Ideas for Impact
There’s a difference between the data you’d like to have to decide and the data you’d need before you can make a decision.
When you get to a point where any further data may serve to make your decision better-informed but wouldn’t really change your mind, it’s time to stop deliberating. Make that decision.
Be willing to act on adequate data.
Most people spend a good part of their day responding to ad hoc requests, drop-ins, questions, and emergencies. During the short periods when they aren’t being interrupted, they find it hard to get back to their big projects, knowing that they’d soon be interrupted again.
Here’s a tried-and-tested tactic to prevent interruptions from invading your day.
Make disruptions the exception rather than the norm. If your job allows it, don’t add on work for the same day. In many professions, there aren’t a lot of “emergencies” that really threaten a life or a business if not addressed within an hour or two.
Idea for Impact: Unscheduled tasks can add up to a dreadful drag on your productivity. Stick to a plan and stay focused. You’ll manage your day better and protect the most important, deep thinking work that’ll drive your goals forward.
You have an enemy: a feisty, malign force working against you. It’s the internalized perfectionist. It’s the stream of subversive self-talk urging indecision, doubt, and fear.
The #1 hack to overcoming you perfectionist tendency is to accept that whatever you need to work on just needs to be an outline, first attempt, rough copy, version 0. It needn’t be perfect. You just need to get it to a little bit better shape than before. You can then consider the next baby step.
Idea for Impact: Many things in your life need not be done perfectly. They’re to be done … just done … done to spur more done … not to dwell to perfection.
Your goal now is not to be like a Picasso, Mozart, Steven King, Lebron James, Warren Buffett, or some superstar. All you have to do now is create, edit, fix, or process and get whatever it is you’re working on to the next milestone. Make this a rule.
Self-confidence, so often peddled by the self-help genre as the panacea for low achievement, can indeed cause it. Beyond a moderate amount, self-confidence is destined to encourage complacency—even conceit. You’ll never reach anything better with that attitude.
Paradoxically, conceding your insecurities—and having a certain amount of humility about your capabilities—-is usually to your advantage.
Deep down, some of history’s greatest icons—from Abraham Lincoln to Mahatma Gandhi—regularly worried that they weren’t good enough. That’s what kept them striving harder.
Face up to your self-judgment. Low self-esteem is present only when your self-appraisal is more acute than reality.
Channel that nagging voice in your head that keeps saying negative things about you. Don’t be self-defeatingly vulnerable. Don’t worry yourself into perfection, anxiety, or despair.
Engage that little “sweet spot” of insecurity to motivate yourself to exert the additional effort required to seek a better self. For example, ignore anyone who tries to calm your nerves by telling you to “just be yourself” or “who else could be better suited” before a job interview.
Idea for Impact: Satisfaction can be deadly. Lasting self-confidence derives from your ongoing effort, not by virtue.
One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.
Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.
Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.
Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.
It’s easier to hire people you naturally feel comfortable with, and you’ll feel most comfortable with people who remind you of yourself and your in-group. This is instinctive—it’s part of what psychologists identify as implicit bias.
However, clone-hiring initiates groupthink. There’s much value in surrounding yourself with others who are not like you—people who may make you feel a little uncomfortable and bring a different perspective. As the Bay-Area career coach Marty Nemko cautions, “We find comfort among those who agree with us, growth among those who don’t.”
To build a team with diverse talents, look for people with complementary skills and agreeable temperaments. As I explained in my article on competency modeling, identify the traits, characteristics, and behaviors in the star performers on your team and not in the average performers. Then, hire and promote people who have demonstrated the distinct traits and behaviors of the star performers.
Idea for Impact: Don’t try to hire clones. Instead, look for people who’re a complement. You need people less like you and more of a complement to you. Compatibility is not about being similar in nature; it’s about co-existing and thriving in harmony.
