NLP: The New Technology of Achievement - Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) - Notes
NLP, Steve Andreas and Chris Faulkner NLP: The New Technology of Achievement Everything you do is the product of a mental habit My mind is a laboratory (I like this, we forget our mind is malleable and can be changed, everything that can be tested should be tested (Taleb)). You can change how you think. Remember this, repeat it until you truly internalize it. Always think; What do I need to know in order to make this decision? What are the major benefits, and how do I quantify them? “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” William James Terms; Isolates = smallest units of behavior. Associated = in the action Disassociated = separate and watching the action distantly or apart Our brains simply do not know how to put things into negative language. Saying “don’t think” automatically makes us think of it. In order for our brains to not think of something, our brains have to think it. Instead of saying what you don’t want to do or what you don’t want to think about, think about what you do want to think about. Actions; 1. Make what you want to do and what you think into a positive statement 2. Increase the mental vividness of what you want to do in order to make it more attractive to you. 3. Associate into these successful behaviours and mentally rehearse them so they feel natural. NLP suppositions ( people work perfectly); - the map is not the territory - our mental map of the world is nt the world and can be changed - experience has structure - thoughts and memories have a pattern to them - we can change the pattern and change the experience - if one person can do something, anyone can learn to do it - mind and body are parts of the same system - people already have all the resources they need - you cannot not communicate - the meaning of your communication is the response you get - underlying every behavior is a positive intention - people are always making the best choices available to them - if what you are doing isn’t working, do something else, do anything else For the map is not the territory - as you go through time, the map and the world start to separate. Technique 1; You can take an old situation, something you feel bad about, and restructure it, change the background, put music to it, put a frame on it, and you can change it by conveying the opposite feeling is conveyed. Every image, sound, or feeling is a resouce somewhere for something. Talent is simply a set of resources that have been combined, sequenced, and practiced until they become automatic skill. Technique 2; Circle of confidence - imagine a time when you were in the zone and relive it mentally, capture it in a circle and think that circle when the feeling is needed. Use mentoring - basically modeling on successful examples of what you want to accomplish How people think about something makes the crucial difference in how they will experience it. Read up on Dr. Milton H. Erickson, MD - founder of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. Master of hypnosis, he could induce a profound trance just by telling stories. There are 2 types of motivation, away from problems and towards things or goals we want. People have a tendency to only follow one, but that does not work well. (You have to do both.) Going away from problems has 3 things to watch; You move away from something because there is discomfort but the further from it you get , the less motivation you keep, so you go back and forth, hot and cold, it is inconsistent. Because you are going away from something you often do not pay attention to where you are going or how you will end up. Kind of a “out of the frying pan into the fire” kind of thing. Away from people often experience a lot of worry and stress to make a move, usually a lot more than needed or is healthy. Remember: People are always trying to make the best choices available to them and behind every behavior is a positive intention. Check people and watch them, do they seek goals or are they avoiding problems? Always end comments positive - start with what to avoid, and end with the goal.; First state what you don’t want, then state what you do want. Values matter. What we value determines what life means to us, what actions we will take, what we will move toward or away from. When people become disconnected from their values their motivation goes away. Questions to ask; What are my goals? What is important to me? Then ask; What is important about this goal? What do I value or treasure about this goal? What meaning does this goal have for me? Values measure the meaning life holds for us. Values influence motivation, if you don’t have strong values, you have little motivation. If you have strong values, you have strong motivation. NLP: The New Technology of Achievement Visualization exercise; 1. Imagine a strongly motivated experience, something you really liked. See it clearly. 2. Take a breath and look around. 3, Imagine something not exciting you care about 4. Take a breath 5. Compare the differences you feel are elements your brain uses to indicate value to you. Then; Imagine a valuable task you want to do but you don’t do Think about why you don’t do it Think about the end result if you do. Now use the elements from above to change how you think about the result./ Can also be used in opposite by imagining what you are trying to avoid. Remember to use and utilize an away from motivation strategy to move towards what you want. New Behavior Generator See yourself a short distance away and you are watching yourself from inside a bubble. Watch the other you learn and do the task you want to do. Watch yourself feel good as you do it, and adjust when it does not feel right. Once done, merge the two values. Determine your motivation direction - away or toward. What are others’ directions and use them to improve them? What values do you have and how can they influence you? Phase way from and toward motivation for the best results. Use sub modalities of your thinking to change and increase your motivation. Learn how to be more positively motivated towards. Developing a grand vision
Finding a specific direction for your grand vision
Align yourself with the Mission · question yourself - do your actions match your vision and direction/ why not? · negotiate with the parts of yourself that object - find a way to meet it · remember your time here is finite, do not live a life less than you want · find reasons to continue · persist Goals We earn a living by the money we make, but we make a life by the services we provide. Mission oriented goals are worth achieving and lead to meaningful action, and those action lead to a meaningful life Discovering your mission; a mission is a sense of purpose that lures you into your future. It unifies your beliefs, actions, and your sense of who you are. Exercise Go back in time to when you were small and everyone was big, and you are learning all the time. Words every day, new things, new wiring, remember you have 15 billion brain cells and you can hear 1600 frequencies, your eyes can see a single photon - these abilities can be applied to learn in many ways. Now picture yourself as a system of functional capabilities unrivaled in the known universe. You are a learning machine NLP: The New Technology of Achievement Finding your Passion
John Wooden: Be true to yourself make everyday a masterpiece help others drink deeply from books make friendship an art build a shelter against a rainy day pray for guidance Values/ Principles Think of some of your interests, determine your values/ principles, list the values - they must be your deepest values, what is the one deepest value? 3 ways to find values 1. When someone violates them and you are upset 2. Something makes you happy 3. Deep inner thought/ meditation exercise: Utilizing your favorite hero/ heroine aka role model 1. Think of one who excites you 2. See a particular goal - think of a goal they did that they accomplished by living and doing what they did. Make a mental movie. 3. Step into the role - put yourself into their place, make it yours, really feel it. 4. Question yourself - what are my motives? why did doing this accomplish that goal and why did I choose to do it? how does pursuing this goal make me feel? how does this goal fit into my larger mission? 5. become yourself again. Read biographies of your favorite achievers. Roles are important Your mission determines your roles, and your roles determine your goals. " For example, a person may read a lot. However, if that person does not have an identity as a writer, he or she is not likely to learn to write by reading. A person who strongly believes " I am a writer" reads in a very different way from someone who does not share that identity. A person with a writer role notices different things than a nonwriter. A writer reads not only to get the information, a writer reads to learn how to refine the skills of his or her own writing." NLP, Steve Andreas and Chris Faulkner Life roles - 4 primary types; individual, work, personal or family, citizen Ex: artist, athlete, creator, discoverer, friend to self, hero, hunter, leader, learner, magician, meditator, sage, saint, warrior. Your mission will require many different roles. Knowing what you want is fundamental If it is useful to go through a series of questions to make sure your goals are worth having. Well Formed Goal Conditions - Select a Specific Goal The way you think about your goal makes a big difference - you can think of it in a way that makes it easy to achieve or in a way to make it almost impossible. It is your choice, and in your head. Make sure your goal is what you want and not just what you think you should do, or what others want, it has to be yours. Changing your language, how you say what it is you want, makes a big difference, so change from stating what you don't want to what you do. Make sure your goal is stated in a way that you can get it yourself, no matter what other people do. Your goal must depend on you and not on others. Ex. If a goal is I want my boss to stop criticizing me - that requires your boss to change which is not in your control and it leaves you vulnerable and dependent. Instead - what can I do, or experience that will allow me to remain resourceful, no matter what my boss thinks. How will you know when you have achieved your goal? Make sure you decide how you will know you have met your goal and insure the time line is not long. Better short goals for feedback and encouragement. You want to make sure you think about when you do and when you don't want your goal. It is easier to achieve your goal when you are careful about where, when, and with whom it is appropriate. Make sure your goal fits into the ecology of your life so it does not become one sided. Exercise: Goals you will make the rest of your life. 1. Set the stage 2. See yourself in the future in your chosen role 3. Make your goal well formed Remember: · goal is positive - it is what to do · you want to do the goal, not should · you are the one doing it - not someone else · you can do it - it is not impossible · the goal is specific - not general · the goal is ecological - if achieved it is positive Make your image compelling, notice the pathway. Exercise: Developing a Plan
