by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 59 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How do you grade yourself?
— From Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers.
Today we have another idea full of wisdom from one of my favorite entrepreneurship gurus, Derek Sivers. As he was in New York City, he noticed that there were many buildings that said TRUMP on them. And even as he was driving into the rural countryside, he saw a Donald J. Trump park (this is before Trump became President).
“It made me wonder if he grades himself according to how many valuable properties bear his name,” says Sivers. “Plenty of real estate tycoons have made billions without putting their names of everything, but maybe that’s his measure.”
Then the author points out that “we all grade ourselves by different measures.”
For some people, it’s as simple as how much money they make. When their net worth is going up, they know they’re doing well.
For others, it’s how much money they give.
For some, it’s how many people’s lives they can influence for the better.
For others, it’s how deeply they can influence just a few people’s lives.
For Sivers, he says, “it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that is not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.”
He challenges us to think about how we grade ourselves. Because, he says, “it’s important to know in advance [how you grade yourself], to make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.”
So, how do you grade yourself? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: Take a moment to ponder how you grade yourself. I’ve come to the realization that, depending on the stage of my life, I’ve graded myself one way or another. Think about the stage you are in and how you grade yourself now: Is it consistent with who you are today and your ideas and goals? Or are you still grading yourself with some measure from the past? Give yourself a grading upgrade if that is the case.
FUTURE: As you embark on future goals and projects think of how you will define success and how you will grade yourself. The answers must be congruent and aligned.
Know someone who needs upgrade his or her grading? Please share this post: Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Proudly exclude people
— From Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers.
“You know you can’t please everyone, right?” Asks Derek Sivers, musician and entrepreneurship guru, in his book Anything You Want.
If we instinctively answer YES to his question, agreeing that we know it’s impossible to please everyone, why do most businesses try to be everything to everybody? No wonder they can’t get people’s attention!
What to do about this?
Sivers says, “You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you’re not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.”
The author shares the example of The Hotel Café, a music venue in Los Angeles that is a no-talking club.
Yes, you read that right: “Big signs read, NO TALKING DURING PERFORMANCES! Performers are encouraged to stop the show if someone is talking, and let the person know that he can go to any other club in town to talk over the music. This is the one place in L.A. where you can sit and really listen to the music, which, of course, makes it the most popular music venue in town.”
Sivers also shares his own experience with CD Baby (the company he founded and later sold for millions):
When CD Baby got popular, I’d get calls from record labels wanting to feature their newest, hottest acts on our site.
I’d say, “Nope. They’re not allowed here.”
The record label guys would say, “Huh? What do you mean not allowed? You’re a record store! We’re a record label.”
I’d say, “You can sell anywhere else. This is a place for independents only: musicians who chose not to sign their rights over to a corporation. To make sure these musicians get the maximum exposure they deserve, no major-label acts are allowed.”
He goes on to say, “It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.” And he encourages us, “Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.”
They will value you as the best in the world.
ACTION
TODAY: Think of your audience: whether you have a business, work in one, or do volunteer work for an organization. What can you do to—purposefully and intentionally—niche down and focus solely on your target?
FUTURE: Every time you come up with a new project, product, service, idea, etc., make it a habit to define who your audience is and who is not. Share it out loud in the planning and promotions, and once established, keep sharing it. This will act as a filter so that you don’t have to spend as much time and energy later on explaining or excluding.
Know someone who needs to niche down and proudly and loudly exclude? Please share this post: Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Goals, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Don’t be a hero
— From REWORK: Change the way you work forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
“A lot of times it’s better to be a quitter than to be a hero,” say Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
Whaaaaat?!
The authors of Rework explain: “Let’s say you think a task can be done in two hours. But four hours into it you’re still only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think, ‘But I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent four hours on this!’ So you go into hero mode. You’re determined to make it work (and slightly embarrassed that it isn’t already working). You grab your cape and shut yourself off from the world.”
Sometimes that sheer determination and work overload can produce your desired results. “But,” the authors ask, “is it worth it?” Probably not is the answer. “The task was worth it when you thought it would cost two hours, not sixteen.”
Yet we feel terrible to leave behind, as incomplete, that investment of time and effort. While you will be the one to decide whether it’s worth it or not, you can help decrease the emotional overload by purposefully ignoring sunk costs, as you cannot get them back.
