Bryan David Falchuk's Blog: Do a Day Blog

Some Thoughts on Alcohol From The Editing Room Floor

When I was writing my book, Do a Day, I had written a fairly long and, let’s just say, impassioned section on drinking alcohol. It was a bit of an aside that took the chapter down a path of less coherence and strength, and my editor rightly suggested taking it out. While I did that for the book, I still believed in what I said, and felt it was valuable to share. I don’t do this passing judgment on anyone, nor saying you have to do the same as I do to be ‘good’. This is what I feel, and the choice I’ve made for my life. You make whatever choice you want for your life.

For context, this was in the midst of talking about ideas on how to clean up your diet to help you lose weight. Specifically, this section was on things to take out of your diet to avoid calories that don’t help you, as well as toxins and other things that aren’t great for your health.

With that background, here is the text that didn’t make the final edit of the book.

I want to address something specifically. While I started with taking soda out of my diet, another drink is something to strongly consider removing from your life for a variety of reasons – alcohol. I talk about it with a lot of people, and the conversations are usually the same. It’s a huge source of calories, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a source of toxins that your system has to get rid of as a top biological priority. Alcohol is literally poison to your body, which means processing it out of your body prevails over so many other biological functions as your body is a master of survival. That means the energy and time your organs are spending dealing with the alcohol and sugar you put into your system from wine, liquor or beer isn’t being spent on making you healthy. That translates to less healing and recovery, removal of cancer-causing free radicals, synthesizing proteins, fighting bacteria and viruses, digesting food and more. It’s unproductive work for your body, and I’m certain it doesn’t speak to anyone’s motivation or goals. The feeling of being hung-over is because you’ve been poisoned…only you did it to yourself.

The justifications I get are usually the same mix of things. I hear things like, “it’s just one or two glasses of wine,” “wine is good for you,” “I ran X miles today so I can ‘afford’ the calories,” “I had to because I was at a party/work event and we toasted so-and-so,” and on and on. While some alcohol does seem to have health benefits,* you can achieve the same benefits without the toxins or sugars, so these arguments quickly stop holding water.

Another common justification is that it helps people relax or unwind from a tough day. This relaxation argument can be true for many, but can also be achieved in a variety of other ways (e.g., meditation, working out, watching a funny show, reading, listening to or playing music). Alcohol doesn’t have a monopoly on calming us. Actually, it’s a depressant, so it does much more than calm us – it actually moves us down past ‘calm’ to sad. Who wants to be sad?

Lastly, alcohol is a common part of many people’s social scene. We go to a bar after work. We go out on a date for a drink. We have a beer at dinner. Well, not ‘we’ since I don’t drink, but you get the point. One thing I noticed as a non-drinker is that most people actually don’t care if I’m not drinking when we’re together at a bar or eating out. Those who do care are typically either immature, perhaps have a drinking problem or even just an insecurity about their own drinking (if you aren’t drinking, it somehow points out more openly that they are drinking, and maybe that’s not okay or the amount isn’t okay), or aren’t good friends since they’re more interested in your drinking than what you have to say.

For me, I was never a big drinker. I drank when I went out on the weekends after graduating from college and had a few hangovers in the mix. But after getting my masters, I backed away from it. As I entered my thirties as a husband and father, I found that I’d maybe have fifteen drinks a year, and they served no real purpose. I didn’t have more fun because of them, I didn’t care for the taste, and I almost always noticed the impact on my health of even one drink. Not to get too graphic, but if you do drink, I want you to pay attention to the smell that you produce in the bathroom the morning after you’ve had a few drinks. That’s a sign that your body is getting poison out of it.

