I hope you are off to a fantastic start! May 2019 be filled with happiness, success, and good health for you and your loved ones.
My family and I were watching a documentary called “The Last Man on the Moon” and there were a few quotes that struck me as incredibly insightful, beautiful, and inspiring, and I want to share them with you.
Gene Cernan, the astronaut protagonist, was remembering his time as a pilot in the U.S. Navy, when the space program was just starting. He was asked (informally) if he’d like to be a part of it. He thought to himself, “I’d love to do it, just give me the chance.” However, his internal hesitation came up immediately and he thought, “But by the time I get good enough, by the time I get qualified, by the time I meet all the requirements, there won’t be anything left to do. All the pioneering will be over.” And, at the end of his life, reflecting on his deeds and accomplishments, he emphatically stated: “Don’t ever shortchange yourself, you never, ever, know what fate has in store.”
After that, the documentary continued narrating and showing Cernan’s life. Once again, there was a scene where he’s looking back at his life, and says, “Don’t ever count yourself out, you’ll never know how good you are unless you try.” Then he encourages us to act:
“Dream the impossible and go out and make it happen. I walked on the moon, what can’t you do?”
With this in mind, my wish for you this year is that you get the chance to do something that you love. And if your internal hesitation pops up, don’t pay attention to it. Keep going because you never, ever, know what fate has in store for you. Give yourself the gift of trying, so that you can find out how good you are. Take action on your dreams and go out and make them happen.
Remember that you have to do something you’ve never done to get something you’ve never got.
I’m immensely grateful to you for being one of my wonderful Gurupies—a member of the EntreGurus family—and I’m cheering for you and wishing you a wonderful 2019.
What can’t you do this year? Imagine the possibilities!
The 12 days of Christmas refers to the period of celebration (secular and religious) from December 25 through January 5. And because it coincides with the period of time that I’m going to be out on vacation visiting my family, I thought I’d make a miniseries for you during this time with posts from 12 Books of Greatness.
I strongly believe that greatness starts within us, so all of the posts that I chose for these 12 days come from books that are tremendously insightful. My hope is that reading these posts will give you plenty of ideas and “a-ha!” moments to end 2018 strong and start 2019 on a high note!
Today is the last day of 2018… I hope this was a spectacular year for you and that you are ending full of joy, satisfaction, and hope for an even better year to come.
Today my heart is overflowing with gratitude: a big and heartfelt THANK YOU to you for coming along with me on this wonderful EntreGurus journey–this year has been magical! And I’m looking forward to another fantastic year ahead along with you.
Cheers to a blissful, healthy, and most prosperous 2019 for you and your loved ones,
Know someone who would like this book or this miniseries on 12 Books of Greatness? Please share it with them via email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, thank you!
Wishing you and yours the happiest of holidays! May 2019 bring you much happiness, prosperity, good health and everything your heart desires.
A big and heartfelt THANK YOU for being with me on this journey and letting me share with you the ideas and a-ha moments that I gather from the books I love.
Cheers to YOU and to another year with lots of reading, insights, and goals accomplished!
Today is Christmas Eve: the evening in which Santa Claus delivers millions of presents to the kids all around the world.
And today’s post is dedicated—with a BIG and heartfelt thanks—to all of the millions of helpers that make this incredible feat of happiness and toyness happen year after year.
In his book Thanks a Thousand, gratitude guru and best-selling author A.J. Jacobs went halfway around the world thanking everyone who made his morning cup of coffee possible. Along the way, he met Ed Kaufmann, head of buying at Joe Coffee (where Jacobs purchases his coffee every morning).
Jacobs recalls the conversation with Kaufmann, as the latter was surprised to hear that the author would be writing about him. “It’s kind of odd that you’re featuring me in your book,” Kaufmann said. “I’m usually more of a background guy. I’m a bassist.”
In his spare time, Kaufmann plays bass guitar in a rock band, so he meant that literally and figuratively: “I like being the bassist… Everyone wants to be the lead guitarist or lead singer, and we need those. But we also need bassists. I’m necessary, but I’m background.”