Taking Action on Your Goals; 1. Assign a realistic completion date 2. Schedule the steps 3. Keep an eye on the mission/ progress 4. Do it - persist. Creating Rapport and Strong Relationships: Other people are the most valuable resource we have. Networks matter. 83% of all sales are predicted on the customer liking the salesman. Successful people know how to make relationships last. You are not in the business of selling - you are in the business of relationships 3 Steps to build relationships;
Success goes to those who think of their customer's goals before their own Long term thinking is important. If you don't have rapport, you simply will not be effective with other people. When you feel uncomfortable talking to someone, you are out of sync, then you are not in rapport 2 ways to think of rapport; First is to intentionally build rapport whenever you talk to someone Second is to assume you have rapport and watch to insure it is not lost. When you don't have rapport with someone, you are acting differently then they are so the way to regain rapport is to become more similar. Matching occurs naturally in rapport, but also can be actively used to establish and increase rapport. You can match any behavior you observe, postures, facial expressions, tone, rhythm Practice voice matching. Don't square off unless you want to keep your distance, instead go in alignment facing the same direction. You can always develop emotional rapport NLP presupposes that the other person wants to deal positively with you, even when yelling, and if you match, you can communicate. Decide what emotional states you want associated with yourself. NLP: The New Technology of Achievement Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
Good book, I thought at first it would be like most business books, a good idea that would take fifteen minutes to explain spread over two hundred pages, but I have enjoyed it. It is made of several ideas, flow, etc, but blends them together well. Chris Rock deeply understands that ingenious ideas almost never spring into people’s minds fully formed; they emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery process. ..............most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them. Jeff Bezos has accepted uncertainty; he knows that he cannot reliably predict which ideas for new markets will work and which won’t. He’s got to experiment. The type of creativity that is more interesting ...... is experimental innovation. These creators use experimental, iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually build up to breakthroughs. Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work toward their goals. When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not. These methods are decidedly not ways of just trying a lot of things to see what sticks, like throwing spaghetti against a wall. The most productive creative people and teams are rigorous, highly analytical, strategic, and pragmatic. Fundamental to the little bets approach is that we: • Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. • Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged. • Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up. • Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem. • Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion. • Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock does to perfect his act. “A lot of our most successful ideas over the years came from the bottom up, by really understanding user needs.” “illusion of rationality.” We are all vulnerable to this illusion. It happens when ideas or assumptions seem logical in a plan, spreadsheet model, PowerPoint, or memo, yet they haven’t been validated on the ground or in the real world. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries To effectively confront the insurgent enemies of today and the future, soldiers must be able to identify and solve unfamiliar problems, rapidly adapting to the circumstances unfolding on the ground. They work from the ground up and must learn from the environment—the people and the situation in each village and town—then craft new tactics that will address the problems they discover. They must be willing and able to adapt those tactics and keep developing new ones as they go. The counterinsurgency approach is one of discovery and experimentation, a creative approach to warfare. Preconceived templates or plans are obsolete. The cornerstone of counterinsurgency operations is what Army strategists call developing the situation through action. Central to the process is acknowledging that mistakes will be made, like violating cultural norms or initially picking the wrong partners, because soldiers are operating in an arena of uncertainty. They must be willing to seize (and retain) the initiative by taking action in order to discover what to do, such as by launching frequent reconnaissance probes. In order to help soldiers become comfortable with this approach, Haskins says, “You have to catch people making mistakes and make it so that it’s cool. You have to make it undesirable to play it safe.” “Design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.” Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain, and that it facilitates the development of means as we progress with an idea. The affordable loss principle: Seasoned entrepreneurs will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains. Her work also shows that entrepreneurs tend to be highly aware of the importance of their means, which she defines as: Who they are: their values and tastes; What they know: their expertise, knowledge, experiences, and skills; and Who they know: their networks, friends, and allies. Of course, we should also add their monetary resources. She highlights that successful entrepreneurs are comfortable being adaptable in pursuit of their larger goals in large part because they are progressively building their means, such as by recruiting people or partners with complementary skills and experiences. the value of building means as well as an affordable losses mentality. Of course the subject of affordable losses highlights a key issue with the little bets approach—it inevitably involves failure. In almost any attempt to create, failure, and often a good deal of it, is to be expected. Ambitious (dare I employ the overused word audacious) goals are essential. A big vision provides the direction and inspiration through which to channel aspirations and ideas. But one of the most important lessons of the study of experimental innovators is that they are not rigid in pursuit of that vision, and that they persevere through failures, often many of them. When they run into problems, they accept that they must go down some unexpected paths in order to get to the ultimate goal, or maybe even redefine what that ultimate goal should be. This requires being willing to walk away from ideas that seemed great, overcoming significant challenges, as well as coping with the emotional impact of failure. One of the striking characteristics of those who have learned to practice experimental innovation is that, like Chris Rock, they understand (and come to accept) that failure, in the form of making mistakes or errors, and being imperfect is essential to their success. It’s not that they intentionally try to fail, but rather that they know that they will make important discoveries by being willing to be imperfect, especially at the initial stages of developing their ideas. By expecting to get things right at the start, we block ourselves psychologically and choke off a host of opportunities to learn. In placing so much emphasis on minimizing errors or the risk of any kind of failure, we shut off chances to identify the insights that drive creative progress. Becoming more comfortable with failure, and coming to view false starts and mistakes as opportunities opens us up creatively. Research has demonstrated that people tend to lean toward one of two general ways of thinking about learning and failure, though everyone exhibits both to some extent. Those favoring a fixed mind-set believe that abilities and intelligence are set in stone, that we have an innate set of talents, which creates an urgency to repeatedly prove those abilities. They perceive failures or setbacks as threatening their sense of worth or their identity. Every situation, therefore, gets closely evaluated: “Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected?” Fixed mind-sets cause people to be overconcerned with seeking validation, such as grades, titles, or social recognition. Conversely, those favoring a growth mind-set believe that intelligence and abilities can be grown through effort, and tend to view failures or setbacks as opportunities for growth. They have a desire to constantly challenge and stretch themselves. “If you try to shortcut the game, then the game will shortcut you,” Jordan said. “If you put forth the effort, good things will be bestowed upon you.” Dozens of studies later, Dweck’s findings suggest that people exhibiting fixed mind-sets tend to gravitate to activities that confirm their abilities, whereas those with growth mindsets tend to seek activities that expand their abilities. Praising ability alone reduces persistence, while praising effort or the processes a person goes through to learn leads to growth mind-set behaviors. Dweck has found this to apply regardless of age. Of course, just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures. To be closely monitoring what’s working and what is going wrong and making good use of that information. “The measure is how we respond to the crises as they happen. We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Not even Frank Gehry can inoculate himself from fears of failure. That is almost surely an integral part of the creative process for everyone to some degree, even those who have achieved the most and the most consistently. The key is that we can teach ourselves to think differently about failures and mistakes, seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth. Carol Dweck’s research has shown that not only does everyone actually have a mixture of both fixed and growth mindsets, but the growth mind-set orientation can be developed. “Changing a mind-set is not like surgery,” she says. “You can’t simply remove the fixed mind-set and replace it with a growth mind-set.” That begins when someone becomes aware of which mindset they lean toward. Simply knowing more about the growth mind-set allows them to react to situations in new ways. Next Dweck says that people can think about things in their lives that they thought they wouldn’t be good at, but eventually were. Another method that Dweck has shown can facilitate a mind-set shift is to focus people on evidence demonstrating the brain’s ability to grow its capacities. When you learn new things, these tiny connections in the brain actually multiply and get stronger. The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow. Then, things that you once found very hard or even impossible—like speaking a foreign language or doing algebra—seem to become easy. The result is a stronger, smarter brain. This is another reason why the little bets approach can be so effective: It helps us to cultivate an exploratory, growth mind-set. Redefining problems and failures as opportunities focuses our attention on insights to be gained rather than worrying about false starts or the risks we’re taking. By focusing on doing, rather than planning, learning about the risks and pitfalls of ideas rather than trying to predict them with precision up-front, an experimental approach develops growth mind-set muscles. Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. Characteristics of what psychologists view as healthy perfectionism include striving for excellence and holding others to similar standards, planning ahead, and strong organizational skills. Healthy perfectionism is internally driven in the sense that it’s motivated by strong personal values for things like quality and excellence. Conversely, unhealthy perfectionism is externally driven. External concerns show up over perceived parental pressures, needing approval, a tendency to ruminate over past performances, or an intense worry about making mistakes. Healthy perfectionists exhibit a low concern for these outside factors. One of the methods that can be most helpful in achieving this balance, in order to embrace the learning potential of failure, is prototyping. What the creation of low cost, rough prototypes makes possible is failing quickly in order to learn fast. entrepreneurs push ideas into the market as quickly as possible in order to learn from mistakes and failures that will point the way forward. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries “The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird. Just get it down on paper, she recommends. Write like a child, whatever comes to your mind. “All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” This is a key reason why failing fast with low-risk prototypes the way Chris Rock does is so helpful: If we haven’t invested much in developing an idea, emotionally or in terms of time or resources, then we are more likely to be able to focus on what we can learn from that effort than on what we’ve lost in making it. Prototyping is one of the most effective ways to both jump-start our thinking and to guide, inspire, and discipline an experimental approach. They tracked everything they did with data, and moved on from what didn’t ultimately seem useful or valuable ..... but finding ways to fail quickly, to invest less emotion and less time in any particular idea or prototype or piece of work, is a consistent feature of the work methods of successful experimental innovators. Potential users of ideas are more comfortable sharing their honest reactions when it’s rough. There is less ego involved if it is unfinished and rough. As Limb hypothesized, when the performers were playing improvised jazz, activity in the prefrontal cortex, the parts of the brain associated with self-censoring or conscious self-monitoring, were deactivated. In other words, when the performers switched from structured music to improvised jazz, the part of their brain responsible for evaluating and censoring their behavior effectively switched off. Improvising unlocks a far more creative state of mind. Kids don’t have the self-censoring capacity of their brain welldeveloped, which helps explain why they will say outlandish things, and also why kids are often extremely creative. Scientists are still in the early days of understanding the functions of the brain, as well as their use of fMRI imaging. They do believe, however, that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain right behind the eyes, is linked with self-expression. Ansari and Berkowitz found that during improvisation, the right-temporoparietal junctions of the pianists’ brains were deactivated. Neuroscientists associate this area of the brain with the ability to make judgments, particularly about differences between self and others. The experienced pianists seemed to be able to turn off a judging part of their mind, freeing them up to create novel melodies. According to Berkowitz, brain scans of nonartists do not exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests that experiencing creative processes could help to build certain creative muscles. Ansari and Berkowitz also found that portions of the brain associated with selecting between two conflicting possibilities lit up during improvisation. They were locked in, what psychology researchers might describe as a state of flow. Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did the pioneering work about the mental state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi had defined flow as: “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Attaining a state of flow can be quite rare because there are many barriers to freeing our minds. Csikszentmihalyi identifies negative forms of perfectionism, fear, self-doubt, and self-censoring as primary obstacles to flow. Read the book Flow. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Part 2 Book is pretty good, very short, and it is like The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, in that it has a great insight but it could have been more simply said. Definitely a read, if no other reason than to think about it and find new books to read next. "Playing the game of saying yes to everything " is a simplified and somewhat silly example, but the point of accepting every offer is that nothing is too silly. Accepting every offer by using “yes … and” language, a cornerstone of improvisation, facilitates building up ideas. Throughout the Pixar creative process, they rely heavily on what they call plussing; it is likely the most-used concept around the company. The point of plussing is to build upon and improve ideas without using judgmental language. A host of studies indicates that humor creates positive group effects. Many focus on how humor can increase cohesiveness and act as a lubricant to facilitate more efficient communications. In order to produce positive mental effects, however, researchers Eric Romero and Anthony Pescosolido found that humor first must be considered funny to the people involved, not seen as demeaning, derogatory, or put-downs. That finding is consistent with the underlying improvisation rationale for accepting every offer and making your partner look good. Successful group humor, I am fascinated by the power of constraints - On a typical project, the constraints, what Gehry also calls “guard rails,” that define the scope of Gehry’s figurative box will include a budget, timeframe, materials, political or regulatory rules, and the nature of the building site itself. Those constraints not only help Gehry Partners to bound, focus, and measure their progress, they help begin and evolve the design. As Google’s Marissa Mayer has put it, “Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome.” productively creative people use constraints to limit their focus and isolate a set of problems that need to be solved. The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem. For example software development projects should be broken into small pieces, prioritized, completed, and released based on user needs. They emphasized using small collaborative teams to respond to change over determined processes or plans, and believed that working software was the best measure of progress. Smallifying processes facilitates more efficient development of code, and it promotes faster learning. Note that one of the great benefits of the agile approach is that it is also a good method for failing fast. As Vanier explains, if he can launch ten features in the same time it takes a competitor to launch one, he’ll have ten times the amount of experience to draw from in figuring out what has failed the test of customer acceptance and what has succeeded. One of his favorite examples of the importance of immersion is Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, the lender responsible for launching the microfinance industry, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. In 1974, Yunus was an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. That year, a severe famine ravaged India sending starving, skeletonlike people from the countryside into cities in search of food. They started showing up in railway stations and bus stations, Yunus recalled in his autobiography, Banker to the Poor. Find this book Yunus felt shocked. He especially could not believe that Sufiya earned just two cents per day. “In my university courses, I theorized about sums in the millions of dollars, but here before my eyes the problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies,” he recounted. “Something was wrong. Why did my university courses not reflect the reality of Sufiya’s life? I was angry, angry at myself, angry at my economics department and the thousands of intelligent professors who had not tried to address this problem and solve it.” Nothing foreseeable would break the cycle of poverty for Sufiya, or for her children. “I had never heard anyone suffering for the lack of twenty-two cents,” Yunus lamented. Yunus went back to his house where he and Professor Latifee took a walk through the garden in the late afternoon heat. “I was trying to see Sufiya’s problem from her point of view,” Yunus recalled. “She suffered because the cost of bamboo was five taka.” Sufiya could not afford to buy raw materials for the bamboo stools and she could not get a conventional loan since she did not have collateral. The middlemen allowed her just enough profit to survive from day to day. Sufiya lived as a bonded laborer, essentially enslaved. But, over the coming years, Grameen would loan over $6.5 billion, while maintaining repayment rates consistently above 98 percent. The practice became known as “microlending” or “microfinance,” and would become a global phenomenon. “All I really wanted to do was solve an immediate problem,” he said. As Yunus described in a speech years later, “At the beginning, you had no idea that something like this [microlending] would emerge, but it is so clear, so transparent, you don’t need to be a smart researcher to go find it.” The insights and ideas that were obvious to Yunus the anthropologist had been hidden from Yunus the economist. The difference: by absorbing poverty from the worm’s-eye view, asking lots of questions, and being open to changing his assumptions, he could understand what he could not from a bird’s-eye view. