Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Sharpening Your Skills

Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize

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There’s a difference between what you can measure and what you must prioritize.

If you let the data drive the process, you’ll end up with an abundance of metrics that you don’t really know what to do with. Don’t build metrics based on what is easy to measure instead of measuring what matters.

Don't Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize While you might want to track many metrics, you need to prioritize a few of them—just the ones that matter most for your team. Start with strategic goals, and frame the data collection and analysis around those goals. Be clear about these goals in your internal communications.

Idea for Impact: The more you measure, the less prioritized you can be. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to measure everything. Focus on developing reliable metrics and models that consistently link the data to your team’s performance. Measure what matters.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize
  2. More Data Isn’t Always Better
  3. The Data Never “Says”
  4. “Goals Gone Wild”: The Use and Abuse of Goals
  5. Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

An Underappreciated Way to Improve Team Dynamic

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An Underappreciated Way to Improve Team Dynamic Reverse mentoring (the youngest and brightest teaching the oldest and experienced) has obvious symbiotic benefits for the mentor and mentee. The approach can also stimulate compelling results for the core organization and help mobilize nontraditional teams.

Reverse mentoring flips the hierarchy. It helps senior employees avoid the “ivory tower syndrome,” which happens when they become so out of touch that they can no longer relate to the juniors’ day-to-day struggles. The fresh perspectives on how the young think and work can benefit their more established colleagues.

Reverse mentoring builds up the junior employees’ sense of belonging. When included in the decision-making process, they’re comfortable expressing their views.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Book Summary of Leigh Branham’s ‘The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’
  2. Ten Rules of Management Success from Sam Walton
  3. How to Handle Employees who Moonlight
  4. Not Everybody Wishes to Climb the Corporate Ladder [Finding Work-Life Balance]
  5. You Don’t Have to Be Chained to Your Desk to Succeed at Work

How Emotional Resilience Improves with Age

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Studies of social and emotional aging have consistently shown that we tend to enjoy a better sense of emotional well-being as we grow older—starting from our late 50s.

The brain slows down, and memory deteriorates with age, so we process information slower. We get better at regulating the instinct to enact annoyance and anger.

As we get older, we tend to have a positive bias. We stop sweating the small stuff, pick our battles wisely, and find it easier to let go of situations we experience as unfavorable, especially with friends and family.

The lessons these studies bear for us all: organize your life’s physical and social aspects to reduce unnecessary stressors. Happiness is indeed a result, not a cause.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  2. Heaven and Hell: A Zen Parable on Self-Awareness
  3. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’
  4. Lessons from a Social Media Disaster
  5. Why People Get Happier as They Age

Focus on Rituals, Not Goals

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My biggest takeaway from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) is the importance of shifting your focus from your end goal to what your need to do regularly to reach that goal.

'Atomic Habits' by James Clear (ISBN 0593189647) Though goals can provide orientation and motivation, Clear notes that committing to the system makes all the difference. Goals aren’t necessarily the best way to ensure things are done. Thinking about only goals tends to make people believe, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.” This impedes their long-term progress.

Instead, Clear recommends centering on the routines and things you need to do regularly to reach the goal. For example: If you’re a swim team coach, and your goal is to win a championship, the system that you should focus on is training every day, “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

Idea for Impact: A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mindset. “Fall in love with the process rather than the product.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize
  2. “Goals Gone Wild”: The Use and Abuse of Goals
  3. The Power of Sharing Your Goals
  4. Missing in SMART goals: the ‘Why’
  5. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

Why Sandbagging Your Goals Kills Productivity

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Sandbagging is managers believing they can accomplish more if they lower the bar and set goals their team can easily hit. Sure, managers often purposely set comfortable goals so that there’s room for “under-promise and over-deliver.”

Why Sandbagging Your Goals Kills Productivity Setting low goals may appear a clever strategy, but it’s a recipe for underperformance. Sandbagged goals don’t demand much in the way of performance when managers already know precisely how their teams will achieve the goals.

However, sandbagging can let teams down. Under-setting goals actually does what it’s created to avoid—teams eventually find such easy goals boring and demotivating. Low goals require little and inspire less, and ultimately undercut productivity. According to this study by Chancellor University’s Steve Kerr and Douglas Lepelley, when goals are fixed “too low, people often achieve them, but subsequent motivation and energy levels typically flag, and the goals are usually not exceeded by very much.”

