful problems where I can turn it into a form factor that’s easy to share and scale expertise.

I find that having a language to think about your strengths can help you better.

34 Key Strengths
Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. identified 34 key signature themes of strength. There is a brief description of each strength in the appendix of The Clifton’s Strengths Finder 2.0 Technical Report: Development and Validation. Here are the 34 signature themes:

Achiever
Activator
Adaptability
Analytical
Arranger
Belief
Command
Communication
Competition
Connectedness
Context
Deliberative
Developer
Discipline
Empathy
Fairness
Focus
Futuristic
Harmony
Ideation
Inclusiveness
Individualization
Input
Intellection
Learner
Maximizer
Positivity
Relater
Responsibility
Restorative
Self-assurance
Significance
Strategic
Woo

24 Signature StrengthsMartin Seligman named a set of 24 Signature Strengths. You can find out more about Martin Seligman’s work at the Authentic Happiness Center. Here are Seligman’s 24 Signature Strengths:

Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
Bravery and Valor
Capacity to Love and Be Loved
Caution, Prudence, and Discretion
Citizenship, Teamwork, and Loyalty
Creativity, Ingenuity, and Originality
Curiosity and Interest in the World
Fairness, Equity, and Justice
Forgiveness and Mercy
Gratitude
Honesty, Authenticity, and Genuineness
Hope, Optimism, and Future-mindedness
Humor and playfulness
Industry, Diligence, and Perseverance
Judgment, Critical Thinking, and Open-Mindedness
Kindness and Generosity
Leadership
Love of Learning
Modesty and Humility
Perspective and Wisdom
Self-Control and Self-Regulation
Social Intelligence
Spirituality, Sense of Purpose, and Faith
Zest, Enthusiasm, and Energy

How To Use These Strength Vocabularies
One way to use these is to take their tests and find out what they say about you. I do like the fact that they have framed and named the strengths which makes it easy to explore, test, and evaluate. Personally, I’ve found more value by simply exploring the labels and using them as lenses. I’ve been rationalizing them against the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as well as my own frames for strengths, looking for underlying patterns and practices.

At the end of the day, the most important thing for me has been finding where I get energy from, and finding what takes it away. This leads me to a personalized strengths frame that I can use as a lens for investing in my portfolio of strengths … and this is the key to exponential results.

3 Steps to Designing a Strong WeekThere are many ways to spend more time in your strengths, but here is the most effective way that I mentor individuals, teams, and leaders:

Steps	Checks
Step 1 – Map Out Your Weaknesses.	Can you identify the top 3 activities that make you the weakest? Can you identify the types of work that make you weak? Can you identify who drains you and who catalyzes you? What’s the pattern?
Step 2 – Map out Your Strengths.	Can you identify the top 3 activities that make you strong? Can you identify the types of work that make you strong? Can you identify the patterns of people that catalyze you?
Step 3 – Design a Strong Week.	Have you eliminated as many of the activities that make you weak as you can? Have you found a way to add a few activities that make you stronger? Have you consolidated your weaknesses as best as you can?

Usually what happens is you find out that you have a scatter chart all over the week of spending time in your weaknesses and spending time in your strengths. The key is to consolidate your weaknesses so that you can either spend less time in them, get them off your plate, or pair up with other people, or find a way to enjoy them. The other key is to add more activities that give you strength to each and every day. This is the secret of renewal and boundless energy for making things happen in your life.

Example of Mapping Out Your WeaknessesHere is an example of a map of activities that are weaknesses throughout the week:

-	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	W	-	W	-	-
10:00	W	-	-	-	W
11:00	-	W	-	-	-
12:00	-	W	-	W	-
1:00	W	-	-	-	W
2:00	-	-	-	-	-
3:00	W	-	W	-	W
4:00	-	W	W	-	-
5:00	-	-	-	-	-
6:00	-	-	-	-	-
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	-	-	-	-	-
10:00	-	-	-	-	-

Simply use a “W” to indicate that that time is spent in a “Weakness.”

Example of Mapping Out Your Strengths
Here is an example of activities that are strengths throughout the week:

-	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	-	S	-	S	S
10:00	-	S	-	-	-
11:00	-	-	-	-	-
12:00	S	-	S	-	-
1:00	-	-	-	-	-
2:00	-	-	-	-	S
3:00	-	-	-	-	-
4:00	-	-	-	-	-
5:00	-	-	-	-	-
6:00	-	-	-	-	-
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	-	-	-	-	-
10:00	-	-	-	-	-

Simply use an “S” to indicate “Strength”.

Example of a Strong WeekHere is an example of a strong week by design:

-	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	W	W	W	W	W
10:00	S	S	S	S	S
11:00	-	-	-	-	-
12:00	-	S	-	S	-
1:00	S	-	-	-	-
2:00	-	-	S	-	-
3:00	-	S	-	S	-
4:00	S	-	S	-	S
5:00	-	-	-	-	-
6:00	-	-	-	-	-
7:00	-	-	-	-	-
8:00	-	-	-	-	-
9:00	-	-	-	-	-
10:00	-	-	-	-	-

Simply use an “S” to indicate activities that make you strong or catalyzes you, and a “W” to indicate activities that make you weak or drains you.

Cornerstone ConceptsHere are some cornerstone concepts to help you really adopt a strengths-based approach to your life:

Everybody has strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths are not simply what you’re good at.
Strengths are what you naturally think, feel, or do.
Spend more time in your strengths. Schedule it. If you schedule it, it happens. If you don’t, it won’t.
Own it. Only you can do this. Only you know what your strengths are.
Do less of what makes you weak.
Energy can come from your mind, body, emotions, or spirit.
By spending less time in your weaknesses and more time in your strengths, you renew, rebuild, and rejuvenate your mind, body, emotions, and spirit … it’s your multiplier.
You have to own getting on your strengths path.
Find the specific things you want to spend more time doing each day – the things that make you STRONG.
Find the jobs, tasks, and activities that are directly related to your strengths.
Find creative ways to change how you do what you already do to gradually integrate more of your strengths. Your little wins will add up.

Your Assignment

Find your strengths and write them down in ways that sing to your heart and put precision on what truly makes you strong. Your done when your list feels like a short-list of your super skills.
Map out your strengths and weaknesses.
Find creative ways to eliminate, consolidate, or reduce the activities that make you weak, and find a way to spend at least one more hour per week in something that makes you strong. Trade-up spending time in your weaknesses in favor of spending more time in your strengths.

sourcesofinsight

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Day 9 – Prioritize Your Day with MUST, SHOULD, COULD

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:08:00 +0000

“Good things happen when you get your priorities straight.” — Scott Caan

Your Outcome: Get a handle on the minimum you need to do. Get the minimum out of the way and the rest of the day or week is yours. By having clarity on what you MUST do, you can avoid getting overwhelmed by all the tasks and activities competing for your time and energy. With clarity comes conviction and you set the stage for fierce results. Or simply clear your plate, then do enjoy the rest of the day, Cool Hand Luke style.

Welcome to day 9 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 8, we learned how to dump your brain to free your mind. Today, we learn how to use some simple language to help us prioritize more effectively.

Prioritizing effectively is one of the most important keys to your success. When you feel like you’re working on the right thing at the right time, it’s easier to focus and stay engaged. Prioritizing is a continuous activity. It’s about taking things on while letting other things go. It’s about making trade-offs. It’s also about finding synergies. To prioritize effectively you need to be able to see the forest from the trees, and you need to be able to identify the minimum for success. That’s where MUST, SHOULD, and COULD comes into play.

MUST, SHOULD, COULD
Rather than prioritize with priority 1, priority 2, and priority 3 (or p1, p2, p3), I’ve found it way more helpful to think in terms of MUST, SHOULD, and COULD. If you need to use a prioritization system that is number centric, then you can still think of it in terms of MUST, SHOULD, and COULD. If you get really good at focusing on your MUSTs, you’ll see immediate improvement. Where people fall down is they mix too many SHOULDs and COULDs in their work each day and they don’t actually ever get anything done. If MUSTS really are a problem for you, The Rule of 3 should help you cap and avoid overwhelming yourself. Getting three MUSTS done each day quickly builds momentum. It’s a sense of accomplishment. You may find as you get more effective, you start to bite off more.

Getting a Quick Handle on Your Day

Ask yourself …

What MUST I do today?
What SHOULD I do?
What COULD I do?

Whittle it down to three MUSTs for the day. If you have more than three, then limit to three max. You can always up level them or bubble them up into a higher-level outcome. Capping it at three will help you focus and remember them easily.
Getting a Quick Handle on Your Week
Ask yourself, …

What MUST I do this week?
What SHOULD I do this week?
What COULD I do this week?”

Carve out your MUSTs by weighting your window of opportunity, pain points, and best value.

Identify Your Minimum MUSTs for the Day
If you stay mindful of your minimum MUSTs for the day, then you’re in the driver’s seat. At an instant, you know how significantly any quick trade offs are,such as doing this over that, hitting or missing a window of opportunity, and trading pain for pleasure. You have your three MUST results on the mind, which gives you a laser sharp path. If your boss comes by and has something more for you to do, you can either push back or negotiate your success, “I can do that, if you want to prioritize it over XYZ …”

What if You Have fewer than Three MUSTs?Good for you! Don’t upgrade SHOULDs to MUSTs, acknowledge that you got your MUSTs done, and move on to your SHOULDs or COULDs. Remember the whole point of MUSTs is not just to help remind you of what’s most important for you, it’s about survival

CHOOSE TOsOne thing to note is that if the word MUST for you creates a sense of heaviness or you find you no longer look forward to getting your results, then change your language. Rather than your MUST dos, think of your CHOOSE TOs. This puts you back in power and this simple reframing can help you get your energy back.

Why Priorities MatterA laundry list of To Dos where everything is equally important is a recipe for failure. Time spent identifying your three MUSTs for the day is more than worth it because it gives you flexibility. Without knowing your three MUSTs, everything is mushy and you have nothing to steer by. At the end of the day, you will likely wonder how you worked on what you thought were so many important things yet without anything important getting done.

MUST becomes increasingly clear under high pressure. People who do their minimum MUSTs each day tend to do well. When push comes to shove, these people pick one MUST each day for themselves, their job, and their family to keep things in check, when when chaos, pressure, and overload abound.

Why MUSTs?There are many reasons for using MUSTs, but here are a few to consider:

MUST means something. Contrast this with asking “What is Priority 1 this week?” Your mind has to translate what Priority 1 really means. With MUST, SHOULD, COULD your mind can categorize the tasks much easier instead of translating into some other systems.
Nailing your MUSTs builds a rhythm of results. Without your three MUSTs to prioritize with, everything looks important. This is the source of overwhelm, shutdown, burnout, and lack of focus. When you start with a firm foundation of MUSTs, then you can drive your day. You can prioritize incoming requests against your three. As you finish something, you can take more on. This is how you find your rhythm for results.
MUSTs help you put your most important issues out on the table. It’s the heart of focus and prioritization and outcomes. If you don’t know you’re on your best path, you can’t commit all the way. When you know you’re working on the most important things right now in the moment for your most important outcomes, then you can fully engage and you’re no longer worried about all the other noise.
MUSTs help you quickly identify your minimum for the day. The MUST is for brutal clarity around the minimum — I’ve never found a more cutting word to get somebody to absolutely focus on just that (and even with *MUST* folks still bite off too much or don’t prioritize their best.) The commitment of MUST forces you to choose definitely doable in the available time and not overstep. Taking on too much is where folks fall down.
MUSTs help you create a glide path for the rest of your day. Take care of your basic needs and MUSTs first in the day so it’s a glide path for the rest. A simple way to think about your day is MUSTs, then SHOULDs, then COULDs.
MUSTs enable incredible flexibility. If you know your three MUSTs for the day, you then can prioritize against them. If something more important comes in, you can bump something out as a deliberate trade, yet still remain agile.

