Book: Loonshots

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“How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries”

This book is essentially about innovation and how to sustain it. It draws parallels between the physics of phase transition and the innovation management theory.

The business realities are pulling big businesses/corporations in the direction of franchise improvements – producing more of the same, boring and tested products as before.

On the other hand, small shops and startups are incentivized to bet on crazy ideas, but they rarely have resources necessary to pull them off. The business realities pull them towards failure.

The key to success is dynamic equilibrium – fluid, permeable border between those 2 modes of operation, where groups working on innovative approaches can hand them off to improvement to franchise businesses.

Amazon Link

Vannevar-Vail rules

Vannevar Bush was responsible for creating National Defense Research Committee – a key institution that has helped turned the tide of war through innovation and first true “Loonshot factory”.

Theodore Vail was a president of Bell Labs. After he took over, the organization went on an amazing streak of mind-blowing discoveries, including the transistor, Digital photography chip and many others.

Both Bush and Vail put extra effort into nurturing innovation. Safi Bahcall calls these rules „Vannevar-Vail” rules:

  1. Separate the phases
    1. Separate your artists and soldiers
    2. Tailor the tools to the phase
    3. Watch your blind side: nurture both types of loonshots (product and strategy)
  2. Create dynamic equilibrium
    1. Love your artists and soldiers equally
    2. Manage the transfer, not the technology: be a gardener, not a Moses
    3. Appoint, and train, project champions to bridge the divide
  3. Spread a system mindset
    1. Keep asking why the organization made the choices that it did
    2. Keep asking how the decision-making process can be improved
    3. Identify teams with outcome mindsets, and help them adopt system mindsets

All this is very reminiscent of „Skunkworks” approach described in „Bold”

How to keep your organization innovative

Phase transition is a perfect lens for dissecting innovation. Just as water can turn to ice almost instantly, an innovative organization may loose its „spark”.

Sure, it will be able to survive for a while reliving past glory and selling their assets, but the sudden change from being on top of the world to a shadow of former self is not uncommon. Safi has isolated a few variables to explain why companies turn into „franchises”.

It all really boils down to tug of war between internal politics and desire to contribute to the product. The M in this equasion is the max amount of employees your organization will be able to sustain without transitioning into a “franchise”. So if you want to remain innovative:

  • Introduce Equity on top of salary. Keep in mind – that may be soft equity, like autonomy or recognition
  • Increase management span, by having more direct reports. See that this value is squared, so this will have the biggest impact.
  • Decrease salary growth rate in hierarchy – that way, contributing will be more important than getting promoted.

Twitter thread

While reading this book, I isolated the most interesting bits on Twitter – this is a new thing I am trying to better remember the book I am reading.

