Episodes

“You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.” – Tom Rath.

In our lives, we tend to fall into things, or luck into things or desperately cling onto things. And many times, we don’t design the life that we’re looking for. Even though we see the results of what planning and design does for other things, we don’t take that on ourselves. And not only that, when we design our lives, we tend to design based on the goal, and not based on the realities of who we are. We’re going to talk a little bit about talent and designing your life. After reading a number of articles and books about this particular topic, it seems all of them fall into this line, where your happiness is an intersection of your values, and your talents. You’ve always seen those talent shows where people aren’t very talented at the thing they’re supposed to be talented at. Boy, they love what they’re doing! Or someone has a job in what they’re talented at, but it makes them miserable. I think we’ve all met people who are really good at their jobs, they hate it. What we’re trying to do is find that intersection of value and talent.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Strength Finder 2.0

The first book we’ll talk about today is Strength Finders 2.0 from 2007 by Tom Rath. He worked for the Gallup company for 13 years and is author of this book that focuses on what you’re good at. It’s not one of these personality tests. But instead, it’s a list of talents. And then rank orders your talents are from best to worst. And they’re not even just things that you would find in a personality test. Like I’m an introvert or I’m an extrovert. It’s things like lifetime Learner, and Ideation, Connectedness, and Relators. There are all kinds of personalities that are built into this test. He also talks about what a waste of time it is, to really work on your weaknesses, I would that is partially true. You have to be at least minimally good at time management or minimally good at other things, even if you’re not particularly good at them. Because modern day life and work requires you to be at least okay in those things. But really, where you have to focus in your life are what your talents and strengths are. This book is called Strength Finders, 2.0. And you can find it everywhere you find books. The interesting thing is that if you buy the book, you get a code. And so, make sure that the book, either digital or physical, has the code to go online and take the test. The test will give you the top results, you can actually just buy the test from the website itself and it is five dollars cheaper, but you don’t have the book.

https://store.gallup.com/c/en-us/assessments

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

The next book we’ll talk about is a book from 2016 called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. We’ve talked about very small motions when it comes to habits and goals. I hear a lot of people right now talking about this exploration of where their life is at or where their life could be at. There’s a lot of time for introspection right now. While there are small steps, in terms of experiment, and research, and looking at what makes you happy, it still is about major life changes. Which means the work is a little bit bigger than a lot of the different plans that we’ve talked about in the past. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t take some of these ideas and try some of them. You don’t have to plan your entire life; you can just plan aspects of it. For example, if you think you might be interested in volunteering for a nonprofit organization and maybe you’d like to be on the board someday. Give it a shot. Try it. These are experiments. While the book itself talks about big life changes, they don’t have to be big. You can run very minor experiments in your own life. It’s time to really step out and really see what’s possible for us to do. Don’t be intimidated by the message of the big changes. If you are considering doing major life changes, such as living in a different place, or getting a different kind of job, I do suggest reading this book. It’s a very detailed book with lots of ideas and exercises. The exercises will help you in designing a full-blown life. I found the book really enjoyable and really enlightening. This book is about going after the things you really want to have in your life and not just falling into them or accidentally backing into them. This is a really great perspective to have through any aspect of your life. The book is a little bit focused on jobs. But this is important for all of your life, not just your work. He says that life is about, “playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself each day,” I’d say it’s never too late to start, and you should start right now.]

What Problem Are you Trying to Solve?

That’s what I think this book is really about, designing life where our talents meet our values. The first step in doing that is trying to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. You’re here in your life for a particular reason. Maybe because you fell into it, or it’s a life that you tried to design. Maybe you’re happy with it, or maybe you’re not happy with it. But you decide that there’s some problems that you want to solve. And when you start identifying these problems. Sometimes we just give up, we get what is called “learned helplessness”, which is when we won’t even solve our problems anymore. Because we just determined that it’s just not worth it. ’I’m never going get what I want.’ He talks about two types of Gravity Problems. Gravity is not a problem and if you said that gravity is your problem, it wouldn’t work. Because gravity just is. You can’t stop gravity. The two types of gravity problems are Functionally Inactionable. Which means you could maybe change it. But there’s a high risk, high effort, and it probably won’t change. Best thing you can do at that point is to alter your goals into something that you can win. Then there is Totally Inactionable. And that means you can’t change it, no matter how hard you try. He gives us an example of maybe a poet who wants to earn a lot of money. But you know what, poetry doesn’t earn a lot of money, and he’s never going to make poetry earn a lot of money. That is a Gravity Problem. This is where he talks about changing your focus. Could that person who writes poetry, become a songwriter? Or get together with a graphic artist and start making posters? There might be something that this person could do that incorporates what they love to do, but actually earn them money. Get out of that gravity well and look at something that you could actually change!

Lifeview and Workview

The first part of his plan talks about reflecting on your life with two 250-word paragraphs and to spend no more than 30 minutes on them. The first paragraph is your “workview” philosophy. What is good work? What is satisfying work? Is it money? Is it impact? The second paragraph is the “lifeview”, which involves personal values. How a good life is lived, Is it religion? Morality? Justice? Society? what are those things that makes your life valuable? Now, the goal is to balance those two things. If you compromise one of those in favor of the other one, you will become unhappy. Find out where those two paragraphs intersect.

