by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 27 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Great Ones Think Big
— From 177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class: The Thought Processes, Habits and Philosophies of the Great Ones by Steve Siebold
“The life each of us lives is the life within the limits of our own thinking. To have life more abundant, we must think in limitless terms of abundance.” – Thomas Dreier
In 177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class, Steve Siebold makes an important assertion about successful people (whom he calls world class), “Their philosophy seems to be, ‘If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.’ Their love- and abundance-based consciousness is the engine that drives their big thoughts and creative ideas.”
In contrast, Siebold states that “average performers think about how to survive with the least amount of pain and struggle,” instead of planning a brilliant future by thinking big.
The author suggests asking the people around you what they think about at any given time. He says, “You might be surprised to learn how many think about just getting by. The world class refers to this as ‘selling yourself short.’”
Siebold highlights the differences in mindset: “One group views the world as a scary place, and the other sees it as an exciting adventure with endless possibilities. [Most people] see life as a threat; the great ones see it as a game.”
In sum, Siebold says, the difference in mindset and worldview is so dramatically different between these two groups, that when you talk to them “it’s as though you’re speaking to people from different planets.”
“The great ones are fearless and focused on manifesting their ultimate dreams… [and their] abundance-based consciousness drives them to think and dream bigger with each passing success.”
ACTION
TODAY: This action comes directly from the book: “Review your vision for your life and think about your greatest dreams. Are you selling yourself short? Are you thinking too small? Are you letting fear hold you back from the abundance of life? Do you really have what it takes to hit it big? (Hint: yes!) Rewrite your vision today and go bigger than ever. Trust in your ability to find a way to make your dream come true. You can do it!”
FUTURE: Two great books to expand your mind to keep thinking big and see opportunity and possibility everywhere are: (1) The Magic of Thinking Big, by David J. Schwartz. Here are some posts I’ve written about it. This book was written in 1959, but the advice is as valid now as it was back then. (2) The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. This book is one of my absolute favorites and I can’t recommend it enough. Here are the posts I’ve written about it. If you like audio books, you’ll love listening to it: the music is beautiful, as Ben Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
Please share this post with the great ones around you, and ask them to share their worldview, it’s always wonderful to learn how they see the world! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Planning, Productivity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 35 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Maker’s Schedule vs. Manager’s Schedule
— From Paul Graham’s blog by Paul Graham, Co-Founder & Partner, Y Combinator
A few years’ back, Paul Graham wrote a post on his blog where he finally deciphered the incompatibility between scheduling: there are people who deal with their time as managers, and people who deal with theirs as makers. And then there are the hybrids.
Hmmmm, what does all this mean?
Let me explain:
Graham writes in his blog, “The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals… When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done. Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command.”
The makers are programmers, writers, and anybody who needs large chunks of time to devote to focus on making whatever it is that they do. “They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
“Each type of schedule works fine by itself,” Graham continues. “Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.”
Managers and makers beware, now that we know how the others operate. Graham offers a solution that has worked for him: office hours clustered at the end of one day. That way managers and makers can indeed meet, but the meeting is not intruding into precious making time.
But what happens when you are a hybrid of both manager and maker? I know I am. And I thought I was going crazy for having a back-to-back meeting schedule on certain days, and reserving other days for long, uninterrupted chunks of time that I defended vehemently and refused to break up with meetings. On the latter, I’d go into “Monk Mode” as Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, calls it.
I had, not knowing, created maker’s days and manager’s days in my calendar. Thanks to Graham, I now know that this is not a crazy thing to do if you’re a hybrid. You can also partition your day into maker’s hours and manager’s hours.
Graham’s case is also a good illustration. As the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most famous companies to provide seed funding for startups, when he and his team were starting, he “used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt [him]. Then [he’d] sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what [he] called ‘business stuff.’” He explains, “I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”
Understanding these two schedules, and the way in which they interact or the way in which you can combine them if you are a hybrid, brought much clarity and peace of mind to me. I hope it will do the same for you and the way in which you use your time.
Are you a maker, a manager or a hybrid? Let me know in the comments here.
A reminder that, tomorrow, starts the 90-day sprint towards the end of the year — woohoo! Check out Achieve in 90 to focus on finishing your 2018 goals!
ACTION
TODAY: Figure out how whether you’re a manager or a maker, or both.
FUTURE: Now that you know about these two types of schedules, you can rearrange yours for your optimal performance as well as the optimal way in which you interact with your team and the outside world. Here’s a great post with some tips on how to do this.
Please share this post with managers, makers and hybrids, they will thank you! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 16 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: There are only 3 things leaders must do to succeed
— From The Art of People: 11 Simple People Skills That Will Get You Everything You Want by Dave Kerpen
“Are you kidding me, Dave? There may be no ‘I’ in team, but there sure as hell is an ‘I’ in leadership. Now quit [clowning] around and step up and become a leader!”
Wow… Dave Kerpen, social media guru and author of The Art People, recalls being admonished with those words by Robb High, a mentor of his, after Kerpen had mentioned his belief in “everyone being equal, working together as a team, and supporting one another.”
The answer from High? “That’s all fine, Dave. I’m all for teamwork. But every team needs a leader.”