My Highlights

  • 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.
  • The most important breakthroughs rarely follow blaring trumpets and a red carpet, with central authorities offering overflowing pots of tools and money.
  • They pass through long dark tunnels of skepticism and uncertainty, crushed or neglected, their champions often dismissed as crazy
  • We can think of the two competing incentives, loosely, as stake and rank.
  • As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps. Incentives begin encouraging behavior no one wants. Those same groups—with the same people—begin rejecting loonshots.
  • We will identify the small changes in structure, rather than culture, that can transform a rigid team.
  • The idea that would turn the course of the war passed through a decade-long tunnel of neglect and skepticism.
  • One molecule can’t transform solid ice into liquid water by yelling at its neighbors to loosen up a little. Which is why Bush didn’t try to change military culture.
  • phase separation and dynamic equilibrium were the key ingredients in Bush’s recipe.
  • Although Bush didn’t know it, FDR was suffering from severe cardiac disease and possibly metastatic cancer.
  • The New York Times, however, questioned its conclusions and patiently explained the nature of science to Bush (and his 41 MD and PhD coauthors):
  • The magic of Bush and Vail was in engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for them rather than against them. Luck is the residue of design.
  • they are careful gardeners. They ensure that both loonshots and franchises are tended well, that neither side dominates the other, and that each side nurtures and supports the other.
  • Separate your artists and soldiers
  • Leaders of powerful franchises across every industry routinely dismiss early-stage projects by picking at their warts
  • Love your artists and soldiers equally
  • When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally.
  • Manage the transfer, not the technology
  • The next day, the chiefs of both the Army and Air Force found identical notes on their desks: I’ve seen the new radar equipment. Why haven’t you?
  • well-separated and equally strong loonshot and franchise groups
  • Note: Automattic should not pride itself in chaos but dynamic equilibrium
  • “Ah, my boy—it’s not a good drug unless it’s been killed at least three times.”
  • In the real world, ideas are ridiculed, experiments fail, budgets are cut, and good people are fired for stupid reasons.
  • Obesity was “disgusting,” he said. “Maybe if the idea got around again that obesity is immoral, the fat man would start to think.” Keys’s
  • The statins would grow into the most widely prescribed drug franchise in history, saving millions of lives. But first, Endo’s drug had to survive the Three Deaths.
  • Much later, scientists learned that rats have mostly HDL (“good cholesterol”) circulating in their blood, and very little LDL,
  • With Paula’s encouragement, which he later called “Spouse Activation Factor” (SAF),
  • Beware the False Fail
  • They train people for the project champion job—the Deak Parsons skill-set—and elevate their authority. It goes against the grain.
  • When someone challenges the project you’ve invested years in, do you defend with anger or investigate with genuine curiosity?
  • With P-type loonshots, people say, “There’s no way that could ever work” or “There’s no way that will ever catch on.” And then it does. Let’s
  • With S-type loonshots, people say, “There’s no way that could ever make money.” And then it does.
  • Deaths from P-type loonshots tend to be quick and dramatic. A flashy new technology appears (streaming video), it quickly displaces what came before (rentals), champions emerge (Netflix, Amazon), and the old guard crumbles (Blockbuster).
  • He was called Attila the Hun, Bob the Butcher, Darth Vader, and—in case the message was still not clear—Fang (he has prominent canine teeth). On weekends, he’d go to work and leave notes on desks: “I was here. Where were you?”
  • That’s pretty much what the major airlines faced in 1978. They were locked into long-term contracts, paying wages far higher than what brand-new competitors were paying.
  • Thirty years before Big Data became a Silicon Valley buzzword, American discovered big data.
  • At Trippe’s request, Lindbergh lobbied on behalf of Pan Am for its Latin America routes. Imagine you are a career Post Office bureaucrat, and the most worshipped young man on the planet walks into your drab, ten-by-ten-foot office. Pan Am won every US postal contract to the region.
  • Trippe went to the main branch on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. At the information desk, he asked for the logs of the nineteenth-century clipper ships that traded across the Pacific.
  • Buried in the old handwritten documents, Trippe found a reference to a deserted island midway between Honolulu and Shanghai, called Wake Island. An American expedition had claimed the island in 1899.
  • Soon the shovel hit a metal box. Lindbergh had the designs to Germany’s jet engines. When Lindbergh returned to the US, he filed his report, then immediately called on Trippe. Trippe rehired Lindbergh on the spot. It
  • Trippe had played possibly the highest-stakes game of business poker in corporate history up to that time—a $269 million order for 45 unprecedented commercial jet planes—and won.
  • Let’s call it the Moses Trap: When ideas advance only at the pleasure of a holy leader
  • “There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.”
  • Sick dogs that were fed quinine to treat parasites showed an unusual type of crystal in their urine. Those microscopic crystals, called herapathite, turned out to be the highest-quality polarizers ever discovered.
  • In Washington, DC, shortly after his first meeting with FDR, Vannevar Bush heard about Land’s vectograph. Within a year, the Army and Navy were using 3D terrain maps to prepare for battles in Europe.
  • Land’s 3D still images were soon converted for use in film, which turned into a craze. (At its peak, in 1953, Polaroid was making six million pairs of 3D glasses per week.)
  • Couples realized their prints would not be seen by technicians at developer labs. And so was born what Polaroid delicately called “intimacy” pictures.
  • The familiar story of the decline of industry Goliaths begins with decades of success, after which the proud old company grows stale. It loses its hunger.
  • First: The dangerous, virtuous cycle builds momentum
  • Second: The franchise blinders harden
  • Hooke suggested some of the initial ideas, he did not have the skills to create a complete system. Newton did. Newton was a great synthesizer, just as Jobs was a great synthesizer.
  • Newton tried to crush Hooke and bury his contributions (including, allegedly, losing the only known portrait of him).
  • Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.”
  • Franchise projects are easier to understand than loonshots, easier to quantify, and easier to sell up the chain of command in large companies.
  • You can analyze why you argued with your spouse. It was, let’s say, your comment about your spouse’s driving. But you may improve marital relations even more if you understand the process by which you decided it was a good idea to offer that comment.
  • System mindset means carefully examining the quality of decisions, not just the quality of outcomes. A failed outcome, for example, does not necessarily mean the decision or decision process behind it was bad.
  • Failing to analyze wins can reinforce a bad process or strategy. You may not be lucky next time.
  • 1. Separate the phases • Separate your artists and soldiers • Tailor the tools to the phase • Watch your blind side: nurture both types of loonshots (product and strategy) 2.
  • Create dynamic equilibrium • Love your artists and soldiers equally • Manage the transfer, not the technology: be a gardener, not a Moses • Appoint, and train, project champions to bridge the divide 3.
  • Spread a system mindset • Keep asking why the organization made the choices that it did • Keep asking how the decision-making process can be improved • Identify teams with outcome mindsets, and help them adopt system mindsets
  • “With notably rare exceptions, Germany remained largely at peace with its neighbors during the 20th century.”
  • 1. At the heart of every phase transition is a tug-of-war between two competing forces. 2. Phase transitions are triggered when small shifts in system properties—for example, density or temperature—cause the balance between those two forces to change.
  • A policy of banning trucks from passing other trucks (called a truck-overtaking ban) reduces the pileups behind trucks. Those pileups temporarily increase the density of cars and can push smooth traffic flow across the dashed line and into a jam.
  • A change in control parameters transforms one kind of motion (smoothly flowing cars) into a different kind of motion (jammed flow) by making the smooth flow very sensitive to small disruptions (driver tapping on his brakes).
  • The power of a beautiful model comes from what you choose to omit.
  • You need to decide if you will spend the final hour of the day on (a) work that might increase the value of your projects (polishing up the client presentation; researching coffee machine designs), or (b) networking and promoting yourself within the company (currying favor with your boss, your boss’s boss, or other influential managers).
  • If, however, promotions come with a 2 percent increase in pay, who cares? You might as well put your energy back into your project, where some extra effort could earn you a bigger bonus or increase the value of your stake in the company’s success.
  • chapter). Promotions happen so rarely that it’s not worth spending any time politicking. With a span of two, however, you are constantly in competition with your peer.
  • The greater your equity fraction, the more likely you are to choose project work over politics.
  • adjusting their structure (#2 → #3). When group size exceeds the
  • McElroy was an outsider. Unlike Bush, he had neither technical nor military experience. He began his career selling soap door-to-door for Procter & Gamble. Eventually he came up with the idea of shows that housewives could watch during the day, which P&G could use to deliver ads directly to their living rooms.
  • Use soft equity
  • They are granted authority to choose their projects, negotiate contracts, manage timelines, and assign goals. The combination of visibility and autonomy creates a powerful motivating force:
  • But every organization can find opportunities to increase autonomy, visibility, and soft equity.
  • One exception is a recent article, “Goals Gone Wild,” which traces a handful of famous business disasters to poorly constructed goals.
  • The analysis goes beyond the normal experience of a rubber-stamper payroll person. In other words, it requires a strategic chief incentives officer.
  • Which takes us to another reason a wide management span helps nurture loonshots: it encourages constructive feedback from peers.
  • Catmull designed a system for a group of peer film directors to regularly coalesce around a project and give its director advice—honest feedback from colleagues rather than marching orders from marketers or producers.
  • Creatives are suspicious of those outside their faith.
  • Reduce the return on politics: Make lobbying for compensation and promotion decisions difficult. Find ways to make those decisions less dependent on an employee’s manager and more independently assessed.
  • Use soft equity: Identify and apply the nonfinancial rewards that make a big difference. For example: peer recognition, intrinsic motivators.
  • Increase project–skill fit: Invest in the people and processes that will scan for a mismatch between employees’ skills and their assigned projects. Adjust roles or transfer employees between groups when mismatches are found. The goal is employees stretched neither too much nor too little by their roles. •
  • Fix the middle: Identify and fix perverse incentives, the unintended consequences of well-intentioned rewards. Pay special attention to the dangerous middle-manager levels, the weakest point in the battle between loonshots and politics. Shift away from incentives that encourage battles for promotion and toward incentives centered on outcomes. Celebrate results, not rank.
  • Bring a gun to a knife fight: Competitors in the battle for talent and loonshots may be using outmoded incentive systems. Bring in a specialist in the subtleties of the art—a chief incentives officer. •
  • Fine-tune the spans: Widen management spans in loonshot groups (but not in franchise groups) to encourage looser controls, more experiments, and peer-to-peer problem solving.
  • (painting a fly on urinals has been shown to reduce urinal spillage by 80 percent).
  • Both the film and the drug-discovery industries have separated into two markets—the market of the Majors, who trade in franchises, and the market of small specialists, who nurture loonshots.
  • The 1687 book was a sequel to his first book, on the invention of what is now called a pressure cooker, so Papin called it A Continuation of the New Digester of Bones. Buried in the back, after a section on how to cook cows’ horns and dried vipers, in what might be called the greatest example of burying the lead in history, was the answer to his puzzle on how to add a piston to Boyle’s air pump. It described the key components for a new invention: a steam engine.
  • So Kamprad went to Poland and discovered high-quality suppliers—for half the price. He passed the discounts on to customers.
  • and especially for delicately explaining to me, on occasion, why something I thought was funny was not quite so much.

Book: How to talk to anyone

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This book is a practical translation of Dale Carnegie’s „How Win friends and influence people„. However, the advice here is more tactical and updated compared to the original version.

Amazon Link

I picked up this book because I am getting married in 3 weeks and I want to avoid the faux-pas during the party. I know reading a book about smalltalk while doing wedding preparations is weird, but hey – that’s me.

Contrary to other books, nobody recommended this one to me. I searched amazon and found this gem and I have to say – I am very pleasantly surprised. This is a book-buying strategy that Kevin Systrom from Instagram uses.

The things I have to particularly work on

Being more conscious about how I make others feel

I usually get into the thick of the conversation, forgetting about everything else. I get excited about what we talk about and respond instinctually. But sometimes my instinctual responses are driven by my Ego and I have to curb it. I have a tendency to jump in with „me too” a little too soon.