Good Time Journal and the AEIOU Method

He asked everyone to do what he calls a “Good Time Journal.” You’ve heard people probably talk about “joy” or “flow” or “peak experiences”. It’s those times when you’re having so much fun. Time just disappears. You don’t know where the day went.  That’s what you have to start documenting. He talks about also then documenting the things that drain you he talks about using a method that he calls the AIEOU method

• A – What were you actually doing?
• E – Environment? Where were you? What was the mood of the area?
• I – Interaction? Was it people that you were working with machines devices? Was it a formal setting? Was it a casual setting?
• O – Objects What were you actually working with? Were they devices? Or tools? Or things?
• U – Users who were you there with? Were they adding or subtracting to your flow? Why?

He also talks about running this kind of analysis with memories of our peak experiences or memories of our bad experiences. Memories stick with us for a reason. He asked us to do the good time journal daily or at least every few days for at least three weeks.

Then once you have a few ideas about what really gives you those flow moments or what really detracts from those flow moments, he asked people to generate lots of ideas about what would make our lives happier. He says don’t fall in love with that first idea. Our brains are lazy and it’s just going to fall for whatever we say the first thing is, or it’ll fall for the thing that seems like the least amount of work, come up with lots of things that will potentially make your life happier. Once we have those ideas, he asked us to look at creating prototypes of solutions to those ideas Test out the things that we think are going to be great ideas, or solutions for the problems we’re trying to solve. Ask questions, do research, collaborate with other people.

Feasible Other Lives

His next step is to create possible other lives. He wants you to look at creating three possible, five-year versions of yourself. Where could you be in five years, if things were just radically different based on what you documented are your values and what you documented are your problems that you’re trying to solve? And there’s no right answer to this. A few of them will be feasible, some of them will make you happy. Make sure they’re just not different versions of the same thing, or different versions of what you’re doing now. Present your plans to other people who know you and can give you good feedback. You then move on to having hands-on experiences. What could I do in exploring these feasible five-year plans? But the important thing is that these aren’t full-scale models. They’re just tiny examples of what your future feasible life could be. Try to get other people involved in your experience. Start conversations with others who are doing what you’re thinking about doing. Try to turn those into opportunities of learning. He calls it “sneaking up on the future”. You’re going towards the life you want, but not fully. So, one example he gave was of a woman who wanted to be in charge of a restaurant. She thought she just loved everything about restaurants. She quit everything, used your savings, and bought a restaurant. And as it turned out, she did not like owning a restaurant. She liked designing restaurants. She liked planning them out. But the actual day-to-day work was not something she enjoyed. She could have found that out by doing some minor experiments, like working in a restaurant, or interviewing people who work in restaurants. But because she jumped in without these experiments, it became hard for her to analyze this before it happened. And she just jumped right in.

Interview Key People

My friend’s father who I’ve mentioned before, always had this great idea where he talked about interviewing people. One of the exciting things about interviewing people is they love talking, particularly when it has to do with themselves. So, it’s very easy to ask someone for 30 minutes for a cup of coffee, or maybe a Zoom meeting just to talk over what their lives are like, or what their thoughts are about this kind of industry. People love to talk about themselves. Give it a shot! It sounds a little scary, but I can tell you it’s a valuable effort. I had this opportunity to do something very similar to that. I came in second place on a scholarship for actuarial science. And while I didn’t get the scholarship, the person who was in charge of the scholarship, liked my application. He invited me to come out to his company and spend half a day there and really learn about what it takes to be an actuarial scientist in an insurance company. So, I got two hours of his time, which was amazing.  I got to interview him about what he thought the job was like, what he thought the company was like working for. I had a lot of reason to believe I would love this job, because I’m a math girl. And I love anything that involves math. Except when I walked away from this interview period, I figured out that while I like math, I don’t like statistics about death and accidents. And I would become very depressed about a job like that. So, this interview process led me into a different path, and allowed me to see that this job potential wasn’t really for me. Think of an example where a person decides that they think they would enjoy owning a restaurant, but they’re not entirely sure. Or maybe they would give up their high-pressure job and work in a library. These experiments can happen by taking small part time jobs, or volunteer jobs and giving it a little experiment to see if it’s true. Would you like working in those scenarios? That’s what he means when he talks about running experiments. Test out aspects of these feasible lives.

You’ve come up with some ideas. You created this feasible life. You’ve interviewed and done some research about what these feasible lives will be. Now to look at the options, narrow down the list, really understand things. And deep dive into what you learned in this whole process of looking at your designed life. You can even start to live part of your reality if it’s possible. Again, you could volunteer at a library, work part time at a restaurant, and play out some of these scenarios.

