Success often hinges on avoiding unforced errors. Here’s how to do it.

Photo: indi.ca

What’s the cause of unforced errors in life and work? Not stopping to think. Going so fast that you don’t see the looming pothole until you hit it. When asked why they did something stupid, the commonest thing people say is: “It seemed like such a good idea at the time.” It did — because all they saw were their dreams of success, and they didn’t slow down enough to notice the risks that went along with them.

Today’s leadership role models tend to be aggressive by nature. They prefer the spectacular win over any series of small gains, even if it comes with far more risk. They want to be known as ‘winners’, not people who play safe. And, like all who have the power to recruit others, they tend to choose people in their own image: people whose strengths and weaknesses are very like their own. You can think of this like the emphasis on successful stock-picking that flew around before the dot-com bust. The supposed masters of this art were widely imitated, even though all the evidence is that even the most dedicated and professional of them cannot beat the market over the long term.

The truth is far more prosaic: in nearly every human activity, success depends more on avoiding unforced errors than flashes of brilliance. The one who doesn’t mess up, wins. The brilliant risk-taker produces occasional miracles, but they’re often out-weighed by all the mistakes that come along with that approach. Look back on your own career for a moment. Some of the bad times certainly won’t have been your fault; chance plays a huge part in events, personal and organizational. But how many times did you make some mistake that you know was perfectly avoidable — if only you’d seen it in time? How many unforced errors have caused you embarrassment, loss of credibility, or even more serious career set-backs? Read the full story

Six Ways to Boost Your Long-term Prospects for Success and Happiness, Starting Today

Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri (www.i-pix.it)

The US government is giving away millions of dollars in handouts in an attempt to stimulate economic activity. Fine. We all like to get money from Uncle Sam, but even a handout on this scale cannot provide more than a temporary sense of satisfaction. What each of us needs is to put together our own, long-term stimulus package, made up of actions that will add to our potential for enjoying life far into the future.

Here are six suggestions to include in your personal ’stimulus package’ — six simple ways boost your prospects for career success, enjoyment of life, and personal happiness.

1. Long-term success and satisfaction are nearly always best found in doing work that you love. It’s not always easy to discover what that may be, but it’s well worth the effort to try. Take the time to think about what is most enjoyable in your life; what you look forward to in whatever you do today; and what you maybe day-dream about doing, if only it were possible. Then make a firm effort to find ways to incorporate as many of these sources of enjoyment as possible into your life on a regular basis; some through work, some through things outside of work. If nothing succeeds like success, nothing produces success like loving what you do.
2. Many platitudes have been wasted on looking for greater satisfaction from your life. I suspect the best answer is the simplest: you’ll get most satisfaction from spending your time on things that make you feel good about yourself and what you have produced. Giving the quality of your life a boost will raise your spirits and improve your well-being. And quality of life doesn’t always depend on money. Sometimes the richest people have lives full of wealth, yet seriously deficient in true quality. Real quality of life comes from living according to your deepest values. Do that and you cannot go far wrong.
3. Your mind is a precious asset that needs stimulus to keep it vibrant and alive. If you let it become slack or dull, you cannot hope to be happy and successful. Your personal stimulus package should therefore contain ways to keep your mind alert and your thinking fresh and powerful. Reading is one of the best approaches, along with learning additional skills and adding to your knowledge on any topic that interests you. Don’t just enjoy things passively; get involved, research, explore, become a minor expert. If you find yourself slumped in front of the television, numbing your brain with the mental equivalent of the worst junk food, get off your butt and start giving that mind a work-out. Few things will pay you back more handsomely.
4. In your package, you should also include ways to stimulate your creativity. Ask questions. Try new things. Explore the unknown. Challenge yourself to come up with your own answers, instead of accepting what others tell you, no matter how expert they are or how much authority they are said to have. The truth can stand up to any amount of challenge, while half-truths, myths, and downright deceptions will all crumble sooner or later.
5. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that physical fitness plays a major role in personal well-being. You don’t have to become a fitness fanatic, or spend hours at the gym. Just get sufficient exercise appropriate to your age and circumstances; add enough sleep (many people are chronically sleep-deprived); and don’t make your physical state worse through drink, drugs, or constantly over-eating.
6. Last, but far from least, slow down and make time for the little things of life than can transform any day. Take the time to admire the beauty all around you. Spend quality time with friends and loved ones. Learn to appreciate art, or music, or nature. Make something beautiful. No life can be satisfying if it is lived in such a headlong rush that you are scarcely able to notice what happens between waking up and falling back into bed, exhausted, at the end of the day. Are you in such a hurry to meet death that you cannot spare time while you are alive to enjoy to the full whatever life has to offer you?

