Sharpening Your Skills

Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’

March 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s best-selling The Power of Full Engagement (2003) is a persuasive reminder that matching your energy to a task is the key to excelling.

Personal energy, like willpower, is a “reservoir” that not only becomes depleted during a day but also can be filled up. “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”

Your Most Valuable Resource is Energy, Not Time

Even if you’re effective at time- and task-management, you may often find yourself with the available time to do something, but not the energy, focus, or passion needed. You can achieve so much with better time-management, but at some point, you can’t put in more hours because time is a finite resource. You can then pivot to another realm of self-management—your personal energy.

Identify the kinds of activities that drain and sustain you. If you know yourself well enough, you can make conscious, proactive choices that will help you feel more energetic throughout the day.
Understand your working pattern. Match your tasks to your energy levels throughout the day. If you are at your best first thing in the morning, work on something challenging at that time and defer the mundane and the routine until later in the day.
Start your day with a brief planning session to force yourself to be proactive. Planning is easier when your energy levels are highest, which, for most people, is first thing in the morning.

Manage Four Types of Personal Energy

The Power of Full Engagement characterizes four distinct but related sources of energy—physical, emotional, mental (ability to focus,) and spiritual (values and beliefs.) For peak performance, you must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

Energy levels vary from person to person, and people are each energized or exhausted by different things.
If you feel wiped out, think about which of these four “reservoirs” of energy is depleted. Stimulate yourself by doing something else that can draw stamina from another reservoir of energy.

Create Positive Energy Rituals

The authors’ study of the performance of top-rated athletes revealed that they rely on rhythmic patterns of focused performance and convalescence. In other words, peak performers push themselves intensely for a time, recuperate, and then return to another round of focused performance. The higher the performance demand, the greater the need for recovery and energy renewal.

Human beings operate in rhythms. Every 90 to 120 minutes, we transit from a high state of arousal slowly down into a lull. Our physiological constitution is designed to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal to help sustain energy throughout the day.

Intersperse periods of intense work with rejuvenating breaks. Build a rhythm throughout the day so that when you’re working, you’re truly engaged. After a period of intense activity, take a break to renew your energy levels.
Develop intentional routines and rituals—habits that can become automatic over time. Habits are so much more potent because they can reduce the need to rely on your limited conscious will and your discipline to take action.

Idea for Impact: Energy, Like Time, is a Resource You Must Learn to Manage

The Power of Full Engagement (2003) is an essential read—it can help you operate “rhythmically between stress and recovery” and pace your day better.

For sustainable high performance, you need to find systematic ways to expend your energy positively and balance it with regular energy renewal.

Seek periods of good energy and favor them. Reconsider periods of reduced energy and manage them better.

The Sensitivity of Politics in Today’s Contentious Climate

March 9, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

If you feel like you’ve been overdosing on news and conversations related to politics and Trump, much to the exclusion of other meaningful subjects, try the “No Trump Rule” evoked by essayist Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal:

Every Friday I meet for lunch with three or four friends from high school days. I instituted at these lunches what I called the No Trump Rule: ‘No’ not in the sense of being against Trump’s politics but against talking about him at all, for doing so seems to get everyone worked up unduly. The rule, I have to report, has been broken more than the Ten Commandments. No one, apparently, can stop talking about our president. The Trump talk quickly uses up most of the oxygen in any room where it arises, and can bring an argument to the shouting stage more quickly than a divorce settlement.

Look, I understand that everybody has been amped up to eleven since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s nominee in May 2016, but some of us don’t want to talk about him—or politics.

I, for one, don’t think it’s a good idea for so much of our news, talk shows, and social media feeds to be devoted to a single subject for this long. Yes, Trump is a polarizing figure, and our country is so divided. But we don’t need to let him, and the anger he provokes, besiege every moment of our lives.

Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but hatred isn’t meaningful activism

I’m happy to listen to everybody’s opinions, but I’m fatigued by the extent to which politics dominates present-day exchanges. Ordinary conversations about routine topics tend to degenerate quickly with any evocation of the current state of affairs. Even banter about the weather (“the last refuge of the unimaginative” per Oscar Wilde) can quickly spiral into climate change, the environment, fossil fuels, oil, Russia, Putin, and so on.

