by Helena Escalante | Goals, Leadership, Planning, Tools
TODAY’S IDEA:
KISS = Keep It Super Simple
— From: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
This is one of my favorite books (yes, I know, I have so many…) because the Heath brothers manage to distill the art of effective messages down to a model that they’ve called SUCCESs. The first step is an idea that applies well to messaging and also to many other areas of business and life. The concept? Keep It Super Simple (remember it by its acronym: KISS).
The important thing to understand is that by simple they don’t mean dumbing down, what they mean is finding the core of the idea. This means “stripping an idea down to it’s most critical essence.” Yet the hard part is not “weeding out superfluous and tangential elements” but discarding other ideas “that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.”
To further explain, the authors describe what the Army calls Commander’s Intent. “Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of a soldier at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.”
This is important because you can plan all you want but “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Unpredictable things always occur, yet when that happens, the goal should be to keep the intent in mind. If everyone does that, you’ll inevitable get to where you want to go, or at least move closer into that direction. Note that the Commander’s Intent applies as well to people from all walks of life: “No sales plan survives contact with the customer.” “No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.”
The way in which you can arrive at your Commander’s Intent is by asking these two questions:
- If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ____________.
- The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ____________.
Simple enough, don’t you think?
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
ACTION
TODAY: What are you working on where the plan did not survive contact with the intended recipient? Take a moment to ponder the two questions above to arrive at the Commander’s Intent for your project. Once you have found your core idea, then you and all involved will be able to move forward in that direction.
FUTURE: How about setting a Commander’s Intent for each project that you work or collaborate on? Share the concept of Commander’s Intent and the two questions with your team, that way everyone involved will have clarity to move towards the common goal.
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Mindset, Planning
TODAY’S IDEA:
The ten-thousand-hour rule is only half true
— From: Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman
A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000-Hour rule” in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. Briefly, the rule states that the key to mastering any skill at world-class level, is a matter of practicing around 10,000 hours.
However, Daniel Goleman, in his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, states that the problem with the rule is that it’s only half true, despite the fact that it has “become sacrosanct gospel echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops.” He explains, “If you’re a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, ten thousand hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.”
Goleman contacted Anders Ericsson, the psychology professor at Florida State University who is known as the world’s foremost “expert on expertise,” and the one who conducted the study of the 10,000 hours that Gladwell mentioned in his book. Ericsson said:
“You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal. You have to tweak the system by pushing, allowing for more errors at first, as you increase your limits.”
The important thing to keep in mind is that this does not apply solely to the physical practice of something (sports, musical instruments, etc.). If you follow this advice of constantly improving and increasing your limits, you too can achieve the highest levels of performance in your field. This is great news because it means there’s hope for all of us.
My take on this is that the rule may not have to be so-daunting: while you may indeed need the 10,000-hours to achieve one of your goals with mastery, “good enough” sometimes works out very well too. And because good enough is a step on the road to mastery, you’ll have to go through there anyway. For example, if you are going to Italy on vacation and are learning Italian, with 10,000 hours you will likely be able to write an Italian best-seller, but with much less than that you will be able to speak well and have wonderful, memorable conversations on your trip.
Whether you want to achieve mastery or sufficiency, the best way to go about it is applying what Ericsson calls deliberate practice, “where an expert coach […] takes you through well-designed training over months or years and you give it your full concentration, […] and it always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them.”
That’s the key formula: don’t spend the hours merely repeating something that doesn’t work. Spend the hours, instead, in studying people who have done what you want to do, hiring a coach to help you get there, focusing on improving, and getting out of your comfort zone. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until you reach your goal.
ACTION
TODAY: Look at your most important or pressing goals and determine which ones need mastery and which ones need sufficiency. (This mere exercise, to me, was an enormous eye opener. It took the weight off my shoulders because I had mistakenly believed that I needed to achieve mastery in many things, when in reality sufficiency was all I needed).
FUTURE: Plan for mastery or sufficiency accordingly. Look for your role models. Who has achieved what you want to do? Are they within your reach? Do they offer coaching/training or some sort of teaching? If not, who can they recommend you work with? Or ask around for a competent coach/teacher/mentor in that area. Figure out how long it will take to get to where you want to go. Commit. Get started. Don’t look back. Enjoy the journey!
Any major a-ha moments while reading this? Please let me know or leave a comment!
by Helena Escalante | Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 24 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Actualize your dreams during the weekends
–From What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, a short guide included in What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: How to Achieve More at Work and at Home by Laura Vanderkam
Remember how Laura Vanderkam helped us reframe the way we view our weekends? Well, how about bringing her back in to help with the actual planning of the weekend?
