“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.”
Mary Tyler Moore
Updates from January, 2017 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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What's Holding you Back? What can Help you Make the Leap to the Next Level?
Are you feeling stuck in some area of your life? Do you feel like you have hit an upper limit in your happiness? The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level might help you ask some questions that help you breakthrough.
Some questions I am considering are:
- What am I doing that I am incompetent at? Why are you doing it?
- What can I do OK that so many people can OK? Why are you doing it? Zone of Competence
- What am I doing that I can do well but other people can do better? Why are you doing it?
- What sets you on fire? What do you do well and better than anyone else. Zone of Genius
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Pearson’s Law: “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”
Karl Pearson -
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An Interesting Question – What will Destroy your Business?
An interesting question from my friend Daniel Marcos of the Growth Institute. Form an external team, one away from the immune system in a business that destroys new ideas. The job of this external team is to come up with a plan to destroy your business. A very useful exercise. By the way, I believe he got this idea from Salim Ismael at Exponential Organizations.
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Intelligent Positive Energy – Bill and Melinda Gates
Need some intelligent positive energy in your life? Follow Bill Gates and Melinda Gates on Facebook. You will quickly learn that the world is becoming better every day–less disease, less poverty, better education. Want to see what Mr. Gates is thinking about and working on? Go read his blog, Gates Notes.
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Tim Ferris interviews Mike Birbiglia – Mindwriting Quotes, 5 minutes of Comedy
Am on a bit of a Tim Ferris kick after reading Tools of Titans. On my evening walk (hit 10,000 steps!) I was listening to Tim’s podcast interview with Mike Birbiglia. Couple of interesting things stuck:
- Mindwriting Quotes – What the heck are mind writing quotes? An example from Mike – “Art is socialism, but life is capitalism.” Basically quotes about writing. Google mind writing and you’ll find tons of examples.
- The importance of feedback on your work – Mike’s process involves giving his friends world class Pizza to get feedback. Guess I’ll have to use Indian dinners
- How can you be more interesting by banishing the word interesting from your vocabulary
- To produce five minutes of great comedy you have to write what you think is 3 hours of great comedy. Wonder how much writing you have to do to get 3 hours of great comedy. What’s the ratio in your work?
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Tim Ferris' Tools of Titans
Reading Tim Ferris’ Tools of Titans. Tim wrote this book as a way to summarize the wisdom learned from the many people he has interviewed on his podcasts. I first met Tim at an EO Nebraska event right after he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. He attended the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder event right after and hacked his way into asking Warren Buffett a question.
I collect quotes as a way to trigger my thoughts, and often make me dig back into a book. The quotes I like so far are:
“‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch”
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use be the same again.”—Steve Jobs
“In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.”—Various
“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”
By the way, an immediate action from his book was to change the theme for this blog to P2 — a theme designed by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to encourage more blogging.
It is also worth reading Testing The “Impossible”: 17 Questions That Changed My Life on Tim’s blog.
If you want to check out some of Tim’s readers favorite quotes, check out this post on Facebook:
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The Stockdale Paradox – Blind Optimism is Not the Answer
Ten years ago health problems put me in the hospital, in rather dire straits. One of the key things that got me through that hard time was Admiral Stockdale’s story that I had read in Jim Collin’s classic book Good to Great.
Vice Admiral James Stockdale was the highest-ranking naval officer held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He spent seven years as a prisoner of war, most of them in the Hỏa Lò Prison (Hanoi Hilton), where he endured and survived unspeakable conditions. He was tortured more than 20 times. He also was subjected to “special” treatment as part of the “Alcatraz Gang” of 11 U.S. prisoners who were singled out for their particular resistance to their captors.
In Good to Great, Stockdale talks about his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.
When Collins asked who didn’t make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
Stockdale then added:
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Blind optimism is not the answer to surviving tough situations. Confronting the reality of the situation, seeking the support needed and taking the steps necessary to survive another day can often lead to a better outcome.
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“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” Dave McCullough
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Alan Miltz on the right financial focus for a business
“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king.”
A good metaphor for how the income statement, the balance sheet, and statement of cash flows integrate with each other.