What are you waiting for? Start something. Take it a step at a time. Celebrate. Huzzah!
You’ve just been Monday (kid)pep-talked!
What would be your Space Jam? What will you create to make the world awesome? … If we can make every day better for each other, if we’re all on the same team, let’s start acting like it.
Just the act of jotting something down is an act of discipline that affects how we think about our actions, and bolsters our resolve to modify our own behavior.
Andrew Leonard, on the quantified self movement in “Can your iPhone Help You Lose Weight?”
Self-knowledge can lead to self-improvement. Check your life’s blind spots in order to work and live better.
Great advice from artist Marlo Meekins. Stay confident, and keep going, step by step!
You’ve got to be audacious enough to set goals that make you stretch and give you clarity of vision and purpose. But you have to have the humility to know that this work is hard, and that you might not get there. If you start off talking about all the reasons that you’re not going to get there, you’re not going to get there. And so it’s holding that balance of not being reckless, but also having a huge element of fearlessness.
Take some small step today, and value each step you take. You never know which step will make a difference. This is much better than not trying to do anything.
Dr. Tamar E. Chansky, in Jane E. Brody’s NYT’s Well Blog post, When Daily Stress Gets in the Way of Life.
Dr. Chansky suggests taking a small step and acknowledging it as an effective way to deal with paralyzing anxiety.
“If you’re worrying about your work all the time, you won’t get your work done,” she explains. And don’t forget, every small step is itself powerfully motivating!
’Tis easy to frame a good bold resolution;
But hard is the Task that concerns execution.
Take some comfort in the fact that Ben Franklin, the genius who did everything, still found the doing part a little tough!
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
We wrote about Peter Thiel’s unorthodox management philosophy of extreme focus.
How important company culture is to Zappos.
Using better “behavior design” to motivate, because why we are all basically still four years old.
Happiness is like a butterfly.
What’s the secret to happiness at work? Recent studies show that it’s not how much money you make, but how much progress.
We’ve written before about the progress principle, an idea developed by Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, who found that the greatest indicator of happiness and motivation at work is incremental progress toward a meaningful goal.
Meaningful goals can be anything from the team’s stated objective, to a personal goal. It can be tangible and specific, like tackling the bugs in a program, or more general, like ensuring customer happiness.
We were curious about the progress principle in action, but meaningful goals are so personal and variable that we didn’t know where to begin. So we approached startups that served a social good. For these companies, their meaningful goal was collective, explicit and already built into the job description.
We asked each of these startup founders:
Your startup works towards a meaningful social good every day.
How does your goal motivate your team’s hard work and happiness daily?
Here are their responses:
