Energy and Productivity

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”

–Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz

Answer this question. If you decided you want to get more done in your work and pursuits, what would be more important—a detailed to-do list or a good night’s sleep followed by a good healthy breakfast?

It turns out that giving proper attention to your physical well-being comes first. If the fuel tank on my Nissan is nearly empty, I’m not going to make it to the show in downtown Nashville, about thirty miles from where I’m sitting, insane traffic and all. Our working production follows, metaphorically, a similar fuel-to-distance ratio.

Living in Middle Tennessee has its benefits. One is there are a lot of remarkable people who live within an hour of me. Michael Hyatt is one.

Michael has been in the book publishing industry for decades, first as partner in his own publishing company and then as Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville. He is now CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company, a company dedicated to mentoring and leadership.

A self-confessed productivity nerd, Michael has made a lifetime pursuit of “how can I get more done in my day?” And one thought he shared in an earlier podcast really got my attention because I’d only ever thought of productivity in terms of lists to check off. Simply this: It is more important to manage your energy than your time.

This insight was not original with Michael. He’d gotten it from Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in their New York Times Bestseller The Art of Full Engagement.

As a result, Michael structures his life to make the most of this reality. This means he pays close attention to what he eats, how much he sleeps (seven to eight hours a night), and regular exercise. Bed, table, gym. Then Evernote, Franklin Covey Planner, MS Excel.

Here are questions to consider:

• Do you know what it means to eat well and, well, do you? Eating refined carbs will give you first an energy spike and then an energy drop, foggy brain and all.
• Are you aware that sleep deprivation can be as dangerous as alcohol intoxication, impairing your health, awareness, reaction times, etc. and putting others at risk?
• Do you approach regular exercise, though it involves the expenditure of energy, as something that increases energy through increased blood flow and release of neurotransmitters like dopamine that give you a greater feeling of well-being and elevate your mood.

You have one life and one body. Manage well!

Suggested Resources:

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz)

Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to A Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success (Shawn Stevenson)

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Michael Hyatt)

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The Art of Listening: Ask Good Questions

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

–Albert Einstein

I once asked a student of the late Dr. Edwin Friedman, marriage and family therapist, why Friedman was so effective in his practice and writings. The answer: “Friedman was a rabbi and rabbis deal in questions, not answers. I ask questions so I can get to better questions.”

Dale Carnegie taught that one sure way to win a friend is to start a conversation, ask questions of the other, then get out of the way and let them speak. People love it when they get a chance to talk about themselves—what they like, dislike, and what is important to them. The questions draw people out and put them in the spotlight. Again, it’s about less airtime for you and more for them.

Questions, rather than pontificating and unsolicited opinions, are a mark of humility. Nobody likes a know-it-all. By asking questions, we are communicating that we don’t have life solved and want to learn more. Cultivating the habit of asking questions locates us as curious individuals, something that is less common than you think.

This habit of questioning is not reserved for head-to-head conversations but also includes reading. Yes, when you read intelligently you are engaging another person even if they’ve been dead for centuries. In the classic book How to Read a Book, the authors teach that to read well—and not simply read—one must ask the right questions of the text. You don’t ask of A Brief History of Time what you’d ask of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or a Garfield cartoon. The authors teach us how. The same thing is true when we talk with the person in front of us. Ask, then be quiet and pay attention.

Here are some starters. More in future posts:

• “So, tell me your story—why did you move here rather than….?”
• “Where can a guy like me get decent Italian food in this [new] city?”
• For clarification, use paraphrases like, “Okay, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying….?”
• When one of your direct reports blunders badly and you don’t want a homicide on your record, “Can you please help me try to understand what led you to do thus-and-so?”

Suggested Resources:

Friedman’s Fables (Edwin H. Friedman)

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Simon Sinek)

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren)

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Arm’s Reach and Your Life’s Direction

If somebody puts Mint Creme Oreos on our kitchen counter, I will eat them. Why? Because they’re there. I will also put on weight and my blood sugar will get jacked out of proportion. Rarely will I win the battle to say “no.” After all, they’re small, taste so good, and they’re there.