There you are. Six simple elements of a stimulus package you can give yourself — a package that will provide a massive, long-term boost to your life, success, and career satisfaction. What better way could there be to beat today’s economic gloom?

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The assumptions that faster is better and “time is money” may turn out to be false — especially when it comes to benefits for anyone outside the executive suite.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net (CC: Attribution-NonCommercial)

There are some assumptions in business nobody thinks to challenge. One of the commonest is that saving time means saving money. Benjamin Franklin seems to be to blame for the phrase “time is money.” It first appears in his book “Advice to a Young Tradesman” in 1748. Since then, it has become one of those automatic assumptions of the world of business. Perhaps it’s time to see what, if anything, it might mean today.

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” (Will Rogers, in a letter to The New York Times, 1930)

When you save time, what exactly are you saving?

For a start, time cannot be saved. You can’t put it in a bottle to use later. You can’t pile it up, like a miser piling up gold coins, and gloat over your hoard. Time goes on at its own pace. You can spend less of it doing something. You can give up doing something and, in theory, make the time it would have taken available for something else. But you cannot, whatever you do, put that time aside and use it later.

So what are you saving? Read the full story

I came across this picture on the web recently. I think it shows the perfect attitude to take to working on the computer. It can also be seen as a perfect example of sleeping on a problem.

A bit of nonsense, I know, but sometimes it’s worth it to relax a little. Animals are what they are. They don’t fret about it. Only humans seem to get hung up in what the rest of the world thinks about them and start posturing as a result.

That’s what lies at the root of today’s epidemic of macho management: a continual worrying about appearance and conforming to the fashion for obsessive, short-term action.

Perhaps we should all lie back and forget about the world’s preoccupations a little more often.

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Slowing down isn’t about giving things up. It’s making time first for the things in your life that matter most

Zen Habits has an excellent post on making time in your life for your personal needs and goals.

In our action-obsessed, “get it done” culture, it’s all too easy to become convinced that the more goals you have — especially tough career and work goals — the better your life will be.

This is wrong. As in so much else in life, quality in goals matters far more than quantity. Setting yourself too many goals makes it certain that you won’t accomplish more than a tiny fraction of them — and won’t have time to enjoy whatever you do manage to bring to a successful conclusion.

Losing focus on what matters most

Whether you’re talking about work or broader life goals, having just a few, important, quality goals will always produce a better result than overwhelming yourself with more goals than you can handle — or certainly handle well.

As the Zen habits article says:

Often the problem is that we try to take on too many goals at once. We have a list of things we want to accomplish, spanning the spectrum from gardening to learning Italian to getting in shape. It can be overwhelming, and because of that we never start. Or instead, perhaps we start with a head full of steam, but then run out of steam quickly, because it’s extremely difficult to maintain focus and energy (the two key ingredients in accomplishing a goal) for too many goals at once.

Slow Leadership, like slow living, means focusing on what matters most and giving yourself the time you need to accomplish it — and do it well.

Do first what matters most. Do it well and enjoy it fully. Then, and only then, turn to whatever else you have sufficient time to tackle properly.

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Murphy’s Law (that whatever can go wrong, will) is the natural result of organizations and their leaders rushing headlong into situations of negligible visibility

When Napoleon still ruled most of Europe, a Prussian general called Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book entitled “On War” — one of the all-time, classic books on warfare and strategy, still studied in military academies worldwide. In it, he coined the term “friction” to mean all the things that fail in the chaos of battle conditions. It’s better known in business as Murphy’s Law: that whatever can go wrong, probably will.