Balance Against What You Want
As you deal with your MUSTs, one thing to keep in mind is that you should balance them against what you ultimately want. You can use three simple questions to help you checkpoint:

What do you want?
What do you want to accomplish?
Who do you want to be and what experiences do you want to create?

Today’s Assignment

Identify your MUSTs for the day.
Identify your MUSTs for the week.

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Day 8 – Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:21:00 +0000

“You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden.” — Astrid Alauda

Your Outcome: Turn your mind from a carnival funhouse or haunted mansion to your own private den. Free your mind up to focus on better things. This is part of achieving a "peaceful calm" state of mind, as well as getting rid of the "buzz" in your mind, or the nagging reminders that interrupt your focus throughout the day. Rather than use your brain as a depot for random ideas, "To Do" lists, reminders, and general mind clutter — you’ll have a place for dumping your brain and unshackling your mind.

Welcome to day 8 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 7 we learned how to setup boundaries and buffersas a way to recharge our batteries, set the stage for work-life balance, and create a foundation for a sustainable life style. Today, we’ll de-clutter our minds and give ourselves space to think, dream, or simplywonder around without bumping into so much mental clutter, mental chatter, and noise.

The Mental Chatter is There for a Reason Before we start doing any brain dumping, we need to know why this works and why it’s so important. All those things on your mind, are probably there for a reason. They’re reminding you that you’ve got stuff on your plate that needs attention. There are things that could threaten your quality of life, or that are blocking you from the quality of life you’d like to enjoy. Many of the things bugging you, are actually useful, whether it’s for motivation or simply for reminders.

Thinking on Paper to Dump Your State However, your mind is not where all the things bugging you belong. Stream of conscious thinking is way less effective than thinking on paper. When you dump your state on paper, you can stop trying to remember what you were thinking about, and instead focus on what you want to do about it, or whether you can just let it go, or prioritize something else. When it’s on paper, you free your mind. When it’s on paper you can slice it and dice it in a more effective way, or sort it in a way that works for you, instead of against you.

Thinking on paper is how you go from soup to sanity.

The opposite approach is to let things lurk in your mind, where every corner you turn, something jumps out at you — surprise!– or each thought turns into a Jack-in-the-Box, or each idea is like looking straight into a Funhouse mirror.

3 Ways to Dump Your Brain
There are three common ways to dump your brain:

Daily brain dumps. Have a place to write things down. For me, on my computer I keep Notepad (a plaintext editor) open and I dump things down throughout the day. It’s a simply a tickler list. Rather than let it bounce around, I write it down. This helps me stay focused throughout the day, without worrying about what I’m forgetting. At the end of the day, before I go home, I dump down whatever “state” I’ve built up in my mind, such as things I still want to accomplish. If I have a bunch of browser windows open, I simply paste the URLs into my open Notepad in case I want to “rehydrate” my state at another time. I simply save these brain dumps with the current date: “20010-08-06”, “2010-08-07”, “2010-08-08”, etc. This way I can flip back through them if I want, or just let them go. It’s my “dumping ground.”
Periodic brain dumps. This is where you periodically dump everything down that’s top of mind or tugging at you. It’s just a long, flat bulleted list of anything that keeps popping into your mind. You take a few minutes and you just keep dumping until your brain says, “OK, I think it looks like you got everything I’ve been trying to tell you.” This might be many pages, or you might find your mind was simply a broken record and it’s been telling you the same five things again and again. Once your mind feels heard, and you’ve echoed it back by writing it down, your mind can now shift into what it does best – problem solving. In my case, again I use Notepad and I simply title the file today’s date (“2010-08-08 – Master List”) I tend to add a distinction in case I have my daily brain dump and my mother-load.
Pen and paper on the go. Simply carry a notepad, a sticky pad, or index files with you. It’s nothing fancy, but it is effective. Rather than let things float around in your mind, jot them down. You’ll get very effective, very quickly at keeping tight tickler lists to remember gobs of information. A single word might be just enough to help you jump back to that idea you had to change the world. As a key tip, use The Rule of 3 to keep things simpler. For example, when I’m in a meeting or taking training, I’ll shoot for walking away with three take aways over a laundry list of things.

In all of these cases, you’re factoring your thinking from your chatter and your reminders. This is like factoring editing from your writing – write it down, then edit. (As an aside, Hemmingway edited for an hour and wrote for an hour.)

Once you have your lists, you are empowered to turn them into action, and you can simply do so by chunking them into stories, and fitting them into your three stories for the week, or three stories for the day.

Example of a Periodic Brain Dump
Here’s a quick example of a periodic brain dump. All I did was dump the things that are bugging me around the house:

Clear the growth along the path
Clear the growth around the deck
Clear the growth on the back driveway
Get rid of stuff that’s no longer useful
Downsize book collection
Fix the gutters on the house
Fix the gutters on the garage
Fix the front deck
Fix the back deck
Re-tile bathroom 1
Fix the shower in bathroom 1
Add a border to the back lawn
Re-tile bathroom 2
Take down the tree
Get a new fence
Fix the floor in den 2
Fix the window in den 2
Fix the floor in the kitchen
Shred the papers

That was step one. it’s random and it’s just a quick dump of my top of mind things. Step two would be sorting it and analyzing it against what I want to accomplish. That’s where my map of Hot Spots really comes into play, because I can see at a glance what’s on my radar and what’s important.

Today’s Assignment

Dump your brain. Simply make a list and dump out everything that’s top of mind or tugging at your thoughts.
Take a moment to enjoy the fact that you uncluttered your mind and gave it some breathing room. Let yourself play with the possibilities.
If you’re really feeling gung-ho, then review your list and find some low hanging fruit. For example, the simplest thing on my list is shredding papers, and I enjoy it, so I’m gong to tackle that. For the other things, I’ll have to step back, prioritize against what I want to accomplish, then make a simple plan.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 7 – Setup Boundaries and Buffers

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:27:00 +0000

“Simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not do.” — Karl Weick quotes

Your Outcome: Create space in your life to renew and recharge. By setting boundaries and buffers, you set yourself up for sustainable results and you take a significant step toward mastering your work-life balance.

Welcome to day 7 of 30 Days of Getting Results. Inday 6, we learned how to use Friday Reflection to skillfully take a look at what’s going well and what to improve. Today, I had to ask myself, what’s the most useful nugget I can share with you at this stage? I think the answer is — setting boundaries and buffers. This is how you create space in your life and make time for what’s important. It’s at the heart of finding your peaceful calm and finding your flow.

A Quick Recap of What We Learned So Far …
Before we start though, let’s take a moment to recap some things we’ve learned so far:

You can use The Rule of 3 to avoid getting overwhelmed.
You’re the author of your life and you can write your story forward, one moment or one day at a time
You can use three stories to drive your day and and light up your day by connecting to your values (Daily Outcomes).
On Mondays, you can use three stories to drive your week (Monday Vision).
On Fridays, you can use Friday Reflection to celebrate your wins and find your personal success patterns.
You can map out what’s important in your life using Hot Spots to create a meaningful map.
You can let things slough off with skill … no more straws breaking the camel’s back .

Agile Results is a system that can support you the rest of your life, no matter what you do. I use it for shipping stuff at Microsoft, leading teams, writing books, learning, etc. The beauty though, is not just that it’s simple, or that it’s proven … it’s that each day you get a new chance at bat – a fresh start. Each day you wake up is another chance to ask the question, “What are three things you want for today?” … and so youwrite your story forward.

Buffers and Boundaries are the Key to Work-Life Balance
Now then, on to setting up boundaries and buffers. If you can master this, it’s THE key to work-life balance, and it’s how you can get more done, in less time, with more energy, and it’s how you can find your flow. If you feel overwhelmed by too much to do, and not enough time, buffers and boundaries will set you free. At the end of the day, it’s about knowing what you ultimately want and balancing your competing wants and needs against that.

Keep this in mind — you have to Protect yourself – and boundaries and buffers are your friend. Nobody will set effective boundaries for you, and you know the most about yourself better than anyone. This is the ultimate care and feeding of yourself, which sets the stage for everything you do.

Mental Model for Boundaries and Buffers
Here is a simple mental model for thinking about buffers and boundaries:

Note that you have to set your own boundaries that work for you. This is just an example of how some people have found a way to perform well at work, spend more quality time with those they love, invest in their body, and find a way to spend time on their passions again … and remember that one person’s minimum is another person’s maximum.

3 Steps to Setting Up Boundaries and Buffers
Here are three simple steps for setting up your boundaries and buffers:

Step 1. Set up time boundaries for your week. Keep this at the high level. Decide the maximum time to spend on work. Decide the minimum amount of time you should spend on your body. For example, if you’re not getting enough sleep, decide that you’ll get a minimum of 6 hours or 8 hours or whatever you need to perform your best. If you want to get your best results and have a sustainable life style, don’t compromise on eating, sleeping, and working out. Trade something else where you can. The simplest rules I’ve heard for setting limits on work are “Dinner on the table at 5:30” and “weekends off.”
Step 2. Set time limits for your daily routines. For the things that you do regularly, figure out how much time you should spend on it. Don’t default to how much time you already spend on it. Decide how much time is reasonable based on where you are at and what you want to accomplish. Balance that against your other competing demands and set simple time limits. For example, when I run, it’s 30 minutes, but periodically an hour. When I blog, I give myself 20 minutes maximum on average, except for the occasional “heavy hitter post.”
Step 3. Build in space. Create space in your life. This is key – if you’re always feeling harried or under the gun, then you don’t have effective buffers or boundaries. You need to build in some space. For example, I need my alone time on Sundays and either early in the days during the week, or later at night. it’s how I recharge. When I drive to work, I give myself 30 minutes to get to there, though it usually takes closer to 15. I don’t want to race against the clock. I eat breakfast slowly, I take the back way, and I plan my outcomes for the day, while enjoying the ride (and of course, playing my favorite tunes.) I don’t blog on weekends, except for the occasional exception (I’m making exceptions while I work on 30 Days of Getting Results.) Copy machines and I don’t get along, so I print off stuff for my meetings well in advance. One of my favorite rules here is “Tuesday night is date night” and everything has to fit around that. Keep in mind there are always lots of reasons and lots of excuses why we can’t create space. That’s no the challenge here. The challenge on the table is — find a way to make space — “how can you create space in you life?”

Stepping back, I can tell you that the most important pattern I’ve seen across people that get more of what they want from life, is that they fix time for eating, sleeping, and working out – and everything else fits around that. They never rob themselves here – it’s their foundation and platform for all results in their life.

Example of Setting Boundaries in Hot SpotsTry using “Hot Spots” (Mind, Body, Emotions, Career, Financial, Relationships, and Fun) and setting boundaries like this. Set a max on career and a min on relationships, body, and fun. For example

Mind
Body – minimum of 3 hrs
Career – maximum of 50 hrs
Financial
Relationships – minimum of 3 hrs
Fun – minimum of 3 hrs

You can only spread your life force over so much. The categories support each other.

Key Insights

When you set a minimum in the right categories, you avoid getting unbalanced and improving other categories. When you set a maximum in the right categories, you learn how to become more effective. For example, if you only have 8 hours to throw at your day, you’ll use them wisely.
The worst mistake it to throw more time at problems.
The key is to reduce time spent, while increasing value and improving effectiveness/efficiency.

So step one is deciding to spend no more than 50 hours each week at work. Now it forces you to bite off only what you can chew. This is how you start improving plate management and pushing back effectively.

Why Use Time to Set Boundaries
It’s the simplest way to avoid spending $20 on $5 problems.