Failure

And then he says, if we do get stuck in learned helplessness, don’t consider yourself what he says “screwed”. Instead, acknowledge that you’re stuck, and then reduce the risk and do a smaller prototype. But just remember, it can sometimes feel like a failure if things didn’t really work out the way you thought they were. But if you’re living a life of curiosity, and experiments, there is no such thing as failure. There is learning something and amending your plans. Or experiment passed and you have more things that you’ve learned and more experiments to run. But something didn’t go the way you thought it was going to go. Write it down, categorize it, and then look for insights. Sometimes there are screw ups where you just messed something up. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it has no bearing on the future. Or there’s weaknesses. That’s where you have to go in and look at it and say, ‘Maybe I could hire a business manager, or a third-party company that could take care of those things for me. So, I can focus on the part I love.’ Again, that analysis has to take place when you live that life of a curious person. Keep trying stuff and don’t postpone it. But we’re doing little experiments. There’s no reason why you couldn’t volunteer at a library next week or work part time at a restaurant after your day job right now. So, don’t put off these experiments. Just keep experimenting and looking at those things. And if you run into a problem, again, re-frame it a little bit, don’t just say, ‘Oh, well, I failed. This is over.’ But instead look at where you were coming from. What would be some other perspectives that other people might have about what went wrong? Maybe talk to someone who knows you very well to help identify what actually went wrong and what could be done to change it. But all of this is a real process, and an awareness for us to really understand what we wanted, and what went right what went wrong.

Once you design something, it will change your future, it is possible to change things just by designing it.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Summary

1. Take an assessment of your strengths. Get feedback from other people about your strengths, you might be surprised!  But get really focused on what you’re good at where your talents are and then start strengthening those talents.
2. Know what problems you’re trying to solve in your life. Make sure that they are solvable, and that you’re taking a framework of it, that makes it possible to solve it. Make sure that you don’t have learned helplessness and just get defeated right away. Make sure you take a new look at what’s going on and coming up with the right problem to solve.
3. Identify those flow moments and peak moments and also really bad moments and analyze them with the AEIOU method.
4. List your values of work and home life. Are you getting the right money? Impact? Expression? Value? Where is it that your life values and your work values intersect?
5. Create three, five-year possible lives. Research them determine what would be the best life for you. Ask questions of experts or people in that field. interview people in that life and try out small experiments to see if you can prove that these would actually be good ideas for you.
6. Remember, you can’t fail when you live a life of curiosity and experiments. There’s always lessons to be learned whether they fail or succeed.

Challenge

Write two 250-word paragraphs about what your work view is and your life view. What are your values, your requirements, your satisfactions? What makes you happy? So, you know where your first options to design your life will come from?

Fun Advice Quote

Our fun advice is from Buckaroo Banzai “Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean. Cuz remember, no matter where you go there you are.”

And he’s right about that. You are where you are. And now’s the time to design where you’re going to be next.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” That was a quote by Benjamin Franklin.

The other day I went grocery shopping. And right now, with the pandemic going on, I tried to go grocery shopping the least amount of time I possibly can, just to keep safe. So, I get to the grocery store, and I didn’t have a list and I didn’t really look at what I was missing or what I had in my house. And I never bought the things that I really needed to buy on that grocery shopping trip. Sure, I got about 80% of the things that I wanted, but not much more. And when I got home, I realized I didn’t have the things I really wanted. Was that a bad grocery shopping. Or was that a bad night before grocery shopping, when I didn’t even look in my fridge to see what I needed? It was definitely my failure to prepare. We see errors in our lives all the time. But we want to try to reduce them so that we can attain the goals we’re looking to get. And when I didn’t prepare to grocery shop properly, I had to go back a second time, it cost me an extra hour of time and all it would have taken was just a few minutes with my head in the refrigerator to see what I needed.

Pre-mortem

This is where we get into the conversation about a pre-mortem. You’ve heard the word post-mortem, where you look at something and say “wow, what happened?” But a pre-mortem is when you look at something ahead and try to prevent the mistake in the first place. According to the Harvard Business Review, in an article from 2007 “On like a typical critiquing session in which a project team member are asked what might go wrong. The pre mortem operates on the assumption that the patient has died. So, what did go wrong? The pre-mortem seeks to identify five the threats and weaknesses via hypothetical presumption of near future failure.” It used to be Murphy’s law that said, “if anything can possibly go wrong, it does.”

Poka-Yoke

This is where the concept of Poka-Yoke comes in. It’s a Japanese term, which means to basically prevent mistakes. You look at it in terms of trying to determine what will go wrong, not what has gone wrong. Some examples you can see of Poka-Yoke in our lives are things like airbags or spell checkers, fire extinguishers, nightlights, remember those Mac books that had the magnetic plugs? You can imagine that someone tripped on it just one too many times. And they wanted a way to prevent dropping your laptop on the floor and breaking it. There are two kinds of mistakes that happen. something stupid just happened. It was random and you could not have prevented it. If you want to. You were driving to work. You had every intention of getting there on time but traffic was backed up because of an accident. Can’t prepare for that. Maybe you can leave a little bit early in case it does happen. But for the most part, it happens so infrequently, that you can’t really prepare. Or mistakes that are part of the process. For example, I do laundry on Sunday night, I take my gym clothes out of my car and Friday, I wash them Sunday night, it gets late, sometimes the laundry isn’t done very early. And then I forget to put them back in the gym bag and put my gym bag back in the car. Or maybe I just forget to take the gym bag again. That’s a process mistake. Something in my process is causing things to go wrong. I made a deal with myself that I didn’t have to exercise every day after work. But if I didn’t exercise, the one thing I had to do was write down in this specific notepad, all the reasons why I didn’t exercise. The items I got from that; I forgot my gym clothes, I was too tired, I really was pretty hungry, I wanted to go home didn’t have time at the end of the day because something came up. Once I knew what was going wrong, I was able then to prevent it from happening again. I did it in a reactionary way. I reacted to a mistake I was making Poka-Yoke is about preventing the mistakes from the first place. So, whenever you start going in and start thinking about your plans, that’s where you want to try to prevent mistakes.

