Archive for March, 2006
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Threaten Yourself With Change
Yesterday, I met with the second most intimidating person I’ve ever worked with. We discussed a job opporutnity within my company, one that I feel passionate about, but that will be a stretch goal for me. Though some of the job is within my domain of knowledge, there’s plenty that is quite outside my knowledge, experience, or full understanding.
In other words, I’m really going to have to work to make this happen.
It is so powerful to threaten yourself with something new. Leaping off the pier into unknown waters is quite a wake-up call to your senses. There’s something to learn from all this, with regards to your own self-improvement:
Evolution Requires Discomfort
Are you sick of the same job? What is motivating you to do something different? Most of us have created callouses around the parts of our life that are uncomfortable, even though the pain points still exist, and even though we might feel better if we moved on to something that fit us more appropriately.
It goes against human nature to want to feel pain, but that’s exactly what you have to do to move yourself forward. It doesn’t have to be life-threatening pain. You might not have to quit your job, shave your head, and denounce bathing. Maybe you just have to choose something simple, like, I will not eat food from a drive-thru ever again.
The Art of the Start
Threatening yourself really requires that you break from the old. You have to pick a path and set out, and that requires STARTING. Starting is the primary ingredient of doing something different. Don’t believe me?
For almost 15 years, I did nothing about my weight except watch it go up. On the first day of doing something, here’s what I did: I wrote down all the reasons why I knew I had to make those changes. The next day, I looked over the nutrition info in the book I decided to choose to follow. That was it. I just looked. But it was the start.
Escape Velocity
Your life is a series of gravities. You are with the company you’re with and that has some gravity. You are with the relationships you have, and that has some gravity. Your habits are all gravities unto themselves. Any of them require you to achieve escape velocity to break out of the existing orbit.
I’m telling you, it’s not easy. You have to build up a fire in your internal engines to make a change. That’s just one part of the mix. Build up the fire, but you’ve gotta set your sights on a star. You have to point in a direction, and not just plan to shake free. What good is a new gravity and a new orbit if you haven’t picked it?
Second Star on the Right
The plans you make that promote change don’t have to be grand. In my case, I decided to switch roles within the same company. It’s not all that uncomfortable. I might or might not get the job, but when I do, it’ll mean just a different desk, different work to do, and a different boss. Lots of the equation stays the same.
So, you don’t have to shoot the moon. You can pick little changes, but they have to be plans where you’re talking in terms of where you’re going, now where you’ve been.
“I want to lose weight” is a sucky banner. “I want to improve my flexibility, build my aerobic health, and fit into the next size of clothes down from today” really rocks. It’s all about where you’re going, not where you’ve been.
Always try to plan with a forward-facing goal, not a break with the past.
Change for Change’s Sake
Warning, you can get in the silly loop of making changes for no reason at all. This *feels* like you’re moving forward, but really, you’re just eating up time in a new way. It’s really no better than just sitting around watching TV. It’s important that you consider the changes you want to make, and decide if this is really going to help you achieve whatever it is you think matters most to your life.
And maybe that’s a big bite to take. Hell, look at the smaller goals in your life. What would you change if you knew it’d make your life better, but in a small way?
Here’s one: I want to have no debt on my credit card by the end of the year. To that end, I have to make changes that feel ouchy, but that will get me there. It’s change. It’s going towards a goal (debt-free card). It will hurt and require habit changes to accomplish. It’s not earth-shattering.
What kinds of goals can you see threatening yourself with over the next few months? What would be the FIRST step you’d take? And how will you keep that momentum?
tags: self-improvement, career, health, change
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Beware Killer Worker Bees
Always Always Always realize that everyone isn’t always as passionate about things as you.
If you are interested in improving yourself, or if you’re interested in doing something new or big or amazing, pay attention to the reactions you get. It’s important to sort out the people who are worker bees, who feel they’re at their job due to divine providence. There might be critics of you and your ideas, but you must clearly understand the mindset of the person giving such a critique. Do they raise valid and constructive points? Or are they just buzzing around the hive and have no sense of the bigger picture?
