When most of your time is spent doing things you were doing yesterday.
When the most common answer to ideas is “something to keep in mind for the future”.
When you get lost in planning and details, postponing what matters in search of perfect.
When you and those around you are busy, and yet that busyness does not bring you any closer to what you want to achieve.
It’s time to leap.
Not being an asshole is a daily choice.
Not letting your mood affect the way you treat others. Not setting the agenda of a company, of a department, of a team on the base of your current focus. Not having the stress derived from your position permeate every interaction, every decision, every exchange. Not allowing busyness to become the answer to all requests of help or information or attention or care. Not giving a bad day, an unsatisfactory job, a regretful life the power to determine the days, jobs and lives of those around you.
It’s not an If-This-Then-That type of situation. We have an active role in deciding how we follow up with actions and words to the circumstances of the world.
There might be mitigating circumstances, and yet we own this.
There are two major factors that go against doing.
The first one is perfection. It’s a myth, something everybody aims for and nobody ever achieves. It is the resistance of having all your ducks in a row, and it delays delivering until a day that will never come.
The second one is analysis paralysis. At any time, we have access to a whole lot more information than what we need to make things happen, and this is unsettling to most. For every piece that tells you to do something, there is one that tells you to do the opposite, and so we lose focus, get distracted and, once again, delay delivery.
Habit and practice are the antidotes.
If you are preparing to deliver a presentation that matters (to you), consider the following.
Start with the audience and the change you’d like to see (even when you are just presenting results, you are still demanding a change). List them down somewhere and have them visible throughout the process.
Have the deck ready early, at least a week before the presentation.
Little text on a slide is always better than more. Always.
A list is a list even without a bullet.
Allow enough time to collect and implement the needed feedback. If you get feedback too close to the time you are supposed to deliver the presentation (<24hrs), be brave and disregard it.
Write a script for the key points and the transition between slides.
Rehearse the presentation multiple times, keeping the script at hand, but without reading it.
Few hours before the actual delivery, free your mind and take a break from the presentation. Do something else. The deck is ready by now, and so you are.
Good luck.
The ability to move past things is a direct measure of future success.
How long will you keep working on that project that has zero evidence of success potential? How long will you continue with the same strategy when everything around is telling you it’s wrong? How many excuses will you come up with to motivate keeping in the team a person who is no longer the right fit? How far will you push your regret for that promotion you have not been granted against everyone’s expectations? How much is the last big failure going to impact the way you approach your next responsibility?
We have the impression that by sticking to things, plans, ideas, people we commit to them, and if we do that long enough, we will make them better. More often, that is just an excuse, an easy way to hide behind the power of sunk costs and limited possibilities.
Once you have determined that you’ve given the situation your 100%, and yet it is still not working, move past that. It’s not being cold and heartless, it’s not jumping from one opportunity to the next, it’s not a selfish act. It’s allocating the limited resources you have at your disposal at any given time. When you do that by focusing mostly on the past, chances are the future will look grim.
You've got this 