by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 27 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Little bets, big breakthroughs
— From Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
Amazon and Google, two of the biggest companies of our time, as well other successful enterprises (regardless of size), all have one thing in common: they embrace an experimental discovery mentality. They don’t know which ideas will be a big hit and which ones won’t, so they allow themselves to experiment and “learn and uncover opportunities as they go.”
Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, often compares his company’s strategy of “developing ideas in new markets to ‘planting seeds’ or ‘going down blind alleys.’ […] Many efforts tend to be dead ends… but every once in a while, you go down an alley and it opens up to into this huge, broad avenue.”
In today’s business environment, long gone are the elaborate business plans in favor of lean and agile ones. The focus is on action, and this means actually “do[ing] things to discover what [companies/people] should do.” Little bets, then, are “concrete actions taken to discover, test and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. […] The important thing to remember is that while prodigies are exceptionally rare, anyone can use little bets to unlock creative ideas.”
“Most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.”
Two advantages of the little bets approach are that:
- It lets us focus on what we can afford to loose, versus projecting or assuming the gains (this is called the affordable loss principle); and
- It makes us aware of the means we have and those we will need as the idea moves along.
The affordable loss principle involves failure. However, it doesn’t focus on failure as a negative and dead end, but as a means to an experiment. It’s the “error” part in trial-and-error. We’re not intentionally trying to fail; yet “in almost any attempt to create, failure, and often a good deal of it, is to be expected.”
With this in mind, trying out little bets as experimentation on new ideas and projects works. Why? Because we “will make important discoveries by being willing to be imperfect, especially at the initial stages of developing [our] ideas.” And as we move forward, iterating from the feedback we obtain, we will be able to build up to breakthroughs.
ACTION
TODAY: Take the time to figure out which one idea or project you have going on where you could put little bets to the test. Then decide which little bet you can start working on and what little means you need to make it happen.
FUTURE: Embrace the experimental discovery mentality in all you do, both professionally and personally. Include little bets so as to turn an initial idea or project into a great one by means of experimenting, iterating, refining and pivoting if necessary. Remember to move forward imperfectly. By doing this, you’ll be able to discover your best, breakthrough ideas and succeed with them.
Know someone who could use the little bets approach? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 50 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Launch a search party for the opportunity
— From Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff
Change is hard. Change is uncomfortable. Change brings an unknown factor into the equation. Most of us don’t like or accept change easily. Jon Acuff, in his book Do Over, rightly says that “upon being confronted with change, our first reaction is to brainstorm reasons it won’t work: I’m too old. I don’t have enough money. It’s too risky. I’m not qualified enough. Someone has already done that exact same thing. There are worse jobs than the one I currently have…” and the litany of excuses goes on and on.
“For minutes or maybe even lifetimes, we do our best to rally the troops around why we shouldn’t do something. And this tends to be the approach we take for ourselves and even other people.” For example, say that you ask a friend to do something that he really doesn’t want to do. Your request is met with resistance, so what’s the next thing you do? Very likely you’ll find yourself asking, “Why don’t you want to do that?”
As common as that question is, Acuff says it’s the wrong one to ask. He cites the book Instant Influence, by Michael V. Pantalon, PhD, where Pantalon says, “when you ask someone a question like this, you unknowingly invite them to brainstorm new reasons they don’t want to do something. That question is an invitation to sit in the no and work yourself up even more than you were before.” By asking a negative question we use our imagination in a negative way.
This applies to any scenario, personal or professional, from asking your boss why you can’t work from home one day a week, to asking a service provider why they can’t give you a discount to… Ha! Remember when you asked your parents why you couldn’t go to that party or why you couldn’t hang out with that particular group of friends? Now we know why and how they came up with all those reasons at lightning speed!
What should we do about this?
Acuff says the solution is to ask the opposite. “Instead of launching a search party for opposition to an idea, you launch a search party for the opportunity.” In the example above where you encounter resistance from your boss to work from home, ask instead: ‘‘what’s one reason you could see me working from home as possibly a benefit to the company?”
