Goals

Half-Size Your Goals

July 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the start of the year, if you’re like most people, you selected a bunch of lofty, impossible goals. Now, halfway through the year, you feel disappointed and let down with yourself. In fact, the longer your goals list, the more overwhelmed and off-track you’ve got.

As part of your mid-year review, reflect on the first six months of the year and adjust your goals for the rest of the year. Revisit your goals, assess your progress, evaluate your approach, and change your timeline. Break big ambitious goals down into more manageable decisions and improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire.

Try half-sized goals. If you’re struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal.

If you’re not getting good results, then you go back and tweak what you’re doing. Don’t feel the need to change everything in your life at once.

The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails

July 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Weight Watchers (WW) was born from an unmet personal need, as is true with many businesses. Founder Jean Nidetch had struggled with her weight all her life. In her late 30s, she went to a city-run obesity clinic in New York and finally lost the weight she wanted.

Then, when her resolve to maintain a healthy weight wavered, Nidetch recognized that losing weight is easier if she weren’t doing it by herself. Dieting is more than “calories in, calories out.” Eating the right number of calories and exercising doesn’t always work. It isn’t the occasional overindulgence that creates obesity; it’s the steady over-eating—often in surprisingly small amounts.

Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

According to Memoir of a Successful Loser: The Story of Weight Watchers (1970,) Nidetch realized that what people struggling to keep a diet program needed was one another. Dieters needed a space to talk openly about their diet struggles and became answerable to one another.

Determined to stay on track, Nidetch started with the diet that the obesity clinic had given her. She mimeographed it and handed it out to a group of six overweight but determined friends that she invited to her apartment in the Queens. At the first meeting, Nidetch confessed to an addiction to cookies. Her friends sympathized and shared their own calorific woes. Everyone had a good time, and the group agreed to meet the following week again.

Nidetch’s pattern of programming and social support spread quickly. Meetings grew in size. When Nidetch ran out of chairs, she shifted the sessions to a formal assembly room. Weight Watchers was thus born.

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Weight Watchers has outlasted many fad diets, and it continues to be a popular program. People go to Weight Watchers because it works. The program makes its members think of the regimen not as a diet but as a different way of living.

Collectively, members feel positively about their desire to lose weight. They offer support and grant forgiveness for failures to lose weight. Members aren’t thinking of restrictions; they’re thinking of flexibility and abundance. If they tend to be foodies, they don’t need to stop enjoying food.

Weight Watchers groups meet weekly. (7,000 coaches run the meetings.) Each member contributes. Everyone feels invested in accomplishments. The group celebrates as one.

The robust process of celebrating and retelling success stories reinforces the shared goal of pushing limits. In addition, the interaction helps with accountability and encourages participants to stick with their goals.

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Shared interests get us, humans, to show up and be present. We need structure, tools, and support to be successful. We need a community because the fellowship of others with a shared empowering purpose gives us the accountability and inspiration that motivates us to lose weight—or bring about any lasting change.

Why You Should Celebrate Small Wins

May 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Small steps are more manageable than big, daunting ones. Small wins aren’t just a great way to make progress. They’re good for your emotional well-being too.

Peter Sims writes in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (2013,)

Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward, or as the case may be, laterally. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course.

In the acclaimed paper in which [University of Michigan psychologist Karl] Weick described small wins, published in the January 1984 issue of American Psychologist, he used the example of how helpful it is for alcoholics to focus on remaining sober one day at a time, or even one hour at a time. Stringing together successive days of sobriety helps them to see the rewards of abstinence and makes it more achievable in their minds. Elaborating on the benefits of small wins, Weick writes, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Each time you accomplish a small step, have a little voice whisper in your ear, “You accomplished more than you had ten minutes ago!” This affirmation can help you recognize the momentum you’ve created and stimulate you to get absorbed in more of the task. By the end of the hour or the day, you’ll feel like you’ve had multiple wins on your way towards the larger goal.

A big hurdle to change is the resistance from believing that the pain of attempting major change is too rarely worth it. But researchers believe that any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates your brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine, the pleasure hormone. That can evoke the motivational appeal of an outcome, which in turn can hook you toward achieving even more.

Keep sight of the small victories. Those are the ones that keep you going. If you’re a manager, celebrate even ordinary, incremental progress—that’ll improve your team’s engagement.

Idea for Impact: Celebrate your small wins—it’ll make you feel good about yourself. Attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of fear and hopelessness—this is the crux of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT.)

More from Less // Book Summary of Richard Koch’s ’80/20 Principle’

May 10, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) recorded a “maldistribution” between causes and effects in economic statistics. It’s an observable fact that a minority of reasons—nominally around 20%—tends to produce a majority—80%—of the results.