https://kanbanize.com/lean-management/improvement/what-is-poka-yoke

Upstream by Dan Heath

Dan Heath in his book upstream talks about how we can go from solving problems, but instead think ahead to preventing problems. We have to figure out what the problems are going to be. We have to figure out who the person might be that causes the process. But we also have to look at costs and benefits. You can’t have big Prevention’s for things that have little costs little problems if you don’t address them can eventually lead to big problems. Think if you never exercise because you’re always forgetting something, or always too tired it can lead to big health consequences later. By not making shopping harder, we might overspend, little things add up to big problems. His first condition is called “Tunneling”. That’s when no one sees or cares to look at the big picture, they only see their aspects of the issue, or they don’t have the resources to fix it. They suggest that you get people to stop, see the big picture, talk to other people outside their teams, then you try to work on fixing it. In software, we try to get people in complimentary teams together, all in one room, so that you can see what’s happening step by step, and then you can see the big aspects of the problem. The second issue is “Lack of Ownership”. “It’s not my problem” “I don’t benefit from the problem being solved”. Maybe in fact, “I even benefit from having the problem”. And “to be honest, I don’t really care.” When I started to exercise, I would constantly forget to put my gym clothes in the car. For a long time. I didn’t really care to solve my problem with the gym bag, because it was nice, because then I could just go home and not worry about exercising. How do you deal with that you really look at the issues and try to determine what’s going wrong, make people care about the issue and prove that it’s solvable? Maybe suggest some ideas where other people have solved similar issues that will get people excited about trying to tackle this issue or build in a reward system for overcoming apathy. You make people your helpers, if you are working with a child who keeps forgetting their backpack at home, and then you have to drive it in after they get to school, make them part of the team and have a blame free discussion. How can we get that backpack in the right spot, make them part owner of the issue, not just someone who benefits from having a problem? And then the third issue is called ‘Problem Blindness”. “Well, nothing can be done.” “It’s just how it is.” Or maybe people just don’t even think it is a problem. That’s just like, how you get people to invest in solving a problem is by showing the harm the problem causes, showing them the downstream, get them on your side by showing them why we need to solve this problem. Dan, he says “Downstream is reacting responding to symptoms, it’s easier to think about what you know, and what you’re comfortable with, than it is to think about those other things that we could do to solve a problem. Meanwhile, upstream thinking is preventative. It understands the problem and the results of the problem.

When he talks about shifting to upstream thinking compared to downstream thinking.” First of all, surround the problem. Bring in all the people who are directly involved in the problem. If it’s a child who forgets their backpack, bring the child in, maybe have a family discussion about how backpacks get to school. They can talk to the other children who maybe have succeeded in being able to bring their backpacks and come up with good ideas. Get everyone together so they can talk about the problem. The second thing is immersing yourself the problem. Dan tells us very interesting and funny story. He says “You and your friends are having a picnic by the side of the river. And suddenly you hear a shout in the direction of the water. A child is drowning, without thinking you both dive in and grab the child and swim to shore before you can recover. You hear another child cry for help you and your friend jump back into the water and rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight. And another and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly you see your friend waiting out of the water and seemingly leaving you alone. ‘Where are you going you demand?’ your friend answers. ‘I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water’.” Just an analogy to say you can spend all of your time firefighting and solving problems. But instead, what you can do is prevent the problem from happening.

What you really want to do, he suggests is creating what you call a feedback loop. That means you can just check and see how everything is going. But try to create the system so that you can check to see if things are working. And if they’re not working find out early. He mentions that part of the problem that we have for downstream thinking is that we only reward people for solving problems. You’ll see this at workplaces all the time. People get awards for solving a really horrible problem. Maybe they fix a horrible technical issue a customer was having. Maybe the salespeople recover an angry customer who is about to cancel their contract. Rarely, the people who solve the problems ahead of time and keep the customer from getting angry, get rewarded. They’re usually forgotten. I always said when I was a server admin, the best recognition you can hope for is that everyone ignores you.

https://heathbrothers.com/books/upstream/

https://www.entreleadership.com/blog/podcasts/dan-heath-upstream

Moral Hazards

So when we think about our families do we always exclaim over the kid who finally remembers to do their homework or brings their backpack to school, and not the kid who never forgets, you don’t want to set up a situation, where people are rewarded to fail, because they’ll do it later. And they’ll start getting better at failing and start failing more and more. People learn how to game the systems, whether they’re meaning to do it or not. This is called a “moral hazard”. When you create a situation where people are rewarded for the wrong behaviors. Think of the situation when you have a workplace that gets technical support calls, and the person who answers the most number of calls gets highest rewards. We’ve created a situation where they’re getting rewarded for the most calls, not the happiest customer. So what are they going to start doing, they’re going to start answering questions quicker, and cutting the customer off. Which leads to angry customers. So really don’t set up that situation where staying in the old system is rewarded. For me, I was forgetting my gym bag. And it was a reward for me because I didn’t have to go to gym the next day.