One of my most important lessons is that the best way to set boundaries is to use time. Treat time as a first class citizen. It’s pretty reliable too – each day you get 24 hours. Each week you get 7 days or 168 hours. And the cycle repeats itself, each day, each week. So if you can master your day, you can master your week – and looking at your time from a weekly standpoint helps you establish a schedule that works for you.

I used to be very “scope-driven.” I wanted to change the world. The problem is that when you drive from scope, you often run out of time, then you have to cut corners you don’t want to cut. Worse, you often push past your boundaries (“I’ll eat lunch later”, or “I’ll stay up later to finish this one last thing”, or “I can’t take a break now,” etc. Worse, when you don’t respect time, not only do you throw time at problems and re-enforce bad habits … you miss windows of opportunity. I’ve found that a stitch in time actually saves way more than nine … and that it’s the key to effective results.

This is a key shift from it’s done when it’s done or it takes as long as it takes, to how much time do you have for it and how much time is worth spending on that and how much is too much time to spend on that?

One way to think about this is that time is a budget, just like your money. You only have so much. You can spend it wisely, or you can let it rule you, or you can waste it. Time is a unique resource that you don’t get back and choosing how you spend your discretionary time is what ultimately changes your life. If you want to spend more time in something, then make more time for something. The way to do so is to set smart limits on the things you know you need to do. Trade your time by design vs. by default.

Today’s Assignment

Choose an area in your life that’s not working for you and try setting a new limit. This might mean setting a maximum amount of time in something, or a minimum amount of time in something else.
Find one simple way to add space in your life and take it for a test drive next week.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 6 – Friday Reflection – Identify Three Things Going Well and Three Things to Improve

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:19:00 +0000

“I’ve found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Your Outcome: Celebrate your wins and find your personal success patterns. Learn a simple way to practice your attitude of gratitude while growing your ability to get meaningful results.

Welcome to day 6 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 5, we created a simple map of what’s going on in our life so that we could improve our focus and invest our time and energy more effectively. Today, we reflect on our past week. I call this practice Friday Reflection. It’s part of the Monday vision, Daily Vision, Friday Reflection pattern from my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

Friday Reflection is a simple but powerful practice. For Friday Reflection, simply think about your past week and identify three things going well and three things to improve. It’s a chance to celebrate your wins, no matter how small. It’s also a chance to figure out what’s not working for you. Whatever you learn, you can carry forward into the next week, and use this to continuously improve your results each week. It’s a snowball of success.

3 Steps to Friday ReflectionHere are three simple steps to perform your Friday Reflection:

Step 1. Ask yourself, what are three things going well? The key here is to look at your approach. You can’t always control your results. Instead, focus on whether you made smart plays based on what you wanted to accomplish. Pat yourself on the back for making your best moves, independent of the results. No matter how good a baseball team is, you win some, you lose some. The best you can do is play your best. Where you made smart moves, pay attention to why it worked and how you can use it in the future.
Step 2. Ask yourself, what are three things to improve? This is the tough question, but it’s important to own it, and look at it objectively. Once you put it down on paper, you don’t need to over-analyze it. You simply need to see if you can identify the root cause, but then more importantly, identify some specific ways to improve. Brainstorm here and let your imagination run wild. The key is to quickly shift to “how” questions, don’t keep asking “why?” For example, “How can I be more effective in that situation? … or “How can I be more resourceful when that happens again?” … or “How can I prevent that from happening in the first place?”
Step 3. Identify what you’ll change next week. You’ll likely come up with a laundry list of simple things you can test to improve your results. Just pick a few you really care about and add them to your bag of tricks. Rather than over-analyze your ideas, just write down a few things that you can test next week and get feedback on. The idea is to learn and improve, not beat yourself up, or wallow in pity.

I recommend adding a reminder to your calendar and blocking off time for it. If you don’t, it’s easy to forget to do it. If you schedule it, it will happen, and it’s one of the simplest ways to improve your results every week.

Example of Friday ReflectionHere is a quick example of my Friday Reflection:

3 Things Going Well …

I got great feedback from a lot of people inside and outside of Microsoft how 30 Days of Getting Results is helping them achieve more meaningful results.
I added key people to my network at Microsoft that have very effective ways of getting results.
I effectively anticipated just about every possible surprise this week and had a fallback plan.

3 Things to Improve …

I had the wrong lens, model, and map for looking at a few scenarios, which limited my effectiveness.
I didn’t checkpoint a few of my key assumptions with the right people as early as I could have.
I didn’t reset expectations appropriately in a few cases, which would have saved me some extra work and backtracking.

As far as a few things I’ll change next week, I’ll be asking a lot more pointed questions next week regarding people’s their model and their map. I’ve been quick to expose my thinking and vision, but now I’ll be testing other people’s assumptions, their operating models, their vision, their timeframes, and gaining clarity on understanding how they test their success or what their rules are for what good looks like. It should be interesting. I’ll also be studying up against on effective argumentation as well as rhetoric (the art of arguing without anger.)

Why Friday ReflectionThis is the perfect opportunity to take a look at the patterns in your week. If you’re not achieving what you set out to do for the week, why not? Are you biting off more than you can chew? Are you letting other things get in the way? Are you figuring out the right things to get done? Are you making the right trade offs? As you pay attention to these patterns, you’ll find you will improve your ability to anticipate, you’ll get a better handle on your capacity, and you’ll improve your ability to focus, prioritize, and achieve the results you want, while responding to things with skill, instead of reacting.

Aside from naturally improving your ability to get results, you’ll also improve your outlook. Too many people look at only the upside or the downside of their week. Looking at three things going well and three things to improve gives you a more balanced view, and your wins will build momentum, while your lessons learned will support you in all areas of your life.

Today’s Assignment

Schedule a recurring 20 minute appointment with yourself for Friday’s for reflection on your results. I recommend making this something you do earlier in the AM versus later in the day. Your clarity will serve you for the rest of the day and start you off on the right foot.
Identify your three things going well and your three things to improve. Celebrate those wins!

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 5 – Hot Spots – Map Out What’s Important

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:15:00 +0000

“One reason so few of us achieves what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power.”—Tony Robbins

Your Outcome: Learn how to use Hot Spots to create a simple map of what’s going on in your life. Use your Hot Spots map as a way to invest your time and energy where it really counts, and to know that you’re on your path.

Welcome to day 5 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 4, we look at letting things go with skill. Today, we look at mapping out what’s important. I call this practice Hot Spots and it’s from my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

Hot Spots are a way to see the forest from the trees. The simplest metaphor is to think of your life as a heat map. Take a moment to actually imagine a heat map. On this heat map, if I were to ask you, what’s going on at work, what would you see? If I were to ask you, what’s going at home, what would you see? If I were to ask you to step back and look across your life, what would you see?

I used those three levels for a reason: work, home, and life. Your ability to quickly see what’s going on in each area of your life, will help you make better trade-offs across the board.

Mental Model for Hot Spots
Here is a simple mental model for thinking about your Hot Spot map:

There are three things to notice here:

There are three separate lists: Life Frame, Work, and Personal. These are three simple lists that help you figure out what’s going on in your life.
Notice the “Backlog” category under Work and Personal. This is a way to put everything that’s not active, off your plate. You can acknowledge that you have a lot of projects at work or personal projects, but if they aren’t active in your life, then they are part of your “backlog.” Don’t mix them up with what’s really on your plate right now.
The Life Frame is a durable set of categories that is relatively stable over time: Mind, Body, Emotions, Career, Financial, Relationships, and Fun. If you invest in these areas, they support each other. If you don’t invest in these areas, they work against you. For example, try being your best when you let your body go, or try doing well at work, if you don’t build your relationships, or try having fun if you let your emotions run your life.

3 Steps to Map Out Your Hot SpotsFor the purpose of this exercise, just think of your Hot Spots as simple lists. We’ll create three simple lists to answer the question, “What’s on your radar?”. Here are the steps to follow:

Step 1. Map out your Work Hot Spots. Write down a list of your key roles, your activities, and your projects. Keep it at the macro level. This isn’t a dump of all your tasks. It’s the buckets, not all the items inside the buckets. For example, for work, I would list my main projects: “Common Catalog,” “Simple IA,” “Azure Security Notes,” “Customer Connected Engineering,”, etc. I turn themes of work into projects, and I give them a name. Making them projects gives them a start and finish, and helps me identify outcomes for the project, and measure the impact.
Step 2. Map out your Personal Hot Spots. Write down a list of your key roles, your activities, and your projects at home. For example, for persona, I would list some of my main projects: “Getting Results,” “RV,” “Backyard,” .etc. Don’t worry about getting the order right – just dump what’s on your mind.
Step 3. Map out your Life Hot Spots. Write down the key areas or “big rocks” in your life that are important. Make this a quick exercise and simply list out your top list of areas that are important in your life. For example, I tend to list: mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun (I refer to this list as my Life Frame, because it acts like a lens to helps me frame out or look at the big areas in my life in a simple way. Feel free to use my list as a starting point. It’s easy to swap things out or add, such as adding a “Spirit” category or a “Community” bucket. I lump “Community” under my relationships bucket, but what’s important is that the categories make sense for you.

Congratulations – you just created more clarity in your life than many businesses or people do in a life time!

3 Keys to Great Hot Spot Maps

Don’t try to put your lists in any clever order. It actually breaks it. What’s important is that each list actually resonates with you when you look at it. The order things are listed should simply be the order you would rattle them off the top of your mind. Don’t try to alphabetize them or put them in any logical order. They should simply reflect your mind. I can’t emphasize that enough.
Stick the things you aren’t really spending any time or energy on under your backlog. You might find that you have really long lists. That’s OK. It’s a process. What’s important is now you have a map of what’s going on in your life, from three views — work, personal, and life. If things on your list, really aren’t active, then move them down your list under a heading you call “Backlog.”

Using Your Hot Spots to Invest Your Time and Energy
You can now look easily scan across what’s on your radar and instead of trying to remember what you were trying to do, you can step back and say, what’s worth doing or where do I need to spend more time or energy? In other words, now with your life portfolio in your hands, you can choose where to invest and where to de-invest at a glance.

By asking yourself some very simple questions, you can test your investments. For example, are you spending enough time or energy in relationships? Are you giving your body enough rest and relaxation? Are you challenging your body enough? Are you making time for fun or for play?, etc.

The key to investing wisely, is simply to answer the question, “Why?” … and then cross-checking by asking the question, “What do you want to accomplish?” Your mind can find the answers when you ask the right questions. If your mind can’t find the right answers, then pair up or find somebody you trust how can.

Today’s Assignment

Review your Hot Spot maps for work, personal, and life and improve them until you feel they truly represent what’s going on in your life. They should be simple and scannable. They are not your outcomes, they are not your tasks, they are simply a list of the activities or projects or big rocks in your life.
Explore some of the examples of Hot Spots in Chapter 4 – Hot Spots, from Getting Results the Agile Way.
Pick one area that you could invest less in to invest more in another area. Identify why you would want to make this shift. This is your chance to deliberately improve an area of your life through a conscious investment and managing your life portfolio in a smart way by taking a look from the balcony.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 4 – Let Things Slough Off

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:11:00 +0000

“Sometimes you have to let go to see if there was anything worth holding on to.” – Anonymous

Your Outcome: Learn how to let things go with skill. By letting things “slough off”, you improve your ability to focus on what counts and you make room for YOUR best results.

Welcome to day 4 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 3, we looked at using three stories to drive your day. Today we look at letting things slough off. Letting things slough off simply means either letting things go from your plate either by design or as a natural process of focusing on higher priorities. This is the key to starting each day with a fresh start.

If you don’t let things slough off, the problem is you weight yourself down. This is the problem of big “To Do” lists, which either turn into lists of things that never get done, or you spend all your time managing your list of things to do, but never getting anything done. If you’re a slave to your “To Do” list, or if you fear the sheer magnitude of its size, it’s not working for you!