Disclaimer: This is more griping than constructive, and yet, it’s important to PROTECT your own energy levels from those who might threaten your personal success. Most of this protection comes from within, but it pays to be wary.
Spotting a Bee
Worker bees…
Beekeeping
The main value to Worker Bees to me is that someone has to do that kind of work. I LOATHE the kinds of tasks the bees in my company do. I wouldn’t last a week. I’d procrastinate myself out of a job due to this hatred. But these guys? They just plug along and get it done.
When telling our own life stories, we are the superhero and everyone else is the villain. It’s just how it goes. When these people go home and tell their stories, I wonder how it sounds.
Enough About Other People
We work within our circles of influence, and don’t expend energy on other people. Here are some thoughts about these matters from the point of view of what YOU can do:
There is a long strange road between all the different things I’m passionate about and where they finally take me. The only difference between five years ago and today is that now, I’m really receptive to the option of taking some of those paths, and I’m willing to explore many diffuse opportunities. Part of this comes from giving up on trying to change other people’s minds, and focusing instead on making my own mind pregnant with the opportunity.
What’s your take?
Lead with benefits. Follow with features.
Another post by Marco.
For some reason, people seem to be more comfortable talking about features rather than benefits. However, people almost never buy features. They buy benefits. Case in point. I have never heard of anyone wanting to buy Acetaminophen (main ingredient in Tylenol), but I know many people that buy ache and pain relief with Tylenol (r)
Another case. People don’t “want” memory, dual core processors or NVIDIA graphics cards. They “want” applications that run faster, a computer that runs smoothly and great graphics.
They want benefits… Features are just how they get them.
Focus your communications on what people want, and you are sure to win them as customers.
I recently made the switch from focusing on features, to focusing on benefits. It’s a hard switch but it has been worth it. By doing so, I am also focusing more on my clients - their benefits - and they like it.
Of course, I still talk features. But I leave those until the end.
The results, well, they are now a feature of my company’s fatter bottom line.
Contributed by: Marco
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Marco owns a business financing company that can provide small businesses with factoring, invoice factoring,medical factoring, purchase order financing or a letter of credit.
Free Forms and Templates
The super-crack team over at PigPog have collected some excellent forms and templates from all over the place (including one from me). Give them some love.
P.S. I reverted to blogger’s standard comments, because people were complaining they couldn’t use the Haloscan comment system. Sorry, gang.
How Cool Is This?
Okay, so I subscribe to Business 2.0 magazine, and I’m a HUGE fan of the staff. Om Malik writes for Business 2.0 among other ventures. He also keeps a great blog called GigaOm. Well, I’m actually engaged in a discussion with him about telecommunications. How cool is that?
This is a guy I listen to every week on a podcast with Niall Kennedy, and I respect his opinions on lots of things. In this case, I just had a different perspective on MVNOs, a new trend in wireless telecom.
See the discussion here.
The Bionic You
If you were the best shovel-user in the world, there’d still be some work for you, but hey look: bulldozers and excavators and backhoes have all shown up. You are now marginalized to only insanely tiny niche jobs. If you knew how to set type on a manual machine (my dad did this for a living once years ago), that rocked, until electronic typesetting came to power. Oh, and forget that. We’re all publishers now. We’re video editors. We’re music producers. We all have our own labels, our own TV studios, our own comic books.
Uh-oh, that’s a problem, right? Yes. It is. Deny any of the above, and I’ll be buying my large iced coffee from you this summer. Don’t worry. I’ll listen to you cry about how you used to have a great job. Don’t believe me? GM just offered pretty much EVERYONE a chance to shuffle off the mortal coil with a little bit of cash and a strange boot-print feeling on their ass.
If you make a living at a keyboard, you’ve got to take a look at the work you’re doing and break it down into tiny pieces. You’ve gotta be brutal about it. Look at every single piece of this pie. What can be done by a robot? What are you doing manually that just betrays your lack of technical knowledge? (I had a personal experience with this last night: I learned how vector drawings would’ve been SO much easier for some things I was painting pixels to accomplish).
