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2012-05-11
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2012-05-10
We don’t know about the origin of this story but it’s a nice reminder about setting priorities:When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day isn’t enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 cups of coffee.
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open area between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”
The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things…your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions…and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your home and perhaps your car.
The sand is everything else…the small stuff. “If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.
“Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Enjoy a romantic dinner with the one you love. Play another 9 or 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the faucet.
Take care of the golf balls first…the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented. The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.
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2012-05-09
Forget about productivity and numbers. They matter not at all. If you are driven to do things to reach certain numbers (goals), you have probably lost sight of what’s important. If you are striving to be productive, you are filling your days with things just to be productive, which is a waste of a day. This day is a gift, and shouldn’t be crammed with every possible thing — spend time enjoying it and what you’re doing.
— How to Live Well, zenhabits.
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2012-05-08
Hope your dones are part of the good in every day!
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2012-05-07
Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.
— Theodore Roosevelt
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2012-05-04
The book trailer for Andrew Zuckerman’s Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give to Another is a treasure trove of wise words from leaders of all fields who are all over 65 years old.
Here are some of our favorites from the wise words spoketh:
“Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you’re the only expert in it.” - Frank Gehry, architect.
“You can’t get to wonderful without passing through alright. You can’t skip from not being able to function all the way over to running the whole show.” - Bill Withers, musician.
“I always thought that inspiration was for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.” - Chuck Close, artist.
(via the great brainpickings archive)
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2012-05-03
Wise use of space means creating the right context for concentration, learning, communication, and collaboration—the building blocks of productivity.
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Productivity is not just about you. It’s also about your environment.
The National Institute of Building Sciences takes a look at “productive building design.” Organizational effectiveness, or organizational productivity, is a fancy way of saying using space wisely. It makes sense to make a user-friendly work environment to cultivate an organization’s greatest resource and expense — the worker!
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2012-05-02
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
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Zig Ziglar
(Photo by Krikit)
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2012-05-01
Some great tips for working smarter, not harder.
Less than half of workers report being satisfied with the recognition they receive on the job. Is it just a coincidence that less than half of employed adults report being completely satisfied with their jobs?
Do you have any tips for working smarter, not harder? Share them with us in the comments!
(Infographic from: Best Masters Degrees) -
2012-04-30
Confronting the Brutal Facts of Your Startup’s Reality
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
- Admiral James Stockdale [1]
Fundraising is distracting because much of it is about framing facts about your reality rather than confronting the brutal facts of your reality. For us, that meant coming up with a plausible story for not sucking when we did mostly suck. [2]
Some startups try to handle this by juggling two different stories: the one they tell investors and the one they know to be true. That sounds easy enough, but it can get very confusing and that confusion results in friction.
That was especially the case for our team. I used to be a lawyer, and it’s a lawyer’s job to put different frames on facts and argue why a given frame is closest to the truth. An engineer’s mentality is to find the closest frame to objective truth. [3]
When the team got down emotionally, I would try to persuade them that reality wasn’t as bleak as it seemed. I laugh thinking about it now. The guys would tell me, “You can’t persuade me of the pitch because we helped come up with it!”
The problem is that I was operating under the mentality that a team needs to be motivated to get more done. It turns out that my attempts to frame reality for the purpose of motivating was extremely demotivating to the team because it distracted our attention away from confronting the brutal facts of our reality.
Jim Collins in Good to Great and Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle both interviewed hundreds of managers and employees, analyze thousands of employee journal entries, and concluded that motivation is a waste of time — employees aren’t motivated by motivation. Rather, the right people are self-motivated and the key is just to stay out of the way and focus on not demotivating people.
Not dealing with reality on the part of management is a huge demotivator. When you confront the brutal facts of your current reality, you’re able to conduct an autopsy in earnest, and then execute — a process that’s invigorating and self-motivating.
Notes
[1] Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001).
[2] Ironically, the best investors are those that want to confront the brutal facts of your current reality with you and that’s what value-added is in that context. They’ll find you difficult to talk to if you engage in sales talk rather than confront the truth. The funny thing is that practicing pitching with the average investor may lead you astray with exceptional investors.
[3] All of this is somewhat ironic because iDoneThis is a tool that shows you the truth.