Jonathan Cawte calls this the Law of Food Proximity. Briefly, “If you can see it, smell it, or reach it, you will eat it.”

In his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear—chapter 6 “Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More”—tells the story of Anne Thorndike, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who wanted to change the eating habits of staff and visitors to the hospital. She and her colleagues did this by designing a six-month experiment in “choice architecture” in the hospital cafeteria. By simply adding bottled water to the refrigerators next to the cashiers, which had previously contained only soft drinks, and positioning additional bottles of water in spots all over the cafeteria, they saw a soda sales decline of 11.4 percent and an increase in bottled water sales of 25.8 percent. This is the power of proximity. More water + less soda = healthier staff and guests.

We tend to make choices based on physics—location—rather than ideals. It’s easier. Advertisers know this and design grocery store layouts strategically to leverage this basic human tendency. Why do you think the Kit-Kat bars are staring at you while you wait in the checkout line?

What and who you have close at hand will largely determine the life you live. Jim Rohn has said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” The choices in food, friends, function, and fun at your arm’s length are worth knowing and designing intentionally.

Here are some practical suggestions to design your environment for the outcomes you want:

• Keep healthy foods in reach and in sight. Put junk food, if you have it, in a place where you must stand on tiptoes or a chair to reach it. Your brain will often translate that little bit of effort into, “Too much work. Just eat a piece of fruit.”
• Keep exercise equipment out and close at hand. I telecommute and keep dumbbells in my home office two feet from my desk. They’re there, so I lift every day.
• Put an app on your smartphone to limit time on social media. Constant nibbles on Facebook and Instagram are about as healthy as constant nibbles on the Oreos.
• If you’re a musician, keep your instrument out of the case where you can grab it quickly. Even a little practice, done daily, adds up. I always keep a guitar out and on a stand.
• Choose your social environments, and therefore your friends, wisely. A lot of our friends have become so simply because of proximity. Same workplace, same watering holes, same church and civic groups.

Suggested Resources:

Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (David Allen)

The Magic of Thinking Big (David J. Schwartz)

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Listening and Closing the Sale

“When somebody comes to me and wants to sell me something, whether it’s Fuller brushes, a political position or whatever, the first thing I ask myself is, ‘Does this person know how to listen?’”

A mentor of mine—a licensed marriage and family therapist—taught me this important principle back in 2014. I’ve found it very helpful. Here’s why.

If you’re constantly talking, making noise, and transmitting, you cannot receive from another. Simple physics—you’re dominating the airwaves. Not listening and hearing the other before you is more costly than you think.

Consider this. A doctor, when he or she takes you on as a new patient, asks you many questions both on the intake forms and in the exam room. Why? Doctors do this because they cannot make accurate diagnoses without getting at least basic (or, preferably, extensive) health history information about you. An expert diagnostician must be a good listener—no shortcuts on this one. And to be a good listener means being quiet and paying attention. This is the standard in health care but also in other helping professions like law, therapy, spiritual direction and social care.

We’ve all had the experience of being with someone who had something they wanted to sell us or bring us into and they did so by being a talking head. They had a spiel they needed to present and didn’t want to be bothered with questions and input from you, the buyer. If you’re attentive, you figure out that they are not really interested in serving you but in closing the sale.

That is where you simply say “No thank you, that won’t work for me.” Why? Because they’ve not listened carefully and respectfully enough to know what you really need.

Put yourself in the role of the seller. What can you do to avoid these mistakes and show genuine care for the person you’re trying to help?

• Be the last to speak. Let the buyer tell you what they want if you’re selling. Let your subordinates share their ideas about new company direction before you give your proposal. This was the practice of Nelson Mandela’s father, a tribal chief (see the video below).
• Value the person before you as a person more than as an impersonal target that you can use as a sounding board or as income.
• In relationships, understand that it’s usually the hearing of the other—rather than giving bullet-point solutions to problems—that brings the healing of the other. If you’ve been married a while, you probably know this. When people feel they’ve been heard, they are open to you and what you have to bring them.