As world-traveler and side hustling guru, Chris Guillebeau, says in this post, regardless of how much time you’ve spent, “consider the next [period] of your life, not the previous investment that brought you this far.”
Look at it this way, “In those sixteen hours you could have gotten a bunch of other things done.” Plus, by going into hero mode, “you cut yourself off from feedback, which can lead you even further down the wrong path. Even heroes need a fresh pair of eyes sometimes—someone else to give them a reality check.”
The authors share how they’ve experienced and solved this problem firsthand: if anything takes them more than two weeks, they bring in someone else to take a look. That someone else might not do any work on the task, but they give their opinion. “Sometimes an obvious solution is staring you right in the face, but you can’t even see it.”
And while, most of the time, we tend to associate quitting with failure, “sometimes that’s exactly what you should do,” the authors point out. “If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.”
Remember, we can get or make almost everything back, except time. Don’t be a hero to defend a project that is dragging on for too long, instead, be the hero that defends your time and the best use of it.
And while you’ll find that sometimes you cannot “quit” the project altogether, because it’s out of your control, and it continues to drag on, look for ways to substitute yourself. Is there someone whose time and talent are better spent on this than yours? Can you ask for help? Can you outsource it? Think creatively and you’ll come up with the best solution.
To dispel the myth of quitting as a failure, here are some other posts about that: Selective quitting, Quit before you start, and Understanding when to quit and when to stick.
Let me know in the comments here if you’ve ever gone into hero mode and what you learned about it!
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at your tasks at work and life. Is there a particular one that is taking longer than anticipated? Are you thinking about going into hero mode or already there? Reexamine the situation and consider how you can solve it (if it needs solving at all) so that you can be a good steward of your time.
FUTURE: Keep track of where your time goes for a week or a month, it’s a great exercise, as only that way we can truly see how much time we spend on hero mode without necessarily knowing about it. Sometimes we go into microhero mode and don’t even detect it: that extra long phone conversation, that meeting that went on for too long, etc., they all add up and we don’t even notice except when we look at the data in front of us. Time management guru, Laura Vanderkam, has a simple but effective time tracking sheet and a time makeover guide (it’s free).
Know someone who is about to go into hero mode? Save him or her some time! Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Collaboration, Creativity, Growth
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 8 seconds.
Hi there!
EntreGurus is celebrating 250 posts today and I wanted to say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, for reading it and for coming along for such a joyous ride!
It’s an honor and a privilege to share a daily idea with you, and I hope so far you have experienced many a-ha moments and will continue to experience them as we go along.
In the spirit of fun and celebration, I want to share some fun stats with you.
If I were to put all the posts together in one document the results would be:
- 380 Pages
- 4,497 Paragraphs
- 17,265 Lines
- 157,055 Words (as a comparison, a regular business book averaging 200 pages has 50,000 words.)
- 738,558 Characters without counting spaces
- 892,369 Characters with spaces (this would be the equivalent of 6,374 tweets at 140 characters each.)
Crazy awesome, isn’t it?
I made this word cloud that shows the most used words throughout all the posts:
And here’s a table with the top 50 words throughout the posts. (Thanks to databasic.io/en/wordcounter for the great online app to count the times a word appears in a document!)
| RANK # |
WORD |
FREQUENCY |
RANK # |
WORD |
FREQUENCY |
| 1 |
time |
768 |
26 |
every |
251 |
| 2 |
today |
730 |
27 |
go |
248 |
| 3 |
one |
635 |
28 |
mind |
244 |
| 4 |
people |
565 |
29 |
like |
236 |
| 5 |
make |
520 |
30 |
would |
231 |
| 6 |
idea |
486 |
31 |
better |
227 |
| 7 |
work |
485 |
32 |
important |
226 |
| 8 |
get |
442 |
33 |
person |
225 |
| 9 |
take |
383 |
34 |
new |
216 |
| 10 |
want |
382 |
35 |
ideas |
214 |
| 11 |
way |
378 |
36 |
book |
210 |
| 12 |
action |
355 |
37 |
good |
206 |
| 13 |
think |
343 |
38 |
many |
205 |
| 14 |
things |
328 |
39 |
give |
202 |
| 15 |
know |
317 |
40 |
see |
198 |
| 16 |
us |
313 |
41 |
much |
197 |
| 17 |
day |
308 |
42 |
keep |
195 |
| 18 |
life |
306 |
43 |
help |
192 |
| 19 |
need |
293 |
44 |
change |
192 |
| 20 |
future |
292 |
45 |
someone |
189 |
| 21 |
success |
283 |
46 |
others |
187 |
| 22 |
something |
263 |
47 |
great |
180 |
| 23 |
business |
261 |
48 |
done |
176 |
| 24 |
best |
260 |
49 |
find |
173 |
| 25 |
says |
251 |
50 |
say |
173 |
Please let me know in the comments here which one has been your favorite post so far and why — I’d love to write a post listing the most popular ideas from EntreGurus and feature your comment.