Problem Prevention

Here’s some thoughts about how you can set up a system that really helps you figure out what the problems are and start thinking about preventative matters. First of all, don’t set up a situation where people are rewarded to fail. When having discussions with your family members or whoever is having the issue that’s causing the problem? Make sure it’s a blame free discussion. Everyone feels free to answer questions about what went wrong in the process, and how they might solve it. You can try to make it impossible to error.  Could I set my gym bag in my car on Sunday nights so that I don’t forget it on Monday? Or make the mistake harder to make. Maybe my car keys sit on top of my gym bag and so I can’t drive the car until I grab the bag with it. Maybe make an early warning system, something that warns you things are not going the way you thought would. You want to do is make it very hard to make a mistake. The last thing you can try to do is to build a process that tolerates errors. That means if you make a mistake, it’s not so bad. In the end, make it simple, duplicate it, leave a note or set a reminder on one of your smart devices. Try to make it impossible to fail.

Over Preparation

Don’t get into a situation where you over prepare. It’s sometimes a form of procrastination. Prepare for the proper errors and take care of things that are likely going to happen and try your best to not overdo it. You don’t want to turn your life into such a chaotic situation where you’re preparing for every eventuality that you stop doing the important things you need to get done. Is at the end of the world if I forget my gym bag? Nope, not really. Can just put some easy things in place? Is it a hardship if your child forgets their backpack at home and you have to come home from work, get the backpack and then drive it to school? Yeah, that can be quite time consuming and leave your kid without their resources and leave you having to exit work for a couple of hours. That checklist might be bigger, because of the cost involved with having that child forget the backpack. Don’t try to prevent every mistake, try to prevent the likely ones. Otherwise, you’ll just have a headache in life, and you’ll be dealing with too many fake problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/how-stop-over-preparing-actually-get-things-done-ncna810126

Summary

1. Do a pre-mortem look into what things that you really want to have happen and try to figure out ahead of time, what might go wrong.
2. Make sure that you don’t have tunnel vision. Make sure that you’re not just looking at your own little world but you’re looking at the bigger picture when trying to solve a problem.
3. Make sure that the people who are involved in the problem are involved in the discussion of the solutions. Make sure that they feel comfortable in telling you what went wrong
4. Be preventative, think upstream. Try to think of the problems and the solutions before they happen.
5. Try to make the solutions not worse than the problem themselves.

Challenge

Find one thing that seems to be consistently going wrong in your life and try to think ahead about how you can avoid those mistakes. Try to make it hard to fail. Let me know how it worked.

Fun Advice

Here’s our fun quote of the day. It comes from The Office and Dwight Schrute

“Do something ‘I think would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.”

So do you think you can prevent mistakes like that? Maybe that’s a good idea, at least is kind of a fun to think about.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. Let me know what you think of it or tell a friend. I’m happy to hear any feedback that you may have. Or if you want me to cover a particular issue for something that you’re struggling with that you’re trying to get done. You can find me and all the ways to contact me at smallstepspod.com.

In this podcast episode, I dive into the topic of eliminating noise in life and the significance of focusing on what truly matters. The episode stresses the need to prioritize tasks that have the most impact and eliminate low-value distractions that consume a lot of time and energy. To achieve this, the episode introduces the Pareto principle, which helps identify the 20% of tasks that cause 80% of problems. By concentrating on these high-impact tasks, individuals can make the most of their time and effort.

In addition, the podcast suggests reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown, which is an excellent resource for anyone looking to eliminate noise and focus on what’s essential. McKeown’s book emphasizes channeling energy and resources toward the most significant tasks while eliminating low-value distractions. It also urges readers to prioritize their goals and make space for what matters most. This podcast episode also offers practical tips for prioritizing and eliminating tasks, including writing down goals and ranking them in order of importance, identifying the tasks that contribute most to problems, and removing tasks that don’t help overall progress. By adopting these strategies, individuals can focus on the tasks that matter most and progress toward their goals.

Overall, this podcast episode is packed with valuable insights into the significance of eliminating noise and prioritizing what really matters in life. Individuals can optimize their efforts and make the most of their time by focusing on high-impact tasks and eliminating low-value distractions.

Transcripts

[MUSIC] Hello! This week, I’d like to thank my friends who helped me with this podcast. They saw every version of the recordings, every graphic, every website style, every color choice to make this podcast great. “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything,” as David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done, said. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but some people are better at planning, producing, and knocking out a schedule. We must eat and care for our loved ones, have fun, have hobbies, chill out, spend time doing nothing, and sleep. We will break if we don’t do these things. We get burned out, feel like our tasks are bossing us around, and eventually feel like we’re victims of our schedules, not leading our lives.