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

More than a century later, the Romanian-American quality control pioneer Joseph Juran (1904–2008) embraced Pareto’s notion and demonstrated that 80% of all manufacturing quality defects are caused by 20% of reasons. Juran urged managers to identify and address the “vital few” or the “critical few “—the small fraction of elements that account for this disproportionally large fraction of the effect.

This Pareto Law, 80/20 Rule of Thumb, Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, Juran’s Law of the Vital Few, 80-20 Thinking—call it what you want—permeates every aspect of business and life. Now that you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

A fifth of your customers accounts for four-fifths of your sales. 20% of your employees are responsible for the majority of your firm’s productivity. 20% of your stocks will be responsible for 80% of your future gains. You tend to favor 20% of your clothes and wear them 80% of the time. You spend 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your friends. 20% of the decisions you’ve made during your life have shaped 80% of your current life. 80 percent of the wealth tends to be concentrated with 20 percent of the families.

The Pareto principle is a state of nature (the way things happen) and a process (a way of thinking about problems.) The 20% are the sources of the most significant potential impact.

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999) elaborates on using this seminal prioritization principle. “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. … The winners in any field have … found ways to make 20% of effort yield 80% of results.”

Koch explains ad nauseam that most of us work much too hard and produce much less in relation to what could be produced. If trying harder hasn’t worked, perhaps it’s time to try less.

Invest your time and effort more wisely. Don’t address the less significant elements. “Most things always appear more important than the few things that are actually more important.” Examine what you do of low value. In other words, eliminate or reduce the 80% of efforts that produce less-significant results.
Know when to stop. Once you’ve solved the 20% of the issue to deliver 80% of the impact, any further effort can only achieve diminishing returns.

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Recommendation: Speed-read Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle. It’s an excellent reminder that not all effort is equal, so it pays to focus on what matters most.

Embrace the “80-20” frame of mind in everything you do—at work and home. Unless you want to spend every waking hour working, it’s essential to learn how to focus your efforts on the most promising, impactful aspects of what needs to be done.

Realize that few things really matter in life, but they count a tremendous amount. These vital things may be challenging to discover and realize, but once you find these things that really matter, they give you immense power—the power that gives you more from less. Spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy making sure these decisions are made well, and you put yourself in the best position you can in the process.
If you want to improve your effectiveness at anything, focus only on what matters most. Be extraordinarily selective—spend time resourcefully on the few essentials that matter the most and little or no time on the massive trivia that engulfs most of your time.

This Hack Will Help You Think Opportunity Costs

March 29, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Making decisions is all about opportunity costs. For instance, every time you spend money to get something, you should ask yourself what else, perhaps of better value, you could get with that money—now or later.

The problem is, when forced to choose between something immediate and concrete and something else that’s comparatively abstract and distant, the opportunity cost could lack clarity.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely proposes the notion of “anti-goals” to help examine the trade-offs you’re forced to make. Ariely encourages pairing goals such that if you satisfy one, you’ll impede the other. For example, when choosing to spend $100 on an evening out today, you can consider a tangible anti-goal—say, saving for the family’s summer vacation—that’ll be held back.

Idea for Impact: Thinking about what you want to avoid—the anti-goal—is a potent tool. It allows you to focus on things that really matter.

Intentions, Not Resolutions

January 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I think resolutions set you up for failure because they’re usually daunting, and they don’t give you a plan for how to realize what you want to achieve. More to the point, you underestimate how long it’ll take you to kick a bad habit or adopt a good one.

On the other hand, intentions propose paths forward—they can keep you accountable in the process.

Intentions dig into the WHY

Change is hard—change requires real commitment, planning, and follow-through. Intentions help by grounding you to what you can commit to today and tomorrow. Intentions will remind you of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live.

Intentions don’t demand perfection, and intentions leave some room for error. Intentions will help you commit yourself and not fill you with guilt and shame if you fall off the wagon for a short period. With intentions, you can anticipate lapses and plan for them.

Setting intentions and then taking action becomes an exciting path of self-discovery rather than a guilt-trap set up with broken resolutions.

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

Put less pressure on yourself and set yourself up for success by making regular daily, weekly, and monthly intentions. Once you set the intention, focus on getting to the first step. Then, regroup and think about step two. This way, you target short-term achievable results, and the intention orients you.

Don’t make intentions for the entire year. It’s just hard to keep up with something and stay excited about it year-round.

Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two

December 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the end of each day (or first thing in the morning,) plan tomorrow and the next two days.

Review your commitments and write out the full list of what you want to accomplish over the three days. Outline the first day more thoroughly than the other two.

This act of writing down what needs to get done helps you feel less anxious—tasks seem smaller on paper than in your head. According to the Zeigarnik Effect, just the simple act of recording a task in a plan relieves the mental stress attributable to unresolved and interrupted tasks.

Having a three-day horizon allows you to be flexible.