You don’t need lots of reasons. Once you have a good one, you’ve succeeded at establishing a positive foothold in your or the other person’s mind, and you can start to build from there.
ACTION
TODAY: Identify one area or one task where you’ve been asking negative questions. Where have you been building up a reservoir of negative reasons as to why you don’t want to do something? Or where have you given someone the opportunity to nurture reasons why not to do something? Flip that around and launch a search party for the opportunity. What question will you ask yourself or someone else that will shed some positive light in favor of doing something?
FUTURE: Keep this tool handy and make a habit of asking a positive question versus a negative one. Your life and that of the people who surround you will be all the better for it, as there will be less friction and less stress when facing any kind of change.
Do you know someone who is finding a myriad reasons why not to do something? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Drop the Story
— From: Habit Changers: 81 Game-Changing Mantras to Mindfully Realize Your Goals by M. J. Ryan
The reason why first impressions are so important is because, in those first few seconds, the brain takes in the new information and gives it some meaning. M.J. Ryan, leading expert on change and human fulfillment, says that this meaning is built on information, stories, conclusions, and assumptions based on filters from the past.
“[Our brain] does this automatically, below our conscious awareness. Like everything else our brain does, this has an upside—we couldn’t function well if everything coming in were new to us… But there’s also a downside: our unconscious story can get in the way of our seeing the new information so we can respond in a fresh way.”
And right after the initial story we tell ourselves, comes in confirmation bias: “the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.” (Britannica). This happens to everyone and in any situation, not just at the beginning of something.
So what can we do to think clearly and in an unbiased way?
Ryan suggests being aware that we need to “drop the story.” To illustrate this point, she tells a story of a client of hers whose sales “were tanking and he was convinced it was because he didn’t have the right person at the helm. Why? Because years ago he’d swapped the role out and sales had gone up.” Ryan asked him, “What would happen if you drop the story that your problem is caused by the sales leader?” To which he replied, “I’d have to look to other factors, like market forces.” Turns out that he discovered the real problem: “his products were not competitive anymore, and quickly made manufacturing adjustments to cut costs.”
Dropping the story, in any situation (whether personal or professional) brings a fresh approach to thinking. It allows us to depart from our unconscious assumptions, focus on other ways to look at the problems and find solutions.
ACTION
TODAY: Where are you stuck? What one issue has been in your mind that you can’t seem to find a solution for? State what you think your problem is, and then drop the story. Examine other angles and ask why 5 times to get to the root of the problem. Once you have correctly identified what it is, you will be able to move forward to solve it.
FUTURE: Keep this “drop the story” mantra in your toolbox. It will come in handy the next time you are trying to solve an issue. It works well by itself and is also a great complement to asking why 5 times.
Have a friend who is racking his brain about something? Please share this post and tell him to drop the story via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Resources, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Prioritize your priority
— From Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
In his wonderful book, Essentialism, Greg McKeown eschews the idea that “you can have it all,” because it is a damaging myth. “It results in stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already overscheduled lives.” I can definitely relate.
The word priority (meaning “the very first or prior thing”) appeared in our language around the 1400s and continued that way, in singular, for centuries. “Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple ‘first’ things.”
The problem with this approach is that we have many competing things, all of them appearing to be the most important, and as we try to juggle them all at once, we give our control away. “When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important.”
“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”
The key, however, is to be cognizant that prioritizing our priority (I just had to write that!) doesn’t mean just saying no. It entails “purposefully, deliberately and strategically eliminating the non-essentials, and not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good opportunities as well.” There are always going to be trade-offs, and some decisions will be very hard to make and require lots of careful thinking, especially when the opportunity in front is very attractive.
Ask yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” Remember that when an opportunity presents itself, it’s either “Hell, yeah!” or “NO.”