Kerpen says, “In an effort to have everyone feel that his or her voice was heard and that everyone was important, I had failed to become an effective leader.” And while he recognized the importance of what High was saying, “the problem was that [Kerpen] had no specific idea how to become a leader.”
Have you ever been in this position?
“Chances are, you have chosen to become or have been asked to be a leader at some point in you life. But what does leadership mean? Does it mean leading by example? Yes. Does it mean inspiring others? Absolutely. Does it mean doing the right thing (after figuring out what the right thing is)? Yes. Leadership includes all of these things. In fact, leadership can mean many different things to many different people…”
Fortunately, the author met Verne Harnish, a renowned business guru and author of many books, including the well-known Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Harnish told Kerpen there were “three and only three things on which great leaders have to focus… [By] doing those three things well, everything else will fall into place.”
These three things will help you lead whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 or the CEO of your home. The author and his wife have applied it, both, to their business and to their growing family of 5, and it has worked wonders for them.
So, what are those three things?
1. Setting and communicating the overall vision for your team. “This is most important but is often overlooked. What is your grand mission? Your purpose? Your overall vision for how things will be? It’s important to develop this because everything else can fall into place once you have it. Once the vision and mission are established, it is essential to overcommunicate it!” Everything else you and your team do must be in alignment with this always.
2. Making sure you have the right people in the right seats on the team. “Beyond you, it’s essential to make sure you have the most talented, most appropriate people surrounding and leading the way… There are only two questions to consider in making this determination about your people: How capable are they of doing their jobs? And, How aligned are they with your vision and values?”
3. Making sure you have enough resources and money to help the team succeed. “Whether this means applying for more funding, getting creative, or somehow figuring out MacGyver-style, it’s your job to make sure the team has everything it needs to succeed so that the team members don’t need to worry about it.”
ACTION
TODAY: Whether you lead a company, a large or small team, a group of volunteers or your household, make an (informal) audit to see how well you are doing in these three areas.
FUTURE: Based on the results of your audit, determine the changes (or not) you need to make. Do you have, and have you communicated your overall vision? Do you have the talented help you need where and when you need it? Do you have enough money and resources to succeed? Create a plan to begin or continue implementing these three things. And speaking of plans… if there’s something that you and/or your team need to get done before the year is up, sign up for Achieve in 90, my online program to guide you and keep you accountable during the last 90 days of the year.
Cheers to your success!
How about sharing this post with someone you know who is in a position of leadership? Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 18 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Make it impossible to fail
— From Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
When we think of our never-ending to-do list, or when we feel stuck on the project in which we are working, it’s natural to feel resistance. This resistance comes from not being clear on what we need to do, says David Allen, renowned productivity guru, in his book Getting Things Done.
Yet sometimes that clarity we seek is muddled by our way of looking at the task: if you write down a to-do item as, for example, “Tires for the car,” it may be too big and unclear of an item.
Allen suggests an incredibly simple, but oh-so-effective solution. By asking yourself this question and acting on it, it will be almost impossible for you to fail on making progress: “What’s the next action?”
And I’d take it one step further as: What is the immediate, smallest, next action required, for me to move forward with this project?
“This is the critical question for anything [you’re going to write down on your to-do list]” says Allen. “If you answer it appropriately, you’ll have the key substantive thing [to move forward]. The ‘next action’ is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality of this thing toward completion.”
In the above example of the tires, the immediate next action is not actually you changing the tires. It’s not making an appointment at the tire shop to bring your car in, either. It’s calling your friend Fred, who told you he’d give you the info of the shop where he got his cars’ tires changed at a great price.
So, the broad “tires for the car,” that has been in your to-do list for the past week, suddenly turns into this immediate, small, next action: “Call Fred for name and phone of the tire shop.”
By breaking it down into small, actionable, next-action chunks, any task can be achieved.
It’s so simple that all we intuitively know it, don’t we? (Yet sometimes we need someone to point out the obvious for us for it to sink in. And that is why Allen’s Getting Things Done system has worked so well for millions of people worldwide, it’s so effective!)
And then what?
The author says, “Do it, Delegate it, or Defer it. Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options.”
1. Do it. “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.”
2. Delegate it. “If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity.”
3. Defer it. “If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it.”
I’ve implemented this simple system for a while now, and it really makes it almost impossible to fail. It always gets me unstuck. And sometimes the action I need to take is so small, that it makes me laugh and, thus, I do it with much joy to move forward.
Hope this turns out to be as effective for you as it’s been for me!
P.S. If you want to learn and apply this and other ways to achieve your goals in 90 days, I’m starting a program called Achieve in 90. Hope you can join us!
ACTION
TODAY: Redo your to-do list in terms of the immediate, smallest, next action required, for you to move forward with your projects.
FUTURE: Make it a habit of thinking in immediate, small, next actions required to move your to-do list forward and achieve your goals. This approach brings clarity and replaces overwhelm with a feeling of can-do when you focus on the next action that you can take. That’s why it makes it impossible to fail.
Please share this productivity tip with someone to alleviate their to-do-list overwhelm! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
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!