But all is not lost.
More and more conversations are out there on the web about how humans are still the secret sauce to things working well. I agree. I think we’ve got all kinds of easy-cheesy things on-board that make us better than the best google search. Sure there are things computers and systems will do better for us. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Amazon launched Mechanical Turk because they understood the value of humans to do a lot of little jobs that need human interface. This is neat because it is a shot across the bow of the crumbling notion of computers replacing humans as “artificial intelligence” machines. It’s just not likely to be happening any time soon. Helpers? Yes. But more like bionics, cybernetics. You follow?
How does this all relate to you, your job, your future role?
It’s the value chain, stupid
Clinton knew it was the economy in 1992. Around the same time, we learned it was cheaper to manufacture overseas. Not many people make computers (or anything) in the US in any bulk now. It’s stupid to do so. It’s cheaper elsewhere.
In the 2000’s, Thomas Friedman knows it’s in the value chain. What does that mean? My definition of the value chain is: a view into the different components of your product/service creation-delivery-service process from a cost-vs-return perspective. Blech. What a crappy definition. Let’s break it down just a little bit.
You make something. Maybe you make software. Someone writes requirements for what it should do. Someone in the company comes up with the design. Someone writes the code. Someone tests it. Someone documents what it does. Someone markets it. Someone sells it. Someone supports it. And then, there’s a whole other layer. Someone pays you. Someone keeps you safe, legally. Someone hires you. Someone keeps your benefits up to snuff. hese are all distinct elements of the value chain. And often, they are all done within the walls of your company. But they don’t have to be.
Some people think of value chains as a way to understand outsourcing. Call centers are an easy example. It’s cheaper to get people in Bangalore to answer the phone than it is for someone in San Francisco. I can buy 7 software developers in Hyderabad, India, for what it’d cost me in Boston. That’s all easy to understand, right?
The Bionic You
Considering the value chain means understanding if what you do is VITAL to the product/service you offer, or if what you do is something easily replicated in a cheaper location? What extra something are you giving to the process? Are you a set of hands like a shovel or are you the mind that can jump into the bulldozer and get even more done with this new technology?
Creativity, content, new ways to synthesize information and ideas from disparate sources are your new target skillset. You are a farmer standing in line at Henry Ford’s factory, looking at the well-oiled machines of industry. But boy, this factory is crazy. I’m already seeing signs of it.
An enhanced you, a you equipped with digital talents is now positioned to maneuver around the existing passel of “knowledge workers” like a ninja. There’s a layer cake out there right now: On the bottom layer are people who aren’t comfortable with technology, and who are dragging their feet trying to hold to the old ways. In the middle layer are people who can use technology and use if proficiently, but more in the mindset of “weapons.” Point them at a target, and they’ll hit it. But ask them to contemplate what targets will come up next, and they’ll shrug. The top layer of this cake is where you can make a difference as a creative person.
Just like the cake I described, there can’t be a top layer without the bottom two layers. Don’t ever look down on the people who fill those other categories. They are all providing something valuable to the system as well. However, it’s in the realm of the creative where the most opportunity will lie in the coming years. I almost said “security,” but I think job security is about as relevant to conversations as betamax.
What This Means
If you’re heavy on the left-brain, prepare to laugh at me and dismiss me.
You should start looking into education around the following:
By the way, give Visual Thinking School a look-see. Dave Gray’s got the right idea with his company, XPLANE. They’re selling their storytelling abilities to HUGE companies and institutions all the time. Demand is outpacing supply.
Learning about play, how we learn from it, how to use it for a communications method, and how to create new content for it strikes me as a safe career for the coming future. There are lots of engineers out there who can work through ragdoll physics and wireframe rendering, and those jobs are noble. However, it’s writing the stories and populating the worlds with characters and giving games something to do that gives those engineers their work. YOU should consider a position bringing content to play in some form or another.
Oh, and if you want a career in the gaming industry, it’s now just a given that gaming has overtaken the movie industry and is eating its LUNCH! Trade your moviestar aspirations for game character dreams.