We won’t get anywhere if we plan a vacation like many of us plan our lives, with no ambition or direction. If we were to go to the center of the U.S. and decide to drive to Los Angeles, no wait, New York, no, let’s go to Fargo, we would go nowhere. We would speed across Interstate 80, and then in a few hours, do a U-turn and go back. If anyone saw us doing this, they would wonder what’s wrong with us. Well, that’s how we live. It’s not our fault. The world demands a lot from us. Then we get frustrated that few of our plans succeed. We’re frustrated that we can’t make traction on what needs to happen or what we dream of happening. We start to blame the very people and activities we love.

We suffer from sunk cost bias, where we feel we must stick to something because we’ve already put so much effort into it. But this is where it becomes hard. Are we just at a tough part of our adventure, and sticking to it would help us win and love our goal? Or are we just doing something that is not worth our effort? This is hard to tell and takes a lot of deep soul-searching to figure out what is true. Work harder and get to the goal over the plateau or just quit and confess this wasn’t for us.

When eliminating the types of tasks that we have in our lives, what we’re really looking for is what gives us the most bang for our buck, the most win for the least amount of effort. Especially if we’re starting new habits, once we start seeing payoffs with good habits, they will gain momentum. Right away when we start doing them, it’s hard to creak out those habits and behaviors. So start small, get the most impact for the least amount of effort, and keep the effort level down.

This is where the term “essentialism” comes in. Greg McKeon, in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less from 2014, advocates for the main point of the book: focus your energy, resources, and prioritize. He talks about getting down to what it really means to move from a person who says, “I have to or I must,” and insists instead on saying, “I choose to,” and only a few things really matter. You move on from saying yes to everything to deciding what matters. You go from being out of control in your life to feeling like the right things are getting done. You go from thinking that most everything is important to thinking that only a few things are important. You go from big goals and desires and big shiny wins to small steps and big actions over time.

He then discusses eliminate, the ongoing process of eliminating any and all things that are low-value distractions and take away from our effectiveness. For eliminating, he suggests that we write everything down as a candidate and start crossing them off. While many people ask us to imagine future success and our happy selves, he says to stick to what’s important now. He suggests adding 50% time to what we think something will take. We are terrible at estimating time. We usually think that something will take a very little amount of time, and it ends up taking a lot longer. With buffer, we could reduce that stress and get those things done on time. This ensures that the important things will get done.

According to this book, we must prioritize, and some things just won’t drop off the list. But we realize that they are so far down that we won’t even have time to worry about them. We have to realize that not everything is an A1 in our task list or our life. We should look for the right time, the right thing, the right reason, and also have the right resources in place. Greg also warns that his book is not about going back to a simpler time. It’s not about lamenting emails or disconnecting from the web and living like a hermit. That would be backward. It’s about applying a principle that less is better to how we live our lives now and in the future. That’s innovation. Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. The way of essentialism means living by design, not by default, and figuring out what the minimal viable progress is. We use this concept in software. What fields must you fill out for the product to work?

He reminds us to reward progress. Then he says, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” He mentions one of my favorite quotes by Stephen Covey, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” He talks a little bit about backpacking as an analogy to essentialism, and that the number one goal is getting to the campsite. There are pretty things to look at on the trail. There are trails that go off in every direction. But do we want to set up our tents in the dark? Do we want to go to bed without a cooked meal? The first thing is getting to the campsite in daylight, building a fire, setting up our tent. It isn’t about denying us the pretty things along the way. It’s about the tradeoff between the pretty things and the main goal.

So, in conclusion, essentialism is about identifying what matters most in our lives and focusing our time and energy on those things. It’s about saying “no” to distractions and low-value activities, and saying “yes” to the activities that will move us closer to our goals. By prioritizing and eliminating the non-essential, we can live a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful week! [MUSIC]

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do. —Elbert Hubbard

I struggled in my 20s. I saw my entire life in front of me along with every opportunity or direction. Where should I live? What should I do for a living? Do I get more school? Do I get married or have children? There were so many paths and so many directions. I couldn’t think about what to do next because I couldn’t figure out which direction to go. I didn’t even know how to decide. It was like the worse Choose Your Own Adventure book ever.

When we don’t pick goals or directions, decisions are made for us. At some points, some decisions are made, and other paths are closed off. But other doors open too.  It’s just how life is. So how do you decide now which goals and dreams you want to take on and make a reality?

One thing I learned over the years, is that the impossible really is possible. I know when I was in my 20s I didn’t think anything was possible. That I would be as happy as I am today. That I would have a job I would like as much as I do. It just seemed so far away. When I was in my 20s I had three jobs and the job market was bad and I was extremely poor. I could see my way to do anything I wanted to do in my life. I resigned myself to being poor and alone and not really have much going for me. I really needed to think how to change my life. So even when you are stuck in a place when you don’t have advantages in life, you still must go through small steps. You might have to go through more steps because you are starting in a place where you are disadvantaged. But the process is still the same. You just must go through and figure out what is the next thing you must do to do better and keep going through the process until you see yourself clear of it. As you start to achieve these things you start realizing that dreams are possible.

If I were to ask if you were to pick the one thing you could do to change your life what would that be.  What if a fairy godmother came down with a single wish, what would that be?

