Tag Archive for 'Change'

Lose Yourself… or Lose this Day Loitering?

Published on 19 December, 2008 in Change, High Performance and Personal Growth. Closed Tags: , , , .

Lose this day loitering – ’twill be the same story
Each indecision brings its own delays,
To-morrow – and the next more dilatory;
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute -
Begin it, and then the work will be completed!
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated -
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

While The Secret is riding its wave of popularity it is easy to forget that things change when we change. Not just when we think, but when we do. Not think about doing, but actually do.

Von Goethe wrote about a tendency towards activity with such precision that his words continue to be repeated and contemplated perhaps two hundred years after he wrote this piece. While he was one of the creative giants of history – and a polymath, having attained world-class status as a dramatist, novelist, poet, journalist, painter, statesman, educator and natural philosopher – it is clear that as creative as he might have been, he made things happen and got stuff done.

Intellectualisation, rationalisation and introspection are some of my favourite hobbies. I like to think that many of the mistakes that I have made shall not be repeated as many times because I took the time to notice and amend the cause. But there is nothing quite as powerful as doing stuff! A bit of science helps us understand this – it seems that eminent performance comes after about a decade of disciplined and focused practice within a domain (from Ericsson originally, but more accessible here). Instrumentality – believing that what you do will make a difference – has a big impact in results too (kids who believe that they can get smarter if they work harder do get smarter!)…

But once you’re done intellectualising, the only way that you get somewhere is to get on the phone or the internet and buy the plane ticket… or buy your own plane of course.

Oh yeah… and a huge thanks to Daniel Lewis for his photographic work. You’ll see it here soon!

Daniel Smith

The messiness of innovation

Published on 3 December, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Changing things is great, though it’s important to keep making progress. And when you’re trying to do something amazing all the time, you have to make sure that you have spare time… otherwise, you’ll end up being late for everything a lot of the time. Back in the 1930s, Felix Pollaczek said this: “high capacity utilization and high variability in task-completion times can combine to create severe delays.”

So if you are committed to getting things done, keep focused on tasks whose duration you can maintain good control; if you are looking to do something amazing, don’t work too hard.

Then again, you could take a leaf out of Tim Ferris‘ book and just work for four hours a week… if you can eliminate time wasting habits, put your cashflow onto autopilot by outsourcing everything that you can, and keeping mobile by moving from place to place in a series of mini-retirements (ie work hard, play hard). I like his style…

I do love how there are so many ways to express the same thing. “Behonce’s Action Method” strikes me as being just a fragment of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, though it’s still a nice way of expressing the sentiment. I like to think that I come up with the odd novel thought from time to time… though maybe I ought be satisfied with just coming up with my way of expressing something. Yet I really do love their Action Pads and how they’ve created a product from their service experience!

Daniel Smith