In fact, it was this smell that was the wakeup call that drove me to say, “Enough. I don’t drink alcohol anymore.” After all, what was the point of this small amount of alcohol anyway? If I was barely drinking anymore, and it only had downside to it, why even bother ever drinking? That was mid-2013 – four-and-a-half years before writing this – and I’ve not had a drop of alcohol since. I’ve also not paid a price ever for not having a drop of alcohol in terms of looking weird at social events or feeling like I’m missing out on something. It hasn’t cost me any business or career opportunities, and no one has skipped inviting to me something because I don’t drink. I’ve only benefitted by not weighing my body with that burden anymore, regardless of how big or small the burden was.**

Some people would take infrequent drinking and make the same, but reversed argument. Rather than saying you might as well quit if you do it so infrequently, they say you can just keep doing it so little since the impact is small. I get that argument, but it’s no stronger than my position of, “why not just stop?” You can choose – do you want to do something that has a benefit or do something that has a small cost?

The fact is, we don’t need alcohol, and we do pay a price for having in our lives. That price is counter to what this book is trying to help with – health, fitness, happiness, and balance in life for the rest of your life. This is why I talk about alcohol with people I coach, and why I raise it here. You need to decide what’s best for you, but I at least urge you to think about what it is doing to you in any quantity, and whether you need it at all.

*Many people have heard about the benefits of red wine from resveratrol, or the link between drinking wine and low heart disease in France – which is correlation, not causation, so you can’t just say it’s because of the wine. In fact, research has concluded that it is not due to red wine.

**I can say that I’m not an alcoholic nor do I have those tendencies. I’ve never craved alcohol or been unable to say no to it. Therefore, I recognize that it may have been easier for me to stop drinking than it would be for others, and I don’t share my story standing in judgment of anyone who drinks. If you do have a problem, I strongly urge you to get help – for yourself and for those who care about you. I promise, no matter how alone you feel, there are people who care about you and want you to be better.

#alcoholfree

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Bryan Falchuk, CPT BCS, is the best-selling author of Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day, acclaimed public speaker, life & executive coach and C-level executive in the Financial Services industry. His work has been featured in publications such as Inc. Magazine, The LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and more. He has been a featured guest on over 100 podcasts and radio shows, and is a TEDx presenter. Learn more about his work at bryanfalchuk.com.

This article is inspired by Bryan’s best-selling book, Do a Day, available in print, ebook and audiobook at doadaybook.com or at your favorite book sellers.

How Can You Be Goal-Oriented If You Prefer to Fly by the Seat of Your Pants?

Here’s why having goals mean you can’t have chance encounters with opportunity

I was recently did a podcast appearance where the host asked me a challenging question I had never really contemplated before when I was talking about setting meaningful goals. He asked if all the setting and focusing on goalsremoved any opportunity for serendipity to bring new opportunities and paths into my life.

Wow.

I had never thought about this at all. One of the reasons is that I tend to be a planner, while some people prefer to be less structured or planned out. What struck me wasn’t whether I left any room for chance in my life, which I do, but whether my message would inherently not resonate for or be accepted by the non-planners out there.

This isn’t about not selling a book to someone who doesn’t like to plan, but rather whether that person needs help in overcoming their greatest challenges, and my approach would not be able to help them because of this seeming focus on planning.

Why do I think you can have it both ways?

My response was that being goal-oriented and leaving no room for serendipity are not the same. I think, by extension, that you can be a non-planner and still be goal-oriented.

Goals are about having your eye on where you want to get some aspect of your life to. It’s the point you are going to work toward and measure yourself against. And, yes, you generally have some plan of action to achieve that goal that would get pretty specific.

Serendipity in the structured world of marathon training

But being specific with a plan does not mean you have to be rigid. The most specific goal-focused plan I’ve had was tied to my first marathon that spelled out every action every day for five months.

Did I stick to it word for word, minute by minute? No.

Why not? Simple–life happened.

I got injured, the weather didn’t cooperate, a couple of important family events came up, work demands arose, etc., etc., etc.

Did I achieve my goal of being able to run a marathon despite all that? Yes. And I learned a ton through the deviations from my plan, some of which I wrote about.

And the marathon itself, which I had planned out pretty meticulously with pacing by mile all programmed into my watch to beep at me if I was too fast or too slow, also had to get thrown out the window because I got sick the day before the race. And that seemingly bad bit of luck lead me to meet a really inspiring person on the course who I never would have met if I wasn’t walking, contemplating whether I needed to go to the medical tent and drop out of the race.

