Everyday Excellence

Bryant January 5th, 2009

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself with the new year upon us. The beginning of a new year is a great time for renewal and laying out your plan of where you’d like to go.

In the same way that a ship’s captain lays out the travel plan to avoid storms and reach the final destination, it’s important for you to chart a course so you can control where you want to go rather than letting the wind blow you where it will.

For myself, I’m on the verge of finishing my major goal from last year. In a few short days, I will be running my first marathon. So as I cross that off my list, I’m looking forward to sitting down with my compass to chart my course for the new year. This will mean laying out my annual goals.

As I lay out these annual goals, I’ll try to keep to the following principles:

• Keep them Limited: One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from Leo at zen habits is that you can’t do everything. If you limit the number of goals you’re focusing on, you’ll feel less stressed and make more progress.
• Keep them SMART: This is an acronym for how you should create your goals. They should be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
• Keep them Role-Based: Stephen Covey introduced me to this idea and it was useful to bring some balance into my life. He recommends that you define different roles for your life (eg - Father, Business Owner, and Athlete) and set goals for each role.

But, as important as it is to lay out goals and work toward achieving them, remember that life is a journey and more often than not, it’s the striving for these goals that you should enjoy, not just finishing them.

As I close the book on my marathon training, I look back on my long runs as some of the toughest and yet greatest moments of my life. On my 20 mile run, for example, I pushed myself farther than I thought possible and yet felt fully alive. Even without completing the marathon, I’ve learned a lot about myself just by training for it.

So as you chart your course for 2009 don’t forget to enjoy the journey!

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.
-Seneca

Tags: Annual Goals

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Bryant November 14th, 2008

I recently heard about a study where they presented an entire box of chocolates in front of people and told them to eat as many as they wanted. When presented with this choice, the average person ate one piece of chocolate. But when the people were presented with only six chocolates and told to eat as many as they wanted, the average person ate three pieces. What can we learn from this?

First of all it shows that too many choices can overwhelm people. We live in a world of nearly infinite choices. Consider the bookstore (assuming you still shop at the bookstore). You can find multiple books on nearly any niche topic. In fact, because of the amount of books out there, bookstores have begun to create little islands highlighting specific books to help focus your attention. It’s been proven to help boost sales because it limits the choices.

You would think all of this choice would be a good thing, but in fact it causes stress in many people. Let’s say that you want to buy a digital camera and you are one of those people who want to get the best one for your money.

When digital cameras first came out, you did not have a lot of choices. Only a few companies made them and they very expensive. Now that they are everywhere you have to struggle through finding the “best” one. You have to research the different brands and compare matrices of features to get the right one for the right price. Once you find the right one, then you have to pick the best place to buy it from.

All of these choices explain why searching and organization of information is so important in this day and age. With such a large amount of choices we need a system to help us find and sort through them. This is why Google has become one of the hottest companies because it provides such a valuable service.

The same principle of limiting yourself applies when trying to get tasks accomplished. If I have a list of twelve things to do for the day, I find that I’m much less productive than if I only have three.

When I only have three, I will get them done, but if they’re twelve things to do then it’s much harder to even start. The list seems too big and I’m not sure which task to focus on first, and even if I get through five of them I still don’t have a sense of accomplishment at the end because I have seven uncompleted tasks. You are much better to limit yourself to just the three most important tasks for the day.

The same holds true of big goals. I try to set about three big goals to focus on for the year. Much more than that and I find that I’m not able to make steady progress towards them because I’m spread too thin.

To do more, limit yourself.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

-Albert Einstein

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Bryant October 3rd, 2008

There is a large part of me that is a doer. I’m not happy each day until I can cross items off my list and feel like I’ve made progress toward a goal. In many ways this is a good thing. It helps me to be productive with my time and make steady progress toward achieving goals.

In fact, my business is often about implementing IT projects for clients. I pride myself on running a consulting company that “gets things done” rather than one of those lofty consulting companies who charge a small fortune only to generate a list of all the things that are wrong, but can’t actually help fix them.

But because I’m so focused on making daily progress sometimes it’s hard for me to step back and look at the big picture. And the reason why the big picture matters on an individual or corporate level is that it helps establish who you are and where you’re ultimately going. These things can sometimes get lost in the details, but they are vitally important especially when you are looking to get a group of people working toward a common goal.