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries As Steve Blank, a cofounder of the software company E.piphany, who teaches entrepreneurship at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and who routinely challenges entrepreneurs to get out into the world to challenge their own assumptions, says, “No facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” “You gotta come in with your ears open,” H. R. McMaster told George Packer inside Tal Afar during 2006, “You can’t come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people.” Research evidence suggests a strong link between inquisitiveness and creative productivity. Iinnovators closely observed details, particularly about other people’s behaviors. “In observing others, they act like anthropologists and social scientists,” “Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs told Wired magazine. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people … Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.” Truth be told, most investors get their insight from traders or other investors. It’s what Chanos calls the smart-guy syndrome: When hedge-fund analysts go to a dinner in New York or London and hear someone they think is smart talk about a company. “The next day, they all go take a two percent stake in the company,” Chanos says. This is not original thinking. It’s amazing how common the smart-guy syndrome is among investors and how rare it is to find original thinking investors. In my experience, the best investors, by contrast, are contrarian thinkers. They get out into the world to find unique insights. Dell, founder and CEO, asking why a computer should cost five times as much as its parts. “I would take computers apart … and would observe that $600 worth of parts were sold for $3,000,” Dell shared. In laboring over the question, Dell’s personal-computing business model ideas emerged. “When something seems like an opportunity—it seems like you have the skills, and maybe some kind of advantage, and you think it’s a big area—you will always get asked the question, ‘Why? Why do that?’ Bezos told Harvard Business Review, then elaborated, “But ‘Why not?’ is an equally valid question. And there may be good reasons why not—maybe you don’t have the capital resources, or parts of your current business require so much focus at this key juncture that it would be irresponsible. In that case, if somebody asked, ‘Why not?’ you would say, ‘Here’s why not …’ But that question doesn’t get asked.” Chet suggested that I spend only a week or so doing market research, so that I could come up to speed on the industry and competitive landscape. His main advice was that we should just get out, talk with potential customers, and look for problems and needs before coming up with any strategies. Not surprisingly, he learned this approach through experience. “If you look at four-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work,” Gregersen observed generally. “But by the time they are six and a half years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.” It’s a haunting finding that raises serious concern about our education system. Specifically, what is the purpose of education? The remaining pattern of action that Dyer and Gregersen found distinguished the innovators from the noninnovators that we haven’t yet covered: innovators routinely networked with people who came from different backgrounds. It’s a way to challenge one’s assumptions and gain broader A preponderance of evidence that indicates that diversity, be it of perspectives, experiences, or backgrounds, fuels creativity. We see this pattern at the individual, organizational, and societal level. Learning a little bit from a lot of people was one of the main ways Tim identified so many unique ideas and insights. He left no stone unturned and was extremely open to what could emerge from each interaction. Tim was constantly open to new information and ideas from an extremely diverse network of people. This is a critical capacity that anyone can develop. Dr. Richard Wiseman, - The Luck Factor. (he recommends the book) As the newspaper photo counting experiment illustrates, one obvious implication from Wiseman’s research is that lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people. It’s more nuanced than that. Here’s where being open to meeting, interacting with, and learning from different types of people comes in. Wiseman found that lucky people tend to be open to opportunities (or insights) that come along spontaneously, whereas unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine, fixated on certain specific outcomes. In analyzing behavior patterns at social parties, for example, unlucky people tended to talk with the same types of people, people who are like themselves. It’s a common phenomenon. On the other hand, lucky people tended to be curious and open to what can come along from chance interactions. Wiseman believed another type of behavior played an even greater role in success. Wiseman found that lucky people build and maintain what he called a strong network of luck. He wrote: Lucky people are effective at building secure, and longlasting, attachments with the people they meet. They are easy to know and most people like them. They tend to be trusting and form close relationships with others. As a result, they often keep in touch with a much larger number of friends and colleagues than unlucky people. And time and again, this network of friends helps promote opportunity in their lives. This was Wiseman’s core finding: You can create your own luck. “I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind,” he argued. Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people. Wiseman took his research on luck one step further. After identifying a group of people who identified themselves as unlucky, he shared the main principles of lucky behavior, including specific techniques. As Wiseman described it, “For instance, they were taught how to be more open to opportunities around them, how to break routines, and how to deal with bad luck by imagining things being worse.” Wiseman included exercises to increase chance opportunities, such as building and maintaining a network of luck, being open to new experiences, and developing a more relaxed attitude toward life, as well as ways to listen to hunches and to visualize lucky interactions. After carrying out specific exercises for a month, participants reported back to Wiseman. “The results were dramatic: eighty percent were happier and more satisfied with their lives—and luckier,” Wiseman summed. Moynihan didn’t flinch, as Tim recalled in an interview, “And he said, ‘You have to understand: What you know, they’ll never know, and what they know, you can learn.’ And he slapped me on the back, dusted me off, and sent me on my way.” That new ideas travel along a curve of adoption from early to late adopters is now widely accepted. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Beginning in the 1970s, von Hippel examined where innovations come from (the original source of a later commercialized idea) across a range of industries, from scientific instruments to semiconductors to thermoplastics. In an extensive study on the sources of innovation for major scientific instruments, for instance, von Hippel found that one group, which he called active users or lead users, were responsible for developing over 75 percent of the innovations. A similar pattern ran across an array of other industries. These people not only serve as cutting-edge taste makers, they actively tinker to push and create new ideas on their own. Designers call these people extreme users, whose unique needs can foreshadow the needs of other people. The reason why designers find extreme users so valuable is because the average person isn’t actively thinking about solving problems like these. Their needs and desires are less pronounced. Chris Thoen, who leads P&G’s Global Open Innovation, describes their approach simply: “Choose a few consumers that you really feel are the early adopters, test it with them, see what they like about it and what they don’t like about it … And, if it appeals to them, use them to optimize it [the idea] further and then the laggards will follow.” Now, to adopt the von Hippel Strategy, one of the things that 3M had to figure out, and that Chris Rock must do when he sets out to develop his material, was how to find active users. Take the mountain bike. It wasn’t invented by a person or company. In the mid-1970s, dozens of avid pro-am riders in northern California started making modifications to their bikes for off-road riding on local mountains. They replaced thin tires with thicker ones, reformulated the braking systems, and modified the bike frames (I would recommend the documentary The Klunkerz, if you’re curious about the whole story.). I then identified potential agents the same way 3M identified active users: by looking at who represented authors of similar books, asking around, then sending the agents cold email introductions. I will never forget the first conversation I had with one of these agents. Though painful, it illustrates the value of the von Hippel Strategy. After sending a rough threepager, the agent and I spoke for thirty minutes. It was a long thirty minutes. As we begin to make use of these methods to develop new ideas, strategies, and projects, they combine to facilitate what organizational psychologist Karl Weick refers to as small wins. Weick defines a small win as “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” They are small successes that emerge out of our ongoing development process, and it’s important to be watching closely for them. upon. 