Laura says that, when figuring out what to do over the weekend, the best way to frame the question is to ask, “What do you want to do more of with your time?” And, invariably, with that answer comes the realization that we’re going to need more fingers and toes than we have to count all the things we want to do. So, she suggests creating a List of 100 Dreams and brainwriting “anything you might want to do or have in life.”
The first entries on that list will likely be large, once-in-a-lifetime happenings, such as “…go see the pyramids in Egypt. By Dream 100, however, you’ll be coming up with more everyday founts of joy, which tend to make excellent weekend events.” Further, she suggests, “keep going until you have a good long list of these doable dreams. You could also think of these as a bucket list focused on activities within a two-hour radius from your house.”
Keep the list handy so that, as you plan your weekends, you can access it and check off the items that you are going to do over the weekend. Also, the list is dynamic: you may want to change, add or delete from it according to the things you cross off, additional interests you want to include, or changes in your life’s circumstances that will prompt you to modify things on your list (such as moving to another state).
And don’t forget to include in the list the wishes of your kids, significant other and anyone else who spends weekends with you. You’ll all be creating memories together, so might as well plan for them together and enjoy the anticipation together.
Vorfreude: (German noun) The joyful, intense anticipation that comes from imagining future pleasures.
ACTION
TODAY: Start (and if you have enough time, finish) your list of 100 Dreams. Divide it into things you can do over a weekend and things that require more time than a weekend (save this last one for future planning).
FUTURE: Take your “weekends” list of activities and plan to do them during future weekends. Enjoy doing this!! Laura gives an example about a woman and her husband who “sit down with beers on Friday to plan out their weekends. It’s more about catching up and brainstorming what they’ll do (and drinking beer) than a chore.” Take it easy and have fun, that’s what this is all about!
Have a lovely weekend and let me know in the comments what you are going to do!
by Helena Escalante | Planning, Productivity, Resources, Tools
TODAY’S IDEA:
There is no such thing as a shortage of ideas!
This idea is a segue from yesterday’s post on practicing proactive procrastination to generate ideas. Yet instead of procrastinating and getting bored, today we are going to do the opposite: take action.
How many times, when we need an answer, do we ask “hey, do you have any ideas on…?” only to hear our teammates, or even ourselves, say “no, I really can’t think of anything…” This answer naturally leads us to call for a brainstorming session. But more often than not, during brainstorming sessions everyone tends to agree with a few of the first ideas tossed out and that’s it, we’re stuck again with a less-than-desirable solution.
This happens because, usually, the most vocal people in the group toss out the first ideas and the rest of the group either agrees or keeps quiet, leading to groupthink (“the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility” – Google Dictionary). To avoid this, the concept of brainwriting can be used. It’s very simple: have everyone write their ideas down in paper before either saying them out loud, or passing the list on to the next person as a way to spark more ideas. That’s it.
The process then can follow many different courses (examples here and here). Yet it ultimately follows the course of whatever the moderator wants to do with the many ideas generated.
I recently put this to the test with several friends where the task was to generate as many business ideas as possible in 10 minutes. We came up with over 130. Of course, not all of them were good or viable, but they were all valid for what we wanted to prove to ourselves: that anyone is able to able generate many ideas at once with this method, and that it’s better if you do it as a team because you’ll produce many, many more ideas than as as individual. And once you start discarding the crazy, unviable ideas, you’ll be left with a handful of good, actionable ones that you can start putting into practice right away. As Seth Godin says, “you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
So there you have it. Use brainwriting instead of brainstorming, and you’ll never be at a loss for ideas again.
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”
— Linus Pauling
ACTION:
TODAY: Play along with the idea of brainwriting for yourself. Take 10 min and write down as many ideas as you can think of for an issue you want to solve or for a goal you’d like to achieve. Don’t judge the ideas, simply write them all down and let your brain loose while you’re doing this exercise. You’ll see that you can come up with a great amount of ideas and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at yourself. Then discard the bad ideas, take the good ones and implement them.
FUTURE: Get together with a group of friends, colleagues, or family and brainwrite answers to a challenge or problem that you are facing. Alternatively, set a goal (e.g. write down 50 ways to improve a process in your company, or 100 places where you’d like to go on vacation, etc.) and give yourself a finite amount of time, say 10-15 minutes. Then be in awe as to how many ideas you come up with! Vote for the best ones, discard the bad ones, and happy implementing!
Enjoy learning this new process, it’s easy, fun and VERY helpful in all aspects of business and life. Let me know how you did in the comments!
by Helena Escalante | Habits, Mindset, Planning, Time
TODAY’S IDEA:
Practice Proactive Procrastination
— From: Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
For many of us, the best ideas strike randomly, and likely in a place—like the shower or the gym—where we cannot write them down. So we interrupt what we’re doing, scramble to finish, change the watch/ring to the other hand, or repeat the idea incessantly… until we can get to a piece of paper or favorite electronic device to write it down.