In another chapter of the same book, “Intelligence in War,” he discussed the problems of getting accurate information in the middle of a military engagement: a situation later summed up by others as “the fog of war.”

These two aspects of battle, fog and friction, account for most of the mistakes and fumbling that characterize all military campaigns. On paper, the strategy is clear. Once battle starts, people lose their way, communications become garbled, and no one is sure who is doing what where and to whom. The result is a series of unforced errors that can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Business, like warfare, is messy and uncertain

Despite all our electronic wizardry and battalions of analysts, what von Clausewitz wrote holds true on both the battlefield and in the boardroom. As soon as people move from the calm of planning meetings to the messiness of action, fog obscures the vision and friction confounds preparation. While actions fail to work as planned (friction), accurate information is missed, lost, or mangled (fog).

The ensuing confusion, tension, adrenaline, and anxiety brings in Murphy’s Law to govern events. If you create “battle” pressures in an organization — by competitiveness, under-staffing, overwork, fear of dismissal, pressure to win no matter what, and despotic management — you’ll get what real battles bring: chaos, confusion, constant breakdowns, frantic levels of anxiety, and many unnecessary losses. All that hurry, stress, competition, anxiety, in-fighting, and pressure to meet near-impossible deadlines increases fog and friction a thousand-fold.

Business friction

Machines that run at high speed demand constant and abundant lubrication to prevent friction between the parts. Slower-speed machines need less. Running a machine, or a business, faster than it should go is the perfect recipe for provoking the maximum number of breakdowns.

That’s even more true when an organization is being forced to run faster and harder that it was designed or intended to do. Taking organizations and whipping them into a frenzy of activity has become a favorite pastime of consultants and gurus of all kinds. It looks good on paper, and in the short-term costs fall and profits soar, but mature organizations are rarely able to jump back into the rapid growth of their youth without paying a huge penalty: the build-up of friction as component parts wear out and systems designed for methodical use collapse under the strain. Starbucks is only the latest example of a business that has learned that excessive growth comes at a price.

The fog machine in the executive suite

Do you remember the game children used to play called “Chinese Whispers?” How you sat in a ring, whispering a message to the next person, who had to pass it on right away, whether it made sense or not? That’s the state of internal communications in many companies today. It’s no wonder garbage comes out, whatever was put in at the start.

Too much haste is the prime cause of mistakes and omissions in corporate communication. A person under pressure hasn’t the time to check they’ve explained clearly and the other person has fully understood. Someone listening when all around them is frantic is very likely to mishear the message or grasp only an incomplete form. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, they’ll try to remedy the nonsense using the best guess they can. No time to check back or ask for clarification.

The corporate grapevine is often a better, more accurate source of information than official channels simply because everyone takes their time when relaying gossip.

Coping with fog and friction

Fog and friction are the prime causes of loss and wastage in organizational settings — wastage of money, time, effort, manpower, and resources of every kind. They turn opportunities into fiascos and cause excellent plans to fail. The world is a turbulent place; you can’t change that. It makes no sense to add to your problems through self-inflicted and unnecessary time pressure.

The best way to avoid both the effects of Murphy’s Law and messed up communications is simple: slow down. Give yourself time to react properly when things go wrong — for they surely will sometimes, whatever you do. Instead of switching into panic mode, take a deep breath, stand back, and look at the problem without the turbulent effects of emotion. If you’re wise, you’ll have expected failures and snarl-ups, so you won’t be surprised.

Slow down. Relax. Take time to let the fog clear and the dust settle. Most situations are less pressing and critical than you think. Success in business rarely depends on split-second decisions; that’s just ego and hype.

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What makes the difference between the work of a craftsman and the output of a hack?

Is it talent? That certainly has something to do with it. Is it application? Again, yes: though application won’t be enough on its own. Is it skill? Certainly, though skill again isn’t sufficient without the extra element that I am thinking of.

That Magic Ingredient Is . . . time.

