Erudite Relics of Loc Huu Ho

2:21 PM Tuesday August 24, 2010
by Tony Schwartz

I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I’ve taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I’ve had a number of rapturous moments during which I’ve played like the player I long to be.

And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Aristotle had it exactly right 2000 years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do.” By relying on highly specific practices, we’ve seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.

Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work — something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice as the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.

There is something wonderfully empowering about this. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that’s also daunting. One of Ericsson’s central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying. Read the rest of this entry »

BY AMBER SINGLETON RIVIERE
I was recently interviewed by Betsy Talbot of Married With Luggage, who wanted to know how I managed to bring big projects to completion so quickly. Here are the biggest three steps for me in getting things done.

Step 1: Prioritize.

The first step is to prioritize. This applies to decicinding what projects you take on in the first place, as well as prioritizing the tasks you do each day.

You have to first decide what projects will get your attention. As a business owner, you might have a hundred different ideas for creating revenue streams or even new marketing strategies you’d like to implement, but you can’t do them all at once. The way I like to prioritize projects is using a real estate method called “highest and best use.”

In real estate, agents value property based upon its highest and best use. For example, a house might actually be better suited as a commercial property, thereby tripling its value. You can use the same technique to value your time. Not all projects are created equal when it comes to creating the most value or the most return on investment. You have to decide which project will generate the most value at this time.

Once you’ve selected the project with the highest likely return on investment, you have to prioritize your tasks and how you spend your time each day. For that, I like to use the “revenue line” concept of Julie Morgenstern, author of “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning.” You never want to be more than three steps away from the revenue line. For a business owner, the first step away from the revenue line are those tasks that are most likely to generate immediate (or more immediate) income. That includes things like working on client projects, creating new products, and even invoicing, since it will lead to revenue right away. Two and three steps away from the revenue include lead generation activities, those that more directly influence your revenue, as well as those that indirectly influence it.
Read the rest of this entry »

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway

2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

4. That good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

7. People favor underdogs but follow only the top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent Keith in 1968, when he was 19, a sophomore at Harvard College. They were part of The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council, his first booklet for high school student leaders. Here is how it all came about. Read the rest of this entry »

Original Source: 10 Things – Calvin Sun It’s easy to demotivate your staff without realizing you’re doing it. Calvin Sun highlights a few morale-busting behaviors to watch out for.

The sad thing about killing morale is that you can do it without even trying. In the words of a George Strait song, “It just comes natural.” But if you damage morale, you will lower the productivity of your group and create problems for yourself. Look at this list and see whether you recognize yourself in any of these morale-killers. Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Punish desired behavior

This action, and the following one, fall under the category of sending mixed messages. Do you think you could never do something like this? If you’re a parent, you may have had this conversation with your child: “Anytime you have a question or problem, please come see Mommy or Daddy.” But then what happens when that child does come see you? “Come back later; can’t you see I’m busy?!” With respect to the workplace, the number one example of punishing desired behavior is “shooting the messenger” following a management statement to “be open and honest about your concerns.”

2: Reward undesired behavior

How many times has it happened: You show up on time, or even early for a meeting. But because several people still haven’t arrived, the meeting leader decides to postpone the meeting for 15 or 20 minutes. What message does this action send? It tells the latecomers that arriving late is okay and tells the punctual people that their punctuality is useless. If you’re running the meeting, and people are on time, be fair to those people and start on time. This same principle goes for other situations as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Jobs, the entrepreneurial genius who co-founded the Apple Corp., is a very charismatic leader of technical people. When his group was designing Apple’s new Macintosh computer, Jobs flew a pirate flag over his building. Its purpose was to signify his team’s determination to blow the competition out of the water. Rather creative motivation.

Good leaders and managers have creative ways to motivate their employees.

Robert Waterman Jr. wrote about Chiyoshi Misawa, founder and president of Misawa Homes — the largest homebuilder in Japan. At least once every decade he “dies” to arrest the momentum of out-of-date assumptions and policies. He sends a memo to his company that formally announces “the death of your president.”

This is his way of forcing the whole company to rethink everything. When employees resist change because they are used to the old way of doing things, Misawa declares: “That was the way things were done under Mr. Misawa. He is now dead. Now, how shall we proceed?” Read the rest of this entry »