A friend of mine works for Hilton. He could say that his job is to ensure that the beds get made and the dinner gets served to the various people who travel through the O’Hare Hilton. And that’s nice, but it sure sounds like just a job and would make you wonder “what’s the point”? 

Instead what if he said, quoting Conrad Hilton, that his job  ”has been and continues to be [my] responsibility to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality.”   Wow! What a difference. Now that’s something worth working for!

Setting a vision for a group helps add meaning for the people that take part in achieving that. People are happier and more driven to work hard when they feel like they are working toward a shared goal and something that brings meaning to their life. It sure sounds a lot better than I’m here to make money or for a company to say that the company exists to make money for partners or shareholders.

Having a vision helps to define a corporate culture, and some of the classics of business literature have agreed that this is the best way to ensure that a business succeeds over the long term. For example, “Built to Last” from Jim Collins talks about how those businesses with a bold mission (BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and cult-like culture do much better than those that just focus on profits:

Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.

…Highly visionary companies often use bold missions–what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags, short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”)–as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress.

-Built to Last, Jim Collins

Take a look at some vision/mission statements from famous companies to get a feel for what I’m talking about:

• Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
• Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
• Amazon.com: seeks to be the world’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
• Mcdonalds: McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.

I think the key to the vision is to come up with something inspiring, unique but not trite. Some corporations just go off to an executive retreat and throw a bunch of fancy words together without really identifying the unique DNA of their company. In my mind, that is key to the vision.  In other words, define what makes your group special.

All of this has led me to begin developing a vision for my company. Otherwise how can I or my employees really know where we’re going? 

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.

-Anonymous

Tags: Vision

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Bryant September 20th, 2008

What if I told you that by doing a simple 5-minute test on a child, I could tell you what their likelihood of success in later life will be? Would you believe it and do you know what I’d test?

In the 1970s Walter Mischel of Stanford performed a series of tests on four-year-olds. The main test consisted of putting the child in a room with two plates, a bell and a nice man. One plate has one marshmallow on it and the other has two.  The child is told that the nice man is going to leave the room and come back. If the child can wait until the nice man returns then that child will get the two marshmallows. If the child doesn’t want to wait for the nice man anymore then the child can ring the bell and get one marshmallow.

After fifteen years Mischel follows up with the parents of those children in his initial study, and it’s amazing what can be predicted (as documented in the Happiness Hypothesis):

Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to  ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a  teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as  teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this in the “real” world. People that try for easy success usually don’t achieve it. Easy success in life is a myth. Sometimes people get lucky and stumble into something big without a lot of work, but that is much more the exception than the rule. To paraphrase Edison, success usually looks like dirty overalls because it’s a lot of hard work, and along the way there are many failures. The key is to be persistent. Time and again that is proven as the path to success. You’ve got to be able to wait and wait and not give up too soon.

How different this idea is from the world we live in. Everything is instant gratification. If I want a book, I can have it immediately on my kindle. If I want to watch a TV show, I can have it up immediately on hulu.com. If I want a song, I can have it immediately on iTunes. Delayed gratification is a tough skill to learn in a world of instant gratification, but it has great benefits.

For example, let’s look at how delayed gratification affects some areas of our life:

• Financial: Delayed gratification is probably most obvious in this area. Isn’t that what all Financial Planners preach in a nutshell: Put as much away now for your retirement so that you can actually enjoy it later. Don’t spend it all now or live paycheck to paycheck. If you wait, it will be worth so much more later. They even have a fancy phrase for it — the time value of money
• Marriage: In order to summarize his foundational studies on sex and marriage, Alfred Kinsey stated the most common sign that a marriage will be successful is that both parties have a “willingness for marriage to persist”. Even when times are hard, they don’t just give up because it’s convenient. They are willing to hang on and push through the difficulties. Now there are some marriages that should be given up on because they were based on false premises or there is abuse, but the vast majority give up too early because it’s not as fun as it was in the beginning.
• Business: Most businesses start out under-funded and overworked. They’re typically not thriving for the first five years. Often times, the owner of a new business plans to have a loss for the first few years in the hopes that down the road they will start making a profit. In fact, Walt Disney sold his car to make payroll in the early years. Even if you are not starting a business and are just starting a new job, there is a period in the beginning where everything is bad. You don’t know how their processes work; You don’t know who to talk to about what; Heck, you may not even be able to find your way back to your desk if you get too far away. The people that succeed in business are those that push through the lean and hard times.
• Health: If you haven’t work out for a while and you start a new workout routine, it’s not fun. In fact, it’s painful. But if you can push through the pain long enough, you can get to a point where you actually enjoy it and begin to look forward to the workouts. That’s been my experience with running. If you are training for an athletic goal, you know that you are going to go through a lot of hard practices, maybe for years, before finally reaching that goal.