ACTION
Scales of Justice
TODAY: Figure out what is your one priority. A very simple way to do this is to compare the items on your current list of priorities one at a time, as if you were putting them on the scales of justice, to see which one weighs more. Say you have 4 priorities: A, B, C and D.
- Take A and B and compare them: which one is more important? Let’s say A. Keep A as your priority so far and park B aside.
- Now take C and compare it to A: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Keep C, as it has become your priority so far, and park A aside.
- Now take D and compare it to C: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Park D aside.
With this method you have just determined that your priority is C. Period. Congratulations!
Now look at A, B and D and decide whether they make the highest possible contribution towards your goal. Yes? Great, schedule them in the order in which they’ll make the greatest contribution too. No? Then don’t do them if you can get away with that: delegate them, change them, get rid of them or further park them in your “that would be nice to do” list for a future. Or if you must absolutely work on them, do so only after you have done what you need to do today to advance C.
FUTURE: Question the validity of all you do so that you can focus on your priority. Look at your activities for the upcoming week or for the full month. Which ones contribute toward your goal? Keep them. Try to do away with the ones that don’t. Notice that I said, “try to” because in a week/month it’s going to be hard to focus solely on your goal and get rid of everything that doesn’t fit. We’ve all given control of our agenda to others, so it will take a bit of time to gain it back; but if you make a habit of questioning all actions and activities, in a very near future you’ll be focusing much more (if not completely) on your goal. Another great way to prioritize appears in this post: How to choose what is important? Principles of priority.
Know someone who’s trying to do it all and have it all, and is spread way to thin? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Let’s redefine failure
From Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes–But Some Do by Matthew Syed
We’ve all failed at something at some point. It’s not a happy day when that happens. It’s a mad scramble as we watch our project go down in proverbial flames. The memory of it is not a happy one either and, usually, we try to avoid bringing it up again, right? Ugh!
Matthew Syed in his book Black Box Thinking, says there is a better way: “If we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure.”
“We learn from our mistakes, it is as simple and as difficult as that. […] Sometimes committing errors is not only the fastest way to the correct answer, it’s the only way.” This is, obviously, easier said than done. The key is not in the procedures but in changing the attitude towards error that liberates individuals and organizations from the “twin dangers of blame and cognitive dissonance,” which is the default mode when things don’t go well.
James Dyson, the inventor of the famous Dyson vacuum cleaner went through 5,127 prototypes (!) before his technology was ready. As tragic as airline accidents can be, the findings are quickly applied and transformed into new rules for all aviation personnel in the world to avoid the same mistakes. (Read more in this book summary by Samie Al-Achrafi.)
Heather Hanbury, former headmistress of Wimbledon High School in London, created “Failure Week” after she saw her students doing well academically but struggling to reach their potential outside the classroom. The rigidity of the school system punishing mistakes was stagnating the students in other areas of their life. She said to Syed, “You’re not born with fear of failure, it’s not an instinct. It’s something that grows and develops in you as you get older. Very young children have no fear of failure at all, they have great fun trying new things and learning very fast.”
How can we, then, unlearn and redefine this acquired fear of failure? A trite—but illustrative—example that comes to mind is the one coaches sometimes use to exemplify why we should not give up: think of an adorable baby girl who is starting to learn how to walk. Would you give up on her simply because she falls constantly? Would you throw your hands up in the air in frustration and blame it all on gravity? The mere thought of it is ridiculous. However, we sometimes do this (metaphorically-speaking) to ourselves and to our projects.
Here are some questions and a few posts to help you redefine and reframe for yourself:
- How many times have we given up on something that we’ve considered a failure without giving it a fair chance? (Read: Move forward imperfectly.)
- How many times have we found the process frustrating as opposed to making the most out of it? (Read: Why 5 Times.)
- How many times do we bury as deep as we can within ourselves whatever happened, and waste the opportunity to learn from it? (Read: You are not your past.)
And I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from T. Harv Eker:
“Every master was once a disaster.”