While ideas are very welcome at any time (see: 15 Famous Ideas That Were Invented in Dreams), I’ve often wondered if we could purposefully create those a-ha! moments to our benefit. Turns out, we can. Austin Kleon in his great (and beautifully designed) book talks about harnessing this power to come up with ideas by boring ourselves on purpose. He calls it “practicing proactive procrastination.”
“Take time to be bored. […] Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, ‘Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.’ Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.”
I believe we are ALL creative people. We all make use of creativity and imagination to solve our problems, to see things from a different angle, to come up with new and exciting projects, to surprise our loved ones, etc. And thus it comes as no surprise that more and more people are scheduling time to just think. One of the most famous examples is Bill Gates taking “Think Weeks,” but short of that, as Kleon mentions, even the time that it takes to iron a few shirts will produce results.
Maybe that is why Raymond Inmon said, “If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.”
And don’t forget to take a notebook with you!
ACTION
TODAY: Take a few minutes to practice proactive procrastination today by going for a walk or simply taking time to think. Pick an issue that you need to solve and set the intention to find answers or solutions during your “think time.”
FUTURE: Plan to take some “think time” periodically, and schedule it in your calendar. By creating this habit, you’ll be able to harness the power the ideas to your benefit and your business and life will be better for it!
Let me know how it goes!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Habits, Planning, Productivity, Time
TODAY’S IDEA:
Create uninterrupted time FOR YOU daily.
Given that we all have 24 hours in a day, how come some people seem to get a lot more done than others? I believe the secret lies in creating the habit of scheduling uninterrupted time on a daily basis and focusing during that time on your priorities.
At plain sight this seems very simple, but in practice it’s not: we’re all busy, not to mention sleep deprived… And the first thing that goes out the window in the face of a looming deadline or lots of work is the time we make for ourselves.
Most of the authors I read and the people I admire prefer to open up a chunk of time in their schedules early in the morning.They accomplish a lot when their minds are fresh and when they are well rested. This is their time, there are no interruptions, and they focus it on exercising, writing, meditating, journaling, reading, or a combination of these or other things that enables them to get closer to their goals.
Mornings are ideal because then you can go on with your day knowing that you have already accomplished, or taken a step towards your main goals. At the end of that day, you’ll feel like you’ve made progress, as opposed to feeling overwhelmed by the lack of time and distractions that would otherwise prevent you from working on your goals. The U.S. Army says: “We do more before 9AM than most people do all day.” This leads me to the amount of time to carve out: whatever is best for you. Experiment at first until you find your sweet spot.
Most of the people I’ve read who have a set morning routine spend anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. Yet Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM), says that, in a pinch, he can do his six morning activities in one minute each and then get going. Could you start with 6 minutes a day if you knew this would take you closer to your goals? Seen this way it doesn’t seem all that crazy, right?
Andy Traub, author of The Early to Rise Experience: Learn to Rise Early in 30 Days, tells us to “publicly declare an end to wasting your mornings,” and reminds us, once a day, to:
“Make one decision that will change a person forever:
That day is today.
That decision is to get out of bed early.
That person is you.”
I am an early bird (and even more after reading these two books!) but my husband is a night owl and he gets a lot done in the evenings and late into the night. Since I’m a witness to these two personalities living together in harmony, I’m not an advocate for one or the other, except for the one that works for you. Or if you simply don’t have time in the morning or the evening, how about during your lunch time? And how about just 5 days a week? That’s the idea behind BoxLunch Lifestyle. Cheryl Johnson, the Founder, says: “Your lunch matters in a way you’ve never thought of before. It can reveal what you value and what might be holding you back. Real changes in how you eat and spend your time start here. Take back your life.”
Whether you do it in the morning, lunch time or evening, please make sure that you are indeed carving out some uninterrupted time on your day to work on your goals. Give yourself the gift of focusing on making your dreams come true. It’s never too early and it’s never too late. Your life will be all the better for it.
ACTION:
TODAY: Schedule some uninterrupted time on your calendar today and honor it like an appointment. What gets scheduled gets done!
FUTURE: Start creating this habit this week. Schedule chunks of uninterrupted time in your calendar and determine what you are going to do with that time. Also, unless you are a cold-turkey kind of person, I suggest starting slowly and building up to it. For example, instead of setting aside 1 hr daily as of tomorrow, start with 20 min during one week, then move up to 40 the following and by the 3rd week you’ll be scheduling one full hour of uninterrupted time for you, that way you’ll be able to assess how much time you need for your goals. Be gentle with yourself if you slip while you are building this habit, there will always be a million things screaming to take your attention away from this time. Just keep coming back to set aside time FOR YOU, daily, to work on your goals.
Let me know how it goes!
