It is the little things that are often the most provoking. Seth posted on his blog:

Creativity and the unexpected

Just because it’s on the menu, doesn’t mean you have to order it.

One sentence that triggers hundreds of thoughts. In the food context it jars at little, but take the concept to the work place and see what happens. How often do you order something just because it is on the menu? You took the promotion to a manager position, because “that’s what people do”. Is it? Why is it? Is that really what you want to do?

It is all too easy to follow a groove that has been worn by thousands of people who have gone before you. How about doing something different? Be creative and take a different path. Be you. Don’t something just because it is on the menu.

Make this week different from the last one, and the hundreds that have come before it. Make some different choices and see what happens. Take the lead.

Related Posts: The Power of a New Perspective, The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination, Make More Mistakes – More Quickly

Question: When have you chosen something that wasn’t “on the menu?”

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I’ve said it before, but it bears saying again: If you are stuck or struggling, find a new perspective. Take a look at things from a different angle, in a different context, create a new perspective for yourself. It loosens up the mind, creating new thoughts and a different set of emotions. Taking a different perspective will surface new facts and create a fresh set of opinions. It surfaces hidden beliefs, so that they can be verified and adjusted, and disrupts old habits.

How do you get a new perspective? Read some history, read the news from a different country, read a biography of someone you’ve never heard of. Find out about the poor where you in your area, or somewhere elsewhere in the world. Visit a prisoner in prison, or do something that haven’t done before because you were afraid to. I’ve had a few friends take time out to travel the world recently, it is amazing to see how their new perspective has changed them. You can change your situation.

It is all too easy to get stuck into a rut, trapped into a narrow view of the world that drags you down. Understanding your position in the broader context of humanity, with a fresh perspective, makes a world of difference.

Just read a powerful story on the Avanoo team’s blog, which says all this well.

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My notes from Chapter 2 of Orison Swett Marden’s brilliant “Pushing to the front” – “The Boys with no chance”.

It is not every calamity that is a curse, and early adversity is often a blessing. Surmounted difficulties not only teach, but hearten us in our future struggles – SHARPE

A poor start can lead to future success. If there seems like there is no chance, then be assured that there is always some, don’t be disheartened. History shows that adversity, when faced, breeds determination and determination breeds success. If you face adversity boldly, it places you on a level playing field with some of the greatest and most succesful people in all of our history. Thomas Edison started out as a newsboy and went on to become one of the greatest scientists and inventors that the world has know. If you don’t have the money or resources to start what you want to do, the start by studying – read and learn. The chances are, you will find your purpose, then be single minded, and the rest will follow. Diligence and perseverence, as they meet with opportunity, will offset whatever kind of start you have had in life.

Many of the world’s most powerful and successful people started with some major disadvantage before they came to their success. There is no such thing as ‘no chance’, it is just a question of being ready to take the one’s that present themselves.

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It seems that it is always the most simple things that are the most profound. A top tip from Seth’s Blog today: Show up, on time, with a smile on your face. Does it really count more than what you do or say? Seth says: Showing up on time… …with a smile on your face is almost always more important than what you actually say or do.

If you are late, what you say will count for less. If people start without you, as they should do, or cancel the meeting, then you will not have been able to say anything at all. Even when the meeting does start, you will have missed out on all the greeting and catching up. That will rob you of context that is critical for effective communication. Likewise, if you don’t smile, people are less likely to look at you, and so to listen to you. Not convinced? Try it yourself, study your next meeting and see what happens for yourself.

Go on, be radical, show up early, with a smile. It will get you off to a brilliant start and you’ll get more done. Top observation, as ever, by Seth.

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I’m reflecting back on this week and on this year, being another year older. What have I learnt?

My big take away for the moment is this: A change of context is the quickest way to change your thinking. Do you remember me loosing my car recently (shaken, not stirred)? I had a different replacement vehicle for a few weeks. And I mean completely different. A fraction of the size and power and a very different driving experience. The strangest thing is that it completely changed the way I thought about things. It altered my perspective, and if you drove it and experienced its (non-)braking capabilities, you’d know why. I’m back with my own car now, but my attitude to driving and my habits have changed.

Effecting personal change can be tough, especially if it involves creating good new habits or trying to break bad old ones. Be it habits of doing or of thinking, sometimes, if you want to change, the easiest thing to do is to start by changing your point of view. A different point of view creates a fresh perspective. That different perspective shifts your thinking, and destabilizes old habits by creating fresh new thought patterns. When using ThinkingRock, I have found that when I get stuck breaking down or planning projects, printing out the project reports and going somewhere else with a paper and pen helps me get unstuck. I now even have a specific thinking and planning place, just going there gets my planning and mission juices going. Keeping a context seems to be a good way to support (good) new habits.

Changing the context can completely break a habit or a stuck thought. Addicted to the Internet? Change context. Go to a place that has no Internet for a week or two. Less extreme, try changing where you spend your time or even just changing the colour of a room. It can be a fantastically effective way to loosen your mind up enough to make those big planned changes. From now on, if I am struggling to make a change, I’ll start by changing something else! Do something different, to create a change.