More than anything else, I can’t bear the way most people currently think about politics—in particular, how ill-informed they tend to be. I am dismayed at people’s shallow understanding of the significant issues of the day—immigration, trade, nationalism, economic inequality, healthcare, etc. The stakes are high, and, given the depth of people’s political convictions, their anger is understandable. Nevertheless, the propensity to lash out against those with different views and dehumanize them is deplorable.

I will talk about politics with people who aren’t as much interested in winning an argument and convincing opposing people of the wrongness of their positions as they are about understanding more fully why others hold a particular conviction.

Our values, not politicians, should mold the policies and positions we support

Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers’ commendable I Think You’re Wrong (But I’m Listening): A Guide to Grace-Filled Political Conversations (2019) proposes a framework for having productive political conversations with those you love and yet disagree with.

Somewhere along the way we stopped disagreeing with each other and started hating each other. We are enemies, and our side is engaged in an existential battle for the very soul of the country. We are no longer working toward common goals. We are no longer building something together. Our sole objective is tearing the other side down. Nothing short of total victory is acceptable.

…

The reality is that we never stopped talking politics altogether—we stopped talking politics with people who disagree with us. We changed “you shouldn’t talk about politics” to “you should talk only to people who reinforce your worldview.” Instead of giving ourselves the opportunity to be molded and informed and tested by others’ opinions, we allowed our opinions and our hearts to harden.

The authors, hosts of a popular discussion-podcast, invite readers “to hear each other’s thoughts, to test our own beliefs against each other’s philosophies, and to better appreciate our own core beliefs by having to articulate and challenge those beliefs.” They emphasize an earnest curiosity for the counterargument and the open-mindedness to leave room for nuance:

Engaging with other people is never easy, but it always will be worth it. Engaging with other people about politics is no different. Let yourself take that chance. Let yourself rise to the challenge. Your ability to stretch and grow will surprise you, and so will the people around you. Once people see you as a person willing to have thoughtful, curious, calm discussions, you will have all kinds of interesting conversations that seemed impossible a year ago.

Postscript: Things are far more awkward in the workplace. Politics has always been a sensitive topic—but in today’s contentious climate, such conversations can rapidly escalate into arguments.

Question Success More Than Failure

March 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals

February 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To supplement this illustrious sketch by the British cartoonist Matt Pritchett, an excerpt from HuffPost’s article on “How Jeremy Corbyn Lost The Election,”

One big problem was the sheer size of the [Labour Party] manifesto and the number of policies on offer. Candidates complained that they didn’t have a single five-point pledge card like the one Tony Blair made famous. While the Tories had a simple message of ‘Get Brexit Done,’ Labour lacked a similarly easy ‘doorstep offer.’ “We had so much in the manifesto we almost had too much,” one senior source said. “It felt like none of it was cutting through. You needed to boil it down.”

“We tried to give a retail offer and also a grand vision and ended up falling between the two stools. To get across ‘you’ll be better off with Labour,’ we should have made our position clearer much earlier.”

Idea for Impact: Distill your goals into simple messages that others will find relevant and timely. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical. Weak messages meander. Smart messages immediately express what’s important and help rally your resources towards your mission.

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego!

February 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even Petty Power Corrupts: Authority Can Warp Behavior

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego! Ever wonder why some folks with a little authority, but not much real status, tend to throw their weight around? They often become overconfident, controlling, and bossy. This phenomenon, known as “hubris syndrome,” can lead to micromanaging, unnecessary rules, and a real disconnect from the people around them.

Even in lower-level jobs, you can see these power trips in action. For instance, rub a TSA agent the wrong way, and you might get flagged for extra screening. Summer pool guards can be overly strict with kids and parents who don’t show them the proper respect. In bureaucratic offices, clerks and supervisors frequently impose petty rules just to flex their authority.

These power trippers rely on control to boost their fragile egos. Power tends to amplify self-importance, making people more likely to act in a domineering way—something we often sum up with, “power corrupts” or the “authority bias.