We can only do so much change at the same time. While we are talking about small changes, also think about limited changes. Some of the planners and books talk about having a few tasks for areas of life family, work, spiritual, physical. To make changes we must have enough time to do them and enough resources either financial or time.

So how do you decide what things you want to take on and make it a reality? We can only do so much at the same time. And when we are talking about small changes we are also thinking of limited changes. So, when we are deciding we have to think about the time and the resources, either financial or material. Do we have the umph to carry them out?

A good place to start is to decide on an area in your life that you want to work on. There are a few areas to consider. Where you live in terms of your location or your home, health, faith, purpose, fitness, financials, work, happiness or grit, community, friendships, hobbies, charity, learning something new, relationships, hobbies. There are quite a few areas we can tackle in our lives. The problem is they are not all equal and there are some areas that just demand our attention all the time. We can’t give up on our family because this isn’t the year we aren’t involved with our family. We can give up on our job because we are not focused on this aspect this year. They all come at us and we must make them a part of our lives. Truthfully even if we pick areas to work on, we cannot always guarantee we can follow that plan. Maybe when we thought our job was stable and needed no immediate care or your family was quite stable but then suddenly someone needs some more focused attention. Sometimes we must go after something else because it became more important. Sometimes we even make bad decisions when it comes to our lives. We dated bad people and had bad jobs. But despite the fact we are bad at picking our priorities, we are still the biggest experts in the world on what is good for us.

Questions to Ask Ourselves

If we step outside and treat ourselves like we are own friend, it helps us look at the big picture. If we pretended we were watching our lives as a movie, what would you scream at the screen? “Just go do______ already!!!” I spent a summer abroad in college and came back with an entirely new perspective. It really changed my life! Travel can help too. But to get at the core of what is most important for us to tackle starts with asking yourself great questions. Dig deep and listen to your answers.

• If I were to ask you what would make your life amazing, astounding, and happy what would it be?
• When you pray at night what do you pray for? Do you even pray for yourself?
• What do you want your life to look like in 5 or 10 years?
• What areas of your life would benefit most with attention?
• What area of your life scares you the most when you think about your future?
• If you asked those closest to you were to tell you the thing that would best improve your life, what would they say?
• What do you love?
• What did you dream of as a child?
• If you acted as your own best friend, what advice would you give yourself.
• What is the most important problem do you need to solve right now?
• If you gave a thank you speech in 20 years what would you be thankful for?
• If you could have all the money and time you needed, what would you do?
• What would make you happier if you could achieve it?
• What could stop your happiness if it happened?
• What makes you cry?
• What makes you angry?

My best friend and I have a lot of things we are opposite on and this area is one of them. She thrives when she aspires to a goal or a vision of future gain. I thrive better out of fear of a bad alternative. I often say to myself “So you want to go into retirement without a penny? And so overweight you can’t have adventures?? Well you better go do something about that!” It might be the voice of people in our lives when we were younger but either way you must find out which question means the most to you.

When considering your future goals, you must consider current circumstances. What kind of goal do you have time to tackle? Do you have the money to do this thing now? Maybe circumstances require a particular focus right now. Maybe something has your attention and energy right now. There is nothing like having focus and joy and attention to a goal to help you make it happen.

I wanted to do a podcast for a while as I said before. Because of current circumstances I have the time now. I have the interest now after being invited to create segments on another podcast and found I loved it. But all things came together to create a podcast that I have now. If I had goals to travel the world, perhaps now would not be the best times.

Now that you picked a focus, you must figure out how many goals to choose. We will look at a few ideas on picking goals now that maybe you have a general topic.

Somethings to keep in mind is we all have 24 hours in a day and 365 days. We have obligations and hobbies. But what will happen while walking towards your goal you might change your mind. If you are new at goal setting start small.  Build trust in yourself and as you get some goals done you will see what you are capable of. Then you might be able to take slightly bigger steps. But in general, keep it small. IT is hard when you are new at goals and you aren’t sure if you will succeed at that you dream of doing.

Focus Planner

The focus planner is part of Michael Hyatt’s planning tools. It is really geared towards high performance checklists and goals with plenty of reflecting on what went right and wrong in that time period. They split goals into two kind: achievement goals and habits goals. Achievement goals are something that has a set goal like to pay off house or go on a big vacation. Habit goals would be more like daily like have two servings of vegetables or take a walk after work. Then they have people pick 7-10 annual goals. They think anymore might get overwhelming. 

They mention that according to one study by Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University indicates that there is a 40% bigger likelihood of achieving a goal if you write it down. Their planner is built around gathering and measuring these goals with records of the reasons and the goals and sub-goals and habit tracking. Planners like this are great for some people. They love the plans and the check-boxes. Some people love the paper format and others digital. Some others, like me, can’t deal with planners in their personal lives while do fine with them at work. https://fullfocusplanner.com and https://focusonthispodcast.com to see more.

The ONE Thing

Then there is The ONE Thing and it’s a planner and a system which starts from a book and podcast by Gary Keller. His ONE Thing is to get the reader and listener to pick ONE THING.  Really focus on that by planning it out, blocking off time and doing it. He gives us data that a habit takes 66 days to form or a plan to stick. Stickiness is what we want because we don’t want to fall easily back to our old ways or fall away from our goals.