Talent is a wonderful thing, but without the time to use it fully it will produce frustration and unhappiness. Hard work — application — is no substitute for time either. You may work long hours, but if those hours are filled with activities done in a rush, with no time to concentrate properly, all you will produce is a large total of mediocre work.

Skill too takes time: time to learn, time to develop through experience, time to apply.

Quantity is no substitute for quality

Today, conventional managers unthinkingly equate productivity with producing more in less time and at lower cost, pretty much ignoring what it is they produce that way. As quantitative productivity increases, qualitative output falls. You produce more and more of what’s less and less valuable.

What craftsman was ever concerned with simply producing more? What producer of basic commodities has time to be concerned about craftsmanship?

Cramming and cutting are the price we pay for speed and the search for our obsession with merely numerical, quantitative ideals of productivity. We cram more work into the same time (and yet more into those long, long hours); and we cut costs, resources, and time for thinking, creating, rest or enjoyment.

Time and quality are closely linked

Wine has to mature to become great. Cheese needs time to bring out the flavor. Gabble through the greatest poem at the speed of a sports commentator and you’ll be left with little but disappointment. In our attempts to do everything more quickly, merely for the sake of instant gratification, we too often destroy the very qualities that made us value the outcome in the first place.

Money isn’t a substitute for time either. However much you make, without time you can’t spend it and appreciate what you spent it on. Nor is wealth a substitute for love, happiness, or time to live a contented life. And making more money for the business is definitely no substitute for leadership.

What are you worth?

How much of other people’s time are you worth? A few minutes? An hour? A day? How long should they take to appreciate the full flavor of who you are as a colleague and a person? Would giving you less time mean they sold you short? If your boss spends almost no time with you, could he or she still appreciate your abilities and worth?

Fine, so that’s how much of their time you’re worth. Now, how much of your time should you give others to be able to see their worth properly?

“Slow” is the secret key

Strip away the time and the greatest vacation destination becomes a blurred image from the window of a speeding vehicle. The most wonderful music is turned into a ringtone on your cellphone; a breath-taking love affair is reduced to a quick fumble behind the filing cabinets. The most talented and skilled person is reduced to turning out only what can be done quickest, with most of their attention already elsewhere. If it can’t be done in five minutes or less, forget it. No time.

The stuff of greatness? I don’t think so.

Slow Leadership isn’t slow for the sake of it. It’s slow because that’s what it takes. Time is the magic ingredient. Take it away and what’s left is worthless.

Rushed, frantic leadership is no leadership at all. A life lived at top speed leaves no time to appreciate its joys and savor its experiences.

Why rush? It’s the only life you have. Do you want it to be over so soon?

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Getting too intense about work is a sure route to problems

When they begin to feel stressed and under too much pressure, most people blame it on the boss, the organization, or even the system. All are likely enough culprits, to be sure. But what if the finger of accusation for what is happening really ought to point squarely at you—at your own tendency to become far too intense about what you are doing?

It�€™s easy to get too intense about your work. Most people, deep down, believe what they do is valuable and important. They care about it. The people most likely to suffer burnout are precisely the ones who throw themselves into their job, heart and soul, spending more and more time at work, and taking what they do very, very personally.

It�€™s a smaller step than you think from there to treating your job with such intensity it starts to take over most of your life. Workaholics don’t get that way in one step. They slide into it along the slippery path of taking their jobs just that little bit too seriously for their own good.

The slippery path to burnout

Are you working harder and harder and still feel like you�€™re getting nothing done? The problem may lie in your mind, not in your ability to organize your schedule. Piling on the intensity is the typical response of a potential workaholic to increased job demands. It�€™s also likely to be a major part of the cause of the increase.

Overwork and frenetic intensity seem to be such commonsense responses to extra demands. In reality, they are great ways to lower productivity and increase mistakes and reworking. Then the vicious cycle begins: you notice that you’re losing productivity and getting less done, while the work is piling up higher than ever. Tiredness and staleness are the true causes, but you don’t notice that. After all, if you have still more work waiting to be done, won’t working even harder and for longer hours get rid of the problem? And so it goes, spiraling downwards into potentially serious problems.