You always find love when you aren’t looking for it

More impactful deviation from “the plan” was how I met my wife. I had my adult life all mapped out when I went to business school. Since I was going somewhere pretty rural, that plan excluded any progress on the “meet an amazing woman, get married, start a family” part of the plan, which was not “scheduled” to begin until after I graduated and had a stable job.

The moment I saw her was such a strong moment of serendipity, that things changed (for the better, of course!).

How do pursue a goal and allow for chance?

The key to still being successful is that deviation from the plan should not be the same as quitting. Goals and plans need reevaluation as situations change. Amazon’s Bettina Stix talks about how trying to build a product you will launch five years from now is a recipe for failure. Everything will be different by the time you launch, so you need flexibility in the macro picture while focusing specificity at the micro level.

This is a big part of Do a Day, actually. When we focus our efforts and energy on today, we only get specific about what we’re doing right now. If you try too rigidly to keep yourself to some long-term plan, you’re overly-focused on tomorrow.

And tomorrow may never come, or at least not as you imagine. So you throw away today, and all its serendipitous moments, for some false sense of tomorrow.

So whether you’re a planner or not, you can be 100% goal-focused and work hard to achieve whatever major accomplishment you have decided to tackle. And you can deviate and shift from whatever plan you have along the way.

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Bryan Falchuk, CPT BCS, is the best-selling author of Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day, acclaimed public speaker, life & executive coach and C-level executive in the Financial Services industry. His work has been featured in publications such as Inc. Magazine, The LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and more. He has been a featured guest on over 100 podcasts and radio shows, and is a TEDx presenter. Learn more about his work at bryanfalchuk.com.

This article is inspired by Bryan’s best-selling book, Do a Day, available in print, ebook and audiobook at www.doadaybook.com or at your favorite book sellers.

Be Jay-Z (What I Learned by Doing My First TED Talk)

When I started work on my book, Do a Day, I had a vision of being on stage doing a TED talk. on March 6th, that vision became a reality.

Well, mostly. My vision was to be on the big TED stage, and I did a TEDx event, but it’s close enough and I’m very happy to have achieved this milestone in my work to help and inspire people.

In talking to someone about the event, they asked how nervous I was and how much time I spent memorizing my talk.

Both things struck me as very foreign to me.

On the nervousness, I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with public speaking. That’s not something I’ve ever really dealt with, and I have had lots of experience being on stage from early childhood in school plays, to my first job where I was presenting to a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company two months into the job, to my world today where I’m on some public stage speaking to small and large groups pretty much every month. Public speaking is something that just feels natural to me, so I didn’t have to contend with nerves.

But the second question was what really struck me. To that, I replied, “Memorize? No, I approach it like Jay-Z.”

Huh? What does The Best Rapper Alive (or one of them, depending who you ask) have to do with public speaking like doing a TED Talk?

Simple. Jay-Z famously does not write lyrics. His reason is pretty brilliant. He raps about what he knows, so he doesn’t need to write it down to remember it. He argues that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you shouldn’t be talking. And if you know what you’re talking about, you don’t need to memorize what you’re saying.

I have seen plenty of speakers write scripts, and tirelessly memorizing them. They also tend to get stuck in rehearsals when they forget their lines as they depend on the script to know what to say when, and deviating from the script ends up breaking them.

I know my message, and generally what I want to say in respect of that message. I definitely practice a lot, and make sure I can tell my story within the amount of time I’m going to have on stage, but I never memorize, and I never give the exact same talk word for word twice.

You may be thinking, “Sure, that’s fine for you because you don’t get nervous being on stage. But for those of us who do, we need the script so we make sure we say what we need to say.”

I hear that. I definitely hear that. And I’ve coached numerous people with serious stage fright to be able to present successfully by releasing their dependence on the script.

Here’s how.