Rep. Tom Moore Jr. (1918–2017) of the Texas House of Representatives was dismayed at how often his legislative colleagues in the Texas House of Representatives passed bills without reading and understanding them. For an April Fools’ Day prank in 1971, he sponsored this resolution honoring Albert de Salvo:
This compassionate gentleman’s dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology.
The resolution passed unanimously.
Albert de Salvo was actually the Massachusetts serial killer known as the “Boston Strangler.”
Having made his point, Rep. Moore withdrew the resolution.
Idea for Impact: Don’t endorse anything you haven’t read and understood thoroughly. Abstention, even denial, is much preferable to a blind aye!
American engineer and entrepreneur Wilbert L. “Bill” Gore (1912–86) was the founder (with wife Genevieve (Vieve)) of W. L. Gore & Associates, the maker of such innovative products as Gore-Tex fabrics, Elixir guitar strings, and a variety of medical products.
Gore’s open and creative workplace emphasized autonomy, fairness, commitment, and experimentation. He instituted a mental model for risk-tolerance called the “Waterline Principle.”
Gore compared the level of allowable risk to the waterline on a boat.
Commenting about Bill Gore and his Waterline Principle, business consultant Jim Collins noted in his How the Mighty Fall (2009,)
When making risky bets and decisions in the face of ambiguous or conflicting data, ask three questions:
- What’s the upside, if events turn out well?
- What’s the downside, if events go very badly?
- Can you live with the downside? Truly?
The Waterline Principle encourages prudent experimentation and conscientious risk-taking by lowering the risk waterline.
Idea for Impact: Risk analysis and risk reduction should be one of the primary goals of any intellectual process. Invite your team to identify risks that can sink the boat and those that can cause survivable damages.
As the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes proclaimed, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.”
The physicist Richard P. Feynman often talked about how doubt informs critical thinking and learning. In a 1964 lecture on “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” published in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999,) Feynman warned,
A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
Science produces ignorance, and ignorance produces more science, reminded Feynman in a 1963 lecture on “The Uncertainty of Science” published in The Meaning of It All (1999,)
To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.
When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.
The Czechoslovakia-born Israeli American scientist Itzhak Bentov formulated the so-called “Bentov’s Law,” reiterating that science produces ignorance both deliberately and unintentionally. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (1977,) Bentov wrote,
One’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge. Therefore, the more one knows, the greater his level of ignorance.
Learning the boundaries of your knowledge—the shortcomings, caveats, hedges, and the standard deviations toward everything you think you know—hones decision-making.
In other words, to get to the right answers, you first have to ask the right questions. So the first thing is to ponder about is what questions to ask and how to ask them. What are the things you don’t know, and how can you reach out into these areas that may be new to you to uncover somethings about the world and yourself?
Once you discover the answers, you’ll realize that approximate statements and varying degrees of certainty will require you to think probabilistically. Your inquiry shouldn’t be, “Will I be right, or will I be wrong?” but rather “What is the probability of this scenario versus that, and how does this judgment impact my choices?”
Leave room for doubt, even in your highest conviction ideas. If not, you’ll risk becoming smug and self-satisfied.
When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, Gates was dazzled particularly by how Buffett asked open-ended “big questions”:
I have to admit, when I first met Warren, the fact that he had this framework was a real surprise to me. I met him at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, “Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?” I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that day, he didn’t ask me about any of those things. Instead he started asking big questions about the fundamentals of our business. “Why can’t IBM do what Microsoft does? Why has Microsoft been so profitable?” That’s when I realized he thought about business in a much more profound way than I’d given him credit for.
Asking great questions is a skill, but doesn’t come as you would expect. One contributing factor is that, with age, education, and experience, we become conditioned to cogitate in very rigid terms. Heuristics and mental shortcuts become deep-seated and instinctual to allow for faster problem-solving and programmed decision-making.
Idea for Impact: Don’t ask the same questions most people ask. The smartest people I know don’t begin with answers; they start by asking, “what are our questions?”
Make inquiries using open-ended questions that can’t be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Effective questions will help you think deeper, generate meaningful explorations, and yield far more interesting insights.