Even if you could do it all, you can’t do it all at once. You only have so much time and energy in the day. If there’s one take away from all this remember that it’s the achievements under your belt AND the journey that you look back on.

3 Keys to Letting Things Slough Off
There are three keys to letting things slough off with skill:

Each day, create a new “To Do” list. Start with a fresh “To Do” list each day. These are your Daily Outcomes. A simple way to do this is use a new piece of paper and write your three outcomes at the top. If you’re using an electronic system, then simply create a new file and name it with today’s date. For example, for Wednesday, August 4th, 2010, I would simply name it: 2010-08-04. I use this approach so that I can sort it easily and flip back through my previous days whenever I want. Rather than automatically add everything from the day before, only carry over what you think is an absolute priority for today – and let the rest go. The key here is to focus on what’s valuable now from today’s vantage point, checking against what you want to accomplish for the overall week.
Each week, create a new “To Do” list. Start with a fresh “To Do” list each week. These are your weekly outcomes. Identify the three results that you really want for your week and write those down. Simply grab a new piece of paper each week and write down your three main outcomes. If you’re doing it electronically, then each Monday, create a new file and name it the current date. For example, Monday, August 9th, 2010 would be: 2010-08-09. This let’s you scroll back through your weekly lists of outcomes. This is how you implement the Monday Vision practice from Getting Results the Agile Way.
Focus on flowing value. The real key to letting things slough off is focusing on flowing value. Instead of focusing on your list of things to do or just getting things done, focus on flowing value. Focus on your most extreme value and let the rest go. Value is in the eye of the beholder. It could be value to you, or to your family, or to your team, or to your company. Simply by thinking in terms of your “wins” each day, each week, etc. you shine the light on your most important victories. One way to always get back on track is to ask, “What your next best thing to do?” Another question to ask is, “What do you want to accomplish?”

The pattern here is to shift your focus to what’s important now based on what you want to accomplish. The other thing to remember is that if you let something go, and it truly is vital, it will continue to resurface. You can then deal with it when it makes the most sense.

Set Up Boundaries in Time and QuantitySetting up boundaries is another key to letting things slough off with skill:

Set a limit in terms of quantity. For example, can you prioritize your top three things? … your top 5?, etc. Instead of making a laundry list, can you make your ‘short list.” The Rule of 3 is your friend for setting limits whenever you are overwhelmed by quantity and you have to let things go. If you’re a blogger, you might decide that your post will be no longer than two paragraphs or a list of 10 items.
Set a limit in terms of time. You can set limits in terms of time. For example, you can decide up front that you’ll spend no more than 20 minutes on that. Or you might decide that after a week, it’s just diminishing returns. You might give yourself a maximum of spending 30 minutes a day doing email. In XP development, there is a practice of a “40 Hour Work Week.” if you’re a blogger, you might decide that you’ll spend no longer than 20 minutes writing your best material and sharing your best insights … anything after that sloughs off!

This means brutally focusing on spending more time on what you value, and letting the rest go. You might thing of it as either “fierce focus” or “driving with clarity.” Remember that you “get what you focus on” so spend more time on what you want, not what you don’t

Examples of Boundaries in Time and QuantityBoundaries in terms of time and quantity will help keep your sanity and help you surf your way through producing great results. When I first joined Microsoft, one of my colleagues said that their boundary is “dinner on the table at 5:30” and that’s how they achieved work-life balance. When I later joined another group in Microsoft, a colleague told me that their boundary is they “take weekends off.” They’ll work their fingers to the bone all week, but when the weekend comes it’s their time to recharge. When I worked at Tiffany & Company, one of our director’s had an interesting boundary – Tuesday nights is date night with his wife. Another one of the manager’s at Tiffany & Company had an interesting buffer he used – “Don’t spend $20 on a $5 problem.” In other words, if the problem is only worth 10 minutes of your time, don’t spend more than that. For me, using The Rule of 3 to take away three actionable insights from all the books I go through has both save me a lot of time, and generated a lot of value.

Additional Considerations for Letting Go with Skill
Here are some additional points to ponder that will help you let things go with skill:

Time Changes What’s Important. “To Do” lists get stale. Backlogs get stale. Laundry lists get stale. Everything gets stale. You can spend all your time re-arranging stale things, or you can spend just enough time bubbling up what’s important and taking action on it.
Fresh Starts. By creating new “To Do” lists each day and each week instead of one massive one, you give yourself a fresh start. You carry the most important things forward.
Travel light. Don’t be a beast of burden. If you bite off what you can chew, you can actually get it done. This helps you travel light each day and each week. Rather than start off with an over-loaded pack of things you may never need, you start off with a simple vision and stories of your most important results.
Spend more time doing over “paper shuffling” One of the worst things you can do is continuously reshuffle the things you have to do instead of just do them. For all the things that you keep reshuffling but not actually doing, admit it. Put them into a “parking lot” or “shelve” them for a later point when you will actually work on them. Don’t keep them in your face, and don’t let them get in the way of your results. Most of all, don’t die the “death of a thousand paper cuts.” (If you’ve never heard this term before, paper shuffling is one way to die the death of a thousand paper cuts.”)
Value Delivered Over Backlog Burndown. Rather than simply burn through your laundry lists of tasks, do the quick reality check and ask whether the task is still important. More importantly, step back and ask the simple question, if you completed it, “Does it matter?” Does it connect back to the outcomes that you care about now or in the future, or was it simply a good idea that’s now past it’s prime or past it’s time? In other words, don’t look at your big task lists or backlogs as what drives you. They are simply input. Draw from them, but focus on delivering value, not simply blind execution of things that were important at some point, but now are no longer, “your next best thing to do.”
It’s a mindset thing. A large part of letting things go with skill is about shifting your mindset. It’s about thinking in terms of value delivered over backlog burndown. it’s about asking questions like, “What’s the next best thing for me to do?” or “What do I want to accomplish>?” It’s about focusing on value and your wins and what you got done, over focusing on what you didn’t get done.

Today’s Assignment

Write down three outcomes for today. This is re-enforcing our daily outcomes AND practicing letting things slough off with skill.
Write down your three outcomes for the week. Consider the remaining time and energy you have for the rest of the week, where can you get the most bang for the buck? What would three wins for the week look like?
Set one simple limit on something that’s been wearing you down. Set either a time limit or a quantity limit.

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Day 3 – Daily Outcomes – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:07:00 +0000

“Make each day your masterpiece.” — John Wooden

Your Outcome: Take control of your day by connecting your activities to what you value and what inspires you. Turn even the most mundane activities into meaningful opportunities.

Welcome to day 3 of 30 Days of Getting Results. In day 2, we looked at using three stories to drive your week. Today we take a look at using three stories to drive your day. I call this practice Daily Outcomes and it’s from my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

Daily Outcomes is a way to use three stories to drive your day. Before you start your day, simply identify the three results or outcomes you want to accomplish for the day, and work backwards from that. An outcome can be anything from, “I had a great lunch,” to “I enjoyed my day,” to “I kicked arse in my presentation.” What’s important is that you’re jumping ahead to the end result. I like to think of this practice as taking a fewmindful minutes to avoid going on a mindless march.

3 Steps for Great Daily OutcomesHere are three steps you can use to create your three compelling stories to drive your day:

Step 1. Identify your three key outcomes. You choose what your three key results are. For example, maybe your three most important outcomes are: “I mowed the lawn, I completed my project plan, and I had a great lunch.” If you’re feeling really off, maybe your three outcomes are, “I enjoyed my breakfast, I enjoyed my lunch, and I enjoyed my dinner.”
Step 2. Turn your three outcomes into one-liner stories. Stories help you add an emotional connection to your tasks. You can even be the hero (“Today, I conquered the mess in the laundry room.”)
Step 3. Connect your stories to your values. You can connect your stories to things you value. For example, maybe you don’t like to rake the leaves, but you like to do your part “to help.” Maybe you don’t like doing spreadsheets, but you like “to improve.” Maybe you like “adventure.” Maybe you like “achievement.” To build on the previous example, “Today I conquered the laundry room with skill” which is a contrast to slogging my way through to victory. One of the things I like to do each day is “master my craft.” Get creative. Find the play in your day.

The real beauty of Daily Outcomes is that you can wake up any day and simply ask yourself, “What are the three things I really want to accomplish today?” That’s it.

Make Your “To Do” List More MeaningfulBut what if you have way more than three things to do for the day? Simply add your three outcomes to the top.

The three outcomes will guide all the rest of your tasks. These three outcomes are your “tests for success” for the day. It’s your personal way of setting yourself up for success each day.

Be the Architect, the Author, or the Director of Your LifeDesigning each day empowers you to make things happen with skill. You can be the architect of your day or the author of your life, a story at a time, and a day at a time:

You get to be the architect of your life. Design stories that empower and inspire you for action.
You get to be the author of your life. Write your story forward and connect to your emotions.
You get to be the director of your life. You choose where to point your camera and what to focus on.

Always remember that you are the most important meaning maker in your life.

Your Assignment

Identify the three results you want for today.
Turn each result into a simple story that connects to your passion and values.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 2 – Monday Vision – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Week

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:02:00 +0000

“Map out your future, but do it in pencil.” ~Jon Bon Jovi

Your Outcome: Take control of your week and create a compelling vision to guide you throughout the week.

Welcome to day 2 of 30 Days of Getting Results. Today we take a look at Monday Vision from Getting Results the Agile Way.

Have you ever had a week fly by and when Friday hits you’re asking yourself, “Where did the week go?” Not any more. With Monday Vision, you take a moment to jump ahead to the end of the week, and you ask yourself, “If this were Friday, what are three results I want under my belt?” Monday is your chance to create a compelling vision for your week. Monday Vision is a simple pattern for helping you achieve more effective results each week. It’s also a great way to deal with a case of the Mondays.

The ChallengesMonday Vision can help you deal with three common challenges:

You’re overwhelmed. You have way more to do, than you can possibly get done during your week.
You’re underwhelmed. You’re not inspired. You might have a bunch of things you should or could do, but you don’t have the energy for it.
You get off track. You spend your time on a lot of things, but at the end of the week, you didn’t get done the things you really needed to get done.

The ResponseOn Mondays, you simply identify three key results you want for the week. This is your vision for the week. It puts you in the drivers seat and you get to decide what you want to accomplish. Rather than get lost among the sea of things to do, you bubble up the three most important outcomes for the week, and these three outcomes help guide you throughout your week.
This simple pattern has a few benefits:

Each week is a fresh start.
It’s a way to make your week more meaningful.
It’s a way to help you prioritize and focus.
It’s a way to help you improve your results.

Turning Your Results into Compelling StoriesAfter you identify your three results, you can turn them into stories. You can turn them into simple, one-liner stories, where you are the hero. For example, let’s say three results you want for the week are:

Finish my project plan
Create my slides for my presentation
Complete key stakeholder reviews

This might not be very compelling. You can spruce it up as simple stories and connect it to your values. For example:

Win the race to finish my project plan in record time.
Create a presentation that sets a new bar for my personal best.
Turn my stakeholders into raving fans.

You have to play around to find what connects with your heart. What you end up with is three stories to drive your week. These stories are hand-crafted and personal – after all, you made them. They are yours to make happen.

Your Assignment

Identify the three things you really want to accomplish for the week.
Turn your three outcomes into simple stories that you feel passionate about.