This concept struck the author and prompted him to dive deeply into it. Jacobs says, “In our society, we fetishize the lead singers. And not just in music. The front people in every field—art, engineering, sports, food—get way too much attention. The cult of celebrity has spread into every corner. We overemphasize individual achievement when, in fact, almost everything good in the world is the result of teamwork.”
And I would add to this that sometimes—as was the case in the book—some team members don’t know of each other’s existence. For example, the designer of the coffee cup lid, possibly didn’t know of the existence of the pest control people who make sure that the bags of coffee are not infested by moths in the warehouse; and these folks, in turn, had no clue about the existence of the people at the water reservoir who pick up animal droppings to prevent water contamination so that the water can be safely used in making coffee.
Yet, for those that do know who is in their team but fail to thank and acknowledge, psychologists have coined the term responsibility bias. Jacobs points out that, “For one thing, it causes a lot of pain and resentment among the billions of unacknowledged bass players in our world. But its long-term consequences might be even worse. By elevating individual achievement over cooperation, we’re creating a glut of wannabe superstars who don’t have time for collaboration. We desperately need more bassists in the world… The idea of the lone (person achieving success on his or her own) warps reality.”
And that is why I don’t want to warp reality and, instead, I want to thank ALL of you who help Santa Claus year after year. Millions of kids rejoice because of you. While Santa is indeed the lead singer, and his elves and reindeer are the lead guitarists, the rest of you are the bassists who help make it happen.
We would need Jacobs to write another book to figure out all the ways in which people help Santa Claus all over the world, but from:
The farmers who take care of the cows that produce the milk in the glass left for Santa
To the cookie makers whose cookies are left in a plate for Santa next to the milk above
To the schoolteachers who teach and help kids how to write a letter
To the paper mills that produce the paper in which the letters are written
To the camera makers for making memories of opening the gifts on Christmas Day…
Every one of us plays a role, especially, the parents: thanks for taking care and raising good kids so that Santa can bring them gifts at the end of the year. The world is a beautiful and better place because of all that you do for your children.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you for making this beautiful tradition happen. 🙂
A very merry Christmas to you and yours with much love and gratitude!
ACTION
TODAY: Think about the enormity of the effort—individual and collective—that represents bringing toys to all children in the world… No wonder there are so many big and small roles that people play to make this happen! Santa indeed has millions of helpers.
FUTURE: As you gather with your family to enjoy Santa’s gifts tomorrow, play the gratitude competition that A.J. Jacobs plays with his family (see Today’s Action here). In this case, modify it to suit Christmas and Santa Claus: think of the most obscure and furthest-removed role that you can think of in terms of helping Santa Claus. How about the mill workers who produce steel to make the nuts and bolts that hold together the sleigh? Or how about the rig workers in the North Sea who drill for oil which is then used to make the synthetic hair on a doll? Or the cotton farmer whose fabric was used for Santa’s clothes? You can spend hours having fun and being grateful! And for more on gratitude check out the series of videos where I interview A.J. Jacobs.
Please help me spread the holiday cheer by sharing this post with other Santa’s helpers via email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, thank you!
As odd as this sounds, “annual goals and plans are often a barrier to high performance,” say Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, productivity gurus and authors of the wonderful book The 12 Week Year. The key to productivity, they say, is to discard annual goals.
The authors make the assertion that “there is no question you will do better with annual goals and plans than without any goals or plans.” However, they have found that thinking in yearly increments inherently limits performance.
How is this possible?
It’s actually very simple: we all fall into the trap of annualized thinking. This is the mistaken belief that there’s a lot of time left in the year to do whatever we want and that, at some point, later in the year, “we will experience a significant improvement in results.”
The biggest mistake of all, though, is having an optimistic delusion that we will be able to have much more time later to catch on and do what we haven’t done at this point.
“The fact is that every week counts! Every day counts! Every moment counts! We need to be conscious of the reality that execution happens daily and weekly, not monthly or quarterly.”
Thinking in shorter time frames—12 weeks for example—is a much better way to accomplish your goals. This is the key to productivity: working in sprints.