STOP INTERRUPTING PEOPLE

I have a nasty habit of interrupting people when I know what they are trying to say. I am often wrong AND interrupt people.

I need to let them speak!

The strongest tips for me:

  1. Flooding smile, after recognising someone, so they feel smile is especially for them
  2. Glue eyes to conversation partner. I sometimes dart my eyes all over the place, since it makes it easier to focus on hard conversation. I need to work on affixing my stare on the conversation partner
  3. Picture a wire hanging in the doorway, grab it with the teeth to straighten up the posture
  4. How do you spend most of your time instead of „what do you do” ?
  5. Delay revealing your similarity, let people revel in their interests.
  6. Review your repertoire of smiles 🙂
  7. Return the stolen spotlight! ‘So what happened after the … (and fill in the last few words.)
  8. Whenever you are discussing emotionally charged matters, let the speaker finish completely before you jump in. (I am so bad at this!) Hear their facts but empathize like mad with their emotions.

My highlights

  • There are two kinds of people in this life: Those who walk into a room and say,‘Well, here I am!’ And those who walk in and say,‘Ahh, there you are.’
  • ‘Just give ’em great posture, a heads-up look, a confident smile, and a direct gaze.’ It’s the ideal image for somebody who’s a Somebody.
  • ‘The study went on to say a big, warm smile is an asset. But only when it comes a little slower, because then it has more credibility.’
  • Don’t flash an immediate smile when you greet someone, as though anyone who walked into your line of sight would be the beneficiary. Instead, look at the other person’s face for a second. Pause. Soak in their persona. Then let a big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes. It will engulf the recipient like a warm wave. The split-second delay convinces people your flooding smile is genuine and only for them.
  • In addition to awakening feelings of respect and affection, maintaining strong eye contact gives you the impression of being an intelligent and abstract thinker.
  • Pretend your eyes are glued to your Conversation Partner’s with sticky warm toffee. Don’t break eye contact even after he or she has finished speaking.
  • This is the look Winners have constantly. They stand with assurance. They move with confidence. They smile softly with pride. No doubt about it! Good posture symbolizes you are a man or woman who is used to being on top.
  • Before walking through any door – the door to your office, a party, a meeting, even your kitchen – picture a leather bit hanging by a cable from the frame. It is swinging just an inch higher than your head. As you pass through the door, throw your head back and chomp on the imaginary dental grip which first pulls your cheeks back into a smile,
  • Visualize a circus iron-jaw bit hanging from the frame of every door you walk through. Take a bite and, with it firmly between your teeth, let it swoop you to the peak of the big top. When you Hang by Your Teeth, every muscle is stretched into perfect posture position. You are now ready to float into the room to captivate the crowd or close the sale (or maybe just settle for looking like the most important Somebody in the room).
  • The instant the two of you are introduced, reward your new acquaintance. Give the warm smile, the total-body turn, and the undivided attention you would give a tiny tyke who crawled up to your feet, turned a precious face up to yours, and beamed a big toothless grin.
  • When meeting someone, imagine he or she is an old friend (an old customer, an old beloved, or someone else you had great affection for). How sad, the vicissitudes of life tore you two asunder. But, holy mackerel, now the party (the meeting, the convention) has reunited you with your long-lost old friend!
  • Whenever your conversation really counts, let your nose itch, your ear tingle, or your foot prickle. Do not fidget, twitch, wiggle, squirm, or scratch. And above all, keep your paws away from your face. Hand motions near your face and all fidgeting can give your listener the gut feeling you’re fibbing.
  • Express yourself, but keep a keen eye on how your listener is reacting to what you’re saying. Then plan your moves accordingly.
  • See yourself walking around with Hang by Your Teeth posture, shaking hands, smiling the Flooding Smile, and making Sticky Eyes. Hear yourself chatting comfortably with everyone. Feel the pleasure of knowing you are in peak form and everyone is gravitating toward you. Visualize yourself a Super Somebody.
  • Small talk is about putting people at ease. It’s about making comforting noises together like cats purring, children humming, or groups chanting. You must first match your listener’s mood.
  • it’s not all what you say, it’s how you say it.
  • How do you put people at ease? By convincing them they are OK and that the two of you are similar. When you do that, you break down walls of fear, suspicion, and mistrust.
  • Anything you say is fine as long as it is not complaining, rude, or unpleasant.
  • Your business cards and your Whatzit are crucial socializing artifacts. Whether you are riding in the elevator, climbing the doorstep, or traversing the path to the party, make sure your Whatzit is hanging out for all to see.
  • Whenever you go to a gathering, wear or carry something unusual to give people who find you the delightful stranger across the crowded room an excuse to approach. ‘Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice your … what IS that?’
  • Do humanity and yourself a favour. Never, ever, give just a one-sentence response to the question, ‘Where are you from?’
  • Learn some engaging facts about your hometown that Conversational Partners can comment on. Then, when they say something clever in response to your bait, they think you’re a great conversationalist.
  • open an old-fashioned encyclopedia – all rich sources for future stimulating conversations. Learn some history, geography, business statistics, or perhaps a few fun facts to tickle future friends’ funny bones.
  • ‘No man would listen to you talk if he didn’t know it was his turn next.’
  • Flesh it out. Throw out some delicious facts about your job for new acquaintances to munch on.
  • ‘Leil, I’d like you to meet Gilbert. Gilbert’s gift is sculpting. He makes beautiful wax carvings.’
  • listen to your Conversation Partner’s every word for clues to his or her preferred topic. The evidence is bound to slip out. Then spring on that subject like a sleuth on to a slip of the tongue.
  • ‘Well, when I meet someone, I learn so much more if I ask about their life. I always try to turn the spotlight on the other person.’
  • Never be left speechless again. Like a parrot, simply repeat the last few words your Conversation Partner says.
  • The sweetest sound your Conversation Partner can hear from your lips when you’re talking with a group of people is ‘Tell them about the time you …’
  • Big Cats never ask outright, ‘What do you do?’ (Oh they find out, all right, in a much more subtle manner.) By not asking the question, the Big Boys and Girls come across as more principled
  • ‘How … do … you … spend … most … of … your … time?’
  • ‘Here’s how my life can benefit yours’
  • When you delay revealing your similarity, or let them discover it, it has much more punch.
  • Whenever people mention an activity or interest you share, let them enjoy discussing their passion. Then, when the time is right, casually mention you share their interest.
  • When someone starts telling you about an activity he has done, a trip she has made, a club he belongs to, an interest she has – anything that you share – bite your tongue. Let the teller relish his or her own monologue.
  • However, consider how much better he feels when you tell him, ‘YOU’VE asked a good question.’
  • Start every appropriate sentence with YOU.
  • Review your repertoire of smiles
  • neat phrases make powerful weapons.
  • All pros think of holes they might fall into and then memorize great escape lines. You can do the same.
  • Don’t hide behind euphemisms. Call a spade a spade. That doesn’t mean Big Cats use tasteless four-letter words when perfectly decent five and six-letter ones exist.
  • An innocent joke at someone else’s expense may get you a cheap laugh. Nevertheless, the Big Cats will have the last one. Because you’ll bang your head against the glass ceiling they construct to keep little cats from stepping on their paws.
  • It’s not the news that makes someone angry. It’s the unsympathetic attitude with which it’s delivered.
  • Just one out of every four weekends, do something totally out of your pattern.
  • When you want to give someone the subliminal feeling you’re just alike, use their words, not yours.
  • Unlike ‘uh huh,’ they are complete sentences such as ‘I can appreciate you decided to do that,’ or ‘That really is exciting.’
  • Then use the pronoun we when discussing anything that might affect the two of you.
  • A compliment one hears is never as exciting as the one he overhears. A priceless way to praise is not by telephone, not by telegraph, but by tell-a-friend.
  • Whenever you are talking with a stranger you’d like to make part of your professional or personal future, search for one attractive, specific, and unique quality he or she has.
  • Ask the important people in your life what they would like engraved on their tombstone.
  • You take people’s breath away when you feed their deepest self-image to them in a compliment. ‘At last,’ they say to themselves, ‘someone who loves me for who I truly am.’
  • People perk up when they hear their own name. Use it more often on the phone than you would in person to keep their attention.
  • Don’t answer the phone with an ‘I’m just sooo happy all the time’ attitude. Answer warmly, crisply, professionally. Then, after you hear who is calling, let a huge smile of happiness engulf your entire face and spill over into your voice.
  • ‘Is this a convenient time for you to talk?’
  • Whenever you leave a voice mail message for anyone, try to include a cliff-hanger:
  • When you leave a message, say ‘I can be reached between three and five your time.’
  • If you do business with people around the world, be sure to extend good wishes to them for their holidays.
  • VIPS frequently come early to get their business done before party regulars who ‘hate to be the first one there’ start arriving.
  • When people support the real why of the party, they become popular and sought-after guests for future events.
  • ‘What kind of people will be at this party, and what will they be thinking about?’
  • Politicians always eat before they come to the party
  • Right after you’ve talked to someone at a party, take out your pen. On the back of his or her business card write notes to remind you of the conversation: his favourite restaurant, sport, film, or drink; whom she admires, where she grew up, a high school honour; or maybe a joke he told.
  • Cool Communicators allow their friends, associates, acquaintances, and loved ones the pleasurable myth of being above commonplace bloopers and embarrassing biological functions.
  • Big Winners never gape at another’s gaffes.
  • ‘Now please get back to your story.’ Or better yet, remember where they were and then ask, ‘So what happened after the … (and fill in the last few words.)’
  • Whenever you suggest a meeting or ask a favour, divulge the respective benefits.
  • Reveal what’s in it for you and what’s in it for the other person – even if it’s zip.
  • Whenever a friend agrees to a favour, allow your generous buddy time to relish the joy of his or her beneficence before you make them pay the piper. How long? At least twenty-
  • Whenever you are discussing emotionally charged matters, let the speaker finish completely before you jump in.
  • Hear their facts but empathize like mad with their emotions.
  • A premature letter of commendation for favours not yet received could be a clever tactic.
  • Heavy Hitters, even when they do not agree with the speaker, support the podium pontificator. Why? Because they know what it’s like to be on.
  • Be the first to applaud or publicly commend the man or woman you agree with