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

This anecdotal observation is backed by a study titled “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status.” The researchers argue that neither power nor low status alone leads people to mistreat others; it’s the combination of the two that increases the likelihood of abuse.

We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status—and the respect that comes with that status—then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low-status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings.

One way to prevent these toxic power dynamics is to ensure that everyone feels respected and valued, regardless of their role. According to the study, “respect assuages negative feelings about low-status roles and encourages positive interactions with others.” In other words, courtesy pays off!

Notes

Some people despise anyone they suspect is trying to pull the strings or exert power over them.
Consider the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of students was assigned roles as either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. Despite knowing they were part of an experiment, the “guards” subjected the “prisoners” to humiliating treatment. According to the researchers, this behavior stemmed from the guards’ desire for respect and admiration, which they felt was lacking in their interactions with others. This controversial experiment was later depicted in a 2015 docudrama.
This concept can be compared to the Napoleon Complex, where shorter men may overcompensate for their height through social aggressiveness, despite the fact that Napoleon himself was not actually short.
Cf. The “Waiter Rule” states that how you treat seemingly insignificant people says a lot about your personality and priorities.

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage

February 20, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re an entrepreneur entering a new market with a product or service that nobody else offers, you’ll seek the first-mover advantage.

You’ll move quickly to get established as a market leader. If your business idea has the potential to succeed, other entrepreneurs are possibly working on it at the same time or will be quick to emulate when they see what you’re doing.
You’ll validate your concepts quickly by identifying and partnering with a few enthusiastic “guinea pig” customers who can test your product or service early on and give you feedback regarding what customers really want.
You’ll create some barriers (“establish an economic moat” in Warren Buffett-speak) to inhibit other aspirants from entering the market—you’ll secure patents on your intellectual property, lock-in key locations, or negotiate longer-term contracts with customers.

Alas, many first-mover advantages are not sustainable, and many first-movers are as successful as what the superstars will have you believe.

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

New ventures have higher failure rates than more established businesses.

Creating market awareness, sustaining market acceptance, fending away aggressive competitors are often easier said than done for many new ventures, not to mention lining up suppliers and distributors. Besides, unless you’re well-capitalized by patient investors, you’re likely to face higher-than-foreseen marketing costs on top of lower-than-anticipated sales.

Instead, if you are the second—or later—entrepreneur to market, you’ll stand a better chance of success by learning from the forerunner’s mistakes. You’ll also earn better credence from your customers, suppliers, distributors, employees, and investors to help create a better product or service.

Idea for Impact: There’s an American adage that “many pioneers died with arrows in their backs.” The best time for an entrepreneur to offer a new product or service is after others have already gotten there and laid some groundwork.

The Best Leaders Make the Complex Simple

February 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The New York Times‘s Adam Bryant interviewed 525 CEOs for his Corner Office column and compiled two excellent books, The Corner Office (2012) and Quick and Nimble (2014,) on leadership and management advice. Foremost among the themes common with successful leaders, Bryant says, is “a simple mindset”—the ability to synthesize the simple from the complex and create organizational priorities.

There’s a really important quality [in great CEOs] that I call a “simple mindset,” which is the ability to take a lot of complicated information and really boil it down to the one or two or three things that really matter, and in a simple way, communicate that to people.

In big organizations—frankly, in any company—there are always a dozen or more competing priorities. And it is the leader’s job to stand up in front of the troops and say, “These are the three things that we are going to focus on this year,” or “These are the goals and this is how we are going to measure them.” If you really want to galvanize people and get them operating as a team, you’ve got to create a simple scoreboard that everybody understands.

The communication style, to me, is secondary to getting the content right. And what I’ve been so often impressed by is leaders who can essentially boil down the company’s goals and operating model into, literally, less than a page.

This is a real trick to leadership—creating a simple structure so that everybody in the organization can understand how the work they are doing contributes to the broader goals.

Rob Andrews, CEO of the executive headhunting firm Allen Austin, underscores this “boil the complex into the simple” approach in his leadership manual, High-Performance Human Capital Leadership (2015,)

I have found that when I go into a company to lead, it is important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. I am constantly asking the question,—What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business? What are the two or three things that really matter? And I find that most leaders do not really do that often.