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. 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.” In fact, Schultz described Starbucks’s mentality as: “the value of dogmatism and flexibility.” According to Weick, “a series of wins at small but significant tasks … reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance.” Another benefit of small wins is less immediately obvious: They enable the development of the means to attain goals. Entrepreneurs use their available means, such as their expertise, networks, or financial resources, to develop their ideas and access additional resources and means. As Weick explains about this benefit of small wins, “New allies bring new solutions with them and old opponents change their habits. Additional resources also flow toward winners, which means that slightly larger wins can be attempted.” One element of small wins that is particularly tricky to absorb is that very often they will not emerge in a linear fashion, so they cannot reliably be predicted or planned for and may not build on one another, one step after another. In some instances, one small win may clearly lead directly to another. One last, yet important, point about small wins is that often, rather than validating a direction we’ve been pursuing, they will provide a signal to proceed in a different way. This brings us back to the fundamental advantages of the little bets approach; it allows us to discover new ideas, strategies, or plans through an emergent process, rather than trying to fully formulate them before we begin, and it facilitates adapting our approach as we go rather than continuing on a course that may lead to failure. As Richard Wiseman’s research demonstrates, chance favors the open mind, receptivity to what cannot be predicted or imagined based on existing knowledge. With the barriers lowered, the creative mind thrives on continuous experimentation and discovery. General McMaster lists such core counterinsurgency methods as: understand, act, assess and adapt, consolidate gains, and transition missions to civilian control. General David Petraeus says about counterinsurgency operations, “The side that learns and adapts the fastest often prevails.” General McMaster frames and reframes the key problems from the bottom up before taking bold action. “Very few schools teach students how to create knowledge,” says Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University, a leading education and innovation researcher. “Instead, students are taught that knowledge is static and complete, and they become experts at consuming knowledge rather than producing knowledge.” Change happens in small, achievable ways. Books he recommends/ look for ( most I have read) Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code. New York: Bantam, 2009. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Kahney, Leander. Inside Steve’s Brain. New York: Portfolio, 2009. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1995. - Lamott describes her writing tactics, especially how to overcome the common fears and barriers writers face. Her key insights, applicable to any creative process, include the importance of writing “shitty first drafts” in the interest of getting ideas out first and worrying about perfection later, and writing only as much as she can see in a one inch by one inch picture frame. That is, chunking writing into extremely manageable pieces. Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead, 2006. Price, David. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Knopf, 2008. Chesborough, Henry. Open Innovation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2003. Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma. New York: Collins Business, 2003, and The Innovator’s Solution, with Michael Raynor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2003. Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall. Jim Collins, 2009. Collins, Jim and Jerry Porras. Built to Last. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Drucker, Peter. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Liker, Jeffrey. The Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. University of Michigan Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press, 1995. This is the definitive research book about how ideas spread. Sawyer, Keith. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Sternberg, Robert J. Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. von Hippel, Eric. The Sources of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Von Hippel’s website provides a host of resources related to his research: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/. Bayles, David and Ted Orland. Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Eugene, OR: Capra Press, 1993. Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Professor Csikzentmihalyi de Bono, Edward. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Galenson, David. Old Masters and Young Geniuses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. - His central argument is that people are either conceptual innovators (like Mozart) or experimental innovators (like Beethoven) and that conceptual innovators tend to do their best work while they are young, whereas experimental innovators tend to do their best work in their later years. Critics have poked holes in Galenson’s arguments by finding exceptions to his age rules, but his general distinction is compelling. What’s less clear is what the spectrum between conceptual and experimental innovation looks like at the individual level, as well as whether people can move from conceptual to experimental or vice versa. Maeda, John. The Laws of Simplicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Maeda, Stokes, Patricia. Creativity from Constraint. New York: Springer, 2006. Young, James Webb. A Technique for Producing Ideas. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC/Contemporary, 1988. Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009. Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation. New York: Crown, 2007, and The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Crown, 2006. Martin, Roger. The Design of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009. Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Richardson, Adam. Innovation X. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Belsky, Scott. Making Ideas Happen. New York: Portfolio, 2010. Fried, Jason, and David Heinemeier Hansson. Rework. New York: Crown, 2010. Gianforte, Greg, and Marcus Gibson. Bootstrapping Your Business. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2005. Professor Saras -Sarasvathy pointed me to this book. It provides a host of concrete and specific tactics for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses completely from scratch, with their own resources, including selling, managing cash, inexpensive PR tactics, and customer service. Yunas, Muhammad, and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. New York: Public Affairs, 1999. Johansson, Frans. The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2004. Lafley, A. G., and Ram Charam. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation. New York: Crown, 1988. McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. Discovery-Driven Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2009. - McGrath and MacMillan propose thinking differently about traditional management decision-making models by building income statements up, by determining what revenues need to be achieved to support costs. Their method is similar to what Professor Saras Sarasvathy calls the principle of affordable loss. By reframing analyses from what one expects to gain (traditional expected value calculations) to what one can afford to lose, decision making more closely resembles that of expert entrepreneurs. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. New York: Random House, 2007. - One of the points that Taleb highlights is that, when operating within a high degree of uncertainty, one should experiment including to find what Taleb calls inadvertent discoveries. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries 10-Minute Toughness by Jason Selk ( http://www.enhancedperformanceinc.com/)
10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins This is one of those books that you really debate whether to buy, but after reading it, and making a lot of notes and highlights, I will simply say buy it. I find myself using the breathing technique all the time, and I found the exercises to be worth thinking about and doing.There are some parts that are a little simple, and there is some repetition but over all this is a good solid book. I have noticed that one trait that truly successful people have in common is that they have developed and maintained a solution-focused approach in their careers and in life. You need to always ask yourself, every time you encounter each opportunity - What is one thing I can do that could make this better? Always have a solution on the board: A results-driven model that identifies the biological and environmental obstacles to achieving greatness. What is one thing I can do that could make this better?: A concrete method of overcoming all obstacles and making success a permanent state. An effective way to control heart rate is to use a "centering breath" before and during competition. The centering breath, often referred to as a "diaphragm breath," is a long, deep inhalation of air into the diaphragm. Inhaling air into the diaphragm is a biological tool that helps control the heart rate. Taking a deep, centering breath allows individuals to keep their heart rate under control and perform at a more effective pace. I have tried to simplify diaphragm breathing by qualifying a good centering breath as one that lasts fifteen seconds. The formula is 6-2-7: breathe in for six seconds, hold for two, and breathe out for seven seconds. The heart rate is a primary control of a person’s arousal state. It is important to control heart rate because using the mind effectively becomes increasingly more difficult as the heart rate rises. Once the rate gets to 120 beats per minute, the mind will not be nearly as sharp (unless proper conditioning and mental training has occurred), and at about 150 beats per minute, the mind will essentially shut down and go into survival mode. Do not focus on results but stay in the moment and execute one skill at a time, one routine at a time. If we do not choose our thoughts carefully, they can (and many times do) have a negative impact on performance. "One skill at a time, one routine at a time." When athletes keep their minds focused on positive performance cues, they are more likely to experience success. 