ACTION:
TODAY: You are the only one who knows yourself best and who can redefine failure for you. What steps can you take today to reframe a recent “failure,” so that you can make space for the new learnings? Even in the worst of situations there’s always a positive thing if you know where to look. How about focusing on that? It may look like “Where’s Waldo?” at first, but don’t give up. This simple process will help you reframe and redefine!
FUTURE: As much as it’s uncomfortable to accept, there is no way we can avoid making mistakes in the future. So let’s reframe that too: instead of keeping our fingers crossed and holding our breath “so that nothing goes wrong,” how about trusting in our ability and willingness to be able to gather the information and resources to solve the mistakes to the best of our ability if and when they happen? Ah, what a relief that thought brings!
Know someone who could use some help redefining failure? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Marketing, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
How to turn any venture into an admired brand
— From: Bigger Than This: How to turn any venture into an admired brand by Fabian Geyrhalter
Since I love marketing and the creativity behind it, I’m always delighted to hear how companies brand themselves. The media likes this too, and frequently we hear the branding stories about startups with innovative concepts or products becoming beloved brands, as people flock to purchase whatever they’re selling.
Rarely, if at all, do we hear about companies that sell commodities turning them into beloved brands. That is, until now. Branding Guru Fabian Geyrhalter, author of How to Launch a Brand, recently published his second book, Bigger Than This. In it, he details 8 principles that help companies who sell commodities (“products and services that have remained widely unchanged”) turn their brands around to tell empathic stories that resonate with their existing tribes and create new raving fans.
Here are the 8 principles. Follow one or follow all to position your brand strongly:
1. Tell your story. Stories are memorable and relatable. “They flip the intangible into something tangible, the unrelated into something emotional.”
2. Believe in something and be vocal about it. “Any brand can stand for something meaningful, but to do that it has to define and embody its values.” And the values need to be aligned with those of the customers and the community.
3. Root for a cause. “Identify a social cause that can be activated in an authentic way to manifest that the purpose of the product/service goes deeper than solely generating sales.”
4. Connect with your heritage. We all like to anchor ourselves to different places because we feel a sense of connection or belonging. “Connect your product with the desire of consumers to formulate a deeper connection with the place your brand will be known for.”
5. Be delighted to delight customers. “A small, unexpected gesture will lead to them seeing [your brand] as a friend.”
6. Be transparent. “Create a strategic plan on how far you will take the idea of transparency and where your brand will draw the line.”
7. Stand in solidarity with your customers. “Only deep and honest empathy will touch people’s hearts long term. A quote from Alan Alda in the book says, “… focusing on the other person’s need and not my own was the most effective way to make a sale.”
8. Customize if possible. “Start simply by using your collected customer data to create personal experiences surrounding your customer service or product interactions. Customization can start a small as that and grow from there.”
Finally, the book leaves you with this short and helpful template for a “simple positioning statement to derive the bigger story,” and it instructs to “put extra emphasis in deriving your ‘because’—your reason to believe.”
“To [target audience]
our product is the [category]
that provides [functional, symbolic or emotional benefits]
because [support/reasons to believe].”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at what you do or what you sell. Could your brand benefit from any of the principles above? If so, identify the one that you can start implementing today (even if just with one tiny action). Note that these principles could also apply to a personal brand. What does your online image say about you in the various social media platforms that you have? How can you tell your story in the best light possible to resonate with those you lead?
FUTURE: Run both your business and personal brands through the above principles and template. Both brands will come out stronger and better positioned to suit your goals.
Let me know if you’d like me to put together an online branding session (at no cost, of course). I know a few branding gurus and will gladly invite them to share their knowledge with us via Facebook Live or a webinar or video chat. I think we could all benefit from hearing experts in the field as to how to position our business and personal brands in a stronger way. Shoot me an email to let me know if you’re in, and I will plan accordingly if this idea gains traction. Fingers crossed!
Know someone who might like this post? Please share it via email, Facebook or Twitter!
