Ideas for Impact
If you’re feeling parched, if your mouth feels dry, your body has likely lost 1 to 2 percent of its water content already. That’s a late indicator of dehydration, particularly in older adults.
Idea for Impact: Amid the current record-breaking heat wave, don’t wait for thirst to set in. Monitor for early clues from your body telling you it needs fluids—darker-colored urine, reduced exercise performance, headache, exhaustion, wooziness, and hunger.
If everyday chores feel like a drag and you don’t have the motivation to do anything but be on your phone and laze around, consider the following actions that have most benefited my clients:
News broke out that Ernst & Young revealed this week that its employees cheated on ethics exams. The accounting behemoth is being fined $100 million. That’s one of the biggest fines ever levied against an audit firm.
It’s absurd that specialists responsible for keeping things straight and steering moral enterprise cheated on ethics exams! Ernst & Young’s leadership evidently disregarded the internal reports about the cheating. Perhaps because when people identify so strongly with a group, they’re much more swayed to view the group’s actions positively and accept that group’s norms.
Research by Vanderbilt University’s Jessica Kennedy and colleagues suggests that high-flying people are sometimes more inclined than low-ranking people to adopt what their group recommends, even when it represents an ethics breach. Power sometimes provokes people to so strongly want to identify with their group that they’re willing to overlook when the group’s collective actions cross an ethical line. This affinity is, therefore, urged to sustain transgression instead of stopping its spread, especially when the odds of being caught and punished are slim.
When your team is understaffed and/or overwhelmed, remind your supervisors about the pressures you’re dealing with. Ask for more resources without being perceived as a whiny opportunist.
Idea for Impact: If your team is understaffed and overworked, you don’t need to suck it up and try to do it all. Don’t keep your head down, and don’t let the burden of responsibilities stymie your personal and team goals.
Make nap time the new coffee break. A quick snooze boosts productivity and improves memory and problem-solving.
Bill Anthony’s The Art of Napping at Work (1999) states that a shot of shut-eye was an indispensable afternoon pick-me-up for some of history’s greatest achievers, viz., Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, John D Rockefeller, Leonardo da Vinci, Lyndon B Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill.
According to the University of California-Irvine sleep researcher Sara Mednick, you don’t want to get into a deep sleep because you need to be alert. Her Take a Nap! Change Your Life (2006) uses the term “sleep inertia” to describe the inability to shrug sleep off after a nap. This impaired state worsens as you go deeper and deeper into sleep. So the trick is to avoid getting deep sleep.
If you nap about twenty minutes, you’ll be in light sleep, which is easy to get out of. In other words, twenty minutes is long enough to reach Stage 2 sleep but short enough to ward you off from waking up groggy.
Idea for Impact: Go ahead and snooze for 20 minutes, ideally sometime between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Step into bright light or splash your face with water if you need help regaining alertness after the alarm goes off. The post-nap energy spike can last for several hours.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022) by New York Times columnist David Gelles contends that the pernicious greed spawned by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is exceptionally responsible for exposing the structural failings of capitalism in recent decades.
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The danger inherent in any ideology grows stronger when it starts to thrive because it swiftly morphs into temptation—a voracious appetite for ever better “returns” in the present case. Welch was indeed the most visible catalyst and a much-imitated champion of brutal capitalism. But Gelles’s narrative draws his book’s lengthy subtitle (“How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America”) excessively, thrusting ad nauseam the well-founded thesis against Welch’s ploys and “the personification of American, alpha-male capitalism.” See my previous articles (here, here, and here) about how the faults of Welch’s strategy become evident many years after his retirement.
Gelles does an agreeable job of outlining the socioeconomic paradigm that has made modern western capitalism’s shortcomings ever more apparent. Starting with influential economist Milton Friedman’s decree in the ’70s that the one and only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits, Gelles explains the revering of Welch’s “downsizing, deal-making, and financialization” strategy. Without balance, it provided short-term benefits for shareholders, but the long-term well-being of corporations and society lost out. A sense of restraint is most pertinent to the power of capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t irretrievably bound to fail, as Gelles rightly argues, but it needs to be rethought. It’s morally incumbent upon the social order to inhibit the embedded incentives that create powerful tendencies towards short-termism. Gelles offers no more realistic, objective insights than the familiar solutions prescribed by our career politicians.
Overall, Gelles’s pro-Fabian polemic falls short of a fair-minded assessment of the epoch’s economic forces. Indeed, many of Welch’s tactics were timely and necessary, but he pushed them farther and longer. Too, Gelles fails to study counterexamples of many corporate leaders who’ve thoughtfully copied Welch’s playbook and helped their businesses and communities prosper, not least because they were restrained enough to avoid Welchism’s blowbacks.
Recommendation: Speed Read The Man Who Broke Capitalism for a necessary reappraisal of the legacy of Jack Welch. There isn’t much eye-opening here, but author Gelles affords a relevant parable about the power of restraint and the time- and context-validity of ideas.
In Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive (2021,) University of Texas-Austin’s Kristin Neff argues that self-acceptance and self-compassion—being good to ourselves—makes us more likely to adopt healthy behaviors.
Neff summarizes numerous studies that have suggested that self-compassion is associated with overall well-being: “The more you’re able to accept yourself, the more you’re able to make positive, healthy changes in your life.”
The most important relationship you’ll ever have is the relationship with yourself. Learn to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings. Put your needs on top; give yourself compassion and comfort. Listen to your restlessness. Feelings of agitation can lead to a new life of purpose. True self-awareness can help you learn what drives you, what excites you and motivates you.
Neff suggests creating moments within each day and practicing meaningful self-care. Do something nice for yourself: take a walk in the woods, meditate, play with a pet, call a friend for support, journal, or indulge in a hot bath.
Idea for Impact: Pay attention to your self-talk and speak to yourself the way you would to someone you love, “What do you need right now?” Dwell upon that question and allow an authentic answer to emerge. Then, ask, “What’s one brave decision you can make now to get unstuck and move in the direction of your goals? What’s stopping you from getting started?”
In the Drucker Foundation’s Leader to Leader (1999,) Harvard Business School professor John Kotter proposes one of my favorite visuals on the essence of noticeable results that bear witness to a leader’s vision of change:
This illustration encapsulates why some organizational change initiatives succeed while others never get off the ground or break down after a while. Kotter observes,
Results and vision can be plotted on a matrix that has four dimensions. Poor results and weak vision spell sure trouble for any organization. Good short-term results with a weak vision satisfy many organizations—for a while. A compelling vision that produces few results usually is abandoned. Only good short-term results with an effective, aligned vision offer a high probability of sustained success.
Idea for Impact: The only way a leader can produce a well-paced, sustainable, and transformational change is by mobilizing the people around her to appreciate the benefits for them in her vision of the desired future. Ongoing results oblige visibility into progress and will catalyze the organization’s commitments.
Read Kotter’s Leading Change (1996,) an influential missive on change management.
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.
A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:
Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.
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.
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.