Don’t worry if you have trouble figuring out your three best results, and don’t worry if you have a hard time turning them into compelling stories. What’s important is simply trying the exercise. You might surprise yourself, and in the best case, you’ll inspire yourself to a new level you didn’t know was possible.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Day 1 – Take a Tour of Getting Results the Agile Way

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:50:00 +0000

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” — Albert Einstein

Welcome to day 1 of 30 Days of Getting Results. Today, we go for a quick walk in the park. We’ll take a tour of the Agile Results system, as it’s described in my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

The power of Agile Results is the simplicity. But don’t let the simplicity fool you. It’s the simplicity that makes it work – for individuals, teams, and leaders, at home, at work, and at play.

Agile Results has been battled tested in the trenches of consulting, in the corporate halls of Microsoft, and around the world in various settings from personal productivity to distributed team effectiveness, both in work and in life, and even extreme scenarios (more on that another day.) You too can get the system on your side.

The way I quickly teach colleagues how to get up and running with Agile Results is I show them three simple parts, and it takes no more than a five minute conversation.

The Three Key Parts of Agile ResultsHere are the three key parts to Agile Results:

The Rule of 3
Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection
Hot Spots

Let’s take a quick look at each one.
The Rule of 3
The Rule of 3 is a simple concept. Think in three’s. The Rule of 3 helps us deal with information overload. It’s a simple way to set limits and chunk things down. It’s easy for us to remember things in three’s.

You might have heard of the Rule of 3 before. Even if you haven’t, it’s been all around you. You’ve seen it in titles: The Three Little Pigs, The Three Stooges, Three Blind Mice, etc. Storytellers structure their stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. It’s a time tested approach and it’s been used in everything from marketing to the military. In fact, the military teaches survival in threes: 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food.

In Agile Results, we use The Rule of Three to map out what we want to accomplish in sets of three’s:

3 results for the day
3 results for the week
3 results for the month
3 results for the year

This creates a simple 3×3 system that is easy to use, easy to remember, and easy to get back on track, if you fall off the horse!

Watch the slide show on The Rule of 3.

Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday ReflectionThis is the heart of Agile Results. Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection is a simple pattern for your weekly workflow. It’s a weekly system for getting results that helps you get a fresh start each day, and a fresh start each week. This is the what a week looks like:

Here is a story-driven view of the same idea, which is helpful if you like to think of your results in terms of stories, and if you happen to be a software developer, this should be easy to relate to:

The way it works is pretty simple. Each week and each day is a new chance at bat. It works like this:

Monday Vision – On Mondays, identify three results you want by Friday. For example, maybe it’s “my presentation is complete,” “I have a written plan for my project,” and “I’ve spent a minimum of five hours doing what I love this week.” Focus on outcomes or achievements over activities.
Daily Outcomes – Each day, identify three results that you want under your belt. If you’re having a really bad day, your three outcomes might be as simple as – have a great breakfast, a great lunch, and a great dinner. Some days are like that. Ideally you can see how it connects back to the three results you want for the week. It’s this simple check between the day and the week that helps you see for forest from the trees.
Friday Reflection – Fridays are you chance to take a step back and reflect on your results. On Fridays, ask yourself, “What are three things going well? and ask yourself, “What are three things to improve?” This is how you start to see what’s working and what’s not, as well as learn your own capacity.

The key each week and each day is to celebrate your wins, no matter how small. Are you getting done what you set out to do? This is a quick check on your priorities, your focus, and what’s getting in the way. This also helps you carry forward what’s working and what’s not, so rather than luck into success, you know exactly what works for you – you identify your personal success patterns.

I could go into a lot of details about why this works, but some of the big ideas are that you’re making mindful choices, you’re using limits of three to better prioritize and focus, and you’re using positive psychology practices by shining the spotlight on your wins. You’re also using some proven project management and software practices in a very simple way, to help you author your life and write your story forward, one day at a time.

Watch the slideshow on Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection.

Hot SpotsWhen you think of Hot Spots, imagine a heat map. Take a moment to pause and imagine a heat map in your mind. On this heat map, think of most important things in your life right now. Chances are they fall under one or more of the following buckets:

Mind
Body
Emotions
Career
Financial
Relationships
Fun

Hot Spots are simply areas of focus. They might represent a lot of pain, or they might represent a lot of opportunity. Either way, it’s a quick visual way to map out what’s important for you. You can also think of Hot Spots for work. Simply list out your top projects or activities that matter most. You can also think of Hot Spots for your personal projects. Again, simply list out your top projects or activities outside of work.

Hot Spots are like a portfolio. They help us balance our investment of time, energy, and focus across our competing demands. What you’ll tend to find is that when you invest in your mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun, you improve your ability to respond to whatever work or life throws your way. When you don’t invest in one or more of these buckets, you find that it can negatively impact the others.

At this point, all that’s important is that you know that Hot Spots are a way to visualize a map of what’s important in your life.

Watch the slide show on Hot Spots.

Recap
Let’s recap the key things we learned from our tour:

Use the Rule of 3 to deal with information overload and set simple limits each day and each week.
Use Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection as a pattern for weekly results. Each week, identify three results for the week, then identify three key results you want each day, and on Friday, identify three things going well, and three things to improve.
Use Hot Spots to see the forest from the threes. Map out the key areas in your life that matter most to you. Map out your key projects at work, and map out your key personal projects. Simply being able to list the items is a great start. It shows you at a glance, what’s on your radar. This is important for choosing what to invest more in, and what to invest less in.

Here are the slides that I referred to during our tour, if you’d like to check them out:

sourcesofinsight.com

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Uniting Competitive Groups Through Superordinate Goals

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:27:00 +0000

How do you get competitive groups to work with each other? How do you improve cross-group collaboration? Superordinate goals. In Social Psychology: Theories, Research, and Applications, Robert S. Feldman writes about how superordinate goals were effective in uniting competitive groups.

Two Groups in the Same Camp
Feldman writes:

“One of the best examples of how group goals can influence group formation comes from a now-classic field study held in a boy’s summer camp named Robber’s Cave (Sherif, 1966). Two groups of missle-class 11- and 12-year-olds – none of whom knew that he was in an experiment – were settled in opposite sides of the camp. Each group was unaware of the other group’s existence. To develop the two campsites into groups, the experimenters arranged for the boys to engage in activities that could only be carried out by group efforts, such as carrying a heavy canoe into the water or cleaning a dirty beach so that it was suitable for
use. Quite soon, each campsite evolved into what could clearly be called a group. They gave themselves names (the “Rattlers” and the “Eagles”) and they developed particular patterns and standards of behavior unique to each group.”

Wicked, Disturbed and ViciousFeldman writes:

“Once the two groups had been established, the experiments tried to develop competition. To do this, they developed a tournament of games in which the two groups competed for a series of prizes that only one group could win. The researchers got more than they bargained for: beyond the tournament. The groups picked fights, raided each other’s campsights, and generally behaved in a manner that lead the researchers to feel that, to an outside observer, the children appeared as “wicked, disturbed, and vicious bunches of youngsters” (Sherif, 1966, p. 58). “

Superordinate Goals
Feldman writes:

“In an attempt to reduce the intergroup conflict, the experimenters at first tried a number of strategies that proved ineffective. Arranging for pleasant experiences, such as watching a movie, only provoked more fighting as soon as the lights were dimmed. Moral exhortation proved useless. Even the introduction of a third group, which was supposed to act as a kind of common enemy, was ineffective. One thing did work, however: the introduction of a superordinate goal. Reasoning that it was common goals that led to the formation of the groups initially, the researchers thought that the introduction of goals that were common to both groups – superordinate goals – might be effective in uniting the two groups. This time, they were right. ”

Crisis Brings the Groups Together
Feldman writes:

“The experimenters arranged for a series of emergencies. For instance, the water supply broke down, and the boys had to work jointly if they wanted to have water to drink. After a number of such events, group hostility was eventually reduced, friendships developed across group lines, and the superordinate goals became effective in unifying the previously hostile groups.”

Key Take Aways
I think we’ve all seen crisis bring folks together. At work I often run into groups competing against each other for limited resources or territory. Common goals are a higher level bring groups together. When that’s not possible, it’s important to take away the threat, to reduce cross-group hostility. One way to do this, if the space is large enough, is to carve out a niche, to reduce the turf wars. Everybody gets a place to play and they respect each other’s boundaries.

sourcesofinsight.com

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Importance of Productivity Objectives

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:23:00 +0000

If your business doesn’t have productivity objectives, it doesn’t have direction. If your business doesn’t have productivity measurements, it doesn’t have control. In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker explains that productivity is the best yardstick for comparing management effectiveness.

Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Results are the best way to compare effectiveness. Productivity is the best tool for comparing effectiveness. Your yield is directly related to the effectiveness and efficiency of your production.
Quality of management is a key differentiater. The quality of management differentiates one business from another in the same field. It’s a game of survival of the fittest.
Focus on continuous productivity improvement. Management’s most important job is continuous productivity improvement. This leads to innovations. Being productive doesn’t necessarily mean making more things, it means producing more of the right results efficiently.

I think the meta-point is, assuming both businesses produce effective results, the more efficient one wins in the long run. That’s consistent with my experience. I think another important point here is that if you focus on your productivity, you can usually find a lot of opportunity for innovation in your processes.

Productivity is the Best YardstickAccording to Drucker, productivity is the best tool for comparing management effectiveness across your enterprise:

A productivity measurement is the best yardstick for comparing management of different units within an enterprise, and for comparing managements of different enterprises.

Productivity is the Degree to Which Resources are Utilized and Their YieldThe quality of management differentiates one business from another in the same field. Drucker writes:

All businesses have access to pretty much the same resources. Except for the rare monopoly situation, the only thing that differentiates one business from another in any given field is the quality of its management on all levels. The first measurement of this critical factor is productivity, that is, the degree to which resources are utilized and their yield.

Continuous Productivity ImprovementManagement’s most important job is continuous productivity improvement. Drucker writes:

The continual improvement of productivity is one of management’s most important jobs. It is also one of the most difficult; for productivity is a balance among a diversity of factors, few of which are easily definable or clearly measurable.

Labor is Only One FactorAccording to Drucker, there’s three major resources when you’re considering productivity objectives: land, labor and capital. Drucker writes that you can’t let labor make the other resources less productive:

Labor is only one of the three factors of production. And if productivity of labor is accomplished by making the other resources less productive, there is actually loss of productivity.

Objectives are Direction, Measurement is ControlAccording to Drucker, productivity is central:

Productivity is a difficult concept, but it is central. Without productivity objectives, a business does not have direction. Without productivity measurements, it does not have control.

sourcesofinsight.com

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River People and Goal People

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:18:00 +0000

sourcesofinsight.com

Are you a goal person or a river person? Goal people layout a roadmap of goals and set out to achieve them. River people, on the other hand, go with the flow. They live for the moment and don’t worry too much about the future. Neither is good or bad, or right or wrong. They’re just different approaches for the journey of life.

In the book,Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want NOW! , Stephen M. Shapiro writes about goal people and river people.

Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

There’s two types of people: goal people and river people. Earl Nightingale, chairman of Nightingale-conant and personal development leader originally explained there are two types of people: goal people and river people.
Chuck Frey provides a good perspective on the difference. Chuck Frey, founder of innovationtools.com explained the difference to Shapiro (below).
Goals vs. opportunities. Goal people layout a roadmap of goals. River people seek out learning opportunities and experiences.
Achievement vs. experience. Goal people seek out achievement. River people seek out experience.
Future-oriented vs. living in the moment. Goal people are future oriented. River people live for the moment.

Goal People
Goal people create a path of goals, objectives and timetables. Shapiro writes:

Most of us are undoubtedly familiar with goal people. They are the individuals who write down their objectives and timetables for reaching them, and then focus on attaining them, one by one. By laying out a roadmap of future achievements in front of them, goal people give their creative minds a clear set of stimuli to work on. Their subconscious minds can then go to work incubating ideas and insights that will help them to reach their goals.