Thanks a lot again for reading, and I look forward to continuing to share with you the ideas from the books I read every day.
With much gratitude,
Helena
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Opportunity, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 56 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Encore Effect – Part 6
— From The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do by Mark Sanborn
Welcome back to the last part of this miniseries. So far, we have learned what the Encore Effect is (from the book by the same name from leadership guru and author Mark Sanborn) and understood what it takes to create a remarkable performance, the one that causes your audience to want more and more.
The author has focused on several Ps along the way: passion, preparation, practice, etc., as the ingredients to create a remarkable performance. However, all the while, he’s been wondering what came first: the remarkable performance or the remarkable person?
“Distinguishing between remarkable performances and remarkable people is like asking which came first—the chicken or the egg?”
Sanborn says that remarkable performances often result in increased rewards. “These rewards may include money, but they also come as increased exposure, recognition, influence and opportunity. […] The person who strives to perform more remarkably without also focusing on becoming a more remarkable person is missing the larger point.”
So, how do we ensure that, along with our remarkable performances, there is also growth in the personal area?
Sanborn suggests “six areas of focus that, when developed and mastered, can’t help but make anyone a remarkable person.” He calls this The Pyramid of Possibility, and pictures each of the six areas—each one starting with a P—like an inverted pyramid (that is, in a V shape) “with potential as the foundation for being remarkable and personalization as the highest expression of it.”
It looks like this:
The Pyramid of Possibility
\ Personalization /
\ Persistence /
\ Principles /
\ Passion /
\ Purpose /
\ Potential /
Let’s take a quick look at each of the six Ps on the Pyramid.
Potential: “Our potential—both individually and collectively—has no known limits. Many of us know how good we are at our jobs and responsibilities, but none of us knows how good we could be. That is the magic and mystery of our potential.”
Purpose: “Potential without purpose is like a sheet of metal that has not yet been formed to make a useful object. Feed that sheet of metal into a press and its value is transformed. Every human being has unlimited potential. But we need the press of purpose to create a channel for expression and action. Purpose focuses potential.”
Passion: “Passion is the fire-in-the-belly that we bring to human endeavors. Of course, passion that is not tied to purpose is like lightning firing in the sky… But electricity that has a purpose—well, that’s a different story. That kind of energy can run a household of light up a city.” (For more on passion, read this post.)
Principles: “What are the beliefs that allow you to shape your world your performances) instead of being shaped by it? [… Remarkable people are] unswervingly committed to their core values, ethics and personal and spiritual beliefs…When what you say is reflected and amplified by how you live, you are almost certain to live a remarkable life.”
Persistence: There’s an important difference between persistence and endurance. “ Remarkable performers and people don’t simply endure—they exercise persistence. They refuse to give in to despair, and they work hard at doing what’s right. Persistence is a strategic word that suggests purposeful action…”
Personalization: England’s equivalent to the U.S.’ American Idol is The X Factor, where the X refers to that one “elusive and indefinable ‘star’ quality that separates one performer from the rest.” For the purposes of personalization, Sanborn wants you to think instead on what he calls the “U Factor”: “those qualities that make you unique among the world’s performers. The U Factor is not something that you have to acquire or search for. It’s something you already possess, and something no one else has… It’s how you use purpose, passion, principles and persistence to make your actions you.”
And with that, this miniseries on The Encore Effect comes to a close. I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it. What was your favorite part? Did you get any a-ha moments while reading it? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: Think about your potential. How do you see yourself? How do you see others? The author asks us to ponder, “do you see yourself as ‘finished’ in terms of your spiritual and career advancement or as just getting started?”
