Month: September 2007

While my brother was here, he introduced me to this band from Australia called “Cat Empire”.  Its an awesome combination of australian pub rock, latin (they actually recorded one of their albums in Cuba!) and a bunch of other genres.  They’re just a bunch of 22 year old guys from Melbourne, but have been doing extremely well.  The song below is one of my favourites “Hello”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v63TYgNtOV0&hl=ru_RU&fs=1&]

Ever heard of the children’s author “Enid Blyton”?  Most people in english commonwealth countries have, and growing up in Australia I read tons of her books.  They were all very exciting, and some of you will probably laugh reading me talking about her here.

I recently found that there’s an updated biography published about her life.  It talks about how Enid’s father was pushing her to become a musician.  Everything in her life was being directed towards that goal – by her father.  But over time, Enid was finding that she didn’t enjoy music as much.

Then one day she decided she wanted to teach writing.  Once she started at it, everything changed.  And she wrote about it later that it was like putting a “round peg in a round hole”. 

Too many people in life do things they don’t enjoy.  I think thats a great way to say it – we all need to spend more time ensuring that we’re round pegs in round holes.  Just like my favourite childhood author did.

Ever heard of the DVD called “The Secret”?

Its a self-help/development movie which talks about the “secret” to building wealth.  Oprah is a huge fan, among many others, and its selling very well.  In the end its an updated version of Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich”.  The basic idea they express is that you should focus your mind on your goals and visualize achieving them.  They presume that limiting beliefs are the core reason people fail in business.

Its junk.

Actually I’ve been a big fan (in the past) of Think and Grow Rich.  But by the time “The Secret” came along, I knew better.  Some of the biggest scammers I’ve ever met spend their time dreaming up big plans, which have no basis in reality, their skillsets or resources.  And then to achieve their big goals they have to resort to a lot of dishonest marketing and ripping people off.

So what is better?

I’m in the fortunate position to talk with many successful entrepreneurs.  And something I’ve noticed is that the really successful entrepreneurs are Ayn Rand fans.  They’ve all read Atlas Shrugged and have spent a lot of time thinking about her philosophy.  I’ve also noticed that most “The Secret” and “Think and Grow Rich” fans aren’t very successful.

So my advice to you is that if you’ve been spending a bunch of time on The Secret or Think and Grow Rich is to throw them away and read Atlas Shrugged.  Its a little heavier reading, but you’ll notice a big difference afterwards.

I have.

So we’re having an Australia party this Friday, here in the Dominican Republic.  Of course, you’re invited!

Every year I find a couple of things that make a major breakthrough to how I work.  One of those this year was discovering a type of application called an “outliner”.

An outliner is a very simple program for handling lists.  Ever used Microsoft Word in outline mode?  Thats where you can indent a bunch of ideas, below each other.   For example

Point 1
    Point 2
        Point 3
    Point 4
        Point 5

etc.  The key thing in an outliner is that you can keep indenting this as deep as you want, and open and close them so you can gain different levels of visibility.  The other key point is that beside each item you can add “notes”.  So I might want to add a couple of pages of text to point 1, and its very easy to do it, similar to how you might add comments to a cell in excel.

Thats all an outliner does.  And using is has become my most critical application, even more important than my email.  Yes, I’d rather lose all my email data than my outliner data.

Here’s why:  Because it allows indenting, you can file your ideas any way you want.  I’ve got about 6 major categories, including topics like “Quarterly goals”, “personal goals”, “client goals”, “lists”, passwords” and “people followup”.  These are the topics I access most frequently.  Then inside these are a ton of lists all nicely filed away.  I can easily manage projects inside it, capture new ideas, and everything is organized.

What has been really interesting was to learn that in fact a lot of things I work on are actually just lists.  So as I started using this tool, all kinds of lists are now kept in my outliner.. Books to read.. TV shows to watch..  Restaurants to try locally.. Things to do on my next trip to New York/LA/Santo Domingo/Australia..  My packing checklist..  New words I have to look up in the dictionary.. Ideas I’ve had.. Articles to read..  All of it just goes into my outliner and is neatly filed away.. ALONG with my current goals, and an organized project plan of goals to achieve.  So each day I simply pick out a couple of tasks that need to be done and work on them for that day.

Now the breakthrough part of this is when you can sync it with a handheld device.  I have run into quite a few problems with this aspect, and finally found that Bonsai, for the Palm works great.  So all my data is always with me wherever I go.  For those that are experimenting with this, I used to use LifeBalance, but the notes are too short, only 2kb, so you lose a lot of data.  I also tried MyLifeOrganized, and while their desktop version is awesome, I had problems switching to windows mobile.  I actually switched back to Palm just to use Bonsai, and their software both on the desktop and handheld is great.  If you’re not syncing your data, then MyLifeOrganized is the best outliner I have found.

Now, the next thing to know is that the most effective way to use these is to learn about Project Management.. But we’ll talk about that another day.  🙂

The second major breakthrough in productivity I learned is that if you’re stalling or not getting a task done, the reason is that its probably too complex.  If you take a couple of steps back, and break it into a a checklist of pieces, it suddenly becomes easy to make progress.  Again, the key outcome is to be always having some momentum, no matter how small.

This sometimes takes a little while to realise – you may be stuck on a task and its unclear why you’re not getting further along.  You have to wake up at that point, and brainstorm how to break it into a smaller checklist.  Once you do that, its amazing how the most complicated things to get done suddenly become trivially easy!

I had this explained to me many years ago by a friend on my AIESEC International team, Ante Glavas.  But it didn’t really sink in back then.  More recently, Alan Weiss, the expert consultant talks about this in some of his materials.  Alan Weiss is also partially where my previous posting came from, about doing more by doing less.  He turns out a lot of work, yet his goal is to finish each day by 2pm.

BF Skinner, the person who came up with the (controversial) topic of classical operant conditioning was also extremely productive.  He used to write for just 25 minutes or so at a time, and always take forced breaks where he’d reward himself.  He wrote an insane number of books.  I mention BF Skinner, because his methods of classical operant conditioning and providing rewards made him very productive and they can for you too.  Getting good rewards is critical to maintaining motivation.  Don’t shoot the dog is the classic book on this topic, and you can read my review of it here: http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/#dontshootdoog

Yesterday I was talking with one of my developers, who has been a bit erratic in his work lately.  He’s been vanishing for days at a time, not getting things done.  After talking with him, it became clear the issue was one of motivation.. And how he sometimes completely loses motivation to work.

This has happened to me too, and I suspect it happens to everyone who works independently from home.  Here’s what I learned through experience (and what I suggested to my developer):

One of the biggest causes of demotivation is TOO MUCH work, and not getting things done.  You make a big checklist of things to do for the day, and by the time you’re 2/3 of the way through the day you’ve only done 2 items, with 12 more remaining.  You don’t feel like doing the other items because its too much work and you’re already behind anyways.

This pattern can set in place for days at a time, very easily.  For some people I suspect it can last even longer.

The trick is to do less work each day, especially if you’re really demotivated.  All you need to do is make a list of 2-3 things you can get done that day.  And do them.  And finish the day early.

Then, come back the next day and do 4 things.  Slowly increase the load.  But always make sure you’re scheduling far less things than you think you can actually do.  The important thing is to gain positive momentum, and get things moving forward day by day, and finishing the day on a very positive note, since you accomplished your goals for the day.

This is a form of positive reinforcement, which is talked about in “Don’t Shoot the Dog” (see my review here: http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/#dontshootdoog)