Book: Thanks a Thousand

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Amazon Link

I have issues with focusing on here and now. I tend to be very future-oriented, rapidly jumping from goal to goal. This makes focusing on the present moment a bit difficult and something that I have to put conscious effort into. AJ Jacobs has a similar problem, so in this charming book,  he resolved to thank everyone involved in making his morning cup of Coffee.

He set a goal of thanking a thousand people from the barista to inventor of a paper cup, dock workers who carried the coffee beans to owners of the coffee plantation in Colombia. This picturesque adventure is intertwined with findings of the science of gratitude.

  1. The crucial thing is to stop and notice what you grateful for
  2. Grounding yourself in the moment and coming back to here and now is key
  3. If you act as if you are grateful, you will become grateful

Yep, there is a TED talk.


The other angle presented in the book  (and something to be grateful for) is that the modern world is incredibly interconnected. The logistic chains go around the globe, and it is impossible to untangle the threads of global commerce. This synergy is a good thing since global trade increases peace as described by Yuval Noah Harrari and reduces global poverty, as explained by Hans Rosling.


AJ Jacobs also was a guest on Tim Ferriss show podcast. Except for the concepts in this book, he described that he has a file called „The One Thing” in which he notes one takeaway from every article he reads. I love this idea and started keeping my own. It is also an excellent benchmark to tell me if I want to read/continue a specific piece of writing. If I can’t see a takeaway, I’ll just stop reading.

I am searching for practical ways to practice gratitude for some time now. So far these two have stuck:

My Kindle highlights

  • My three boys are required to write old-fashioned handwritten thank-you notes when they get birthday gifts, much to their disbelief.
  • I’m mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours. That’s a ridiculous way to go through life. I don’t want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of the harp music.
  • We spend far too much time fretting about what we’re missing instead of focusing on what we have.
  • The act of noticing, after all, is a crucial part of gratitude; you can’t be grateful if your attention is scattered.
  • On my way home, I make a pledge. Though I probably won’t hug any other baristas, I promise to look them in the eyes—because I know I’ve been that asshole who thrusts out the credit card without glancing up.
  • “Grateful living is possible only when we realize that other people and agents do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Gratitude emerges from two stages of information processing—affirmation and recognition.
  • It’s a key reason gratitude is so difficult to maintain, and why it takes so much effort and intention: If something is done well for us, the process behind it is largely invisible.
  • “Gratitude has a lot to do with holding on to a moment as strongly as possible,” Scott told me. “It’s closely related to mindfulness and savoring. Gratitude can shift our perception of time and slow it down.
  • savoring meditation.
  • We overemphasize individual achievement when, in fact, almost everything good in the world is the result of teamwork.
  • recently read an article about the poet Robert Bly, who said that when he was a kid and skinned his knee, his mother would say, “Just be thankful that you didn’t break your leg.” He
  • a Museum of Modern Art exhibit called “Humble Masterpieces,”
  • But I do believe in WOLO: we only live once.
  • But I’m going to embrace my confirmation bias and stick to believing that coffee is healthy overall.
  • when I’m feeling particularly annoyed about something—the rattle of the air conditioner, say—I’ll repeat a three-word phrase: “Surgery without anesthesia.”
  • My first reaction was, “Hey! This author somehow retroactively
  • A couple of years ago Slate published an article about pallets with the following headline: “The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy,” which is probably one of the Top Fifty Most Hyperbolic Headlines About Shipping Logistics Ever!
  • When I press send, I realize I have just written possibly the most passive-aggressive thank-you note in history. Thank you, now please change. I’m still waiting to hear back.

Book: Freakonomics

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Freakonomics explores quirky consequences of economic realities. If you ever wondered how realtor’s commission structure is impacting your house sale price or if crack dealing is a steady source of income – this book will be of interest to you.
Presented is the most practical version of the economy – one that works, shapes the world around us but is full of twist, turns and messiness of real life.

Amazon Link

My Kindle Highlights

  • Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.
  • Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
  • For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it.
  • The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones.
  • And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.
  • The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast.
  • So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true.
  • Working together, journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.
  • The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes.
  • when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.
  • An editorial assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament.
  • That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An
  • “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.”
  • Risk = hazard + outrage.

Book: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

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Yes, this is the book in which Malcolm Gladwell wrote that you basically need 10 000 hours of practice to get world class at something.

Many more people have heard about 10 000 hours concept than the book itself. They may be even surprised to learn that this number is NOT a core concept. It appears maybe 3-4 times.