Suggested Resources:

The Making of a Surgeon (William A. Nolen)

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain)

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How Not to Fool Yourself

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” 

–Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Have you ever listened to someone drone on and on about a topic, displaying incredible confidence in their knowledge about the subject, and yet you knew they were full of crap and in over their heads?

You may have witnessed The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is named after a Cornell University study done in 1999 by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The study is about self-awareness and incompetence. Roughly summed up, it says incompetent persons often display disturbing levels of self-confidence and superiority because they lack the ability to 1) recognize competence and expertise and therefore 2) are unaware of their own incompetence. That’s why we have YouTube and reality television “celebrities” who can’t see that they are not in reality what they are in their heads.

It sucks to admit you suck at something. But those affected by the Dunning-Kruger Effect are blissfully unaware of how little they know. This has consequences for lots of people. It is not surprising that Google searches for the Dunning-Kruger Effect have increased quite a bit in the past three years. You can do the math on that one.

So how do you avoid the trap of thinking you are better at something than you really are? Here are some tips:

• Read, listen and view widely on your work, interests, hobbies and passions. Assume that your knowledge is deficient and needs regular updates and additions. Be committed to continuous learning in every form.
• Get feedback on those things you’re working on. These might include things like photography, sports, writing, performing and fine arts, leadership, finance, etc. It’s best if the feedback you seek is objective and searching. Your mom and dad will always love your art work but seek the critique of a professional artist if you want to improve. A pro who cares will tell you if your work is lacking and how to improve. A loved one who did well with his investments told me, more than once, “When you have money, go to those who understand money; don’t go to your friends.
• Set the bar high. Look to the best of the best and follow their advice and practices. When I’m studying classical guitar, I listen to Andrés Segovia. When I’m trying to improve my writing, I pay attention to Stephen King. When I’m trying to improve my leadership and self-differentiation skills, I go to Edwin Friedman. For investment advice, it’s Warren Buffett.

This is first in a series of posts that will deal with ways in which we regularly fool ourselves and how to avoid them. We’ll help each other avoid the banana peels.

Suggested Resources:

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Richard P. Feynman)

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Showing Up or Phoning It In?

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1988, I was hired as the sole manager of a full-line bakery in Upstate New York. I was twenty-four years old and newly married. The owner of the bakery lived a hundred miles away. We did business twenty-four hours a day, 364 days a year. We closed for Christmas; that was it. I was on call always. I learned to get on well with fatigue, my constant buddy.

I learned a lot during the two and a half years I managed the business. One lesson I learned early was the importance of your attitude toward your work, however menial or apparently insignificant. That first year I had one particular employee who worked the counter as one of our bakery clerks. This lady was bright, but not very motivated to keep busy in her tasks, which included waiting on customers and preparing baked goods for the showcases. She told me one day, “When I get a real job, then I will work hard.” (Apparently preparing and selling food, a basic life necessity, didn’t qualify as real work.) Eventually she moved on.

That is the one thing I remember about her. She came to work but she didn’t show up. She punched the clock and did minimal enough work to ensure she didn’t get fired. But she didn’t try. Her attitude colored everything. I’ve wondered a lot over three decades where she ended up in life.

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. The best you can. We cheat ourselves and our colleagues when we give the least amount of effort necessary rather than being a professional and acting like it.

Here’s a few reality checks that will help you:

• What is your attitude as you approach work? Is it engaged and focused, or passive and listless? Trust me, those to whom you report or who report to you can tell the difference.
• With your tasks, how attentive are you to the details? It’s in the details that excellence and mediocrity part ways. Take the time to do it right. The first time.
• Are you committed to continuous learning and improvement in your work or do you stay only as current as you need to keep afloat? Doing the latter will catch up with you, eventually; doing the former will serve you.

