It's such fun to think about possibilities. You might do this or you might do that. Sometimes the opportunities seem endless and exciting. Many doors with well-oiled hinges are within your reach. All you have to do is to gently push on them and they open so you can get a glimpse of what's behind them. I think of these doors as the doors of possibility. A Doorway to Success... or Failure? When you select one door, push it open and stand at the edge looking through … [Read more...]
Good or Great: Is 80% Effort Good Enough?
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Are you an 80 percenter? Are you confident that no matter what you take on, you'll do a good job... at least an 80% job? Most people I know do at least an 80% job of just about everything they do. That's just their baseline. Doing a good job is the norm. I expect it of my friends and acquaintances and they expect it of me. If 100% = "Great," then 80% = "Good" With that logic, 80% of excellent is a good job. What's Your Percentage of Excellence? If you were to … [Read more...]
Pushing Past Complexity to Discover Elegant Simplicity
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I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. --Oliver Wendell Holmes Have you ever worked on a project that you thought was simple, but the more you worked on it, the more complicated and intertwined everything got? Did you worry that you were getting lost in a sea of ideas? But then, just when you were about to throw your hands up in frustration, you had a moment … [Read more...]
Handling Overwhelm, Staying Productive and Asking for Help
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Clearly, I'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed. After my last post -- a cry for help in managing overwhelm -- many people got in touch with me. Through email, phone calls, Facebook and comments at the end of the post, I heard from many of you. And I'm excited to share the things that have already made a big difference. Sanebox: A System for E-Sanity Melea Seward's suggestion of sanebox.com wins the prize! Sanebox is a remarkable app that looks at the patterns of your … [Read more...]
A Cry for Help – How Do You Manage Overwhelm?
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I thought that if I got clearer and more disciplined about my goals, my life would get simpler. But no... That just opened another door on greater complexity. And once again, I feel like I'm drowning. Ideas get lost. Balls get dropped. And myriad little things gobble the time I should be spending on big projects. Is it Just Me? Or is it the times in which we live, where emails and obligations and people stream into your brain and calendar like a fire hose rather than … [Read more...]
Shoplifting, Central Booking and Cookies in the South Bronx
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This was quite a week. My friend, Clemetin, was picked up by the police not once, but twice. Why? For shoplifting! Now you might think as I did, "What's that matter with Clemetin that he would shoplift anything even once, let alone twice!" And I'll get to that in a later post. But for now, put that question aside and read this most unlikely story about cops being nice. Altruistic Police Officers My phone rang on Wednesday afternoon. It was Clemetin, calling from the … [Read more...]
Having a Beginner’s Mindset is Good for You
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My phone rang. It was my young friend, Jordan. She had just landed an exciting new job in a big, prestigious social justice organization. She was anxious that she didn't know enough about social justice or about how the organization worked, and she wanted my advice about how she should prepare. But really, there's no way that even this smart young woman could learn enough to be competent in what is for her an entirely new field. She could study and prepare for weeks … [Read more...]
A Good Reason to Celebrate Endings
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Your memory of an event is shaped disproportionately by the most intense part of the experience and it's ending rather than the entire duration of the experience. That reality of how we remember experiences has been so well researched and documented that it even has a name! It's known as the Peak End Rule. Here's an example from Atul Gawande's remarkable book, Being Mortal... Have you ever watched a football game in which your team played wonderfully, but at very end … [Read more...]
Living Full Whack
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Do you measure things precisely or are you a pinch-of-this and a drop-of-that kind of person? I think that people generally fall into one or the other of those types. Either you attend to details with great care or you don't really fret about the details. I've found that it's not so easy to switch. Being a pinch-of-this and a drop-of-that kind of person, I was tickled this morning to run across a recipe from the remarkable chef Jamie Oliver who, rather than telling you … [Read more...]
Retribution, Reaction and Response: Tamir Rice Meets Lizard Brain
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I read Seth Godin's blog pretty much every day. Yes, amazingly enough, he posts each and every day. And that, in and of itself, impresses me. Most days, I find it worth reading. Some days it's truly illuminating. Other days it just gives me food for thought. And that's what happened today. In his post on Retribution, Seth highlights a comment by Zig Ziglar that caught my eye. Seth says: We can react or respond. … When we react to a medicine, that's a bad thing. When … [Read more...]