10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins A performance statement is a type of self-talk designed to help athletes zoom in on one specific thought to enhance performance consistency. It is a simple, yet concrete, thought that specifically identifies the process of success, or what it takes to perform at your best. The key is to identify the single most fundamental idea of what it takes for you to be successful to allow you to simplify the game. For the majority of athletes, mental clutter usually occurs because individuals do not know what they should be thinking. Mental toughness is abnormal, just as physical strength is abnormal. We are born without much muscle development. As we grow, if we don’t emphasize physical fitness, we will not develop appreciable strength. In that sense, it is somewhat abnormal to be physically strong. The same is true for mental toughness: most people don’t commit to replacing their negative thoughts with positive thinking. In my opinion, the essence of mental toughness is the ability to replace negative thinking with thoughts that are centered on performance cues or that contribute to improved self-confidence. The most helpful method to stop self-doubt and negative thinking is thought replacement. Effective thought replacement occurs when you decide what you want to have happen and then think more often about what it will take to make it happen. Replace all thoughts of self-doubt or negativity with thoughts of what it is that you want, and you will be much more likely to have those things occur. If you determine what you want to accomplish in any given situation and then lock your mind on what it takes to achieve that goal, you will have a much better chance of reaping the rewards. As often as possible, choose to think about the path to success rather than the obstacles in your way. You have to decide what you want and then put your energy into acquiring it. Cognitive psychology has taught us that the mind can fully focus on only one item at a time. In short, if you are thinking about what is going wrong in your life, you cannot be thinking about what it takes to make it right. The most effective way to avoid self-doubt and mental clutter is to replace the negative thoughts with specific positive thoughts. Listen first; then decide; be swift and confident. 10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins Note: see yourself as a advisor to yourself. what would you say to someone else in your position. in my case I would say be what you want to be not what someone wants you to be Self-image is internally constructed: we can decide how we view ourselves. The experience I had with Jenny taught me very early the powerful impact of maintaining a positive self-image. Each of us chooses how we see ourselves. Creating and using a positive identity statement will help you choose a powerful self-image. Largely what determines people’s self-image is the things they continually say to themselves, Simply put, the individual who steps up to the starting line with a true belief in his or her ability to do well has a much greater likelihood of success than those who don’t have that mind-set. In a revised version of Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s work Psycho-Cybernetics, testimonies from top athletes such as Jack Nicklaus and Payne Stewart and coaches such as Pat Riley and Phil Jackson support Maltz’s position regarding the powerful impact that self-image has on athletic performance. Self-image is not mental trickery; it is a scientifically proven agent of control. The key is to create the self-image desired—decide who you want to be and how you want to live—and then continuously tell yourself that you have what it takes to be that person. The self-image will guide and direct actions and behaviors until the self-image becomes the reality. In the words of Maxwell Maltz, "You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. More important, you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or willpower. This is why trying to achieve something difficult with teeth gritted is a losing battle. Willpower is not the answer. Self-image management is. Stop thinking about what you can’t do and start thinking about you want to do. Remember: the centering breath is a deep breath used to physiologically control heart rate and arousal. Taking a centering breath at the end of the mental workout is necessary for athletes because completing the personal highlight reel may cause the heart rate and arousal state to elevate. You always want to feel calm, confident, and relaxed up to the point of competition. it is possible to overdue mental work. I tell athletes that doing the mental workout one time a day is great. Some clients prefer to do it a couple of times a day, and that is OK, but there is no need to do it more than twice a day. Let’s take this opportunity to review the five tools in the mental workout before we move forward. First is the centering breath, which will take you fifteen seconds. Then you recite to yourself your performance statement, a self-statement designed to improve your focus on what it takes (process of success) to be successful; this should take about five seconds. In the third step, you run through your personal highlight reel, comprising three sixty-second clips of visualizations, for three minutes total. When your personal highlight reel is over, you deliver to yourself your identity statement, a self-statement to help you focus on developing the self-image you desire; as with the performance statement, this will take five seconds. You finish the mental workout with another fifteen-second centering breath. The three concepts that turn ordinary goal setting into effective goal setting are these: Process goals produce results No excuses; go public Keep goals alive, and live the dream The three levels, or types, of goals that I discuss with clients are ultimate goals, product goals, and process goals Ultimate goals are the culmination of what you want to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it. When identifying your ultimate goals, imagine being able to look into the future and witness your retirement dinner. Product goals are result-oriented goals. They are clearly measurable and usually are most effective if they emphasize accomplishments in the next twelve months. Process goals are the "what it takes" to achieve the product goals you set. Process goals also must be specific enough to be measurable. It is important to write your goals down and let others know of your intentions. The act of writing down as well as talking about your goals makes them more a part of your reality. The more you can see and recite your goals, the more steadily they move from your subconscious into your awareness. "Never make excuses. Your friends won’t need them, and your foes won’t believe them. Excuses promote underachieving. For goals to work, they must become a part of daily training. The 10-MT goal-setting plan is a three-step process: 1. Further on in this book, you will take a few minutes to write down your ultimate goals. Remember that ultimate goals are the summary accomplishments you want from your sport and how you want to be remembered as going about achieving those accomplishments. Additionally, you will set two product goals for the upcoming season, including three process goals needed to help achieve each of the product goals. 2. After practices and games, you will take about three to four minutes to fill out a Success Log. The Success Logs ask athletes to answer the following questions: What three things did I do well today? Based on today’s performance, what do I want to improve? What is one thing I can do differently that could lead to the desired improvement? 3. Just before doing your mental workout, you will take one minute to review your Success Log entries from the previous day. Looking over your log just before going through your mental work will steer you to emphasize your improvement goals in your mental workout. Hence, the power of goals will be more alive in each and every practice and competition. There are four steps you will need to take to personally tailor your 10-MT goal-setting program: Identify what your ultimate accomplishment would be. Determine the specific accomplishments (product goals) necessary to achieve your ultimate goal. For each accomplishment, identify what it will take on your part (process goals) to achieve the goal. Determine the personal sacrifices and character strengths required to live out your dream. Defining your personal vision is essential to selecting the right goals. If you do not invest a little time to figure out with some precision who you want to be and how you want to live, you may well select goals to which you will not stay committed. Consider using a methodology for choosing goals that Tal Ben-Shahar endorses. Dr. Ben-Shahar’s course on positive psychology has become one of Harvard’s most popular courses. In his book Happier, he outlines a process of selecting goals that produce happiness: First, make a list of all the activities that you know you are good at. Second, of all the activities you are good at, make note of those activities that you enjoy doing. Then go even further by selecting the activities from that list that you really like to do. Once you have that list, go one step further and note the activities that you really, really like to do. Those are the activities on which you should focus. The 10-MT personal rewards program allows individuals to identify the specific type of motivation needed for optimal personal success. Distinguishing between material rewards and experiential rewards helps determine what combination balance works best. Additionally, it is helpful to be able to call on a supporting mentor, coach, or parent as you strive toward your ultimate goal. Set goals that will lead to greatness, and you will maximize your athletic potential. It is also important to set new goals once a goal is achieved. College basketball coach Rick Pitino noted that the difference between dreams and goals is that dreams are where we want to end up and goals are how we get there. This doesn’t mean you train during every waking hour, day in and day out. For one thing, it is necessary to incorporate rest into training cycles. What it does mean is that if you know of something that would help your training and competitive performance, you owe it to yourself to at least test it The two keys to being fully prepared and having unwavering confidence in yourself are, first, to put the time and energy into doing everything you know you need to do to be prepared and, second, to be aware that you are fully prepared. I am a firm believer in the precept that winning versus losing is determined more on training days than on game days. I think the person or team who prepares more fully in training wins more often. From a training standpoint, I use the MP100 + 20 approach for work ethic and training. "MP100" means following 100 percent of your mental-training program and 100 percent of your physical-training regimen, and the "+ 20" symbolizes an additional 20 percent of energy put forth to make sure you are more prepared than the competition. Lanny Bassham, an Olympic gold medal shooter, says that 5 percent of the people do 95 percent of the winning. In addition to adhering to 100 percent of the physical-and mental-training plans, root out a way to personally contribute 20 percent more effort. 