River PeopleRiver people lead a more unstructured life. They seek out learning opportunities and experiences. Shapiro writes:

River People, on the other hand, don’t like to follow such a structured route to success. They are called river people because they are happiest and most fulfilled when they are wading in a rich river of interest – a subject or profession about which they are very passionate. While they may not have a concrete plan with measurable goals, rive people are often successful because they are so passionate about their area of interest. This, in turn, helps them to recognize, breakthrough opportunities that may not even be visible on the mental radar screens of the more narrowly focused goal people. River people are explorer, continually seeking out learning opportunities and new experiences. For river people, joy comes from the journey, not from reaching the destination – exactly the opposite of goal people. From the standpoint of creativity, river people are more likely to benefit from serendipity, because they tend to be more open to new ideas, points of view, and insights than single-minded, focused goal people.

Goal-Free People
Goal-free people choose a life of experience over achievement. Shapiro writes:

River people are individuals who live life out of experience rather than achievement. People driven by passion. These are the goal-free people. Goal-free people don’t necessarily live a life free from all goals. They live from from the stranglehold of goals that grips so many people. They live experientially in each moment. A life of their design rather than that which society tells them to live. They have a deep appreciation for what they are today; they avoid worrying about the future.

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16 Movies Can Teach Us About Life and Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:10:00 +0000

Movies can be an amazing source of insight and inspiration. They fill our hearts and heads with heroes, stories, songs, and scenes we can draw from.

Maybe you think of the theme song to Rocky when you work out. Maybe you think of “waxing the car” or “painting the fence” while you master your craft. What’s important is that you choose the stories, scenes or heroes that serve you.

Here is a sampling of 16 movies and what they can teach us about life and leadership:

300 – Play to your strengths.
The Bad News Bears – The right coach can turnaround any team, from worst, to first. It’s about the journey and the destination.
Kung Fu Panda – The right team can kick arse. You’re the sum of your network (remember the Furious Five.)
Peaceful Warrior – Make every move about the move. A warrior acts, only a fool reacts. Don’t become a victim of your own limiting beliefs. The people that are the hardest to love, probably need it the most. Want more? … check out Lessons Learned from Peaceful Warrior.
Surf’s Up – Find a way, because that’s what winners do. When there’s no wave to ride, make one.
The 13th Warrior – Your competition always has a weakness.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Win the heart, the mind follows. Find the best in everyone.
Star Wars – Keep your ego in check (and carry a big light saber.) Your intuition can serve you well if you master it.
Raiders of the Lost Ark – Make every project an adventure.
The Lord of the Rings – The best heroes can come from the strangest places (who would have thought to check the shire?)
Rear Window – Use your emotions and intuition as input. Check your facts.
The Wizard of Oz – You had it in you all along. You just needed somebody else to bring it out.
Slumdog Millionaire – Smart and gets results can change your lot in life.
Bonnie and Clyde – Passion + smarts makes for a great team.
Rocky – You gotta have heart. Sometimes it’s about going the distance.
It’s a Wonderful Life – Know your value and what you bring to the table.

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Success is a Matter of Determination

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:06:00 +0000

The very first step to achieving success is being determined and motivated. This makes determination the key to success. Without determination, success is just but a far away dream. It is the force originating from within you that seeks to bring out the potential in you and drive you to your destiny.

It is the desire of many to achieve success but a determined person is never satisfied until he gets what he is after. Determination is what motivates one to strive and work hard towards success; therefore without it one tends to walk blindly and without purpose.

Determination almost guarantees success. Being fully determined is already success in itself. The rest just follows smoothly. This is because once you have set your mind on something and you really are willing to get it at whatever cost, the body just follows and does as the mind wills. Someone who is strong-minded to get something will always get it at all cost.

I heard somebody once say that you can always get what you want if you want it badly enough. This is very true and agrees with the saying that 'where there is a will, there is a way'. If you really have a desire to achieve success in life realize there are sacrifices that you will have to take. Nothing in life comes easy.

Determination goes hand in hand with courage and confidence. You will need to trust the great strength that lies within you and believe that you can do it. There is unlimited potential in each one of us but it is up to us to activate the same. Utilize your full potential and you are definitely guaranteed of success.

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Lessons from Seth Godin

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:50:00 +0000

“Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.” – Seth Godin

There’s a hidden message in this post – it’s your free prize inside. Whether you find the free prize or not, this post will make you think. About your life. About work. About just about everything. Why? Because it’s a distillation of lessons from a man named Seth. Seth Godin is an author, an agent of change, a meaning maker, and an Idea Merchant.

I have to say, this was my most challenging “greatness distilled” post to date. Seth is a fountain of insight, and I wanted to do more than show the tip of the iceberg. At the same time, I wanted to take the balcony view, look across his forest of ideas, and make a map of the most meaningful insights. I won’t claim victory, but I smile inside as I think in the spirit of Seth, I won’t let perfect get in the way of the good. I’m hoping people will share their lessons from Seth with me, and the map will go beyond my sketch and take a life of its own. For now, this is my “Seth on a page.”

As you explore Seth’s work, find what you can use for the business of life, or the game of work. If you walk away with the goal of finding 3 ah-has, you’ll change your frame … and a key to life is that if you change your frame, you change your game.

25 Lessons Learned from Seth Godin
Seth is full of lessons and insights. Here are 25 lessons to chew on:

Have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets. Seth says — “Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.”
Be remarkable. Boring is invisible. Remarkable products and remarkable people get talked about. Seth on remarkable — “How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
Success is a skill. Seth’s philosophy on success is — “it’s possible to enjoy your job, to do the right thing, to be transparent, to give more than you get and to be successful, all at the same time.” It takes work. Surround yourself with people who are succeeding. You become who you hang with. By surrounding yourself with people who are succeeding, you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not. You can model their success and open doors that you might otherwise not see. Seth on successful people – “”Successful people rarely confuse a can-do attitude with a smart plan. But they realize that one without the other is unlikely to get you very far.”
Being the best is the best place to be. It’s better to be the best. People pick the market leaders and they narrow their choices to the top. Seth says, “Being the best in the world is seriously underrated.” According to Seth, best in the world is relative – “It’s best for them, right now based on what they believe and in their world, the one they have access to.” In the Dip, Seth shares 7 reasons why you might fail to become the best in the world: 1.) You run out of time, 2.) you run out of money, 3.) you get scared, 4.) you’re not serious about it, 5.) you lose interest or enthusiasm and settle for being mediocre, 6.) you focus on the short term instead of the long, 7.) you pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world.
Be missed. Seth on how to be missed — “Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.”
Everybody is an expert about something. You’re an expert at something. Make meaning. A SQUIDOO lens is a way to make meaning for others. Seth on lenses – “A lens gives context. When it succeeds, it delivers meaning.”
Success is a hierarchy. Seth teaches us the hierarchy of success: 1.) Attitude, 2.) Approach 3.) Goals 4.) Strategy 5.) Tactics 6.) Execution
Don’t do A as a calculated tactic to get B. Do A because you believe in it. Seth on success – “If we define success as the ability to make a living doing what I do, I’d say the following: 1.) No ulterior motive. I rarely do A as a calculated tactic to get B. I do A because I believe in A, or it excites me or it’s the right thing to do. That’s it. No secret agendas, 2.) I don’t think my audience owes me anything. It’s always their turn, 3.) I’m in a hurry to make mistakes and get feedback and get that next idea out there. I’m not in a hurry, at all, to finish the “bigger” project, to get to the finish line, 4.) I do things where I actually think I’m right, as opposed to where I think succeeding will make me successful. When you think you’re right, it’s more fun and your passion shows through, 5.) I’ve tried to pare down my day so that the stuff I actually do is pretty well leveraged. That and I show up. Showing up is underrated.”
Be in it for the long haul. Things rarely come easy. Make the journey worth it. Chip away at success. Seth says — “Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.”
Quit the right things and lean into the right Dips. Winners quit the right things all the time. Recognize when you’re in a Dip. Pick the right Dips. In the Dip, Seth teaches us 3 curves: 1) the Dip, 2) the Cul-De-Sac, and 3) the Cliff. The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is where success happens. Stick it out, only if you’re going to get the benefits of being the best in the world. The Cul-De-Sac is where you work and work and work, but nothing much changes. These are dead-end jobs. The Cliff is a situation where you can’t quit until you fall off. If you’re in a Cul-De-Sac or Cliff, you need to quit. You need to quit these so you can refocus on something with promise.
Decide if you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur. In the Bootstrapper’s Bible, Seth teaches us that a freelancer sells their talents. While they may have a few employees, they’re doing a job without a boss, but not running a business. There’s no exit strategy or pot of gold, but they make their own hours and be their own boss. Examples include layout artists, writers, consultants, film editors, landscapers, architects, translators, and musicians. Seth writes that an entrepreneur is trying to build something bigger than themselves. They take calculated risk and focus on growth. An entrepreneur is willing to receive little pay, work long hours, and take on great risk in exchange for the freedom to make something big, something that has real market value.
It’s like walking through a maze. Seth on building a business from scratch — “Learn as you go. Change as you go. Building a business from scratch is like walking through a maze with many, many doors. Once you open one, 100 new doors present themselves. As you move your way through the maze, you need to stop and check your location. Look at a map. If you’re in the wrong place move. But if you’ve discovered a new place, there’s nothing wrong with exploiting it.”
Everyone is not your customer. Seth teaches us the key to failure – “the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” Listen to your real customers. It’s not the media, the investors, or the early adopters. Seth on everyone is not your customer – “The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers …” Seth on figuring out what your customers really want — “Most people have no clue what they want, and if you ask them, you’ll get a lame answer. Most people don’t know they want Pretty Woman or Slumdog Millionaire. They don’t know they want Purple Cow or one of your killer articles. So if you want to have an impact, all you can do is lead. You can’t ask.”
Feed, grow, and satisfy the tribe. Build your tribe. According to Seth, “You can lead a tribe of people, connect them, commit to them and create a movement.” Seth on building your tribe – “It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.”
Small is the new big. Focus on relevant, specialized, and unique. It’s the difference that makes the difference. According to Seth, small helps you be remarkable – “Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.”
Find the new scarce. Where there’s scarcity, there’s value.
It’s the FREE PRIZE INSIDE. Seth teaches us how to create a remarkable product – “The thing that makes something remarkable isn’t usually directly related to the original purpose of the product or service. It’s the FREE PRIZE INSIDE, the extra stuff, the stylish bonus, the design or the remarkable service or pricing that makes people talk about it and spread the word.”
The third century is about ideas. We went from farms to factories to ideas. Seth on the third century – “Fact is, the first 100 years of our country’s history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks.”
Spread your ideas. Be an idea merchant. Spread your ideas. Seth on being an idea merchant — “If you can get people to accept and embrace and adore and cherish your ideas, you win. You win financially, you gain power and you change the world in which we live.” According to Seth, spreading is a formula of 8 variables: Sneezers, Hive, Velocity, Vector, Medium, Smoothness, Persistence and Amplifier.
Don’t wait for perfect. Test your ideas. Learn and respond. Don’t wait for perfect to land in your lap, and don’t let it get in the way of sharing a good idea. Seth on testing ideas – “I’m in a hurry to make mistakes and get feedback and get that next idea out there.” Seth on perfect — “Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.” Seth on doing it well now, is better than perfect later — “The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.”
Don’t get paid to alter your behavior. Be authentic. There are two types of sneezers – the promiscuous sneezers and the powerful sneezers. Promiscuous sneezers can be motivated by money and rewards to sell ideas to a hive. Powerful sneezers have authority by setting a trend and can’t be bought. A powerful sneezer can be worth many more times a promiscuous sneezer. Seth on staying a powerful sneezer — “After I left Yahoo!, I had many opportunities to serve on boards and do endorsements. I chose not to. Why? Because I didn’t want to squander the powerful sneezing points I’d earned by writing my last book. … In every case, you’re getting paid to alter your behavior. That makes you more promiscuous and less powerful.”
The goal of reading is to choose what to change. Find 3 take aways when you read a business book. Seth on how to read a business book – “Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.”
The world changes whether you like it or not. The world’s getting bigger and smaller. Seth on how the world is changing – “The world’s getting bigger because you can look everywhere, but it’s also getting smaller because categories are getting specialized.”
The game of marketing has changed. It’s not price – it’s relevancy, difference, and value. Marketing is now tribal leadership. Small is the new big. Fire customers that aren’t right for your business. Attention is an asset. Permission marketing works better than spam – “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” You take word-of-mouth marketing to the next level with IdeaViruses. Tell the stories people want to believe. Products that are remarkable get talked about. Be authentic. You can’t fool people. According to Seth — “You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.” Marketing is an investment. Seth says, “If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.”
Feed, grow, and satisfy your business. Plan for the money. If there’s no money, you’re out of the game. In the Bootstrapper’s Bible, Seth shares 9 rules to take care of your business: 1.) find people who care about cash less than you do, 2.) survival is success, 3.) success leads to more success 4.) redo the mission statement and the business plan every three months, 5.) associate with winners, 6.) beware of shared ownership, 7.) advertise, 8.) get mentored, and 9.) observe those little birds that clean the teeth of very big hippos.