The core message Malcolm Gladwell is trying to impart is that success is not individual. It is a product of individual effort and the opportunity to turn this effort into mastery.

The success of a person is shaped by the interaction of environment, upbringing and most of all – timing.

Hard work is only the price of admission, but it is not sufficient.

[Amazon link]

The key to mastery is long hours of deliberate practice. Work put into developing talent has to be continually challenging to conquer and yet easy enough that’s it not overwhelming.

But 10 000 hours of deliberate practice sounds much easier than it is. It’s not sitting somewhere in the basement, just chipping away at it.

You have to have the string of opportunities – each with just the right amount of challenge – present themselves over and over again.

On some level, it makes perfect sense.  If the majority had the opportunity to reach mastery levels, it would be – by definition mediocre. Mastery is at the top of „pyramid” precisely because only a few attain it. It has to be one of the harder things to achieve.

Hard-working attitude is not enough. Only the lucky few have even the opportunity to spend so much time putting the hours in.

The point was brought very close to home when I started the chapter about the upbringing of Bill Gates. Bill had a unique opportunity – by chance he had dedicated access to a school computer since he was thirteen. In that time, nobody was able to afford it. In the result, Bill spent close to 10 000 hours of programming and developing his understanding of how computers work.

Of course, he is a brilliant, driven individual. But many other people are as well,

I am much less intelligent and driven than him, but in retrospect, I have to credit my career to my specific upbringing. Since a very young age, I have been included in ‚engineering’ tasks both by my grandfathers and my dad.

One of my grandfathers was a jet engineer. He has a knack for dirty macgyver-style tinkering and likes to keep half-done parts or projects everywhere.

My dad was in his time a carpenter, painter, metallurgist and an entrepreneur. He also liked to do things his way, and he loved to modify everything to add his unique „improvements.”

I spent half of my childhood taking machines and appliances apart and developed quite an experience in how things are put together.

When the Internet came to Poland in 1990s, by chance I developed a website for my scout team and somehow got „stuck” developing websites for a living (!) since I was 15. That is almost 20 years now.

Of course, to be even moderately successful, I had to have some other qualities, but my sheer amount of experience in both technical reasoning and web technologies themselves will be just hard to beat by anyone.

Naturally, until the world changes enough that my experience will become a drawback rather than an advantage.

Till then, (nerd) party rages on.

My highlights

  • If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.

  • The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists.

  • Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.”

  • “Matthew Effect”

  • We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

  • The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks.

  • Mozart, he argues, actually “developed late,” since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.

  • “We have seen,” Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, “that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

  • He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone.

  • But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

  • The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

  • Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.

  • For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions.

  • The distinctive buildings that still stand on the lower half of Broadway in Manhattan—from the big ten- and fifteen-story industrial warehouses in the twenty blocks below Times Square to the cast-iron lofts of SoHo and Tribeca—were almost all built to house coat makers and hatmakers and lingerie manufacturers and huge rooms of men and women hunched over sewing machines.

  • Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

  • the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a “culture of honor.”

  • But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation—and that’s what a “culture of honor” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth.

  • The triumph of a culture of honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive.

  • Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up.

  • Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we’re from, and being a good pilot and coming from a high–power distance culture is a difficult mix.

  • high–power distance communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and it works only if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other’s meanings. It doesn’t work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken glide scope.

  • In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

  • In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

  • The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is.

  • “No food without blood and sweat.” “Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren’t busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?” “In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.” “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.” “Useless to ask about the crops, it all depends on hard work and fertilizer.” “If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”

  • it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.

  • “Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder,” Jarvis wrote.

  • one of the singular features of rice cultivation is that because of the nutrients carried by the water used in irrigation, the more a plot of land is cultivated, the more fertile it gets. But in Western agriculture, the opposite is true. Unless a wheat- or cornfield is left fallow every few years, the soil becomes exhausted.

  • When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session.

  • “I find that the problem with math education is the sink-or-swim approach.

  • Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

 

 

Book: Four Tendencies

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Upholders ask: “Should I do this?” • Questioners ask: “Does this make sense?” • Obligers ask: “Does this matter to anyone else?” • Rebels ask: “Is this the person I want to be?”

Amazon link

In this book, Gretchen Rubin introduces another framework to categorize people. I know, the idea of boxing in folks is flawed, but this only creates a typology based on how people respond to expectation. It does not struggle to explain all behaviors and incongruencies of human interaction. The broad strokes are:

Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations.

Questioners question all expectations; they meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified, so in effect they respond only to inner expectations

Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations.

Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.

This revelation blew my mind.

I am a classical Questioner and reading about myself was like getting a manual I never knew existed. It explained why I have trouble closing cabinet doors, why I love lists and spreadsheets and deep research about product before committing to purchase.

Most of all, it made me more aware of small differences between me and other people in their strategies. Thanks to this book I am less judgmental and more sensitive about whole variety of people’s choices. It has even cast a lot of light at the relationship with my Mom. Deep stuff.




Take the four tendencies quiz to find out which one are you

Obligers

Upholders

Questioners

Rebels

respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations.

respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations.

question all expectations; they meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified, so in effect they respond only to inner expectations.

resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.

  • Good boss, responsive leader, team player

  • Feels great obligation to meet others’ expectations 

  • Responsible

  • Willing to go the extra mile

  • Responds to outer accountability

  • Self-starter

  • Self-motivated

  • Conscientious

  • Reliable Thorough Sticks to a schedule

  • Eager to understand and meet expectations 

  • Data-driven

  • Fair-minded (according to his or her judgment) Interested in creating systems that are efficient and effective

  • Willing to play devil’s advocate

  • Comfortable bucking the system if it’s warranted

  • Inner-directed

  • Unwilling to accept authority without justification

  • Independent-minded

  • Able to think outside the box

  • Unswayed by conventional wisdom

  • Willing to go his or her own way, to buck social conventions In touch with his or her authentic desires

  • Spontaneous 

  • Susceptible to overwork and burnout

  • May show the destructive pattern of Obliger-rebellion

  • Exploitable

  • May become resentful

  • Has trouble saying no or imposing limits

  • Defensive

  • Rigid

  • Often struggles when plans or schedules change

  • Can seem humorless and uptight

  • Uneasy when rules are ambiguous or undefined

  • Impatient when others need reminders, deadlines, supervision, or discussion

  • Demanding

  • May become anxious about obeying rules that don’t even exist

  • Can suffer analysis-paralysis

  • impatient with what he or she sees as others’ complacency

  • Crackpot potential

  • Unable to accept closure on matters that others consider settled if questions remain unanswered

  • May refuse to observe expectations that others find fair or at least nonoptional (e.g., traffic regulations)

  • May resist answering others’ questions

  • Likely to resist when asked or told to do something

  • Uncooperative

  • Inconsiderate

  • Has trouble accomplishing tasks that need to be done consistently, the same way, every time

  • Acts as though ordinary rules don’t apply

  • Restless; may find it difficult to settle down in a job, relationship, city

  • Struggles with routines and planning

  • May be indifferent to reputation

  • They readily meet outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations

  • They put a high value on meeting commitments to others

  • They succeed when given accountability, with supervision, deadlines, monitoring, and other forms of accountability, such as the duty to be a good role model