10-MT program asks you to undertake three steps that will take you no more than ten minutes per day in all: Fill out the Goal Setting for Greatness Work Sheet once a year. Place it somewhere you will see it on a regular basis. Perform your mental workout before practices and competitions. Complete your Success Log after every practice and competition; review it just prior to completing your mental workout before the next day’s practice or competition. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz expound on the power of goals and rituals in their groundbreaking book The Power of Full Engagement. Rituals are the act of creating positive habits. The 10-MT goal-setting program relies on seven principles for optimal effectiveness. Here’s a recap: Process over product. Each day, focus on your process goals, or "what it takes" to achieve your product goals. No excuses. Take full accountability for growth by not offering excuses for underachieving. Go public. Write your goals down, and tell others what they are, to increase your consciousness of your goals and your accountability for reaching them. Keep goals alive. On a daily basis, fill out your Success Log to enhance motivation and results in practices and competitions. Vision integrity. Choose goals aligned with who you want to be and how you want to live. Personal reward preference. Attach rewards to your goals to burnish motivation and commitment. MP100 + 20. Let goals embellish and control your work ethic by aspiring to follow 100 percent of training plans and committing a further 20 percent of your energy into outworking the competition. Mental and physical training is all about putting yourself in the ideal position to succeed. Excellence is achieved through a solution-focused mind. Being solution focused means keeping your thoughts centered on what you want from life and what it takes to achieve what you want, as opposed to allowing thoughts of self-doubt and concern to occupy the mind. The difference between a solution focus and a relentless solution focus is how often you commit to replacing negative thinking with solutions. Consider the following diagram: Let’s assume the chart represents the chalkboard of your life. On which side of the board have you spent the most time making entries? If you are like most people, you have spent most of your time operating from the "Problems" side. The human mind, as we know, is biologically pre-disposed to be more sensitive to problems, and because of this, we are likely to be problem focused. Whenever people get together, a logical topic of discussion is problems. We all have problems. It is natural to focus on problems, and that is what we talk about with each other. An Olympic gold medal wrestling coach once told me that there are two principal types of athletes, those with talent and those with work ethic, and the greatest athletes possess both. While you may not be able to control talent, you can always control work ethic. When we think about problems, our problems grow. When we think about solutions, our solutions grow. I needed to remind him of the difference between a relentless solution focus and a solution focus, which is the ultimate measurement of mental toughness. People have a tendency to become so overwhelmed with life and all of the things that need to be done that it becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish anything at all. Important concept: The idea that success can be achieved by meeting a string of basic, incremental goals in the present that will ultimately lead to excellence in the future. Use the concept to begin chipping away at your problems and even the biggest issues will become manageable before long. Believe in yourself and your ability to make gradual improvements, and the results will follow. Gradual improvement over time brings about vibrant and sustainable growth. You do not need to arrive at perfection; you need to slowly but surely make things better. .10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins Lanny Bassham, the Olympic gold medal shooter mentioned in Chapter 8, calls this handy precept the "ready, fire, aim" principle. Lanny claims that in sports and in life, people spend too much time aiming at the bull’s-eye and not enough time shooting at it. Rather than placing so much emphasis on getting ready and aiming, go ahead and take a shot. Taking the shot gets you started and also lets you gauge how far off the mark you are. Make adjustments, but keep shooting until you get closer and closer, and eventually you will hit the bull’s-eye. Remind yourself that your body listens to what your brain tells it. If you tell yourself you don’t know, you’re right; by the same token, if you start telling yourself there is a solution, you will also be correct. From now on, when you ask the question, you must come up with an answer. Act as though your life depends on your contributing some form of answer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the right one, but you have to get going on the process, and nothing clogs the process more than the "I don’t know" excuse. This scenario raises another fundamental concept: anytime a person feels uncomfortable, it is a direct response to the perception of a problem. Use this natural alarm system to jump-start the solution-focus process. Anytime you feel angry, sad, stressed, frustrated, or just generally uncomfortable, seek out and define the underlying problem. Keep it simple, spending as little time and energy as necessary on this step. Once you nail down what is causing you to feel uncomfortable, immediately make the shift to the solution side of the board by asking yourself what one thing you could do differently that could make things better. When a problem comes your way that you need to fix, make sure it does cross your mind to take action. Stay solution oriented, and narrow your focus to the present and what you can do now A three-step process carries you to experiencing success as a permanent state and failure as only temporary: Decide what you want to accomplish and what it takes to get there (product and process goals). Choose to act on the physical and mental plans needed to accomplish your goals (MP100 + 20). One of two things happens—either you achieve your goals or you make adjustments to step one (relentless solution focus). when members of a group are solution focused, they will be more successful as individuals. Until there is a solution on the board, continue to ask, "What is one thing we can do that would make this better?" I consider an individual to be mentally tough when the mind is in control of thoughts that help the body accomplish what is wanted When problems knock you for a loop, don’t feel sorry for yourself or make excuses. Get your mind tuned to what you want to accomplish, get a firm handle on what it will take to achieve your goals, and then get busy. Begin the physical and mental work needed to get yourself past obstacles you encounter. If you want to rise higher in sports and in life, it is your responsibility to do what it takes to make it happen. Do not waste your breath or brain cells on cursing the unfairness and difficulty of your plight. Appoint goals, equip yourself with a mental workout that emphasizes what it takes to achieve those goals, and then don’t let anyone or anything stop you. I believe that if you feel the need to announce that you are trying, you probably need to find a way to try harder. "I am trying" is what folks say when they are not accomplishing what they set out to do. Telling yourself and others that you are trying distracts you from thinking about what you need to do differently. Next time, instead of falling back on "I am trying," ask yourself, "What is one thing I can do that could make this better? When you know what you want to accomplish, write it down, and spread the word. Talking about your goals will spring them from your subconscious into your consciousness. It will also add to your accountability. It is harder to call it quits if you have publicly declared that nothing will stop you. Become a "no-excuses" athlete. If you come up short on your goals, avoid giving the reasons why. Simply tell yourself and anyone else who is interested that you missed the mark and you will work on improving and doing better next time. Accountability is a tremendously powerful tool for growth—and excuses are the number one obstacle to accountability. Anytime you are in the presence of adversity, ask yourself, "What is one thing I can do that could make this better?" Force yourself to give a substantive answer. ("I don’t know" is not an answer that will help.) You do not need perfection; all you need is improvement. Decide what you want to accomplish and what it takes to get there (product and process goals). Choose to act on the physical and mental plans needed to accomplish your goals (MP100 + 20). One of two things happens—either you achieve your product goals or you make adjustment to your process goals (relentless solution focus). .10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins Schedule your sleep. Everyone likes flexibility but this you need to maintain and keep to a regular system. I remember hearing of a genius who wore the same clothes every day so he didn't have to think about it. It is that kind of thing. Sleeping reshuffles the deck, and you need to it function at a high rate. This is a case of maximizing your resource when awake, and to do that, you need sleep.