Writing a script takes time. Memorizing a script takes far more time. Practicing delivering from a script in a way that feels natural takes even more time, and is very tough for most people (especially those who are nervous). Instead of spending so much time and energy on the script, put the time into your message, identifying with it, and being able to speak to it openly, casually, on demand.

Talk to others about it. Repeatedly.

Becoming so comfortable and in touch with the “so what” of your message allows you to tap into your expertise and comfort in the uncomfortable setting of public speaking in a way that actually helps to disarm your nerves.

And when it came to giving my first TEDx Talk, I did exactly that. This was the first time I would be speaking so publicly (the event I did gets 8 million views of their event videos!) that could potentially make or break my speaking career, so the stakes were high, as was the pressure.

I went back to my core message, and talked about it over and over.

And then I practiced talking about it a few times without a timer, just to feel the flow out in the open.

Next, I added my slides to the mix, thinking less about what is on them (they’re sparse and just meant as markers to back up the story), and more about when to change slides to help drive the power of the message.

Lastly, I added in the timer to be sure I came in at least a minute shorter than the time I was given because you often go longer live than when rehearsing, so I knew I wanted to have a buffer.

What I never did was worry about what to say. If I stumbled, I just recovered and kept going. If I ran over on time, I thought about what paths I went down that weren’t totally true to my message, and jumped right into another practice without saying those things to see if it helped (and to reinforce talking about my message without that content in it).

And then the day came, and I went out on stage with no concern. I knew what I wanted to say. I had said it many times over and in many different ways. I never got so stuck that I couldn’t recover or keep going, and I had a good natural buffer of time.

When people asked how it went, I tell them this:

Could it have gone differently? Sure. Could it have gone better? I don’t think it needed to. I said everything I wanted to say, didn’t say anything I didn’t want to say, and didn’t get stuck on my message anywhere.

I don’t think you can ask for more than that. I felt like Jay-Z.

Well, except for the part where you make $100 million for being on stage. But, otherwise, totally Jay-Z.

The Simple 2-Step Process to Recovering From Burnout

It’s never too late to break the cycle and make a full recovery.

I’ve written before about the importance of ruthlessly prioritizing to find as much success as possible in your career. The paradox is that, by doing less, you achieve more. Do less of the noise to get to what will actually propel you forward.

It saves your energy for the things that truly matter, and helps protect you from burnout. You know the feeling–you are burning the candle at both ends, trying to do so much at work (and maybe at home, too), then you also start holding a flame to the middle of the candle as even more gets added to your to-do list.

It’s not sustainable or beneficial.

But what if you are reading this too late? What if you are already past the point of breaking? Despite how it may feel, the situation is not without hope. You just have to be willing to accept it.

The biggest issue I have found with people I coach who are burnt out is their insistence on not being able to break the cycle. They fixate on all the “must do” things hitting them and the reasons why getting help or putting any of it off will not work or cannot be done. The feeling is that everything must happen now, and yet there is nothing left in the tank to do it.

The problem with this mindset is that it is all-encompassing. If you try to talk in generalities, the mind lumps everything together into a giant ball if impossibility.

Use this two-step process to break the cycle:

1. Reduce the pressure.

I focus on specific items on their to-do list discretely and manage our conversation to keep from bringing other tasks into the mix.

For example, working with an executive who was dealing with several time-sensitive, mission-critical things flying at him, I coached him through the following steps.

List out the top 10 things that come to mind on your crucial to-do list (no more than 10, but fewer is okay).
Write down the due dates for all of them.
Force-rank by priority–no ties allowed!
Take the top item, and write it down on separate piece of paper (so you don’t see the other items on the list as you go forward).
Structure a plan of attack.

Having a clear path forward on the top priority helps it get done, and physically separating the planning from other priorities removes the pressure of everything going on.

Once you get through the first item, do the same exercise for the second, third and so on. Just do not do them all at once to help maintain separation of all the tasks that were joining up to create the extreme pressure.

2. Allow for recovery.

As much work as step one can take, step two tends to be the one people struggle with the most. It’s also the most important because it will bring you back from burnout and help sustain you going forward.

