Help people by sharing what others think, and they will find a way to interpret that and apply it to their lives.
Help people by playing back what they think, and they will find a way to figure out themselves and be consistent in their lives.
On the other hand, help people by telling them what others mean or what to do, and they will just ignore, even when you approach them with the best of intentions.
When you are looking for a culprit, remember there’s always someone who ate the last cookie in the jar.
Of course, that jar was full at some point. And the person who ate the last cookie might be the one who ate them all, the one who ate most of them, the one who ate some of them, or the one who just ate that last one.
Blame is assigned with great ease to those who are most exposed.
But if it’s reasons you are after, if you want to avoid the jar getting empty sooner than you expected the next time you fill it with your favourite cookies, you have to look a bit farther, a bit deeper, a bit more carefully.
You have got to give yourself the chance to be surprised.
Not because you are unprepared. Not because you had not thought about something enough. Not because someone is trying to get ahead of you. Not because you have lost the bigger picture.
Just because people are surprising, and you got to give them credit for it as well as allow yourself to feel positively about it, without feeling in any way diminished.
We can’t keep assessing productivity in terms of quantity.
The amount of emails we reply to.
The number of meetings we have scheduled.
How many conversations we are in.
How late we are leaving from work.
The quantity of leads, presentations, or projects we deliver.
Productivity needs to be a function of a goal we set and of the actions we take towards that goal.
If within a measure of work (an hour, a day, a week) we complete something that takes us closer to the goal, that’s where we find meaning.
The rest is just a poor proxy. Just faked busyness.
There is one important metric that should be considered in any report.
It’s the cost of what you have achieved.
Not only monetary cost – though that is always a fantastic way to start, that would immediately set you apart from the vast majority of people – but also the cost in terms of energy, in terms of time spent, in terms of forgone opportunities.
Adding the cost to your reports can very much give you a clearer picture of how effective your work is.
It’s surprising how many teams are not aware of how much their achievements cost.
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