I think you could clean up by throwing away technical certifications in Linux and getting instead a degree in how humans do what they do. Like I said a minute ago: we really are still monkeys staring into flame. Skills in the human world are far more necessary than knowing how to code php. There are plenty of folks to do that for you.
Finally
Ultimately, the bionic you is someone who uses all this amazing technology around us to share their creative vision with us all. Learn all about the technologies that blend your ability to develop new content, sythesize different things into a new format. Mashups are like this. As I type this line, I’m listening to a blend of Kris Kross and Ludacris that neither artist would’ve thought of left to their own devices. Instead, I have someone named Instamatic to thank.
The blood in your brain is much more important than AJAX, RubyOnRails, or anything else you’re reading about these days in the field of technology.
Go forth and hone your new top-layer-cake skill sets!
Simple Tools, Small Machines
Think about this: there’s not a lot tricky about a pocket knife and yet, it’s very useful. What about tape? Duct tape is practically a cult. Pens and paper mean we have tools to push thought into a storeable, reusable format. Those devices are all tools.
Machines can be simple, too. The smallest motor basically does one thing: move something around in a circle as fast as it can. And yet, from this most simple thing, we can drill, we can pump water, we can make our cars move forward.
There’s something fascinating and gorgeous and lustful in turning this into a lens for us to think about things we do. What are some of the tools and machines you’ve developed? Do you have a cool little Excel spreadsheet trick that gets the job done? Do you have a little cardboard guide that makes packaging your company’s widget a little easier?
Here’s an example from my universe: I was once a 411 operator for the phone company. You know the drill. “What city, please?” “In Boston, can I have the number for Domino’s Pizza?” “Sure, on Beach, Boylston, or Staniford Street?” Yep. That was my job. The engine underneath this business for the phone company is: get ‘em in, get ‘em out, do it fast and efficient. The measure to beat: average work time. A typical call center — say, a help desk — is measured at around 3 minutes turnaround. At 411, we had to stay under 18 seconds to be profitable.
To search the database, we had to type four characters for the town/city name, and then the first four characters of the listing’s first field (either business first name or residence last name), then two characters of the next name. Here are two examples:
Bost / Domi Pi
Read/ Baxt Ja
By futzing around with the system, I realized that I got much better answers if I gave fewer letters to the first word and more to the second:
Bost/ Do Pizz
Read/ Ba Jame
But man, you can not mess around with the “rules” of a call center. It’s not allowed. Because the folks at the staff level position in headquarters have done studies this way and that to prove they’re right. And by the numbers, they probably are. But here’s the thing: my idea was right, too. So, I implemented it.
I managed a team of 33 employees. I told the ones who’d listen (mostly the non-lifers) that they’d get way better search results from my trick. Guess what? My team suddenly shot their average work time down from around 18 seconds to a consistent 14 seconds. You think four seconds isn’t a lot? It got me dragged into the district headquarters to explain what the hell I’d done.
All this from changing a search parameter manually with my fingers. Yep.
Sometimes, we get locked up by wanting to change the universe in big ways. We think, “Yeah, it’s been done.” Guess what? The highest number of U.S. patents granted in any year goes to people who are just tweaking other people’s inventions. Yep. Better mousetraps.
What do you have? What’s on board? How can you take some of the things you know how to do and make them into a little, discrete useful tool?
Comment Envy
David Heinemeir Hansson has an INCREDIBLE blog called Loud Thinking. He’s the guy who wrote Rails for 37Signals. Via my favorite del.icio.us stream (Bill Keaggy’s stream), I found a link to this conversation about technical publications. What a must-read.
Tim O’Reilly from the famous O’Reilly Media chimes in with some HUGE, interesting, relevant points. The conversation *really* gets roiling along. Another publisher joins in. It’s all respectful, educational, and fascinating.
This is how blogs SHOULD work, people. Ideas should spark conversations that become far more than the original post could ever be. I envy the idea of getting all your smart minds spilled onto my page for discussions. Someday I will find a magic means to get the conversations going on this blog. Then, I will retire a happy man.
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What’s up with that?
