Category: self-help

Inputs and outputs

Fabrizio1 Comment

Admitting that luck has a huge part in most of our achievements and successes does not mean diminishing them. Nor does it mean diminishing our skills and capacities.

It’s more about understanding that there are a set of things we have under our control and a set of things (usually bigger) that we have absolutely no power over. When we understand this fundamental difference, than it is a whole lot easier to practice accordingly and let go of worries, preoccupations and anxieties that are linked to the latter group. And usually strongly limit and hinder our performance in the former one.

You can decide to show up for work every day, you cannot control the path your career will take five or ten years down the road.

You have power over how you will use your time today, you have none over whether people will like what you did or will agree with your decision.

You can set out to begin a project that can potentially touch the life of many people, you cannot decide whether people will actually be touched by it, or change their mind if they are not.

It is up to you to say yes or no to that request, you have very limited grasp on what will happen next.

When we look back at the successes we’ve had, we should praise the role of the work we’ve done, of the efforts we’ve put in, and also be very mindful of the fact that under very similar circumstances the outcome could have been completely different. You can call it luck, randomness, environment, chance, context. It does not matter. As scary as it sounds, you control the inputs, never the outputs.

An additional point on focus

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A person can normally be focused, or in “flow“, for 50 to 90 consecutive minutes (source: Peak Performance, by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness).

So, after you have picked your long, medium and short term focus, and after you have made sure that the amount of push distraction (e-mails, notification, colleagues, and so on) are reduced to almost zero, you still need to make the effort to sit down for a chunk of time and do the work.

Pull distractions might be quite dangerous as well: if we get up from our place three or four times in an hour as we feel restless, if we feel the need to check if we got a message, if we really need to pin that item on the calendar right now, if we absolutely must give in to the urge of going outside and breath some of the fresh spring air, if we have a meeting every half an hour for the rest of the day. No matter how well organized you have the rest, that is not how you will eventually deliver your best work.

Take a breath, go for a walk, attend that meeting, and come back when you can allocate time and attention to what matters. The reward will boost your morale.

 

Focus

Fabrizio4 Comments

Focus is a simple concept and a very challenging practice.

Focus is understanding what is important and what not in your life, what you want to achieve and what is your end game. Where do you want to get before your time is over?

Focus is making short and medium term decisions about what to commit to and what to say no to. Is that next thing that looks so shiny and everybody is using going to help you get where you want to get before your time is over?

And focus is also a minute after minute choice on what to respond to, what has the power to distract you, to push you through a black hole of wasted time and energies. Should I keep notifications on or off? Shoul I keep the mail client always running in the background? Is it ok to be active in the official work chat? How do I react next time someone stops at my desk/office for a chat?

 

Legacy

Fabrizio3 Comments

What is your predominant status?

Anger. “You can’t, you shan’t”. This is the status of fear, of control, of walls to be built, of closed doors and burnt down bridges, of punishment, of arrogance, of self-blindness, of others as a tool to achieve your goals.

Regret. “I could, I should”. This is the status of incompleteness, of insatisfaction, of “if only”, of constant research of something you have already achieved, of blaming the circumstances, of not going beyond because you don’t know what’s behind.

Judgement. “They could’ve, they should’ve”. This is the status of gossip, of spreading mean words, of thinking ourselves better than others, of looking outside rather than inside, of being stuck, of never getting along with anybody.

Empowerement. “We can, we shall”. This is the status of leaders, of knowing about the possibilities, of not letting go to desperation even if you do not know the path, of getting other together around a dream, of looking where others can go and not where they are now.

All are possible, and different circumstances might make us prefer one or the other. Yet eventually you’ll have to start thinking about your legacy, and double down on what you want to leave behind.

Your own experience

FabrizioLeave a comment

Most of the information online nowadays is organised in bullet points. There’s an “how-to” step-by-step guide for basically everything, and listicles are one of the most popular form of content that gets consumed.

Yet, a part from very practical type of instructions (changing a tyre, replacing a lightbulb, starting off your grill, and so on), this type of content fails to deliver outstanding returns on topics such as leadership, self-improvement, marketing, and more generally speaking “success”. They can certainly turn your day into a black hole of information search, yet their effectiveness is debatable.

It is mainly because the people that write them attempt to summarize a certain type of success retroactively. They look from the present towards the past to identify certain patterns, moments or actions that have influenced their achievements. It might be a good exercise in self-reflection, yet as readers we should take all that with a grain of salt.

Kahneman has demonstrated how fallible we are when we attempt to recall experiences from the past, and on top of that it is quite improbable that the challenges you are facing now and the context you are living in are the same as the writer’s.

Value your own experience more than anything else. Stop searching for shortcuts or solutions online and start experimenting. Keep a journal and reflect on what is happening to you, learn from mistakes and improve on your next step. And when you come across a potentially interesting article about a topic that is dear to you, seek not the single points and the tactics, but the underlying strategy and mindset that made that case successful.

And of course, this is my “how to” guide on “how to approach how-to type of content on the net”. So, you know what to do. Nobody ever wrote a memoir by saying: “I have achieved what I have achieved by following this other guy’s life instruction”.