by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Resources, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 15 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Posteriorities
— From The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success by Brian Tracy.
Much has been said about priorities, but what about posteriorities? In his wonderful book The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, author and business guru Brian Tracy says, “Before you start something new, you must discontinue something old.” That is the Law of Posteriorities.
Our lives are full to the brim with many things to do and little time to do them. It’s time we examine all we do and determine whether we need to continue doing so.
“As your life changes, your priorities change as well. Certain things that were important at one stage of your life or career are no longer as important as you move to another stage of your life or to another level of responsibility. You must continually ask yourself, What activities in my life can I cut back on, delegate, or discontinue to free up more time for my most important activities?”
I’m sure you’re familiar with an organizing method that recommends giving away something when you get a new equivalent to avoid clutter. Say, you buy a new pair of shoes, then you give away an old pair of shoes. The law of posteriorities works in the same way, but with our activities instead of our closets.
“To start anything new, you must stop doing something old. We say that ‘getting in means getting out.’ Analyze your time carefully and have the courage to stop doing things that are no longer as important to you as other things could be.”
Keep in mind what we learned in this post: while “giving up” an activity sounds like a heavy sacrifice that we must reluctantly make, the truth is that it is not when we reframe it and simply see it as a choice.
Happy posteriorities!
ACTION
Note: On this post, both actions come directly from the book (instead of coming from me). After each rule is explained in the book, there’s a section called, “How you can apply this law immediately.” I liked the section for this Law so much that I’m including those actions below verbatim!
TODAY: “Analyze your work and make a list of the items that consume most of your time. Which of these activities could you discontinue or delegate to free up more time for higher value work?”
FUTURE: “Compare your daily activities against your annual income. Would you pay someone else our equivalent salary to do the things you are doing? If you wouldn’t, stop doing those things immediately and pass them on to someone who can do them almost as well as you can.”
Know someone who could use the Law of Posteriorities to free up the activity clutter in his/her life? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 52 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Ethics: The Golden Rule
— From Ethics 101: What Every Leader Needs To Know (101 Series) by John C. Maxwell
When leadership and business guru John C. Maxwell was approached to write a book on business ethics, he said, “There’s no such thing as business ethics—there’s only ethics. People try to use one set of ethics for their professional life, another for their spiritual life, and still another one at home with their family. That gets them into trouble. Ethics is ethics. If you desire to be ethical, you live it by one standard across the board.”
And what may that one standard be?
For Maxwell, it’s simple: the Golden Rule. This is the principle of treating others as you would want to be treated. (Wikipedia). “Asking the question ‘How would I like to be treated in this situation?’ is an integrity guideline for any situation.”
Given that there is an equivalent of the Golden Rule in every culture, language and religion, this is “the closest thing to a universal guideline for ethics a person can find.” And these are the four criteria as to why Maxwell believes so:
1. The Golden Rule is accepted by most people. If having an equivalent everywhere is not enough, “a case can also be made for the Golden Rule based on common sense. […] It is not unreasonable for any person to desire good treatment for others. Nor is it asking too much to expect others to treat people well. […] The Golden Rule can be used to create common ground with any reasonable person.”
2. The Golden Rule is easy to understand. “One of the wonderful things about the Golden Rule is that it makes the intangible tangible. You don’t need to know the law. You don’t need to explore nuances of philosophy. You simply imagine yourself in the place of another person. Even a small child can get a handle on that. There are no complicated rules and no loopholes.”
3. The Golden Rule is a win-win philosophy. “Have you met people who believe that in order for them to be winners, other people must be made to lose? […] When you live by the Golden Rule, everybody wins. If I treat you as well as I desire to be treated, you win. If you treat me likewise, I win. Where is the loser in that?”
4. The Golden Rule is a compass when you need direction. “Television commentator Ted Koppel says, ‘There’s harmony and inner peace to be found in in following a moral compass that points in the same direction regardless of fashion or trend.’ In a world with much uncertainty, I think many people are seeking direction. The Golden Rule can provide that. It never changes, even as circumstances do. It gives solid, predictable direction every time it’s used. And best of all, it actually works.”