D From my adventures in the subculture of addiction recovery, I’d learned that the trajectory of one’s life often boils down to a few identifiable moments—decisions that change everything. I knew all too well that moments like these were not to be squandered. Rather, they were to be respected and seized at all costs, for they just didn’t come around that often, if ever. Even if you experienced only one powerful moment like this one, you were lucky. Blink or look away for even an instant and the door didn’t just close, it literally vanished. In my case, this was the second time I’d been blessed with such an opportunity, the first being that precious moment of clarity that precipitated my sobriety in rehab. Looking into the mirror that night, I could feel that portal opening again. I needed to act. But how?
In truth, I needed an entirely new lifestyle. Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll Hustle matters – Grit matters. Ideas are cheap.
You will have a million ideas, and they will happen constantly, and they will all seem great at the time, and you usually won’t do anything about them. Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to your success. The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action. I don’t listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What the say tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, what they do tells you who they are. As you start toact, and things start to happen, other opportunities will come up, other possibilities will come your way. Action equals success. Ideas equal wishes. D 7 ways to Improve Your Brain Plasticity A Brain Fitness Plan 1. Exercise. Change can only occur when the brain is alert and engaged, so you need to be rested. A tired brain is not a highly functional brain. Stay in good shape, go outside, walk each day, eat good food, enjoy the sun. An active and healthy body means an active and healthy brain. 2. Be Positive because Being Positive Works Positive Change strengthens connections between neurons engaged at the same time towards a model of perfection. The brain wants to make connections that make your life and itself better, that improve its chance of survival. Knowing you can literally change the physical aspects of your brain means you can change. 3. Learn new things. Cross train, study things in groups. Neurons that fire together wire together. Studies show your brain lights up when learning something new, and once habit, your brain lights up and the beginning and the end. Challenge yourself, learn a new language, take up a martial art, start painting or write a book, start a business., (www.lifestylebusinessbookclub.com). Training needs to be taxing and systematically improving. 4. Initial changes are just temporary. Incremental engaged steps, bit by bit produce lasting knowledge. Study a little every time, I study in blocks of twenty minutes switching tasks or subjects, but you need to do a little bit every day, consistency matters. Then test yourself. Training should be incremental. 5. Brain plasticity can be positive or negative (bad habits) Habits can work either way, good or bad, so be conscious of what you do habitually. What you do daily, you become. Control your habits, know what causes you to do something, the cue to your habit, learn what the routine is, and then know the reward. What do you get out of the habit. Think about it. Then hack it. Tweak the cue. Find a better way to achieve the reward. Also, being part of a group helps reinforce the change. 6. Memory is crucial for learning and can be improved. Memory is a skill, not a born gift. It takes work and practice. A quote from Walking With Einstein: It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” More notes on walking With Einstein are here: http://www.darylburnett.com/1/post/2012/03/memory-tips-from-the-book-moonwalking-with-einstein.html 7. Motivation is key. Be Engaged. What you do needs to be interesting to motivate, if you want it, you will learn it, so much it interesting. Reward yourself when you progress. Have goal, a reason to improve.D D The Book Willpower has quickly become one of my favorite reads, and I have literally slowed down reading it to one section a week to make it last longer and to give me time to think about what I read. It is worth owning. A WRITER CHALLENGES THE VOICE OF SELF-CRITICISM Excerpt form The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Ben, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school social studies teacher with literary aspirations, had set the goal to finish writing his novel by the end of summer vacation. This deadline required him to write ten pages a day, every day. In reality, he would write two to three pages one day, then feel so overwhelmed by how far behind he was that he skipped the next day completely. Realizing that he wasn’t going to finish the book by the start of the school year, he felt like a fraud. If he couldn’t make the effort now, when he had so much free time, how was he going to make any progress when he had homework to grade and lessons to plan? Ben started to doubt whether he should even bother with the goal, since he wasn’t making the progress he thought he should be. “A real writer would be able to churn those pages out,” he told himself. “A real writer would never play computer games instead of writing.” In this state of mind, he turned a critical eye to his writing and convinced himself it was garbage. Ben had actually abandoned his goal when he found himself in my class that fall. He had enrolled in the class to learn how to motivate his students, but he recognized himself in the discussion about self-criticism. When he did the self-forgiveness exercise for his abandoned novel, the first thing he noticed was the fear and self-doubt behind his giving up. Not meeting his small goal to write ten pages a day made him afraid that he did not have the talent or dedication to realize his big goal of becoming a novelist. He took comfort in the idea that his setbacks were just part of being human, and not proof that he would never succeed. He remembered stories he had read about other writers who had struggled early in their careers. To find a more compassionate response to himself, he imagined how he would mentor a student who wanted to give up on a goal. Ben realized he would encourage the student to keep going if the goal was important. He would say that any effort made now would take the student closer to the goal. He certainly would not say to the student, “Who are you kidding? Your work is garbage.” From this exercise, Ben found renewed energy for writing and returned to his work-in-progress. He made a commitment to write once a week, a more reasonable goal for the school year, and one he felt comfortable holding himself accountable to. Exercise: Below is an exercise that psychologists use to help people find a more self-compassionate response to failure. Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge. 1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that? 2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you. Consider the truth of these statements. 3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback. What words of support would you offer? The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal "The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward. Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would from guaranteed payments. This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. This is why people would rather play the lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO." The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal |
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