FUTURE: Think about your goals. On which of them are you just enduring vs. purposely persisting to make them happen? Make a list of next steps to move that goal forward – there are 100 days left in the year for you to make it happen or to advance it significantly!
Know someone who is an encore performer? Please share this miniseries with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 17 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Encore Effect – Part 4
— From The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do by Mark Sanborn
As promised, today we’re going to talk about PASSION. This is one of the various Ps that are needed to achieve a remarkable performance as explained in the book The Encore Effect. Stay tuned over the next few days of this miniseries to learn about the other “P” components.
In yesterday’s post, the author, Mark Sanborn, said, “Passion is the fuel that drives performance.” Today, he expands on a very important point about passion: “remarkable performance isn’t just about what we do; it’s also about how we do it.”
And he centers on an important point. “Life isn’t just about living our passions but about living passionately.” And while subtle when reading, this makes a world of difference once we understand it.
Sanborn explains, “In the everyday world, most of us don’t get to focus exclusively on doing those things we are passionate about. The solution? Do everything important with passion.”
No matter your role, if you infuse it with passion, creativity, and enthusiasm, you’ll guarantee increased value in the eyes of those around you. This, in turn, will generate opportunities and doors will open for you. “As a parent or spouse, as a volunteer in your church or community, as an employee making a sales call, teaching a class, or leading a company, bringing passion to what you do each day is an exercise in living fully and influencing others by your example.”
“The good news is that passion can be created and stoked. It’s up to you to do so.”
So, how can we develop and cultivate passion?
Sanborn suggests the following five things:
1. Study and learn. “You can go a long way toward becoming a passionate performer by buying the best books, subscribing to the best magazines and going to free university lectures [online]. […] Given the unlimited amounts of information available today, there is little justification for anyone not being a reader [hmmm, let me tell you about a blog that can help you with this… 😉 ] There is no shortage of ways to become an expert in your field—and grow more passionate in the process.”
2. Use small achievements or successes to fuel larger ones. “Remarkable performances are like losing weight. Which goal sounds more achievable—losing one pound per week for a year or losing fifty-two pounds? The result may be the same, but psychologically these goals are as different as night and day. Focus on achieving a remarkable performance today, then another one tomorrow.”
3. Look to other passionate people as role models. “Reach out to people you respect for their passion and performance. Start a group of like-minded people with similar goals. Avoid the people who act as ‘blockers.’ Remember, passion begets passion.”
4. Plug the leaks. “Examine those areas in your life where your resources (your time, talent, and skills) are not being put to the best use. […] Don’t spend time on things that diffuse your focus and do not advance your goals.”
In here, Sanborn tells the story of a student asking Albert Einstein how many feet were in a mile, and him saying he didn’t know. Upon seeing the student’s amazement, Einstein explained, “I make it a rule not to clutter my mind with simple information that I can find in a book in five minutes.”
5. Make passion part of your life. “Where the head goes, the heart will follow. You may not feel passionate, but when you decide you are going to become a passionate person, you will become one. If you act the part and succeed in the part, one day you will discover that you have become the part! If you deliberately and consciously act with passion, you will come to feel that passion.”
All remarkable performances require effort and energy, but they start with and continue to be fueled by passion all along.
As you know, I’m passionate about sharing the ideas I come across in the books I read (…barely noticeable, huh?). What are you passionate about? Let me know in the comments here.
And please come back tomorrow, as we will take a look at more of the “P” elements for remarkable performances in this miniseries.
ACTION
TODAY: Let’s plug the leaks today: find your sources of distraction and eliminate [or appease] them. For example, social media. If I don’t set limits for myself, I go in to read ONE tweet and I’ll still be there 2 hours later… ugh!… (#NotProud). While you don’t have to eliminate it, can you give yourself a set amount of time, timer-in-hand, so that you don’t get sucked into a time vortex? Can you silence or eliminate the notifications on your phone so that they don’t distract you until you are actually on your specified time for this? What other leaks are there in your life that you might be able to plug today?
FUTURE: Create the intention and commit to develop and cultivate passion in those areas of your life and business that are important for you. You will enjoy them more and become a remarkable performer at them.
Know someone who is an encore performer? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