The employee who is approaching burnout is likely to be the last to see it. Until then, he or she will probably continue to try methods of coping that make the problem worse—like becoming even more obsessed with work problems and trying to drive away the blues by increased effort and concentration.

Risking others as well as yourself

You may be able to outperform your colleagues, but you can�€™t outperform your own limits. And trying to shrug off burnout as weakness or think you�€™re immune won’t work either. It�€™s a serious issue that can wreck your life—and produce plenty of problems for other people too.

The workaholic doesn’t just mess up his or her own life. People around start to feel the effects. Maybe they have to begin picking up the problems your tiredness and failing attention cause, thus adding to their own pressures. Maybe they find themselves covering for your mistakes. It’s very likely that they will suffer from your unrelenting intensity and urge you to slow up a little.

Be sure that your teammates and coworkers know there�€™s something wrong. They�€™ll have sensed the difference in your behavior and seen the change in your mood. If they�€™re keeping their distance, you�€™ve probably been growling every time they came near you. Any good manager will already have started to investigate to find out what�€™s wrong. It�€™s their job. But not every manager is good; and some see the problem and apply James Thurber�€™s classic remedy of �€œdon�€™t think about it and it will go away.�€�

Know your limits

In the end, it�€™s up to you. Your health and well-being is more your concern than anyone�€™s. Change comes best from within.

Slow down. Take time out to think and reflect on your needs. Break problems down into smaller pieces. Start with the most obvious bit and ignore all the rest. Then take the next piece. Never try to drive ahead and work your way out of the problem by making still more effort.

As long as you persist in taking on more than you can handle with reasonable comfort and pushing yourself beyond your limits, you run the risk of going to far. What you need to is learn where your limits lie and stay this side of them. Pay attention to what works and doesn�€™t work for you.

Forget the macho nonsense that you can take whatever the world throws at you. You can�€™t and nor can anyone else. If they claim they can, they�€™re fools. The sooner you slow down and allow your own best ways of coping with life to guide your actions, the better off you�€™ll be.

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Thoughts about commemoration and utility

Here in the USA, today, October 8th, is Columbus Day. According to a friend of mine, this commemorates the day that the indigenous people of North America discovered a European sailor wandering around in the Caribbean, hopelessly lost and convinced he had arrived somewhere near India (hence the name West Indies).

Most countries have such commemorative days—sometimes to recall battles or national events, sometimes based on religious festivals.

What is their purpose? Are they simply an excuse for a holiday? Shouldn’t we use them for true recollection, if not of the original battle or person, then for something else?

You can find my answers to these questions in my article today for Lifehack.org (Next Saturday (or maybe the one after that) is �€œDoing Nothing Day�€�).

It seems to me that we should have such days whenever we need them—not to remember events long past or religious stories, but to give ourselves time to think about who and what we are and our choices in life—to take pleasure in being alive and contemplate what it might mean to live a life worthy of the miracle of even being here.

This, to me at least, is truly something worth commemorating.

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Work/life balance is NOT what you think

It�€™s easy to assume working less will inevitably make you happier or that spending 60 hours or more each week working is BAD. What is bad is betraying your identity: working longer hours that fits who you are; pretending to be a hard-driven, achievement-oriented workaholic to win approval, when you�€™re nothing of the kind. The true meaning of finding the correct work/life balance—correct for you that is—comes from selecting a game plan for your life that correctly fits your identity.

Work/life balance isn�€™t simply about allocating time: it�€™s mostly about creating a game plan for your life that works for you in your present circumstances. It�€™s about your identity and authenticity.

How much of your identity, your sense of self, and your self-esteem, is linked to your work?

For many people starting out on a career, the answer is nearly all of it. That’s understandable, since work is usually a continuation of education in terms of a field for achievement, and most young persons long to establish themselves as people of worth.

