Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Archives for January 2022

Get Rid of Relationship Clutter

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Don’t hold on to relationships that aren’t supportive or beautiful—they’re robbing you of joy and nourishment. They’re exhausting your resources for the relationships that do matter.

Letting go of relationship clutter isn’t about tossing people out like tatty pairs of shoes. It’s about getting reflective if our relationships honor our soul self. Is there respect, love, and a sense of wanting the best for each other?

Find ways to distance yourself from relationships that drain your soul. Don’t burn bridges, though. Don’t hold onto every issue or argument. It’s more gracious—and better for you—just walk away, head held high, mouth shut. You’ll be glad you did it that way.

Idea for Impact: To get rid of clutter is to make room for more supportive and nurturing relationships.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Affection Is No Defense: Good Intentions Make Excellent Alibis
  2. The Secret to Happiness in Relationships is Lowering Your Expectations
  3. How to … Break the Complaint Habit
  4. Change Your Perspective, Change Your Reactions
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

Inspirational Quotations #930

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Fun gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no.
—David Garrick (English Playwright, Actor)

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
—Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)

Let those who would affect singularity with success, first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
—Jeffrey Eugenides (American Novelist)

Innovators are inevitably controversial.
—Eva Le Gallienne (American Actress)

Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness.
—Lama Surya Das (American Buddhist Scholar)

Love touched her heart, and lo! It beats high, and burns with such brave hearts.
—Richard Crashaw (British Poet)

It’s essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life’s pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.
—John Bradshaw (American Educator)

You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.
—Alex Haley (American Novelist, Biographer)

The world consists almost exclusively of people who are one sort and who behave like another sort.
—Zona Gale (American Novelist, Playwright)

With years a richer life begins, the spirit mellow: ripe age gives tones to violins, wine, and good fellows.
—John Townsend Trowbridge (American Author)

He who is prepared for the future and he who deals cleverly with any situation that may arise are both happy; but the fatalistic man who wholly depends on luck is ruined.
—Chanakya Neeti (Anthology of Indian Aphorisms)

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
—Charles Bukowski (American Writer)

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.
—Constance Baker Motley (American Jurist)

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.
—Sidney Hook (American Social Philosopher)

To be More Productive, Try Doing Less

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The top performers in every field tend to have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and obsess over getting them right.

If you’re struggling with time- and task-management, the solution is not to try to be even more productive by somehow “finding” time to do more things.

Time management advice tends to want you to believe that you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you can unearth by squeezing out more from your time. You don’t need to commoditize every minute of your life and devote it to productive work.

You can’t—and shouldn’t—do it all

More time is not the answer to your time management problems.

You can’t manage time. You cannot control time. What you can control are your actions. You can control how you spend your time on what activities. You are in complete control of what you do and when you do it.

Jog through your list of things to do. For each task, ask,

  • Why is this task necessary?
  • What would happen a month from now if it isn’t done?
  • What would happen if this never gets done
  • Who wants this task done, and who is the right person to do it?
  • Do fewer things that create more value, rather than more things that are mostly empty.

Effective time management is about knowing what’s essential and what’s not. Don’t get disproportionately involved with small things while monumental things are to be done.

Idea for Impact: No point in doing something that doesn’t need doing.

The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.

To get more done, you need to do less. Trying to do it all doesn’t work. In other words, do only those things that really matter. Focus on those activities that drive the most significant results.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
  2. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  3. Half-Size Your Goals
  4. How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative
  5. 5 Minutes to Greater Productivity [Two-Minute Mentor #11]

Stop Dieting, Start Savoring

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Research suggests that excluding entire food groups, banning your favorite foods, forcing yourself to count calories, and measuring success by a number on a scale may actually make you want to eat more. Restrictive dieting can slow your metabolism down, making it even harder to lose weight over the long term.

You’re more likely to be successful at keeping weight off if you lose weight gradually and steadily. Be more mindful of what you eat and how you eat.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite foods and indulging in your cravings for cookies, potato chips, or ice cream. All you have to do is cut back. Practice awareness by slowing down and thinking about what you’re eating and why you’re eating it.

Don’t gulp your food; you’ll overeat before you realize that you’re full. Instead, rest between bites. Take time to chew your food thoroughly. You really don’t need as much food as you think you do.

When you eat out, keep your food-mindfulness on the right track. Keep hunger under control beforehand. Don’t skip meals. Control portion size. Share your meal or take half of it home.