Suggested Resources:

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life  (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

The Success Principles(TM) – 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be (Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer)

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The Art of Listening: Talk Less

Hi. My name is Christian and I suck at listening.

There, I said it.

The late biblical scholar William Lane used to say, “The best way to show someone you love them is to listen to them.” One of his protégés, biblical scholar and music artist Michael Card, certainly remembered that one.

He was right, of course. You show you care about another person by listening to them. By hearing them. When people feel they’ve been heard, they feel valued and validated.

Maybe you’re like me and lots of others. We get a little too thrilled by the sound of our own voices. A little too impressed with our brilliance. So, of course, we must turn such brilliance loose on the world. We do this with lots of words, domination of our conversations, pontificating ad nauseam, etc. We interrupt, assemble responses while the other is talking to us, talk over the top of their words. That’s how people talk past each other. And that’s happening a lot these days.

I am guilty. Of all of it.

This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be doing here at The Upside on the importance of listening. Feel free to stop by while I try to get this right. I’m preaching to myself.

So what is the first step to learning the art of listening?

Talk less.

That’s it. Reduce word count. Diminish air time. The document I’m typing right now has a word count to it. We don’t really do the same with our speech, at least not without a whole lot of work, say recording yourself for a certain time period and getting a transcript of everything coming out of your mouth and reducing it to a word count. We’d be shocked and embarrassed by how much and how silly a lot of it is.

Try this. Next time you are in a conversation, pause three seconds before responding. Make it a game. Gee, I wonder how few words I can use to respond? Be like Ernest Hemingway was with prose, ruthlessly cutting away needless words.

More will follow. Here’s the promise: If you truly become a good listener, your stock will soar. Why? Good listeners, like diamonds, are rare.

Shhhhh.

 

Suggested Resources:

The Walk: The Life-Changing Journey of Two Friends (Michael Card)

The Lost Art of Listening, Second Edition: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships (Michael P. Nichols)

Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson (Mitch Albom)

The Chosen (Chaim Potok)

 

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The Fun (and Necessity) of Physical Things

Would you rather play or watch?

Over three decades ago, I worked as a day baker for a retired professional athlete in my hometown, Lake Orion MI. This man was an interesting character. After playing Major League Baseball, he went into the food business but kept his hand in baseball. He did fantasy camps, consulted young athletes and their coaches, did color commentary on broadcast baseball games, signed autographs at card shows, etc. However, he let me know more than once that he’d rather play than watch baseball any day. (Detroit Tiger pitcher Mickey Lolich was my boss, for those interested.)

We are physical creatures. We have five senses, all clamoring for stimulation. The essence of feeling more alive, not less, is to be fully, bodily involved in life, whenever possible. An actual, rather than a virtual, existence.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax is easily the most interesting read I’ve come across in the past few years. This is not simply a book about the resurrection of the vinyl LP market. It includes that, but also has chapters on board games (Settlers of Catan), film photography (FILM Ferrania), longhand writing and sketching (Moleskine) and much more.

Sax is a journalist in Toronto, ON. The opening of a new vinyl record shop near his apartment renewed his lost love for 33⅓ hot wax. He bought a turntable and began bringing home records. Inspired by his experience with turntable and record albums, he ventured out into the world to places like Nashville, London, Milan and New York to understand why people—many of them born after turntables, rotary phones and typewriters were ubiquitous and who’ve been raised in the speed-of-light, digital world—are turning back to simpler, more archaic forms of hobby and interest. What he found was stunning.

Physical things like record albums, pencils, chess boards, film and brick-and-mortar bookstores are not dying; they are attracting interest and market capital. Oh, and making money. Sax uses analog as a metaphor for things that involve physical, face-to-face interaction, with as many senses involved as the experience will allow. An analog approach and technology is about the experience of the participant.

There are many benefits to analog technology but here’s just one: It slows you down as you use it. Analog things cause you to be in the moment due to their slower and ungainly nature. They don’t depend on fiber-optics and binary number combinations. 1’s and 0’s have their limits.