Later, especially if you gain family commitments, things get more complex. You likely want to be able to give your family a good life, which usually means higher earnings and probably regular promotions. At the same time, if all you do is work, they�€™ll hardly see you—except as some exhausted, harassed person who appears late at night and spends the weekends locked away catching up with work. Being a �€œgood provider�€� isn�€™t sufficient. You have to be able to give your family regular, quality time. What was your authentic identity earlier (the rising star), no longer works. A new game plan is needed.

Later still, you may find yourself dissatisfied with your life so far. Many people find that what seemed such an obviously desirable career path in their 20s appears, in their 40s, to have been the wrong choice. They long to make a change, even if that means sacrificing some financial benefits. Yet another game plan is needed, with a different balance between work and other life goals.

Job or vocation?

Work has considerable advantages as a forum to establish personal standing: objectives and criteria for success are clear; lots of people are keeping score; rewards are well-known and visible to others. It has many disadvantages too: you are rarely in control of your own destiny; the criteria for success may change without warning; economic downturns half a world away may suddenly deprive you of your job; your organization�€™s goals will never include more than the most incidental interest in providing you with the avenues you need to meet your personal goals.

It�€™s much less easy to judge success in many other parts of life. The time-scales tend to be longer. How long will it take to know if you have been successful as a parent or a spouse? How can you judge whether you�€™ve fulfilled your potential as a human being outside the purely economic realm of existence? How can you compare the benefits of basing your personal identity on things outside of work with the benefits you can expect for making work your life?

I suspect many people focus on work success as much because it�€™s easy to estimate as because they truly see it as the center of their lives. In our achievement-dominated world, deciding not to pursue a path of economic and financial success is usually represented as something of a cop-out: an excuse to cover the fact that you knew you wouldn�€™t make it. We claim to admire those who follow a vocation rather than hard cash, but fail in many cases to translate this supposed admiration into a living wage.

It�€™s as if society assumes that those who aren�€™t primarily motivated by money don�€™t need the stuff anyway. Most of the jobs that are classed as vocational—teachers, social workers, police, fire, nurses, and the like—are abysmally underpaid. In contrast, guys assumed to be interested solely in money, like hedge-fund managers, are allowed to take home oodles of the green stuff.

How to set your own game plan

What are your standards for a successful life? It�€™s a question many people rarely consider in any depth. Most simply accept the conventional standards offered by society. That�€™s a one-size-fits-all approach that really doesn�€™t fit anyone too well.

Establishing a satisfactory work/life balance for yourself means first answering these basic questions:

• What are your fundamental values? What matters more to you than anything else? If your actual game plan—the one you use, not the one you claim to use, but only aspire to—is at odds with your fundamental values, you will never feel satisfied, whatever you achieve.
• What kind of achievements give you the greatest pleasure? If you ignore these, you may earn a great deal of money, or even reach the executive suite, but life won�€™t be fun or enjoyable. Why sentence yourself to 40 or more years of hard labor doing something that doesn�€™t even please you?
• What do your current circumstances seem to demand? As I noted above, peoples�€™ game plans need to change as their circumstances change. What worked in college likely won�€™t work for you as you close in on retirement.

These are vital, life-altering questions and it�€™s always best to reach your own conclusions, whether or not they fit with what society expects, other people demand, or even what you expected yourself when you began to try to answer them. You won�€™t be satisfied with any game plan for work/life balance unless it accurately expresses your true sense of your own identity.

Take some time out to ponder (and discuss) the kind of person you see yourself as being and what game plan and type of work/life balance that implies.

You may really love your work and enjoy nearly most of the time you spend doing it. Equally, you may come to realize that work is a substitute for facing up to life�€™s other demands: it�€™s always there, it�€™s easy to get lost in it, it�€™s socially acceptable, and it prevents you from ever having the time to deal with whatever you�€™re set on avoiding. You may find that work, for you, is simply an economic necessity and your real love in life is something far from your working environment.

Whatever you find, act on your discovery. Look at the game plan you are following—the one that�€™s clear from your actions, not the one you maybe talk about—and see if it matches up to who you are. Every game plan implies its own unique work/life balance. And that�€™s the only one that matters.

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