“What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” He suggests doing this every day.

He has a plan called the 4-1-1 plan. The first step is to set a long-term goal, maybe look five years into the future too. Then set year goals based on this look at the future you. Then break those goals into monthly goals and then derive weekly goals from there. From here you block off time for work on your new goals and start writing specific actionable tasks. In that sense it is very much like the Focus Planner. On a podcast I heard him talk about seeking those items that would make the biggest impact on the year, month, or week. Then it comes to today “if I were to achieve this action, my life, my goal would be so much better.”

He more recently developed the 66-day plan. The goal is to pick one thing and work on it for 66 days until you nailed it. Maybe you repeat this 66-day plan until it takes you to where it is effortless. He takes these small steps and really does the heck out of them until they are set. For me who is not that into planners, at least not in my personal life, this seems much more appealing. He warns not to make this a to do list. The activities must fit int the ultimate goals and not just be something to check off. To find out more about this kind of plan https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/66-day-challenge-tip-1-set-bigger-goals-focus-on-smaller-habits/

In his book, he frames for the plan is a Someday Goal > a One-Year Goal > Monthly Goal > Weekly Goal-Daily Goal and the Right Now Goal. They all work together and are sub-groups of the Someday Goal. This sets up what he considers to be dominoes that fall right into success. As the small tasks and goals are accomplished, the bigger dominoes fall. He insists that you block time for this ONE THING.  Once it is done, the rest of life can continue as well as other goals and tasks you have. He says you should live with purpose and visualize your goals. You should never compromise on the ONE THING even in the face of work. He says we must pursue these dominoes “ruthlessly?

I have not used his plans for my personal life. I have used it for customer projects at work. I do go into work and every Month ask myself what the one thing is I need to do to make this a good month. I do the same for the week. Every day I ask myself what the one thing is I must do today to make it a great day and help my customer succeed. It isn’t the intent of the planning system, but it really helps me focus.

He has a nice goal planning guide here which you can find in my show notes on my website: https://www.the1thing.com/thank-you/?resource=3917. It’s long but it fully lays out his plan.

So, you can see the idea is to pick a goal or a few goals but not too many. Make tasks that directly fall in line with your main goals. As the small steps come together they are pointing towards a successful end of a goal. But what is too much? When do we know we are planning too many things? In my opinion one is too few. It’s a luxury most of us can’t afford. But the Focus Planner suggests too many. To win at achieving our goals we need enough energy, money and time and resources. This will vary based on what is going on in your life already. Each of us will have to decide what our bandwidth on fully dedicated goals without excuse.

Alice in Wonderland

 “Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

Alice in wonderland looks to be tale of a girl growing up. She daydreams and cannot pay attention. She even falls into the hole and not goes in with intent. She has no direction and no aim. She admits she believes anything. She is curious about everything and has no direction or goal. She is confused by the weird world around her and investigates everything she sees. She meets an elderly caterpillar who has some good advice but is comfortable where he is and not going anywhere. He is perfectly happy smoking and relaxing. A Cheshire Cat who is confusing and only aims to confuse others. He is comforting but his advice is useless. When the cat asks her who she is she says, “I hardly know”. The White Rabbits busy all the time and perpetually late. He is frustrating and frustrated. The Mad Hatter was insane. He is stuck in a party that never ends. The Queen of Heart was bossing everyone making her priorities everyone else’s problems. She doesn’t care at all about what other people need or must do. By the end she grows up in size and determination and returns home. You can look at story as a girl growing from a child to an adult.

According to editors Charles Frey and John Griffin, “Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people play, authority, time, and death.” When you approach the book with this idea in mind, it offers interesting and meaningful interpretations of the events and characters in the story.

This is what we must do. Throw away the confusion and uselessness. Get rid of being stuck in contentment. Throw off our priorities driving us mad and burning us out and all the priorities everyone is putting on us. Lastly throwing off the bossy other people who make lives more important than you own.

Summary

1. Dream big about your life. Look at main areas in your life and figure out where you would like to see change or need some work or have big goals.
2. Ask some hard questions of yourself so you know what you are really looking for in life. Reset your frame in terms of a tv show or you talking to yourself as your best friend. What advice would you give yourself?  As those though questions and get the good answers.
3. Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years. Start to create a list of the things you want to tackle.
4. Determine how many goals you would like to have.

Challenge

1. Dream big about your life. Look at areas in your life you would like to see progress or attained goals.
2. Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years.
3. Pick a good number of goals that you are think are attainable with the resources you have right now.
4. Ask yourself every day “What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Fun Advice

Ferris Bueller says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. “

So, what do you think of this advice? I think it sums up a lot of this podcast. Life does come at us pretty fast and gets even faster as we go. Stop! Look around! Then ruthlessly prioritize. Not sure that is what Ferris meant but let’s go with it.

Please let me know what you thought of this episode and your looking carefully at your life and goals and paring them down. Check out the Slack channel and the website at smallstepspod.com. Please subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend. SFR Subscribe! Review! Friend! Thank you and have a great week!