Idea for Impact: To generate the greatest levels of effort and performance, set demanding goals outside your team’s comfort zone, but not so challenging and unattainable as to break your team’s morale. Aiming to achieve extraordinary things—hitting the farthest target and missing—can often be more worthwhile than successfully hitting a easy target.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize
  2. “Goals Gone Wild”: The Use and Abuse of Goals
  3. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  4. Performance Appraisal Systems “Don’t Meet Expectations”
  5. The Trouble with Targets and Goals

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset This Holiday Season

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Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season

Perfectionism can inspire you to deliver top-quality work, but it’ll cause needless anxiety and slow you down, especially over the holiday season.

Even for the more fastidious among us, a spotless home isn’t always achievable. Everywhere you look, there’ll be something to straighten up—unfolded laundry, kids’ toys on the floor, piles of unopened mail.

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset This Holiday Season Embrace the mess. Recognize that not all will get done on time. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home.

Don’t cling to your perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. Put things away when you’re able to, but don’t feel like you have to dedicate many hours to tidy up, especially when that time can be better spent relaxing and rejoicing with family.

Idea for Impact: Now is a good time you cut yourself a break. There’s no need to feel less-than-great about the state of your home over the holidays.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. 8 Effective Ways to De-Stress This Holiday Season
  2. Thou Shall Attend the Office Holiday Party
  3. What Type of Perfectionist Are You?
  4. A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset
  5. Stop Trying to Change People Who Don’t Want to Change

Even the Best Need a Coach

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Even the Best Need a Coach (Tom Brady with coach Bill Belichick)

As the saying goes, it’s what you learn after you know it all.

Top athletes rely on coaches to push their performance to new heights. Even Tiger Woods had a swing coach at the top of his game.

Many corporate executives seek out several advisors who help frame ideas for them and play a point of critical thinking. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch worked with Ram Charan, the eminence grise of business advisors, for many years.

“It’s not how good you are now; it’s how good you’re going to be that really matters”

In a TED2017 speech, the American surgeon Atul Gawande—author of such well-received books as The Checklist Manifesto (2011)—emphasized how coaching helps individuals and teams execute better on the fundamentals:

Having a good coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again.

There are numerous problems in “making it on your own.” You don’t recognize the issues that are standing in your way—or, if you do, you don’t necessarily know how to fix them. And the result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving.

That’s what great coaches do—they are your external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of your reality. They’re good at recognizing the fundamentals. They’re breaking your actions down and then helping you build them back up again.

Sometimes you can be too close to things to see the truth.

Blind spots are less obvious when things are going well. It is very easy for you to become inward-looking, particularly when you’ve been very successful. However, these blind spots can become destructive when performance moves in the other direction.

A third-party, fresh-eye assessment is an obvious reality check. Coaching is a whole line of way that can bring value to what you do and excel at it.

If you’re successful and want to get better, you’ll need to look at your situation as an outsider might. Coaching can help you get perspective and see things in a more detached manner.

It’s Lonely at the Top

Executives need a valuable ally and a resource for professional growth. They hire coaches to help explore their strengths and vulnerabilities.

Coaches are also valuable allies in decision-making. Many executives find it helpful to talk important decisions over with a trusted coach—just the process of talking can help sort out and clarify thoughts and feelings. Not to mention how another person’s views may illumine aspects of a problem that you may have missed.

Besides, many a coach’s specific arena is one of interpersonal relationships, office politics, and corporate culture. To be effective in our work, you must be effective in building relationships with your bosses, subordinates, peers, and other organizational stakeholders such as customers and suppliers. Management and leadership are all about influence.

Idea for Impact: Coaching is how people get better at what they do

You too should consider a coach to look at things with a fresh eye, improve your performance, and help with interpersonal relationships in the workplace.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Performance Appraisal Systems “Don’t Meet Expectations”
  2. You Too Can (and Must) Become Effective // Summary of Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive
  3. How to Stimulate Group Creativity // Book Summary of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’
  4. The Difference between Coaching and Feedback
  5. Book Summary of Leigh Branham’s ‘The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’

You Can’t Believe Those Scientific Studies You Read About in the Papers

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Look at the filler articles in the well-being section of your preferred newspaper, and you’ll often luck into health advice with nuance-free mentions of all sorts of scientific studies.