“The result is a heightened sense of urgency and an increased focus on the critical few, those important core activities that drive success and fulfillment, and the daily executions of those items to guarantee the achievement of your long-term objectives.” By virtue of having the deadline near, you never lose sight of it, and this period is long enough to accomplish things and short enough to have a constant sense of urgency and thus, a bias for action.
And, of course, at the end of every sprint, you have a celebration—just as you would at the end of the year. It may be big or small, but you take some time to enjoy what you’ve just accomplished, reflect on what went well and what didn’t, rest, reenergize, and get ready for the next sprint.
Want to try one of these working sprints out with me? I’m running another one of my Achieve in 90 (90-day sprint program) after the New Year and will be opening registration soon. Sign up here to be notified when it’s open.
ACTION
TODAY: As the New Year approaches, think about a goal that you could accomplish in a sprint. Set the time in your calendar and try it out. (Spoiler alert: You’ll never want to come back to annualized thinking after that!)
FUTURE: Set the habit of working in sprints. While 12 weeks is fantastic, sometimes you may need just a month instead, depending on your goal: you set the timeframe and deadlines. It works incredibly well and you’ll love it.
Know someone who would like today’s idea? Please share this post via email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, thank you!
In parts 1, 2, and 3 of this miniseries we’ve been learning from A.J. Jacobs how to be more grateful and the importance of actively practicing gratitude towards our wellbeing. In today’s video (below), A.J. shares the importance of teamwork and seeing ourselves and what we do as part of something bigger, and he tells two great stories to illustrate this point. “We don’t do anything completely by ourselves,” he says. And that is true: we always have help and we can—and should—get it when we get stuck.
In the book, Jacobs mentions how we’re all interconnected and illustrates this point by mentioning the enormous efforts and logistics behind his cup of coffee:
“By the time I take a sip, the [coffee] bean has been on a nine-month-long journey of 2,500 miles across the equator. It has traveled by motorcycle, truck, boats, vans, pallets, shoulders, and forklifts. It’s been stored in buckets, bags, tubs and metal containers the size of a small apartment. It’s come down a tree, descended a mountain, docked in ports, navigated Customs, been loaded into a warehouse, rattled around in trucks.”
The author went on to thank virtually everybody in this supply chain. And when he realized that a lot of these efforts required steel, he decided to follow that trail and thank the people involved in making steel at the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Indiana.
“My coffee wouldn’t exist without steel. The ships and trains and trucks that carry the beans are made of steel, as are the stop signs and bridges and docks on their routes. Steel is in coffee scoopers and roasting machines, refrigerators and spoons […] brewing machines, and so much else necessary for my favorite drink.”
What struck Jacobs and made him realize that the loop was closing, was a conversation that he had during one of his final interviews with an engineer involved in forging steel. The engineer said, “Well, I’m grateful to coffee.” And then he went on to explain, “You have to thank the coffee itself. Because the steel workers drink a lot of coffee.”
Jacobs wrote that he loved the engineer’s point: “So meta, so recursive, and so true. You need coffee to make coffee. Coffee begets coffee.”
And he closes with a beautiful quote (both in the book as well as in the video) that recognizes how we are all interconnected. Our paths overlap and intersect everywhere. If we take the theory of the six degrees of separation—or the six degrees of gratitude that A.J. applied—we will see that it is, indeed, a very small world and that we need each other’s help all over the map to produce something as simple as a cup of coffee.
Today’s video (4:21 min) is the last in this miniseries on gratitude. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! Let me know which was your favorite part in the comments here.
And if you are in New York, please join me on December 4 at the Business Library for a fireside chat on gratitude and business with the wonderful A.J. Jacobs. Here are the details.
ACTION
TODAY: Something fun to do: As part of the recent launch of his Thanks a Thousand book, A.J. decided to send 1,000 handwritten thank you notes to his readers. If you’d like him to send you one, simply go to ajjacobs.com/thanks.
FUTURE: Pick something that you really like and go on a gratitude trail. It doesn’t have to be as extensive as A.J.’s, yet you can make it as interactive and fun as you wish. Involve your loved ones, friends or colleagues. They’ll have fun too and you’ll build beautiful memories together. Spread gratitude and it’ll come back to you many times over.