You’ll know where your “wiggle room” is, so interruptions don’t invade your day. You can move your priority tasks around should the circumstances change. You can set apart emergencies from non-emergencies that can be addressed later.
When you have a lot on your plate, or something is taking longer than you planned, you can defer what’s avoidable today and move tasks around.

At the end of each day, rewrite your three-day roadmap. Reconsider how each task aligns with the current priorities and spread them over the next three days.

Idea for Impact: Plan tomorrow, plus two. You’ll have a clearer insight of the immediate future—and you’ll be better prepared to attend to those inevitable unforeseen demands for your time.

Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness

July 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To keep your customers in the present day, you can’t be content just to please them. If you want your business to thrive, you have to produce enthusiastic aficionados—customers who’re so keyed up about how you treat them that they want to tell stories about you. These customers and their cult-like loyalty become a key element of your sales force.

American entrepreneur Tony Hsieh built the online retail store Zappos on the fundamental idea that great service is not a happenstance. It starts when leaders decide what kind of experience they want their customers to have—and articulate that approach in a clear mission and vision. As in the case of luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton, leaders keep the mission alive by empowering their employees to go the extra mile for the customer. Above all, when it comes from the heart, great customer service keeps customers coming back over and over.

In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010,) Hsieh discusses the importance of cultivating happiness as a launch pad to better results for your business.

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

Hsieh did not create Zappos. He was one of the startup’s initial investors but got sucked in to help the original founder after six years. Zappos operated in survival mode for a while. As it began to outlive its financial struggles, Hsieh and his leadership team went about building an intentional corporate culture dedicated to employee empowerment and the promise of delivering happiness through a valued workforce and devoted customers.

Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Hsieh tells his entrepreneurial life experiences, often presenting biographical stories to make his line of reasoning. Many great entrepreneurs got started early, and Hsieh is no exception. He started with worm-farming (age 7,) button-making (elementary school,) magic tricks involving dental dams (high school,) burger joint (college,) and web-consulting (post-college) before having considerable financial success with the internet advertising firm LinkExchange (sold in 1998 to Microsoft for $265 million.)

In 2009, Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon for $847 million under pressure from Sequoia Capital, a major financier of Zappos. As a point of reference, Hsieh later recalled,

Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project—“Tony’s social experiments,” they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view–namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board’s attitude was that my “social experiments” might make for good PR but that they didn’t move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh of Zappos Zappos’s corporate culture is guided by ten core values, which aspire to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace (employees are encouraged to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the office and build personal connections with colleagues,) and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

Zappos’s core values include: deliver WOW through service (#1,) be humble (#10,) do more with less (#8,) be passionate and determined (#9,) and create fun and a little weirdness (#3.)
Zappos wants only those employees who really want to work for the company. All new employees attend a four-week training program that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and customer-obsession. Zappos offers $2,000 to walk out at the end of the first week, and the offer stands until the end of the fourth week. Only a small number of new employees take the offer.
Zappos challenges all employees to make at least one improvement every week. Allowing employees to improve the tasks they’re doing and enhancing the processes that they’re responsible for executing allows them to make their jobs more meaningful.
Instead of measuring call center efficiency by the time each call center operator spends on the phone with a customer, Zappos developed its own scorecards. Zappos quantifies such things as the personal and emotional connections operators make with customers using measures such as measuring the number of thank you cards.

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

By focusing on company culture, everything else—such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth, fast turnaround times at warehouses, and passionate employees—fell into place.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships,) and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself.)

Recommendation: Read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. This insightful tome is brimming with practicable ideas on customer service, building a positive company culture, best hiring practices, how to motivate and train your team, and setting business goals and values. The core elements of Zappos’s DNA—purpose, happiness, culture, and profits—are an effective framework for making happiness a business model.

How to Kick That Bad Habit

April 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s The Book of Jewish Values (2011) cites advice from a 12th-century rabbinic text:

Set aside a sum of money that you will give away if you allow yourself to be angered. Be sure that the amount you designate is sufficient to force you to think twice before you lose your temper.

One way to kick a bad habit is to pledge to give money to a cause that you hate should you fail in your goal.

For instance, entrust a trusted friend (or the website StickK) with $200 and ask her to keep an eye on your goal to eat mindfully and lose weight. If you’re a lifelong Democrat, pledge to have your friend give away your $200 to the “Trump for President 2020” campaign should you fail to meet your predetermined criteria.

Idea for Impact: Try this negative reinforcement technique to inculcate some self-discipline. Make it motivating—designate to give away an amount that hurts or to a cause that you loathe!

Endnote: The text above is an extract from Rabbi Avrohom Chaim Feuer Reishit’s Ramban: A Letter for the Ages (1989,) an anthology of the works of Ramban (c.1194–1270,) fully Moses ben Nahman or Naḥmanides, a Spanish religious leader and rabbi.

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.

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Goals

Wondering what to read next?

Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Intentions dig into the WHY

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

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How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

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Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?