  • They may have trouble setting limits on others’ demands They may have trouble delegating, because they feel that some expectations attach to them personally They must have systems of external accountability in order to meet inner expectations

  • They may be exploited by people who take advantage of them, and because of that

  • They may feel resentful or burned out, in which case…

  • They may need managers or others to alleviate expectations, or they may rebel

  • They readily meet external and internal expectations

  • They’re self-directed, so they can meet deadlines, work on projects, and take the initiative without much supervision

  • They enjoy routine and may have trouble adjusting to a break in routine or sudden scheduling changes

  • They hate to make mistakes, and because of that…

  • They may become very angry or defensive at the suggestion that they’ve dropped the ball or made a mistake

  • They put a high value on follow-through

  • They may need to be reminded that, unlike them, others aren’t necessarily comforted or energized by getting things done

  • They may have trouble delegating responsibilities, because they suspect that others aren’t dependable

  • They question all expectations and meet them only if they believe they’re justified, with the result that they may meet only inner expectations

  • They put a high value on reason, research, and information

  • They make decisions based on information and reason; sometimes, the reason is that it’s important to someone else

  • They follow the advice of “authorities” only if they trust their expertise

  • They follow their own judgment—sometimes even when it flies in the face of experts who (allegedly) know more

  • They persistently ask questions, which may make them seem uncooperative or defiant They hate anything arbitrary—rules like “Five garments to a fitting room”

  • They dislike being questioned themselves; they consider their actions carefully so they find it tiresome or even insulting to be asked to justify their decisions

  • They may have trouble delegating decision making, because they suspect that others don’t have a sufficient basis for action

  • They resist both outer and inner expectations

  • They put a high value on freedom, choice, identity, and self-expression If someone asks or tells them to do something, they’re likely to resist.

  • They may respond to a challenge: “I’ll show you,” “Watch me,” “You can’t make me,” “You’re not the boss of me” They may choose to act out of love, a sense of mission, belief in a cause

  • They have trouble telling themselves what to do—even when it’s something they want to do

  • They meet a challenge, in their own way, in their own time

  • They don’t respond well to supervision, advice, or directions

  • They tend to be good at delegating If they’re in a long-term relationship, their partner is probably an Obliger

Obligers need accountability

Upholders want to know what should be done

Questioners want justifications

Rebels want freedom to do something their own way

My highlights

  • The simple, decisive question was: “How do you respond to expectations?” I’d found it!
  • As with all the Tendencies, arguments work better when they address that Tendency’s values.

Questioners:

  • In accepting those inner expectations, Questioners show a deep commitment to information, logic, and efficiency. They want to gather their own facts, decide for themselves, and act with good reason; they object to anything they consider arbitrary, ill-reasoned, ill-informed, or ineffective. Many, many people are Questioners; only the Obliger Tendency has more members.
  • Questioner was the Tendency most likely to agree with the statement “I do what I think makes the most sense, according to my judgment, even if that means ignoring the rules or other people’s expectations.”
  • why this task, why this way, why now?
  • Questioners have the self-direction of Upholders, the reliability of Obligers, and the authenticity of Rebels.
  • But an Upholder or an Obliger may think, “Why do you get to exempt yourself from a rule that everyone’s expected to follow?”
  • In fact, Questioners are often puzzled by others’ willingness to act without sound reasons.
  • I’ve noticed that a love of spreadsheets is very common among Questioners—they also tend to send people lots of articles.
  • Along the same lines, Questioners tend to be very interested in improving processes.
  • Similarly, for young Questioners, school can present a real challenge, because many school rules seem arbitrary or inefficient, and teachers and administrators often feel little obligation to justify them.
  • Along those same lines, the Questioners’ desire to customize, and their questioning of expert advice, can be frustrating for those to whom they turn for help, advice, or services:
  • For instance, legendary entrepreneur and business leader Steve Jobs was a Questioner, and when he was a young man he believed that eating a fruit-heavy, vegetarian diet meant that he didn’t need to worry about body odor—even though many people told him that, in fact, he did need to worry about
  • One puzzling note about Questioners: They often remark on how much they hate to wait in line. A friend told me, “I hate waiting in line so much that I can’t even carry on a conversation while waiting to be seated in a restaurant.” Perhaps it’s the inefficiency.
  • Delivery can sometimes make a big difference in whether others see a Questioner as constructive or obstructive.
  • “I’m definitely a Questioner. Although doesn’t everyone or at least most people think the same way?” Nope, they sure don’t.
  • “Have you noticed that Questioners resist being questioned themselves?”
  • A Questioner wrote to explain: We Questioners have thought about the logic behind our decision. So it’s a) exhausting to revisit something and lay out all the reasons and/or b) we feel we’re right, so we don’t feel like we have to justify it to someone else.”
  • Because Questioners make careful decisions, they’re often annoyed—even insulted—when people question them.
  • And, of course, Questioners particularly hate questions they consider a waste of their time.
  • so when I feel myself getting sucked into research mode, I ask myself, ‘Is this information actually relevant to what I’m trying to decide? Why am I spending this time and energy on this question?’ ”
  • Questioners need clarity, and to get clarity, they can ask questions.
  • Is Tony Robbins a questioner? Maybe that is why he appeals to me so much
  • Is there a better way to do this?
  • “Well, I’ll do these pointless things because they actually do have a point, which is to please my grandmother.”
  • “Don’t just focus on the first order of reason, but think about the second order of reason. You’re doing it for your reasons.
  • It’s important for Questioners to remind themselves to do what they must so that they can do what they want.
  • Their questioning ensures that an organization uses its resources most effectively.
  • My wife jokes that she knows we’re married forever, because I already did the research and made the decision. She’s actually right!”
  • Childhood can be a painful time for Questioners, because children are so often expected to do things because an adult “said so.”
  • It’s worth noting, too, that Questioners often show a strong urge to customize

Obligers:

  • How does an Obliger meet an inner expectation? By creating outer accountability.
  • When what others expect from Obligers is what they expect from themselves, they have the life they want.
  • Obligers vary dramatically in what makes them feel accountable.
  • Also, for some Obligers, accountability works better when it’s positive. Reminders and oversight feel like nagging, and nagging may trigger Obliger-rebellion.
  • But now I realize that this doing-it-for-my-kids strategy can help Obligers accomplish something worthwhile.
  • For instance, many Obligers characterize their behavior as “client first”—a reason for pride.
  • The Obliger pattern is not an issue of self-sacrifice, self-esteem, boundaries, motivation, people-pleasing, or discipline, but rather—and I repeat it yet again—an issue of external accountability.
  • For instance, for many Obligers, spouses or family count as part of themselves, so their spouses’ expectations become “inner” expectations and are therefore ignored.
  • the Obliger expects others to know to stop imposing their expectations, without prompting, to provide relief for the Obliger
  • “I work out every day by getting my husband to ask me about it when he gets home.
  • People who ask for accountability know they need it.

Rebels

  • Rebellion is the opposite of compliance, but rebellion is not freedom.
  • want other people to do what I want, just like I want me to be able to do what I want.”
  • Just as they often pair with Obligers, Rebels often pair with family members as work partners—perhaps because a relative has more understanding, experience, and tolerance for the Rebel.
  • information, consequences, choice—with no nagging or badgering.
  • If he thinks you’re not watching, he won’t need to rebel against your expectations.”