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Following on from the discussion about planned abandonment, there was an interesting post over on Ron Martoia’s velocityculture blog, where he talked about hunting elephants rather than mice, with the follow on comment by Ron:

“…focused on and how do you align time, energy, creativity and any other resource to the accomplishing of that mission. Mice are details, mission is elephant.”

Which got me thinking. It is true that if you spend all of your time chasing mice, you’ll never catch an elephant, but it isn’t that simple with goals and tasks. Achieving long term goals requires ‘running up and down the ladder’ from minute-by-minute tasks at the bottom, to long term goals and life mission at the top of the ladder. Running up and down the ladder means making sure that each wrung is connected with the ones above and below. That way our minute-by-minute doing is connected with our long term vision, and if you run it back up, the long term vision should be connected to what you do minute-by-minute – even if they are very far apart. What we actually do with our time tells us something about what we want to do with our life.

Everyone knows that the only way to eat an elephant is one meal at a time – or to eat it in mouse-sized pieces. Actually, I hope you don’t try to eat a real elephant or mouse, but breaking large objectives down into manageable chunks is a very effective way of achieving them. Setting some goals on the way to a long term aim helps keep track and gives feedback on progress made, or points out any lack of progress.

Now, to really mess the metaphor up: if I am chasing a mouse, I need to make sure it is part of the elephant I am after. If it isn’t, I should stop chasing it as it is probably a butterfly (see Watch out for the frogs). If the task (the mouse!) is part of an elephant, I can picture the elephant and approach the mouse with a better understanding of what it is part of. OK, enough animals, back to the ladder – if I put a foot on the first rung, I must be clear which ladder I am climbing and what is at the top of the ladder – is it up against the right wall (to use a Covey illustration from the 7 Habits)? ThinkingRock is a great piece of software that makes this process very easy, since you can create hierachies of projects, which drill right down to tasks (more on that in a later post). In the mean-time, I hope you have the greatest of success in running up down your ladders, with the right mice and elephants!

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• What is the value of focus?
• Why have a mission?
• Should you set goals for yourself?

I’ll warn you now, I  this is a long one, but you’ll get something good out of it I am sure!

In the beginning

At the start of my career I was trained as a teacher, a domain where the idea of aims and objectives was beaten into you on a daily basis. You worked out where you were headed and set objectives to make sure that you were getting there, in the time available, for every hour of the day. This was followed up with constant reflection on how you were doing, with the occasional random assessment, just to frighten you into action.

When I moved into the business domain I quickly lost site of all that and was educated into mission, vision and MBOs. These seemed to get updated about once every three months, with a cursory check-up on an annual basis.

My recent exploits in the productivity domain have started to introduce me to the language of focus and action – to do lists, a mission and values. Plus a whole dictionary of terms that seem to have arbitrary definitions, but are still useful.

Thrashing it out

These things have all been conflicting in my head, so I decided it was time to do the right thing: Get a piece of paper and let these ideas battle it out!

Let’s take the idea of progress as distance moved, with little arrows to show bits of progress. I think progress is something we all seek at some level, although we never seem to make as much as we want. There are all sorts of reasons for this. Take the direction that the arrows point as aims, with each arrow ending at a goal. You could think of mission as the total path of the arrows. These are really just metaphors to help think through the issues, without depending on the language.

Dissipation

Sometimes we apply our efforts to many different things in many different directions, all at once. When we do, we don’t get anywhere. When you look at the big picture it is clear why we feel that way. This is lots of activity, but it isn’t getting anywhere. Effort spread across many different things, in many different directions, with different aims, doesn’t create much real progress. This is life with no mission. Lots of effort, not much distance moved, no big achievements.

Conflict and Stress

Sometimes we create focus and concentrate all of our efforts, but there are conflicting aims or no clear mission. That leads to stress, frustration and a lack of progress. There is lots of effort, but no movement. In fact progress in one place seems to come at the expense of progress in another. The diagram here is an extreme, but many coaching books focus on surfacing and resolving conflicting aims or values and you can see why. If you are focussed, but you are not making progress, it is quite likely you have some conflicts to resolve. You need to discover what these conflicts are and resolve them. If you don’t, your stress and frustration will keep building and you won’t be able to move on. Write down all of your aims and goals and weigh them against each other.

Drifting Focus

We might have focus, aims and goals, but they are short term and they keep changing over time. Randomly changing short term aims will tend to lead us round in circles, on the balance of probability at least. Again, this is an extreme case. You probably won’t end up exactly where you started, as the arrows here do, but you may not be satisfied when you look back over your progress. It feels like you have made some, but it feels like you could have made more. You haven’t found your mission. Without a mission, we will struggle to know what direction our aims should take us in. The understanding of the mission may change and evolve over time, but a long term focus helps to plot a straight path.

Focussed Drifting

If we find our mission, but we don’t have goals on the way, or clear aims, we won’t know if we are on track. It is possible to have aims, but no goals. An aim, or a value, is not something that you specifically achieve. For example, you might aim to be a great parent, you value parenting. To some that might sound like a goal, but for most people this is something that you can never finish. There will always be room for improvement, you can’t tick it off as a job done. It is an aim, and a hard aim to check yourself against at that. Spending an hour of focussed time with my child is a goal. The aim is to be a great parent, but the goal (or objective if you like) is something that I can check I achieved along the way.