Idea for Impact: One of the essential attributes of a modern leader is the ability to cut complexity everywhere. Develop the ability to take large, complicated things—and information—and make them very simple.

Better Than Brainstorming

February 8, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most brainstorming sessions suck. Facilitators aren’t often skilled enough to direct the creative process and overcome interpersonal and intrapersonal barriers to idea-generation. Participants are not as organized as they need to be. One or two “meeting-hogs,” who lack self-awareness and self-control, dominate the conversations with their pet ideas and shut everyone else down. And then there’s groupthink and self-censorship based on responses to earlier suggestions by others. Consequently, bold ideas seldom survive a group discussion.

If you want to buck the odds, try “brainwriting” instead of brainstorming.

In its simplest form, brainwriting has the participants quietly reflect upon an open-ended prompt of appropriate scope, for example, “how could we improve our design process,” and write down their ideas. A group leader can organize the responses by combining identical ideas, grouping thematically-related ideas, and posting them on a wall for the group to appraise them further. Then, the participants vote on their favorites, and the top ‘n’ number of ideas or priorities are identified for future discussion and exploration.

Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

In essence, brainwriting isolates idea generation from the instantaneous discussion and evaluation that can hamper the creative process.

Brainwriting, when followed by discussion, combines the benefits of both individual and group creativity. Studies have repeatedly shown that people think of more new—and practical—ideas on their own than they do in a group.

In my experience, this creative thinking process is inclusionary, engaging, time-effective, non-judgmental, and mostly free from pressures to conform to others’ ideas. Brainwriting is particularly useful with a group of people who are reserved and would be unlikely to offer many ideas in an open group session.

What You Learn from Failure

February 3, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One common theme among people who cope particularly effectively with failure is their ability to acknowledge the failure, put it in perspective, and seek causes, not blame. As the Dalai Lama XIV writes in The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace (2009,)

If a misfortune has already occurred, it is best not to worry about it, so we do not add fuel to the problem. Don’t ally yourself with past events by lingering on them and exaggerating them. Let the past take care of itself, and transport yourself to the present while taking whatever measures are necessary to ensure that such a misfortune never occurs again, now or in the future.

American investor and superstar hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio writes in his very instructive Principles: Life and Work (2017,)

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that it was the pain of this wrestling that made me and those around me appreciate our successes.

In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement.

Much is written about the notion of failures as gifts, but the key to dealing with failures is to attribute those failures to weaknesses in a thought process, not to personal flaws. Failures expose a weakness in your underlying process, which you can now fix. Fine-tune your tactics until you find out what doeswork. Dalio instructs,

When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it.)

Idea for Impact: Don’t rationalize failures and magnify them in your mind. Fix them. Then, reflect on what they teach about what didn’t work. Inquire, “What was missing?” rather than “What went wrong?” The latter results in finger-pointing. The former opens up possibilities and results in personal growth.

Inspirational Mess, Creative Clutter

January 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Biographer Roland Penrose (1900–84) writes in Picasso: His Life and Work (1958,)

Disorder was to Picasso a happier breeding ground for ideas than the perfection of a tidy room in which nothing upset the equilibrium by being out of place.

Once when visiting Picasso at his flat in the rue la Boétie, I noticed that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. “It’s better like that,” he said. “If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is to hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.”

Studies suggest that, for some people, messiness can boost creativity by spurring inspiration flow and helping them explore different avenues. One researcher explained, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.”

But don’t use this concept as a crutch to defend your clutter.

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Sharpening Your Skills

Your Most Valuable Resource is Energy, Not Time

Manage Four Types of Personal Energy

Create Positive Energy Rituals

Idea for Impact: Energy, Like Time, is a Resource You Must Learn to Manage

Wondering what to read next?

Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but hatred isn’t meaningful activism

Our values, not politicians, should mold the policies and positions we support

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Even Petty Power Corrupts: Authority Can Warp Behavior

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

Notes

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First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

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Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

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