Pairs

  • One Obliger gave a small but telling example: “I use crosswalks and follow the walk signals, while my Questioner husband doesn’t find it important to use crosswalks or signals, so he jaywalks.”
  • An Obliger parent can get very impatient with a Questioner child, whose questions can seem tiresome or cheeky.
  • Similarly, when Obligers complain about something they “have” to do, Questioners don’t have much sympathy, because they think, “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it” or “Why did you say you’d do it, if you don’t want to?”
  • We may think we know the “best” way, or the way others “should” work, but whether at home or at work, as long as the tasks are getting done, we should let other people suit themselves.
  • It’s all too easy to assume that what persuades us will persuade others—which isn’t true.
  • One of my Secrets of Adulthood is that we’re more like other people than we suppose and less like other people than we suppose. And it’s very hard to keep that in mind.
  • Upholders value self-command and performance • Questioners value justification and purpose • Obligers value teamwork and duty • Rebels value freedom and self-
  • And one of the worst, most common mistakes when we’re trying to help someone change a habit? Invoking the dreaded “You should be able to…”
  • To craft a sign that works well for all Four Tendencies, we should provide information, consequences, and choice.
  • The happiest and most successful people are those who have figured out ways to exploit their Tendency to their benefit and, just as important, found ways to counterbalance its limitations.
  • “How do you feel about New Year’s resolutions?”
  • Upholders ask: “Should I do this?” • Questioners ask: “Does this make sense?” • Obligers ask: “Does this matter to anyone else?” • Rebels ask: “Is this the person I want to be?”

Book: Power of full engagement

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

the-power-of-full-engagement

The core tenet of the book is that you have to manage your energy if you want to achieve anything. The best way to manage your energy is to balance spending with replenishing. This is in line with what Tony Robbins is saying.

The book is a result of years of consulting work by the authors. They worked with CEOs, athletes and other high performers to increase their output.

 

 

In the book, there are 4 sources of energy described:

  • physical
  • emotional
  • mental
  • spiritual

As at Tony Robbin UPW – the „bigggest bang for the buck” is at the physical level, since it is often overlooked / ignored. Drinking water, avoiding sugars and getting exercise will prime everything else. But people often forget that and everything else gets outta whack.

My takeaways:

  • Capitalize on morning energy, Post-lunch will always be slump.
  • DRINK MORE WATER
  • Take breaks. – for a walk etc, instead of sitting in front of Facebook
  • DO NOT skip workouts when overworked – they are what will keep you going