Idea for Impact: Eating should be a pleasurable activity. No food is inherently good or bad, and there’s no need to build an adversarial relationship with food.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Cheat. Just Eat.
  2. You’ll Overeat If You Get Bigger Servings
  3. A Hack to Resist Temptation: The 15-Minute Rule
  4. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating
  5. Six Powerful Reasons to Eat Slowly and Mindfully

Inspirational Quotations #929

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Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
—Elinor Glyn (British Novelist)

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?
—Jean Anouilh (French Playwright)

It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins.
—Norm Phelps (American Animal Rights Activist)

Inspiration is the act of drawing the chair up to the writing table.
—Orhan Pamuk (Turkish Author)

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
—A. J. Ayer (English Philosopher)

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (American Academic, Politician)

Since it is not granted to us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.
—Pliny the Younger (Roman Senator, Writer)

Some people bear three kinds of trouble—all they ever had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
—Edward Everett Hale (American Unitarian Clergyman)

Caution is the parent of safety.
—Common Proverb

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.
—Henry Mayhew (English Journalist)

As for courage and will—we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.
—Andre Norton (American Science Fiction Writer)

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
—Dylan Thomas (Welsh Poet)

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
—Yuval Noah Harari (Israeli Historian)

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
—Isabel Allende (Chilean Novelist)

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.
—James Salter (American Fiction Writer)

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
—John Fowles (English Novelist)

When Exaggerations Cross the Line

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Many myths and urban legends—even politicians’ infuriating rhetoric—aren’t wholly untrue. Rather, they’re exaggerations of claims rooted in a kernel of truth.

Yes, many of us don’t achieve our full intellectual potential. However, that doesn’t suggest that most people use only 10% of our brainpower.

Sure, men and women tend to differ somewhat in their communication styles. However, pop psychologists such as John Gray have taken this gender difference stereotype to an extreme, declaring “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus.”

Idea for Impact: Exaggeration is part of human nature. Take care to not cross the line from harmless puffery to reckless overstatements.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Question Success More Than Failure
  2. You Can’t Believe Those Scientific Studies You Read About in the Papers
  3. What the Rise of AI Demands: Teaching the Thinking That Thinks About Thinking
  4. Let’s Hope She Gets Thrown in the Pokey
  5. Situational Blindness, Fatal Consequences: Lessons from American Airlines 5342

Fear of Feedback: Won’t Give, Don’t Ask

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Most bosses are uncomfortable about evaluating their subordinates. The prospect of delivering bad news makes them uneasy. They fear that employees will react to even the mildest criticism with anger, stalling, or tears. They don’t know what to say. As a result, they often do everything they can to avoid saying anything at all.

Most employees, for their sake, are fearful of uncovering what their bosses really think of them. They don’t want to know how they’re doing because they are afraid they aren’t doing very well. So they don’t ask. They wait to be told.

Idea for Impact: Giving and getting feedback may be difficult, but it won’t get any easier if you wait.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Giving Feedback and Depersonalizing It: Summary of Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor’
  2. Never Criticize Little, Trivial Faults
  3. Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

Intellectual Inspiration Often Lies in the Overlap of Disparate Ideas

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From David Chapman’s instructive essay ‘How to Think Real Good,’

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

I’ve always been an admirer of the “Renaissance Man”—the notion that one should try to embrace multiple streams of knowledge and develop one’s own faculties as broadly as possible. An archaeologist who studies only material culture will think similar thoughts to a second archaeologist who studies only material culture. However, an archaeologist whose studies include anthropology, biology, geology, and metallurgy has the wherewithal to pursue her curiosity down disparate channels and synthesize multiple perspectives.

Idea for Impact: Dabble in multiple disciplines from time to time and try to understand the basic thinking model of each discipline. You’ll think more broadly, redefine problems outside of normal boundaries, and reach solutions anchored in a unique understanding of complex situations.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Empower Your Problem-Solving with the Initial Hypothesis Method
  2. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  3. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  4. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill
  5. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo

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Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak writes in his memoir, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (2006):

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.

Teams aren’t automatically better at creativity. In what’s termed “collaborative inhibition,” everyone needs to be happy, so team members talk and talk until they’ve reached a consensus on a decision which is usually the lowest common denominator—something tepid that everyone, worn out from the prolonged discussion, can endorse.

Idea for Impact: The best creative decisions often reflect a unique, opinionated perspective. Look for ways to increase organizational creativity by building better environments in which individual creativity can thrive.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Why Group Brainstorming Falls Short on Creativity and How to Improve It
  2. The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage
  3. After Action Reviews: The Heartbeat of Every Learning Organization
  4. How to Stimulate Group Creativity // Book Summary of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’
  5. Van Gogh Didn’t Just Copy—He Reinvented

Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  2. The Data Never “Says”
  3. Defect Seeding: Strengthen Systems, Boost Confidence
  4. What if Something Can’t Be Measured
  5. When Bean Counters Turn Risk Managers: Lessons from the Ford Pinto Scandal