Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Decision-Making

A Quick Way to Build Your Confidence Right Now

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Guilt, anxiety, and fear usually manifest as a creeping mindset of what’s lacking. You feel you’re not enough, and you don’t have the resources you need to achieve your goals.

Lack of confidence will probably hold you back more than you may acknowledge. Be mindful of your thoughts and address these negative thinking patterns. Notice how you speak to yourself—harping only on what isn’t enough of or what isn’t working doesn’t instill your self-assuredness.

When you spiral about what is lacking, try the Abundance Mentality—it empowers you to believe in your extant ability. You can make do with what you have and overcome any difficulties. This isn’t some naïve “can do” temperament, but it’s an earnest endeavor to muster hope and agency instead of doubt and helplessness.

Idea for Impact: The less you do, the less confident you’ll feel.

Don’t wait until you feel more confident—often, more ruminating leads to analysis paralysis. Self-confidence comes from successful experiences, and to create these successful experiences, take action.

Take a low-risk action to increase your confidence. Assume you’re the most confident self you’ve ever been and do what that self would do. Prioritize your choices and direct your resources to pressing needs, ignoring other goals.

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  5. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect

Get Your Priorities Straight

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Most folks don’t take the time to write down and prioritize their values and goals. That’s the cornerstone of the all time-maximizing strategies.

Without distinct values and priorities, many people devote insufficient time to activities that support their most significant priorities.

No matter your goals, begin by thinking thoroughly about why you are engaging in any activity and what you expect to get out of it. Then be time-conscious. Match your time allocations with these top goals. Deliberately decide if you want to pursue each task required of you. Recall, too, that what you get done, and not time, in and of itself, is the best measure of success.

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  4. Hofstadter’s Law: Why Everything Takes Longer Than Anticipated
  5. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost

Beware of Too Much Information

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Nearly all decision-making models emphasize the need for much information about the situation and options before making a decision.

Information is worthwhile, no doubt, but information can sometimes be less factual or less precise than it may seem. Besides, too much information may distract you from important issues. Scouting for additional data may cloud the picture rather than arm you with crucial information.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the usefulness and truth-value of the information you have amassed. The solution to being overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information is selecting relevant information—not merely less information.

Bear in mind that there’s always room for new ideas and new perspectives. Review and challenge your current comprehension of the problem you’re confronting. Don’t be afraid to refine your understanding and explore other possibilities.

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  5. Creativity by Imitation: How to Steal Others’ Ideas and Innovate

What Most People Get Wrong About Focus

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'Choose Wonder Over Worry' by Amber Rae (ISBN 0385491743) In Choose Wonder Over Worry (2018) self-help author Amber Rae recalls novelist Elizabeth Gilbert’s interaction with a wise older lady who was helping Gilbert with her struggles as a writer:

Lady: “What are you willing to give up in order to have the life you keep saying you want?”

Gilbert: “You’re right—I need to start saying no to things I don’t want to do.”

Lady: “No, it’s much harder than that. You need to learn to start saying no to things you _do_ want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life, and you don’t have time and energy for everything.”

This anecdote is such a powerful illustration of how saying ‘no’ is so much easier when you’re clear about your priorities.

That’s what focus really is—saying ‘no’ to things you’d like to do so that you can free up your time to focus on the pursuits that truly matter—even tasks you have to do, even if they don’t energize and excite you.

Idea for Impact: Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but it’s essential to establish an overall sense of well-being. Every ‘no’ is a ‘yes’ to something else.

  • Don’t find any excuse to say ‘yes’ to what shouldn’t be done.
  • Don’t find any reason to say ‘no’ to what should be done.

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  5. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

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Your first attempts are going to be bad

A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:

  • Make something. Get it functional. Get it adequate. It’s okay if it’s subpar.
  • Then, stumble around. Iterate until it’s good.

Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.

Start, even if you’re bad at it

Case in point: Write bad first drafts quickly. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. Let it all pour out. Let it romp all over the place. No one’s going to see it. You can shape it up later. You can gradually polish the thought flow and enrich the choice of words.

If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.

It’s vastly easier to revise your way into a cut above than drum up brilliance out of thin air.

The way you create something good is by launching into it and then iterating gradually rather than by going into your cave and trying to create that perfect masterpiece.

Essentially, this is agile development. The best programmers write functional code to prove some concept. Along the way, they’ll get a better understanding of the business need for the software and the workflow. Bit by bit, they rework snippets of code and improve continuously.

Idea for Impact: Just start. Do a bad first job.

The bad is the precursor to the good. Bad will get you started. It’ll move you forward. Pressing on, you’ll get illuminated, enlightened, and informed.

Momentum is everything. Don’t put off any contemplated task thinking, “This is hard. I don’t know how to do this well. I’m going to have to do it perfectly. Or I need to wait till I have enough time.” The instant you stop cold and put something off, momentum starts the other way.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Taking action—even in small, sloppy ways—naturally produces momentum. It’s a better solution than trying to do it right the first time.

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  5. Do Things Fast

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.

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  4. Question the Now, Imagine the Next
  5. Avoid Defining the Problem Based on a Proposed Solution

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.

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  5. Gut Instinct as Compressed Reason—Why Disney Walked Away from Twitter in 2016

Is Dave Ramsey Wrong? Pay Off Your Mortgage as Quickly as You Can?

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Sure, personal finance guru Dave Ramsey’s advice has encouraged thousands of devoted followers to get out of debt and stop living paycheck to paycheck. Yet, depending on your circumstances, he may be dead wrong on paying off your mortgage early.

A generation ago, mortgage rates were 6–10%. With interest rates that high, paying off your mortgage was a no-brainer. Today, however, interest rates are 2.5–4%, making a different story. You could pay off your mortgage quicker if you’d like. But with the low-interest rates today, you may want to consider investing instead of paying off the low-interest debt. The average stock market return for buy-and-hold investors over the long term is about 7% annually, even after considering inflation.

In sum, Dave Ramsey’s advice just doesn’t make as much sense today with how low-interest rates are comparatively.

But some nuance is in order: Ramsey promotes financial stability. He accepts the risk of missed investment returns in exchange for the guarantee of reduced financial obligations. On balance, investing in the market while carrying a mortgage is tantamount to leveraging debt.

Idea for Impact: Ramsey measures opportunity cost as the difference between paying down your mortgage and the worst-case stock market investment scenario. So, unless you’re extraordinarily risk-averse and can’t take the risk in the market, you shouldn’t pay off your mortgage early. Invest in a low-cost index fund, and don’t let short-term movements sway your decisions.

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Even the Best Need a Coach

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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.

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Decision-Making Isn’t Black and White

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Most decisions aren’t “good” or “bad;” most fall somewhere in the middle.

Coming to terms with this reality is a big part of allowing yourself to trust your decisions, especially when dealing with uncertainty. Besides, more thinking can’t always be better thinking.

Let go of decisions you made in the past that you weren’t entirely satisfied with. Don’t let them haunt you in the present. Don’t let them second-guess yourself after a decision has been made.

Idea for Impact: When decisions don’t work out as expected, give yourself a break. Not all bad outcomes result from bad decisions. There are positive and negative implications to everything. And that’s OK.

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  3. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking
  4. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  5. Insight Arrives on Its Own Schedule