Until you quiet the resistance and commit to actually shipping things that matter, all the productivity tips in the world aren’t going to make a real difference. And, it turns out, once you do make the commitment, the productivity tips aren’t that needed.
You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.
via Seths Blog: The reason productivity improvements dont work as well as they could.
First you need to be a Driver, then the rest will come.
Just finished reading “First know what you want” by Andrew Halfacre and it is great . The second best question in the world is worth it for the price alone. If you are setting next years goals make sure you read this first.
Why is there a Polar Bear on your book?
Check back in 2012 for the answer…
‘Why is it’ he asked, ‘that something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me?’
My belief is that it is all to do with permission. Cancer or HIV or even a bad accident not only wakes us up to the reality of the finiteness of life, it also gives us a sort of permission to live outside the cultural norms. We feel that our more eccentric behaviour, guided as it is by our authentic wanting instead of our conditioning, is suddenly excusable. ‘I know I’m not supposed to’ we say to an imaginary audience, ‘but cut me some slack. I have cancer insert illness/difficult life experience/etc. here’.
Of course, just because we have permission to do something does not necessarily mean that it is a worthwhile thing to do. Permission to treat yourself and others badly and do bad things does not mean that your life will improve by doing them.
But permission does open up new, wonderful possibilities for what we can do with our lives. And we don’t have to wait until we are ill to make use of them.
When you stop doing what you ‘should’ do and what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, the only way left to navigate is by what you want to do – and if you’re not used to allowing yourself to do what you want that can be a pretty scary prospect.
Still time to order yours for that “difficult to buy for” relative. Comes without the beardy bloke.
After our hiccup with the Kindle version I’m pleased to say the new, improved, version is back for sale from Amazon.
Perfect for Christmas.
“Impossible”.
What a funny word. It’s a word that creates its own reality.
“I can’t do that – it’s impossible!”
Yeah, right.
Let me tell you about some rat cages I saw in a research lab years ago.
I was the founding CEO of a company that manufactured high-frequency pest repelling equipment, and as part of my research, I had occasion to tour some animal testing labs.
I was looking for a place to do some tests on rodent hearing and behavior, and I wanted the best. At that time, Stanford Research International (SRI) in Menlo Park was one of the top labs on the West Coast.
The guy who led me through the labs was a scientist, and we had a fascinating time that afternoon. I saw my breath hatch a million flea eggs from across the room in one lab.
But that’s another story. What I wanted to tell you about right now was what I learned about rats.
We were passing some empty labs and I noticed a pile of shiny steel cages near the door.
“Are those new cages for rodents?” I asked.
“Nope, those are waiting to get recycled. They will melt them down and re-use the steel. They’re no good.”
They looked brand new to me.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“C’mere and look at this” he said. He opened one of the cages and pointed to a spot near the rear corner. It looked a little more polished than the rest of the cage.
“Watch this.” He said. He pushed his finger against the steel wall of the cage, and it poked right through like it was tin foil!
Then he explained. “You see, the rats don’t know that it’s impossible for them to get out of these steel cages. So as soon as we put them into the cages, they go to the rear corner and start gnawing.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I said, “Steel is harder than rat’s teeth.”
“Right, but the rats don’t know that. So they gnaw at the back corner, wearing their teeth down. And their teeth keep growing all during the rat’s life. And they keep gnawing, day after day, week after week, gradually wearing away their teeth, but also removing a few molecules of steel.
“When a rat dies it we replace it, and the new rat goes to the same corner and starts where the other rat left off. After a couple of years, the cages all get like this. We have to throw them away.”
He opened another cage and invited me to test the spot at the rear corner, and I also found the polished spot and pushed, and my finger just poked through.
“We have an instrument that measures the thickness of the cage walls, and when they get this close to breakthrough we remove them from service.”
There were piles of shiny steel cages destroyed by rats.
I’ve thought a lot about those lab rats during the years since I toured SRI. I thought about the mindless faith they must have had, that they could gnaw their way out of those steel cages.
Day after day, rat after rat. Until the steel finally gives in to the softer – but more persistent – rat’s teeth.
The rats never knew it was impossible. They just kept using the tools they had, their teeth, until they had defeated the most sophisticated research lab on the West Coast.
And they were just rats. But they never gave in, never gave up. They just kept at the impossible until it became inevitable.
If a rat can do that what can we accomplish, if we decide to maybe rethink our ideas about what’s impossible?
I invite you to think about what you may have dismissed – too soon – as impossible.
Perhaps you too can turn the impossible into the inevitable.
You don’t want to let a rat out think you, do you?
via Tom Hoobyar NLP Co..
Not as good as it should be
Did you buy the Kindle edition of ‘First, Know What You Want’?
If you didn’t then please ignore this entry.
If you did, then I wonder if you can help me?
We have had some trouble with the formatting on the Kindle version and despite submitting a revised file to Amazon, some people are still having problems.
Problems include places where two or three words run together or strange spaces in the middle of words. According to one or two complaints I’ve had it’s pretty bad but not affecting everybody.
I’m deeply embarrassed by this and am working with my publisher to get a corrected file loaded and sent to all previous buyers.
If your version has these problems, please find my email address in the book (it’s in the Afterword) and send me a note.
I need to know the date you bought it and a rough description of what you are seeing. Screenshots would be fantastic but don’t worry if you can’t.
Good question.
Do let me know if you are having problems and as soon as we can get a better formatted file out to you we will – within the next two weeks I hope.
In the meantime we have taken the Kindle Edition off sale.
Instead of trying to transcribe what’s on your Kindle’s screen or, for our purposes, trying to take a photograph of the Kindle screen without it being out-of-focus, you can take an easy screenshot to pass onto friends or colleagues.
From any screen on a Kindle 2 or DX, just hit Alt + Shift + G and the screen will flash. From there, plug the Kindle into your computer via its USB cable and navigate to the Kindle’s “documents” folder. Inside the folder are all the various books you might have stored on the device, but search for a filename that begins with “screen-shot.”
Source: Ars Technica
This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.
The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.