ACTION
TODAY: Keep the Golden Rule in mind as you go about your day: How can you apply it better in every situation? Note that the Golden Rule is not a soft approach to business—you should expect and apply excellence and high quality, and not tolerate undesirable or rude behavior.
FUTURE: Make it a habit of applying the Golden Rule in all you do. All aspects of your life, and the people who surround you, will be better for it and will respond in the same way.
If you like this post, please share it with someone who will like it too! You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Opportunity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 3 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Leap and leap again
— From The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? by Seth Godin
Happy summer solstice!
In the wonderful book The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin recalls his summer camp adventures when he was a boy. He says, “I spent summers confronting what it meant to do what you wanted to do. That was a loaded obligation, because it meant you had to commit and then execute, without being able to blame the predicament of your choice on anyone else.”
The highlight of the lake, as Godin recalls, was the 24-foot-high diving board. “The deal was simple: If you climbed up, you had to jump off. It was too tricky (physically and emotionally) to climb down. Day after day, new initiates to the cult of the big leap would bravely climb up the tower. Then they’d get to the top and stop. They’d freeze in place, unable to move. Sometimes for hours. One kid once sat there for fourteen hours.”
So, what happened?
Godin then goes on to analyze what happened “between the time a kid started climbing the ladder and the internal system failure that occurred at the top of the board.” There was no new information presented. Why was then the child thrilled and excited at the bottom and frozen at the top?
“What changed was the volume of the argument in the leaper’s head.” At the bottom, part of the brain insists on going up because it will be “fun/brave/heroic/daring/wonderful, the adventure-seeking frontal lobe [of the brain] says.” Once you reach the top, the lizard brain kicks in and the internal dialogue changes completely. “Now the other part of the brain, the one that’s often more powerful, speaks up and insists (demands) that this nonsense stop. It’s high. This is dangerous. This is insane.”
So, what happens?
What happens next is an analogy for a lot of the things we do in life. “Amazingly, after the first jump, the deflowered leapers always do the same thing. They get out of the water, run to the steps, climb right back up, and do it again. Safety zone adjusted, comfort zone aligned. For now. And the opportunity is to make it a habit.”
We’ve all been through something like this: scared to death, we take the proverbial (or literal) leap, and when we do it, we want to leap again, and again.
What are you dreading to do now that you’d love to do again (or at least not be afraid to do) after you leap?
“Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Mary Schmich
ACTION
TODAY: Think of one thing that you’ve been postponing to do because you are afraid of it (could be something as simple as a conversation or as complex as a life changing event). What is the dialogue going on in your head? Is there something other than your fear preventing you from doing it? Put a deadline on your fear and decide to leap.
FUTURE: If, after doing something scary, as Godin says, our safety zone is adjusted and our comfort zone realigned, what would happen if we could envision that adjustment and realignment happening even before we leap? That would certainly make thing easier, wouldn’t it? How can we accelerate that mental process, or at least imagine it, before we leap so that when we do, we are fully convinced (or, at a minimum, not as scared that it takes us 14 hours to leap)? Think about this when you are dreading the next scary thing you need/want to do. It won’t be that scary on the other side. Leap.
Please take a leap and share this blog with someone who also needs to leap! You can share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Goals, Growth, Leadership, Planning, Productivity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 23 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Minimal effort means avoiding work
— From 10-Minute Reflections: One Month Of Daily Exercises That Will Spark Growth In Your Business by Graham Binks
This book is a very quick read of daily exercises to make us think about business in a different way. The author, Graham Binks, is an expert in helping businesses get the best out of their technology investments. He has worked with numerous business leaders, who often ask, “How do we know we’re doing enough?” To what his answer is, “Start by making sure you’re not doing too much.”
Whaaaaaat?!
Yes. To optimize processes, you and your team need to be doing the minimal effort necessary. But please note that this doesn’t mean a mediocre effort at all—on the contrary—it means the best effort without wasting any of it. Thus, avoiding work that turns out to be unnecessary and wasteful, and that could be geared to other productive efforts instead.