I found this video review if you are up to that sort of thing 😀

My kindle highlights

  • Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.
  • Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.
  • The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be.
  • To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.
  • has a unique transformative power, both individually and organizationally.
  • Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
  • Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
  • The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal.
  • We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints—fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.
  • To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
  • Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy—are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.
  • Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.
  • “How should I spend my energy in a way that is consistent with my deepest values?”
  • Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Performance is grounded in the skillful management of energy.
  • By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time.
  • At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body. .
  • We are machine-centered in our thinking—focused on the optimization of technology and equipment—rather than human-centered—focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.
  • I find myself feeling guilty if I’m not working.
  • “More and more what I find is that you don’t really live in the present anymore,”
  • • Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy. We call this oscillation.
  • • The opposite of oscillation is linearity: too much energy expenditure without recovery or too much recovery without sufficient energy expenditure.
  • Balancing stress and recovery is critical to high performance both individually and organizationally.
  • • Expanding capacity requires a willingness to endure short-term discomfort in the service of long-term reward.
  • In practical terms, the size of our energy reservoir depends on the patterns of our breathing, the foods that we eat and when we eat them, the quantity and quality of our sleep, the degree to which we get intermittent recovery during the day, and the level of our fitness.
  • Drinking water, we have found, is perhaps the most undervalued source of physical energy renewal.
  • The longer, more continuously, and later at night you work, the less efficient and more mistake-prone you become.
  • the first thing we had her do was to open the journal that she had purchased and half-jokingly named “Catharsis.”
  • This is a note i want to haave
  • Somewhere around 3:00 or 4:00 P.M. we reach the lowest phase of both our ultradian and our circadian rhythms.
  • This explains why, over the centuries, so many cultures intuitively institutionalized the sort of midafternoon nap that is increasingly disappearing in our 24/7 world.
  • The concept of stress inoculation is very much like the concept of preventing a particular disease through vaccination.
  • Physical energy is the fundamental source of fuel in life.
  • Physical energy is derived from the interaction between oxygen and glucose.
  • The two most important regulators of physical energy are breathing and eating.
  • Eating five to six low-calorie, highly nutritious meals a day ensures a steady resupply of glucose and essential nutrients.
  • Drinking sixty-four ounces of water daily is a key factor in the effective management of physical energy.
  • Most human beings require seven to eight hours of sleep per night to function optimally.
  • Going to bed early and waking up early help to optimize performance.
  • Interval training is more effective than steady-state exercise in building physical capacity and in teaching people how to recover more efficiently.
  • To sustain full engagement, we must take a recovery break every 90 to 120 minutes.
  • Snowden discovered that those nuns whose writing expressed a preponderance of positive emotions (happiness, love, hope, gratitude and contentment) tended to live longer and more productive lives. Nuns with the highest number of positive-emotion sentences had half the risk of death at any age as those with the lowest number of such sentences.
  • After interviewing a large sample of managers and their employees, the Gallup Organization found that no single factor more clearly predicts the productivity of an employee than his relationship with his direct superior.
  • Gallup found that one of the key factors in sustained performance is having at least one good friend at work.
  • she built a reservoir of positive emotional energy that she could draw from at her job.
  • Next, he framed his critical feedback not as a lecture but as a discussion, allowing for the possibility that his perception might not be entirely accurate.
  • We may overvalue toughness and undervalue tenderness, for example, or do just the reverse, when in fact both represent important emotional muscles in our lives. The same is true of many other opposites: self-control and spontaneity, honesty and compassion, generosity and thriftiness, openness and discretion, passion and detachment, patience and urgency, caution and boldness, confidence and humility.
  • In order to perform at our best, we must access pleasant and positive emotions: the experience of enjoyment, challenge, adventure and opportunity.
  • The key muscles fueling positive emotional energy are self-confidence, self-control, interpersonal effectiveness and empathy.
  • Negative emotions serve survival but they are very costly and energy inefficient in the context of performance.
  • The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense stress lies at the heart of effective leadership.
  • Access to the emotional muscles that serve performance depends on creating a balance between exercising them regularly and intermittently seeking recovery.
  • Any activity that is enjoyable, fulfilling and affirming serves as a source of emotional renewal and recovery.
  • Emotional muscles such as patience, empathy and confidence can be strengthened in the same way that we strengthen a bicep or a tricep: pushing past our current limits followed by recovery.
  • We also need access to realistic optimism, a paradoxical notion that implies seeing the world as it is, but always working positively toward a desired outcome or solution.
  • The capacity to stay appropriately focused and realistically optimistic depends on intermittently changing mental channels in order to rest and rejuvenate.
  • Beginning with the German physiologist and physicist Hermann Helmholtz in the late nineteenth century, many thinkers have sought to define the sequential steps of the creative process. Five stages are now widely recognized:
    • first insight,
    • saturation,
    • incubation,
    • illumination
    • and verification.
  • two “yoga” breaks
  • Time management, we tell our clients, is not an end in itself. Rather it serves the higher goal of effective energy management.
  • Some activities generate considerable spiritual renewal without demanding significant energy expenditure. These include walking in nature, reading an inspirational book, listening to music, or hearing a great speaker.
  • We define integrity—a key ingredient in character and a primary spiritual muscle—as doing what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it.
  • Spiritual energy provides the force for action in all dimensions of our lives. It fuels passion, perseverance and commitment.
  • Spiritual energy is derived from a connection to deeply held values and a purpose beyond our self-interest.
  • Character—the courage and conviction to live by our deepest values—is the key muscle that serves spiritual energy.
  • The key supportive spiritual muscles are passion, commitment, integrity and honesty.
  • Spiritual energy expenditure and energy renewal are deeply interconnected.
  • Spiritual energy is sustained by balancing a commitment to a purpose beyond ourselves with adequate self-care.
  • Spiritual work can be demanding and renewing at the same time.
  • Expanding spiritual capacity involves pushing past our comfort zone in precisely the same way that expanding physical capacity does.
  • The energy of the human spirit can override even severe limitations of physical energy.
  • So long as we skim across the surface of our lives at high speeds, it is impossible to dig down more deeply.
  • Jump ahead to the end of your life. What are the three most important lessons you have learned and why are they so critical?
  • Think of someone that you deeply respect. Describe three qualities in this person that you most admire.
  • Who are you at your best?
  • What one-sentence inscription would you like to see on your tombstone that would capture who you really were in your life?
  • A value in action is a virtue.
  • Values hold us to a different standard for managing energy.
  • Next, she got more specific about what these values meant to her in practical, everyday terms.
  • A vision statement is a declaration of intent about how to invest one’s energy. Regularly revisited, it serves as a source of sustaining direction and a fuel for action.
  • The search for meaning is among the most powerful and enduring themes in every culture since the origin of recorded history.
  • The “hero’s journey” is grounded in mobilizing, nurturing and regularly renewing our most precious resource—energy—in the service of what matters most.
  • When we lack a strong sense of purpose we are easily buffeted by life’s inevitable storms.
  • Purpose becomes a more powerful and enduring source of energy when its source moves from negative to positive, external to internal and self to others.
  • A negative source of purpose is defensive and deficit-based.
  • Intrinsic motivation grows out of the desire to engage in an activity because we value it for the inherent satisfaction it provides.
  • Values fuel the energy on which purpose is built. They hold us to a different standard for managing our energy.
  • A virtue is a value in action.
  • A vision statement, grounded in values that are meaningful and compelling, creates a blueprint for how to invest our energy.
  • To be effective in the world, we must find a balance between looking honestly at the most painful truths and contradictions in our lives and engaging in the world with hope and positive energy.
  • Intellectualizing is a means of acknowledging a truth cognitively without experiencing its impact emotionally.
  • A graphic example is the leader who charismatically makes the case for honesty, or decency, or teamwork to his gathered troops, only to flagrantly violate his professed principles in his everyday conduct.
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how fully engaged are you in your work? What is standing in your way?
  • How closely does your everyday behavior match your values and serve your mission? Where are the disconnects?
  • How fully are you embodying your values and vision for yourself at work? At home? In your community? Where you are falling short?
  • How effectively are the choices that you are making physically—your habits of nutrition, exercise, sleep and the balance of stress and recovery—serving your key values?
  • How consistent with your values is your emotional response in any given situation? Is it different at work than it is at home, and if so, how?
  • To what degree do you establish clear priorities and sustain attention to tasks? How consistent are those priorities with what you say is most important to you?
  • Without realizing it, we often create stories around a set of facts and then take our stories to be the truth.
  • As the psychologist Martin Seligman puts it: “When our explanatory beliefs take the form of personal, permanent and pervasive factors (It’s my fault . . . it’s always going to be like this . . . it’s going to affect everything I do”), we give up and become paralyzed. When our explanations take the opposite form, we become energized.”
  • “How might the opposite of what I’m thinking or feeling also be true?”
  • Facing the most difficult truths in our lives is challenging but also liberating. When we have nothing left to hide, we no longer fear exposure. Vast energy is freed up to fully engage in our lives.
  • • Facing the truth frees up energy and is the second stage, after defining purpose, in becoming more fully engaged.
  • Avoiding the truth consumes great effort and energy.
  • At the most basic level, we deceive ourselves in order to protect our self-esteem.
  • Some truths are too unbearable to be absorbed all at once. Emotions such as grief are best metabolized in waves.
  • Truth without compassion is cruelty—to others and to ourselves.
  • What we fail to acknowledge about ourselves we often continue to act out unconsciously.
  • A common form of self-deception is assuming that our view represents the truth, when it is really just a lens through which we choose to view the world.
  • Facing the truth requires that we retain an ongoing openness to the possibility that we may not be seeing ourselves—or others—accurately.
  • It is both a danger and a delusion when we become too identified with any singular view of ourselves. We are all a blend of light and shadow, virtues and vices.
  • Accepting our limitations reduces our defensiveness and increases the amount of positive energy available to us.
  • disengaging—conserving energy by not investing too much of it in anything or allowing himself to think too deeply about the choices that he was making.
  • The bigger the storm, the more inclined we are to revert to our survival habits, and the more important positive rituals become.
  • Rituals for Our Times.
  • “Families who sit down to dinner together every night are saying without words that they believe in the need for families to have shared time together. . . .
  • Participants proved far more likely to eat healthy, low calorie foods when they were asked in advance to specify precisely what they intended to eat for each of their meals during the day, rather than using their energy to resist eating certain foods all day long.
  • When intentions are framed negatively—“I won’t overeat” or “I will not get angry”—they rapidly deplete our limited stores of will and discipline
  • Considerable evidence suggests that smiling literally reduces arousal and short-circuits the “fight-or-flight” response. It is nearly impossible to smile and to feel angry at the same time.
  • • Rituals serve as tools through which we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on.
  • Rituals create a means by which to translate our values and priorities into action in all dimensions of our life.
  • All great performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their behavior.
  • The limitations of conscious will and discipline are rooted in the fact that every demand on our self-control draws on the same limited resource.
  • We can offset our limited will and discipline by building rituals that become automatic as quickly as possible, fueled by our deepest values.
  • The most important role of rituals is to insure effective balance between energy expenditure and energy renewal in the service of full engagement.
  • The more exacting the challenge and the greater the pressure, the more rigorous our rituals need to be.
  • Precision and specificity are critical dimensions of building rituals during the thirty-to sixty-day acquisition period.
  • Trying not to do something rapidly depletes our limited stores of will and discipline.
  • To make lasting change, we must build serial rituals, focusing on one significant change at a time.
  • Because he left each morning before they awoke, he decided to write each of them a note each day and slip it under their doors.
  • Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance.
  • we must learn to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
  • Most of us are undertrained physically and spiritually (not enough stress) and overtrained mentally and emotionally (not enough recovery).
  • A corporation or organization is simply a reservoir of potential energy that can be recruited in the service of an intended mission.
  • 1. Go to bed early and wake up early
  • 2. Go to sleep and wake up consistently at the same times
  • 3. Eat five to six small meals daily
  • 4. Eat breakfast every day
  • 5. Eat a balanced, healthy diet
  • 6. Minimize simple sugars
  • 7. Drink 48 to 64 ounces of water daily
  • 8. Take breaks every ninety minutes during work
  • 9. Get some physical activity daily
  • 10. Do at least two cardiovascular interval workouts and two strength training workouts a week