Top 10 Seth Godin QuotesHere are my top 10 favorite quotes by Seth:

“Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”
“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”
“Go ahead, do something impossible. “
“You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “
“Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what?”
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
“Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “
“If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?”
“Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.”

Quotes Organized by Category
I’ve included some of my favorite Seth Godin quotes below. For simple scanning, I’ve organized them using the following categories: General, Business, Change, Greatness, Ideas, Leadership/ Management, Marketing, Mediocrity / Status Quo, Strategy.

Category	Quotes
General	“A long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.” “Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.) Ignore everyone else.” “If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.” “If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it.” “If there’s time for an emergency, why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning? “ “If you could do tomorrow over again, would you? “ “If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true? “ “If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. “ “Just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.” “Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.” “Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.” “Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. “ “Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities. “ “We notice what we choose to notice.” “Who gets to decide what you want?” “Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “ “You are not your resume, you are your work. “ “You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.”
Business	“As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.” “Choose your customers, choose your future.” “Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.” “Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman. “ “Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new. “ “Everyone is not your customer. “ “Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker.” “Give up control and give it away … The more you give your idea away, the more your company is going to be worth. “ “If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. “ “In a world of free, everyone can play.” “It’s better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo.” “Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven’t done well. It’s that simple.” “Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.” “Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.” “One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. “ “Playing safe is very risky. “ “The application process changes the list of who applies. Your applicants reflect your methods.” “The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.” “The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.” “Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.”
Change	“Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.” “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.” “If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.” “Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.” “No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things” “Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.”
Greatness	“Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.” “Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.” “Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.” “Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record. “ “Go ahead, do something impossible.” “If there isn’t a good reason, go home. If there is, then do something … loud, now, and memorable.” “Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all. “ “When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.” “When the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days or a lifetime, you matter.” “When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.” “When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.” “You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “
Ideas	“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “ “Big ideas are little ideas that no-one killed too soon. “ “Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death. “ “No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.” “There’s no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it. “ “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
Leadership / Management	“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “ “If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. “ “Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.” “Leadership on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.” “’Teamwork’ is the word that bosses use when they actually mean ‘Do what I say’” “The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate. – When people ask you to tell them what to do, resist.”
Marketing	“Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.” “Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value. “ “But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about. “ “Good marketers measure. “ “Good marketers tell stories. “ “If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. “ “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million? “ “If you’re a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.“ “Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing though, that’s efficiency.” “Market-driven design builds the success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.” “Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.” “Marketing management is now tribal leadership. “ “Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power. “ “People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. “ “People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.” “Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts. “ “Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission–which is emotional connection.” “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. “ “The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. “ “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. “ “You can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.”
Mediocrity / Status Quo	“’Good enough’ stopped being good enough a long time ago. so why not be great? “ “If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.” “It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.” “It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.” “In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.” “Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters.” “Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules. “ “The reason they want you to fit in… is that once you do, then they can ignore you. “The status quo is leaving the building, and quickly.” “You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless. “ “You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”
Strategy	“Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve. “ “The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.”

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Happiness is a skill you can develop

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:45:00 +0000

Some people are born happy, while others have to work at it. Some have to work harder than others. Rather than work harder, work smarter. Luckily, with all the focus on happiness, we now have a better body of knowledge to draw from. Carlin Flora shares a collection of patterns and practices for skilled happiness from a variety of sources in her article, The Pursuit of Happiness, in Psychology Today.

Key Take Aways
Here are my key take aways:

We’re lousy at predicting what makes us happy. This is especially true when we try to make predictions from our past experience. Things are almost never as good or bad as we expect them to be. Our memory is a bad recording device. We recall beginning and endings better than the long middles.
Improve your self-talk. Your can lift yourself up or bring yourself down. Practice a positive internal dialogue. Another way to put it is, be your coach not your critic.
Find engaging activities. Focus on activities that are dynamic, surprising, and require your full attention. This is a way to find your flow in your day to day activities.
Feel your full range of emotions. Don’t fear your negative emotions. Just notice them, but don’t let them overwhelm or control you. Remember that what you resist persists.
Practice mindfulness. Don’t struggle against your negative emotions. Just let them be there without struggling against them. Be open and curious towards your feelings rather than making judgments.
Work towards goals. Don’t make happiness a goal. Enjoy the pursuit. Progress and pursuit are the key to happiness. Be sure to stop and smell the roses.
Be generous. Share more of yourself. Whether it’s your time, experience or wealth, giving is the key to getting true joy.
Be careful who you hang with. Your peer group can have a large influence on how you feel and what your expectations are. The more values you share, the more you’ll enjoy it.
Limit your choices. While more choices sound good, it can actually lead to frustration. You worry more about making the wrong choices, or you stress over lost opportunities. Enjoy the choices you do make.
Build your relationships. Make building strong personal relationships a priority. Your relationships can wax or wane. Invest your time and energy in your relationships rather than take them for granted.
Evaluate your well-being at the macro as well as the micro level. Step back and take a look at your life. What makes you happy day to day, may not be what makes you happy over the last 10 years. Use different time frames to find your personal trends in what makes you happy and to gain perspective.
Find out whether somebody else liked it. Chances are, you might too. We’re bad at predicting what we’ll enjoy. Rather than try and predict what you’ll like, ask somebody who’s been there and done that. One of the best ways to figure out whether you’ll enjoy something is to ask one of your friends. This goes for jobs or vacations or just about anything. The key here is to ask a friend who has similar values and taste.
Leverage your natural coping style. If you’re not a shiny, happy person, don’t pretend to be. Instead, leverage your natural style to be more effective. For example, maybe you can turn your stress into better performance. (see Use Stress to Be Your Best.)

I think the key themes boil down to how we talk to ourselves, how we respond to things, how we make meaning, who we spend time with, and how we make the most of what we’ve got. The other key thing is that happiness is dynamic and it’s not a static state. It’s about living, learning and growing, and rolling with the punches.

What is Happiness
Happiness is more like satisfied than ecstatic. Flora writes:

What is happiness? The most useful definition – and it’s one agreed upon by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, behavioral economists, positive psychologists, and Buddhist monks – is more like satisfied or content than "happy" in its strict bursting-with-glee sense. It has depth and deliberation to it. It encompasses living a meaningful life, utilizing your gifts and your time, living with thought and purpose.

We Lack the Skills to Get Out of Ruts
Rather than quick fixes, we need skills to get out of ruts. Flora writes:

Both the happiness and anti-happiness forces actually agree on something important – that we Americans tend to grab superficial quick fixes such as extravagant purchases and fatty foods to subdue any negative feelings that overcome us. Such measures seem to hinge on a belief that constant happiness is somehow our birthright. Indeed, a body of research shows instant indulgences do calm us down – for a few moments. But they leave us poorer, physically unhealthy, and generally more miserable in the long run- and lacking in the real skills to get us out of our rut.

You’re Wrong About What Will Make You Happy and You’re Wrong About What Made You Happy
We’re not good at predicting what will make us happy. Flora writes:

We’re terrible at predicting our future feelings accurately, especially if our predictions are based on our past experiences. The past exists in our memory, after all, and memory is not a reliable recording device: We recall beginnings and endings far more intensely than those long "middles," whether they’re eventful or not. So the horrible beginning of your vacation will lead you astray in deciding the best place to go next year. Gilbert’s take-away advice is to forgo your own mental projections. The best predictor of whether you’ll enjoy something is whether someone else enjoyed it. So simply ask your friend who went to Mexico if you, too, should go there on vacation.

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10 Ways to Think Like Bill Gates

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:42:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve asked various people at Microsoft about how Bill Gates thinks. I’ve asked people from his speech writers to people that have survived his executive reviews, where Bill is known for his grueling interrogations. I was always curious how somebody of that caliber flexed their mind and used their skills to slice and dice problems.

Bill Gates sees and thinks differently than most people do. He has an amazing ability to find the flaws, or see opportunities, or connect the dots. He can zoom in to details with precision or zoom out to the big picture. He can flip back in time or fast forward to the future. He also has the ability to focus on the merits of the idea or innovation before worrying about the business case. Chances are, you could benefit from Bill’s thinking skills, even if it simply means getting a new perspective on your problems. Whether you’re trying to change the world, or you want to unleash your best, it doesn’t hurt to be able to leverage the thought patterns of a billionaire and one of the world’s most influential philanthropists.

10 Ways to Think Like Bill GatesWhile I don’t think Bill will lend you his brain, you can do the next best thing. You can take some of this thought patterns and practices for a test-drive. Here are ten patterns to get you started:

Prioritize. “What’s the next best thing you should be thinking about?” It starts here. Time is your most limited and precious resource. This is about asking whether the problem is even worth your time. Before you throw cycles at it, figure out whether it’s worth it. Is it significant? How much time should you spend on it? For an example of how Bill Gates figures out how to prioritize, check out the following video: Bill Gates on Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Education.
Ask smarter questions. If you want better answers, ask better questions. Rather than getting stuck in one line of questioning, such as “what’s wrong with this?” or “what’s right with this?”, you can explore your thinking more deeply, by asking a range of questions. One of the skills we learn at Microsoft isPrecision Questions / Precision Answers. In this approach, there are 7 categories of precise questions: 1) Go / NoGo - Do we need to talk about this? 2) Clarification – What do you mean? 3) Assumptions – What are we assuming? 4) Basic Critical Question – How do we know this is true? 5) Causes – What’s causing this? 6) Effects – What will be the effects? 7) Action – What should be done?
Make data-driven decisions. This is one of the toughest switches to make. By default, most people make emotional decisions and then find data to support the decision. This means asking questions like, “what’s the data say?” This means getting informed, before you make your decision. This means evaluating the sources of data. It’s an extreme exercise in emotional intelligence to pause your emotional response, while you check your logic and critical thinking.
Divorce your ego. This is where you separate yourself from the problem. This is also about separating yourself from the solution. Instead, you hold the problem or solution out in your hands and inspect it from different angles. Rather than focus on whether you’re right, it’s about whether the solution is right. It’s about being able to beat up the thinking, without taking it personally.
Frame the problem. Framing a problem is simply how you look at a problem, just like how you frame a picture. It’s about choosing what to focus on, what’s in and what’s out. When you frame the problem, you bound it. Framing also helps you get a better perspective on the problem, as well as share the problem more effectively with others. Some questions to help frame a problem include: Who’s the customer? What are their needs and priorities? What’s happening in the market? What are competitors doing? What are our options for responding? How do we differentiate? How is technology changing and what possibilities does it offer our customers? What are the priorities for our business?
Get perspectives on the problem. This means being able to switch your perspectives. Rather than see the glass half-full or the glass half-empty, you should see both. Challenge yourself to switch back and forth from finding flaws to finding opportunities. If you only know how to play the Devil’s advocate, you have a limited view. Like a multi-faceted diamond, you should be able to look at the problem from different angles. This also means being able to broker in experts and get other people’s perspective on the problem. Problem solving is a team sport. It’s also about leveraging smart people without domain expertise. For example, you can take a dev manager in consumer devices and have him/her move into the enterprise or business applications.
Model the problem. By abstracting the problem into a model, you can think about it in simpler ways, without being bogged down by the implementation details. One of Bill Gate’s favorite tools is his whiteboard. A whiteboard makes it easy to sketch out ideas and visualize them. A whiteboard can help whether you’re trying to map out the problem or draw a solution. Keep in mind that George Box taught us that, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Think of the system and the ecosystem. Bill Gates has an engineering mind. He can see the problem as a system. You can map out the system by asking yourself questions along the line of, what are the bits and pieces? … How does it work? … How do the bits and pieces work together? … what’s the flow through the system? … what are the inputs and outputs? After you have a handle on the system, you can ask yourself about the ecosystem or the system of systems.
Think of the problem over time. It’s easy to look at the problem and just see it as a static snapshot. The challenge is playing out the problem or your solution over time. Time can dramatically change what it looks like. Consider the impact of trends. Consider sustainability. Some things that look good only temporary, and really break down when you apply time to them. Sometimes time is on your side. You might find that there may be better windows of opportunity.
Think strategically. Strategy guides your actions. You can think strategically along different lines. Consider the core of what you do (mission, vision, values, and goals.) Consider internal analysis (strengths and weaknesses, resources and capabilities, and benchmarking.) Consider external analysis (competitive analysis, opportunities and threats, and industry conditions.) Consider the organization design (structure, controls and incentives, culture and people.) Consider execution (roles, responsibilities, resources, action plans, measurement, and accountability.) Consider functional strategies (marketing and sales, operations, human resources, and R&D.) Consider strategic choices (corporate strategy and business strategy.)

If these thought patterns and practices don’t stand out as different or extraordinary, contrast them with some common default patterns:

less focus on emotional intelligence and more driven by emotional reaction
more likely to start thinking about a problem before asking which ones
more likely to ask a limited range of questions, from one specific angle or perspective (such as Devil’s advocate)
more likely to get lost in the details of the problem rather than step back, model it, and play with possibilities, unlikely to see the challenge as a system or think about the ecosystem (the players, the key levers, the centers of gravity … etc.)
unlikely to think about the problem over time (especially larger time frames like 1 year, 3 years, 5 years … or consider trends)
unlikely to think strategically over tactically, or get mired in tactical details before evaluating strategic options and differentiators, strengths, or weaknesses.

The good news is, thinking is a skill and there are plenty of resources that we can use to improve our thinking techniques.

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Success = Focus and Determination

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:35:00 +0000

FOCUS

As you're building your business, you can choose to win or lose.
No one sets out to lose, but they do, because they simply do not
stick around long enough to win. Winning requires hard work and
focus. Focus on what you need to get done and don't stop till you get there.

When you're first starting a business, it may seem like you're not getting anyplace or it's slow, but the best things usually follow the difficult times. You have to learn to FOCUS and stick with things.

Focus on how you CAN do something and not why you can't.

Can't NEVER did anything.

Ever met a person that tells you all the reasons why something WON'T work? That's why they are sitting in a dead end job. They don't know how to think out of the box, or run with something
but then they don't want you to be successful since they can't.

If your friends are negative and whiny get some new friends. You become like those you hand around with so look at those friends. Do you want to be like them or would you rather be like
those you admire and look up to.

GET GOING

All too often when the going gets rough, the weak give in and quit, and quitters never win and winners never quit. You can fail your way to the top if you just keep on going. Failures are simply temporary setbacks, however on the other hand if you let them defeat you, defeat is permanent.

We only go around once in life, so we want to make the most of it. If you learn to focus on where you want to be down the road, and blaze a trail, create a plan and work that plan you will arrive.

Talk to successful people not negative ones. Successful people have vision and focus. Negative people are fortunate if they can find their way to the refrigerator for another beer.

START YOUR JOURNEY NOW.

I like to think of building a business as a journey, like going
on a trip. How far do you think you'd get if you jumped into your car to start across country, from Florida to Washington without a road map, compus, or even sense of direction.

You may think you want to go to Washington, but unless you have some sort of map, guidelines or some solid directions,
you could be driving for years and not arrive. You need a plan,

a road map and real directions.

BUILDING A BUSINESS TAKES A PLAN

Why should a business be any different? If you do not have a solid plan and plan to work that plan, with drive and focus you'll be lost and forever wandering around wondering why you are not getting any place. You could go in circles for years.

Create that plan. Take all the shots, and go for it.

Remember you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so SHOOT for goodness sakes. You also reap what you sow, but if you don't sow, how do you expect to grow?

Replace the "THINKING about it" with ACTION and get going.
Don't stop and think of all the rules, and reasons or conditions
of the field - Just PLAY.

If we lived in a perfect world and everything fit in perfectly
challenges would not exist but then neither would the victories.
Victory is sweet, but before you can win you have to play
in the game.

JUMP IN NOW!

Just buckle down and go to work and JUST DO IT.

What are you waiting for, FOCUS and go for it! I love watching people grow into great leaders, and it's fun when they realize they can succeed.

Success comes after hard work, but it's worth the effort. If you don't get started though, or learn to focus and keep your eye on the target, you'll be going in circles forever and ever.

Start today as tomorrow NEVER comes! Today is the only day you know you have. Go to work and focus.

Your FUTURE is waiting for you. It starts TODAY.

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Determination for Success

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Villarosa) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:32:00 +0000

How important is determination and drive for success? Drive is a common characteristic among successful people. The good news is that just like luck and success, drive is a continuum. There’s examples where people with minimal drive, but they enjoy what they do, experience great success. On the other end of the spectrum, you find ruthless obsession.

What if you aren’t naturally driven? Here again, there’s good news. You can adopt successful strategies. What you lack in personality, you can make up for in approach.

In Tactics: The Art and Science of Success , Edward de Bono writes about the role of drive and determination in success.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

Drive is the one common characteristic among successful people. The one thing all successful people share is drive and determination.
Drive ranges from enjoyment to ruthless obsession. Drive can range from simply enjoying the path to what folks would consider “a little mad,” meaning a ruthless obsession for results.
A desire for personal power. One cause of drive is a pursuit of personal power, or an extension of their personality.
Enslaved by an idea. Some people become consumed by an idea. Their drive is fueled by the passion of bringing an idea to life.
Determination to finish the job. Some people are fueled by a passion for finishing what they started. They can’t stand the idea of a leaving something half-finished.
You don’t have to change your personality. If you’re not naturally driven, you don’t have to try to change your personality. Instead, adopt proven success strategies that characterize successful people.
Adopt success strategies of successful people. You can adopt proven strategies such as becoming more single minded and focused, a strong sense of direction, don’t take no for an answer, and become better at saying what you don’t like.

What I’ve learned through experience is that while drive is important, you need to know what you’re trading. For example, try to find balance between your conviction and your connection, so you don’t burn bridges or leave a trail of dead bodies in your pursuit of results. Try to invest in your body, your relationships, and fun during the pursuit of your goals, so that you enjoy the process. Goals are a vehicle. They are a means to an end, but not the end themselves. Be careful not to compromise your values along your journey.

Drive is The One Common Characteristic of Successful People
According to de Bono, determination is the one common trait among successful people:

As the reader will discover in this book, successful people are often very single-minded and determined. Indeed, it would be possible to pick this out as the one characteristic common to almost all successful people. It can take the form of drive: if you want something hard enough, you will get it. it can take the form of ruthlessness: let nothing stand between you and your goal. It can take the form of a strong sense of purpose. It can take the form of determination and persistence: accept failure only as a step on the path to success.

One Single Goal
de Bono writes that some people make big trade-offs in the pursuit of a single goal:

This type of determination comes close to fanaticism and what might be called ‘a little madness’. It implies a rather unnatural view of life, because one single goal becomes more important than any others. A person may be willing to sacrifice his wife, his children, his friends, his health, and even his life for this goal. At times the goal may seem very much like an obsession. At its extreme, obsession is a form of madness.

A Sense of Direction Urges Action
de Bono writes that having a direction helps somebody take action and gauge whether they are on track:

There are many advantages to powerful determination and a strong sense of direction. The sense of direction urges action. The sense of direction shapes the action. The sense of direction allows the value of the action to be assessed: has it got me nearer to my goal? The sense of direction allows all judgments and decisions to be made more easily: does this help me toward my goal or does this hinder me? Most people in their ordinary lives lack such a strong sense of value when taking a decision. Most people may have to take into account a soup of different factors such as family, health, enjoyment, career, etc., when making a decision. The strongly-success oriented person only takes into account one thing: the path to success.

Determination Ranges from Enjoyment to Obsession
de Bono writes that drive is a continuum:

As with luck there is, of course, a spectrum. At one end is the ruthless obsessed tyrant who could properly be called mad. At the other end of the spectrum is the person who enjoys what he or she is doing, enjoys his life and friends, and just seems to stumble into success (as with Nolan Bushnell, Norman Lear, or Sir Clive Sinclair). Readers may be surprised to find that most of the people in this book seem to fall into this second grouping.

Determination for Personal Power or Enslaved By an Idea
de Bono writes that some people are fueled by making an idea happen:

Determination and ruthlessness always seem to suggest a person who wants success and power for their own sake and as an extension of his or her personality. There is, however, another sort of obsession. This is when a person is enslaved by an idea. The person wants to see the idea work, wants to make it happen. Power, riches, and fame have virtually nothing to do with it. Determination can spring from this sort of obsession.

Determination to Finish the Job
de Bono writes that some people are compelled to finish what they started:

There is even a further sort of determination. This is where someone sets out to do something and takes the first few steps. There is then a determination to see things through, to finish that job. Once one block has been place on top of another, there is a compulsion to finish the building. This characteristic also becomes clear in some of the people mentioned in this book.

You Don’t Have to be Driven
de Bono writes that some people that aren’t naturally driven take a passive view on determination:

From a practical point of view it does matter whether we attribute success to a particular type of personality. Some people may feel that since their own personality is not ‘driven’ in this way, then there is little they can learn by reading about people who are so driven. Like the ‘luck’ explanation of success, this is defeatist and passive.

You Don’t Have to Change Your Personality
de Bono writes that you don’t have to worry about changing your personality:

I would not want to get into an argument as to whether people can or cannot change their personalities (through awareness training, counseling, or environmental change). It is not easy for someone to become ruthless by just willing himself or herself to be ruthless … A reader can, however, try to become more single minded and more focused. Once a reader perceives that a strong sense of direction may be an ingredient for success, it is possible to do something about it (for instance, by dropping other projects).

Adopt Strategies to Improve Effectiveness
de Bono writes that you can adopt strategies of people with determination and drive to improve your success:

A person who will not take ‘no’ for an answer and writes ten letters runs the danger of being a nuisance and a pest but may be more successful than the person who is turned off by first refusal. Such things may arise naturally from a personality or they may be adopted as strategy. You cannot will yourself to have a foul temper (even if this often seems to be most useful for success), but you can become much better at saying what you do not like. It may well be that having success-oriented characteristics by viruta of your personality is much more effective — nevertheless adopting some of them as deliberate strategies can also be valuable.

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