Bloggers have to deal with delayed gratification. Most people do not start a blog and then immediately have a million readers. They write and write and write for many years often without anyone noticing. Then slowly but surely they begin to build up traffic based on the quality content they’ve been providing.

So it’s clear that being able to delay gratification is important for success in many areas of your life. The only problem is I’m not sure if it can be taught or if people are just born one way or the other. I imagine like most things it’s a combination of both. Even if it’s something that people are born with, everyone can still learn to enjoy the journey rather than getting too fixated on the end goal. Research has shown, that alone will make you happier.

I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

-Edison

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Bryant September 14th, 2008

In  the World is Flat, Thomas Friedman says that not so long ago if you were born outside of the US and you wanted a highly successful business or research career, your goal would be to get to the US as soon as possible. Nowadays, Friedman concludes, that’s no longer true. You can be highly successful wherever you’re at.

His example was India. Not that long ago an Indian who graduated from the top university would want to come to the US for the best jobs. Now they can do just as well (or better) staying in India. Much of this is due to the telecommunications boom which makes it trivial to communicate across large distances along with the rise of offshoring. In fact, I email or chat with co-workers in Pakistan almost daily.

The world is becoming a much smaller place. It’s relatively easy to hop on a plane and be anywhere in the world in less than 24 hrs. So that raises the question: In order to be successful, does it matter where you live anymore?

Many people say that if I only lived in this place or that place then I would be successful, but some of the most successful people have lived in the middle of nowhere and become the leader in their industry:

• Gates: When Bill Gates moved back home to Seattle to build Microsoft, it was a sleepy northwestern town. It was the rise of Microsoft that turned it into the thriving technology mecca that it is today.
• Buffet: To be successful in finance, the common wisdom is that you have to live in New York, yet Warren Buffet is the richest and best-known portfolio manager. He built his business far away from New York in the heartland of Omaha.
• Walton: You can’t get further out in the middle of nowhere than Bentonville, Arkansas, yet Sam Walton built his retailing empire from there.

So very successful people have built businesses out in the middle of nowhere, but what about the intangibles like the weather — don’t they contribute to your happiness and eventual success? I find myself falling into this trap sometimes. My thinking goes, if I lived somewhere like San Diego, I’d be happier due to the weather which would lead to more success in my life.

I lived out in San Diego for a year where it is always 70 degrees, sunny and rarely rains. In the Chicago area, we get weather like that about 2 weeks out of the year. Every other day is either too hot or too cold.

But the most recent research has dispelled the myth that your external environment makes you happier, as I learned while reading the Happiness Hypothesis:

People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong. People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong

He goes onto to say that studies have repeatedly shown that demographic and environmental factors have very little influence on happiness. People are happy based on the people around them and their internal goals.  Conveniently, these are also the things that make you successful in business. The most important factors are daily persistence toward a goal (achieving Everyday Excellence), and surrounding yourself with good people.

Now, an argument could be made that the best people when it comes to technology, for example, are in Silicon Valley. But remember it’s so easy to work together now from different locations. Many of my favorite web applications were built by teams scattered all over the world.

And not being in the same place as everyone else in your industry can be an advantage because it prevents group think. Buffet is able to be more independent in his stock choices because he’s not influenced by wall street.

There are some exceptions. As my relatives in Tanzania will tell you, it’s hard to become a huge business success in a third-world country with no access to markets, education or private property, but for most people your location should not restrict you.

I would concede that location is not irrelevant, it’s just not as big a factor as it used to be, and you shouldn’t let it be a barrier to your success. It doesn’t matter where you’re at as long as you’re the hardest worker.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Tags: Happiness, Success

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