One week, drinking coffee is good for you. Next week it’s harmful. Ditto video games. Swearing makes you look intelligent, but hold your flipping horses … the next day, swearing makes you seem verbally challenged to explain your annoyances respectfully.

Gutter press revelations isn’t only less-than-scientific, but it actually defeats the objectives of science.

You Can't Believe Those Scientific Studies You Read About in the Papers In June 2014, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an allegedly peer-reviewed paper titled “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes.” The study deduced that hurricanes with feminine names generate more casualties supposedly because tacit sexism makes communities take the storms with a feminine name less seriously. The work was discredited as soon as its methods were dissected. Nevertheless, the dubious paper had made its way into media channels across the country because of the believability implied by the influential National Academy of Sciences.

Positive results that make a sensational headline tend to get published readily—especially if they speak to the audiences’ worldviews. In truth, many of these studies are low-quality studies where the variables are latent, and the effects aren’t directly observable and quantifiable, especially in the social sciences. Sadly, with the push to produce ever more papers in academia, peer review doesn’t necessarily corroborate the quality of research nearly so much as it enforces a discipline’s norms.

Idea for Impact: Let’s be skeptical readers. Let’s be better readers.

'A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics' by Daniel Levitin (ISBN 0241239990) Let’s subject every claim to the common-sense test: is the claim possible, plausible, probable, and likely? Everything possible isn’t plausible, everything plausible isn’t probable, and everything probable isn’t likely.

Being skeptical does not mean doubting the validity of everything, nor does it mean being cynical. Instead, to be skeptical is to judge the validity of a claim based on objective evidence and understand the assertions’ nuances. Yes, even extraordinary claims can be valid, but the more extraordinary a claim, the more remarkable the evidence to be mobilized.

While we’re on the subject, have you heard about research that found that you could make unsuspecting people believe in anything by merely asserting that it’s been “shown by research?” Now then, the former’s the only research worth believing. Very much so, yes, even without evidence!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Trickery of Leading Questions
  2. Why Your Judgment Sucks // Summary of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
  3. Elevate Timing from Art to Science // Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’
  4. Gambler’s Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World
  5. Conspicuous Consumption and The Era of Excess // Book Summary of ‘Luxury Fever’

Don’t Suppress Your Emotions

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Buddhism Lessons: Don't Suppress Your Emotions The Buddha taught that emotions are part of being human. Redemption comes solely from knowledge, the root of which lies in the awareness of the reasons for suffering.

Buddhism discourages you from ignoring unpleasant emotions so that you don’t have to experience them.

Acknowledging the way things are—and that they can’t change—may be the most challenging step toward happiness. It’s worth trying because you really can be happy, even when your life looks nothing like you thought it would.

Don’t try to quash your emotions; let yourself feel them. Yes, even the unpleasant ones. This attitude enables you to process them and challenge the dread that you won’t handle them.

Idea for Impact: Acceptance helps you work with the life you have. You can feel contentment in life without berating yourself for not feeling what you think you’re supposed to feel.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Was the Buddha a God or a Superhuman?
  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Discover the Essence of Buddhism in 5 Minutes
  4. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  5. “Release Your Cows” … Be Happy

The Mental Junkyard Hour

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The Mental Junkyard Hour---Productivity Hour Before Bed If you can muster up the energy, use an hour or two at the end of your day to crank out all those “functional tasks” that don’t require a totally clear head.

Wrap up anything that you shouldn’t carry forward to the next day. Crack down on all those administrative and life-maintenance tasks—like catching up with email, tidying up your home, and reprioritizing to-do lists. If you’re a student, you can summarize class notes, re-do practice problems, and get the school bag ready.

Making the most of the “mental junkyard hour” lets you spend the time when your head is clearer to focus on those tougher, “conceptual” tasks that need deep focused work.

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  2. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress [Mental Models]
  3. Book Summary of Peter Drucker’s ‘The Practice of Management’
  4. Writing To-Do Lists Can Help You Sleep
  5. Your To-Do List Isn’t a Wish List: Add to It Selectively