Nearly There

Some focus, some goals, some progress, but no clear picture. It looks like something good is happening here, but there are some things that just don’t fit. There are a few distractions around the edges. I think this is how I feel right at the moment. I am seeing some of the benefits of having a small number of aims and goals and focusing on them, but not yet the full power of a singular mission. Must try smarter!

Focussed Aim Overloaded

If we try to express our aim or our mission across too many different things, we can actually end up not making much difference. Everything moves in the right direction, but if we are trying to move everything, everything ends up moving not much. I love to do lots of different things at once, but am starting to see the reality of how inefficient that is. In trying to do more and more, you achieve less and less. There is a lack of efficiency which the diagram doesn’t cover, but somehow it seems to speak to it.

Focussed Mission with a single aim and goals on the way.

I struggled with this diagram, because I had loads of arrows left over that didn’t fit on the page, so I parked them at the bottom. There is a fraction of the number of arrows used in the line that head off of the diagram, less than half. Suddenly a light went on in my head. If we have aligned aims, one focus, one mission, with goals on the way as checkpoints, we can get somewhere. Really fast. This is true for companies as well as individuals. We greatly reduce the amount of work, by staying on track. Wow! Now, I’m not sure that life lets us make things as simple as this diagram, most of us have many different roles that we have to serve: Worker, partner, parent or whatever other responsibilities we have acquired. What is clear is that within each role there is a massive efficiency that comes from having a clear aim, a singular mission, with focussed execution and goals along the way. I must have read 30 books that have told me as much, but it took a picture to bring it home. Finding synergies across the different roles helps this even further.

The metaphor here isn’t perfect, but exploring it has helped me resolve to be even more focussed. I know that where I have been, I have seen real progress and rapid results. That spurs me on and increases my motivation. I’m sure that there will be set backs on the way, but that isn’t a reason to change direction.

One last point before I jump. Even if you have gone around in a circle, you haven’t really ended up where you started. I’ll bet that you are a different person. It isn’t just about progress; it is also about who you become on the way. Anytime you stop yourself to say “I’m really not getting anywhere.” you have actually made progress, you’ve become more self-aware, and that is the first step to taking hold of life. You are transformed. You might make that step more than once, but enjoy the journey and the decisions you make – that is real progress!

More like this post: What does success look like?

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Well, it is obviously one of those months! I was involved in a fairly serious crash this week. Two days later, I revisited the scene of the accident and realised that I came within 20 feet of death, or at least certain major injuries. As it happens I did get away with no major injuries, for which I am very thankful. I also have no form of transport!

The incident brought home that excellent, if often used, coaching question: “If you had six healthy months left to live, what would you do?”. I know that very few people end up in that situation, but it is a useful question to frame how you spend time. If there isn’t a tomorrow, the importance of putting First Things First, as Covey would have it, jumps right out at you.

When you are working out what needs doing, put the big important things at the top of the list, then do them first! It stands to reason that if you do them first, you are significantly less likely to run out of time in which to do them. More on that after the jump…

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I wrote on Christmas eve about “One Ends Another One Begins” – about somethings ending so that you can start others. That is the decision point. The crunch comes when the decision becomes an action. Decisions don’t really impact the world until they are actions. Faith without works is dead – why? Because you don’t really mean it until you actually do it. It is what we do that makes a difference. What we decide is only the first birth. The action is the second birth that brings change. Sometimes that is very very hard, but understanding the truth and acting on it is the engine of life.

What will you do today?

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I’ve been quiet for a few days, as I have had an enforced pause. An international flight ran into problems, and I ended up with 8 hours of the night stranded in an empty airport, away from connectivity and most of my belongings.

Pauses are powerful things. Time to reflect. To think. Time to realise. To resolve. Much is being made of ‘going slow’ these days, with sites like slow leadership expounding the reasons for going slow (great site!).

My wife plays netball, and as we were talking about this, she told me about the ‘three second rule’ in that game. When you receive the ball, you have to pass it within three seconds. That sounds like a rush, a hurry. However, as players are coached, they are taught to use ALL of that three seconds before passing. New players almost always end up passing the ball too quickly, they don’t get the most of the pause. They still act, you have to move the ball on, but take the three seconds first. Stop and think, before passing.

Could we use the three second rule in life? A forced gap between action and reaction. An enforced time to think, before we act. A pause between the demand and the doing. For some little tasks, it is easy to end up spending more time thinking about it than doing it. That isn’t efficient. However, it is all to easy to get caught up doing the wrong things. A pause for thought to say “is this the right thing to do right now?” can be a valuable check. We do have to do – after those three seconds, the player has to act, – to move quickly. But getting things done quickly doesn’t come from doing them in a rush. One of the fun things about ThinkingRock is that it enforces that pause and creates some structured reflection, if it is used correctly. Very useful.

Whatever you are doing, happy pausing!

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