What are some of your favorite analog things? Records, real print books, Monopoly, hand woodworking tools? And how can adopting or revisiting analog technologies and practices give you a richer life in addition to your digital, online world?

Tell us in the comments!

 

Suggested Resources:

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day (Michael Gelb)

Measure Twice, Cut Once: Lessons from a Master Carpenter (Norm Abram)

 

Image Credit: Christian Fahey

Stops. And Starts.

You’re forty years old. Middle age is upon you. When you smile, crow’s feet appear. And you’ve just lost your job. Fired.

May 1995. That’s where forty-year old Jim Grant found himself. An Englishman and a big man, 6’ 5”, Jim had made a career in British television production only to see that career dismantled strategically by people and forces over which he had no control. There was little he could do about it and he was angry. And broke.

Jim needed to do something to make a living and didn’t have time or money to waste. He went to the store and bought pencils and a ream of notebook paper. Pencils, because they’re cheaper than pens. He didn’t have a computer. He just sat down at his kitchen table and began to write:

I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock.

Fans of the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child, Jim Grant’s pen name, will recognize these words as the opening lines of Killing Floor, the first of the Jack Reacher novels. Lee Child has published twenty-three Reacher novels, all bestsellers, with a twenty-fourth in production to be published this year.

What are the takeaways for you and me in this short sketch? Here’s a couple:

• He started writing at middle age, not as a kid. He did this because he needed to make a living and had been in entertainment most of his life. A novel is entertainment. Child argues that beginning to write at middle age is a great thing because you have experience with life. This gives credibility to your stories. See the video below.
• He channeled his anger and frustration creatively. He didn’t baptize his misfortunes in pint after pint.
• He began the career of a New York Times bestselling author in the least sexy way possible: At his kitchen table with pencils and loose-leaf notebook paper to save money. No Macbook Pro. No fancy creative space. Just a chair, table, pencil and a piece of paper. It doesn’t take much. Just put your butt in the chair and begin.

That’s what he did. You can do the same.

So start.

Suggested Resources:

Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future (Leonard A. Schlesinger and Charles F. Kiefer with Paul B. Brown)

Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me (Andy Martin)

Image Credit: Christian Fahey

 

Habits + Time = Exponential Growth

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”—James Clear

I’m currently reading an excellent recent book by James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. In this book, Clear argues that goals–while important for setting a direction—are not the things we need to focus on primarily to improve our lives. Rather, we should focus on processes to help us become the kinds of people who regularly meet their targets. The primary tools in the process tool chest are our habits. As the title suggests, the habits are small things that over time shape a life for accomplishment or waste.

Clear gives an example: “The goal is not to learn an instrument; the goal is to become a musician.” The same for becoming runners and readers, not simply finishing marathons or books. The more important target is making these habits a regular, automatic part of your life. You just do the stuff regularly without thinking and stressing about it.

The idea that “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world” has been attributed to Albert Einstein. Einstein surely understood exponents if not banking. What Clear teaches us is that the steady progress of all habits, good and bad, do not reveal their force immediately but over time. The “10,000 hour rule” for mastery of a skill comes to mind.

Habits + Time = Self-Improvement¹⁰   Habits are extremely powerful!

I will share more from this excellent book in the days ahead. It has changed my goal-centered approach to my own growth to one that values the habits I cultivate. The habits can be small, but if repeated over a good chunk of time will yield remarkable results. The task is to begin small and repeat faithfully to build the automatic instinct to continue into your lifestyle.

Here are a few practical ways to begin:

• Commit to exercise ten minutes a day rather than a massive goal of five hours a week at the gym. That goal can come later.
• Get up fifteen minutes earlier to read rather than one hour earlier. Anybody can do fifteen minutes earlier and the benefit of feeding your mind will encourage you to lengthen those early morning self-care times.
• Have one half slice of pizza less than you normally would. Or one cigarette less. Or one drink less.

Suggested Resources:

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (James Clear)

One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (Robert Maurer)

Image Credit: Christian Fahey