Binks shares that when you are planning a successful outcome and think through the steps required in the process, you’ll naturally go from start to finish. And when you’re repeating work that someone in your team has done in the past, they can vouch for the steps taken previously.
“But if you haven’t perfected this kind of work (or your team hasn’t experienced it at all), there’ll be guesswork in the plan. And with guesswork comes extraneous effort.” In his experience, Binks has seen many plans that specified work that turned out to be detached from the critical outcomes of the project.
Thus, he offers a simple review exercise for you and your team “to make sure your projects aren’t wasteful.” This works best with projects when the planning phase is nearly finished—before the actual work starts—or you can apply it as a debriefing exercise on finished projects to see what will work best in the future.
Exercise: Being Minimalist
1. List the 10 project activities that took the most effort to complete in the following way:
#1 _________________ Rank___ Skip?___
#2 _________________ Rank___ Skip?___
Etc.
2. Above, rank these activities by their importance to the project outcome—highest contribution to lowest.
3. Starting with the lowest ranked activity, ask whether the project would have been a success if this activity had been skipped.
If the answer is “Yes!”, congratulations. You’ve found an activity that is not required on the plan. Take it out and save everyone time and energy. Then repeat the exercise with the next activity up the list.
Sometimes, what seems to be a simple exercise can reveal profound inefficiencies. Hope this helps optimize your projects and simplify your effort for a better outcome!
ACTION
TODAY: Think of a project you’re about to start or one that you repeat often. Go through this exercise to find the optimal path to completion.
FUTURE: As you’re planning for projects, or as you finish them, go through this exercise to make sure you’re not doing too much (avoiding wasteful efforts) and your project is running as optimally and as smoothly as possible!
Know someone who needs to optimize their projects? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 30 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The power of positive rituals
— From The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
In The Power of Full Engagement, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz state that only 5 percent of our behavior is consciously done in the moment. Instead, they point out, we truly are creatures of habit: “As much as 95 percent of what we do occurs automatically or in reaction to a demand or an anxiety.”
If that is the case, how can we harness the power of habits or rituals? In this post we learned from Peter Shankman the importance of creating rituals. Rituals work because they become ingrained habits that lead us to the successful outcome we want.
But what is so special about rituals?
The power of rituals is that they “conserve energy,” that is, they are so deeply instilled that we don’t think about them. Every morning, among your ritual activities you brush your teeth. Do you think how to do it? Likely you don’t. You do it on autopilot. And it’s such a set ritual that you would never go a day without doing it!
Contrast rituals to will and discipline: “[the latter] imply pushing ourselves to action, [whereas] a well-defined ritual pulls us. We feel somehow worse if we don’t do it.”
Positive rituals are, “precise, conscious, acquired behaviors that become automatic in our lives, fueled by a deep sense of purpose.” The key is to keep our purpose and our goals in mind, and build positive rituals around them in all dimensions of life—physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. And when we create the environments and the routines for the rituals to take place, the payoff is clear because every ritual reinforces each other; and all together they push us to the top.
“Positive energy rituals are powerful on three levels,” the authors state. “[First,] they help us to insure that we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on. [Second,] they reduce the need to rely on our limited conscious will and discipline to take action. Finally, rituals are a powerful means by which to translate our values and priorities into action—to embody what matters most to us in our everyday behaviors.”
ACTION
TODAY: Think of your established rituals. What additional ritual could you build and peg to one of them so that it can help you reach your goals faster?
FUTURE: Don’t try to set up a bunch of new rituals all at once. Give yourself time to turn them into habits according to your values and priorities. Create one new ritual and do it for 3 months. Once you feel that you are missing something if you don’t do it, then you know it’s become a habit. That is when you know it’s established and you can then go on to build the next one.
Please create a ritual of sharing the daily posts with someone so that more people can benefit from the EntreGurus daily ideas. 😀 You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