This step is about making time for you to separate and recover. When you are overloaded and burnt out, the idea of not doing something feels more than just impossible but actually foolish or dangerous.

I get this all the time from clients. They say, “I have so much to do, and you think I should stop and do nothing? That is totally unrealistic.”

It may feel unrealistic, and it is mandatory. Especially if you are past the breaking point and are burnt out.

I ask my clients about their sleep patterns, what they enjoy doing, and any plans they have to recharge with something like a vacation or even going out for a nice meal.

I’m looking for a few things:

Would more sleep help?
Is there space in their day for enjoyment?
Are there tasks they are doing that could go from being work to being enjoyable by changing how they’re done, like letting someone else cook?

We then find a way to make sure there is a daily chance for them to get some “me time.” Meditation, exercise, watching their favorite show, taking a nap–what you do does not matter so long as:

It doesn’t include any of the sources of stress that lead to your burn out.
It’s something you truly enjoy.
You actually do it.

Most of us go through times of burnout. That is normal, especially for driven, successful people. You can break through it, and then create sustainability in your life so it does not come back.

As long as you look past the feeling of impossibility and actually break the cycle.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on February 26th, 2018 .

4 Pieces of Advice to Be a Successful 20-Something Entrepreneur

Statistically, founding a startup is tough–especially for younger entrepreneurs. Here are four tips to help younger founders get there.

Being an entrepreneur can be tough even when you have years of experience under your belt. And most do–according to the non-profit think tank, the Kauffman Foundation, the average of a successful startup founder is 40.

If it is hard, and most successful founders have nearly 20 years of experience, how can a younger entrepreneur find success?  You can do it, but takes following some advice specific to younger founders.

Here are four lessons I wish someone had taught me when I was in my 20s:

1. Know your weaknesses, and recruit for them.

It is important to know what you don’t know. Understand what gaps you have in your knowledge and skills, and build a team around you that fills those gaps.

This can be employees, advisors or mentors. It’s especially important if you’re a young entrepreneur–you may lack the some of the direct experience needed to succeed.

A young entrepreneur once came to me to understand more about my industry–it was a target market for his startup and he lacked a deep understanding of how it works. I advised him around how to successfully build opportunities for his startup in the insurance sector. If there is someone you think would make an amazing advisor or mentor, but you fear they would not be interested in working with you, ask them anyway.

I often give people this advice: “You aren’t talking to them now, so if you reach out and get nothing, you’re no worse off. You might as well go for it.”

2. Understand your customers.

There’s a rule of thumb in the startup world that you have to talk to 100 customers before you really know what your offering needs to be to succeed. It’s the biggest thing I see entrepreneurs–especially young entrepreneurs–skimp on.

Your original plan will need adjustments. Not just some, but many.

A startup I work with met with a potential customer who took them down a path of creating a product that was very different–and way more expensive–than their original product. Upon talking to other customers, they found that this particular customer was an outlier.

There are great examples of successful pivots and of companies that didn’t pivot and ceased to exist. Did you know Flickr was originally an online role-playing game that had a photo sharing feature that was becoming the most popular part of the game? The company switched gears and made the photo aspect the core product, ditching the online game in the process.

3. Be ready to change.

Pivoting can be difficult, but sometimes, it’s exactly what you need to do. You can’t be overly attached to your original idea.

Countless examples startups and established companies refused to pivot and watched their business crumble. Motorola was the king of cell phones during the analog days and owned the patents on digital cellular technology. It received royalties for every new digital phone sold and could see the explosive growth in digital while analog was slowing.

But it remained analog-only. Refusing to pivot cost Motorola its throne, and triggered a downward spiral including being broken apart, bought and sold a few, and now being left with miniscule market share as a unit of Lenovo.

Why is this especially important for young entrepreneurs? One of the best teachers in this lesson is failure. If you haven’t yet failed because you didn’t foresee the market changing, you may be more blind to the early warnings and the gravity of the implications.

Surround yourself with people who will challenge you and bring that battle-tested expertise through employees, advisors and mentors. And after you have talked to 100 customers pre-go-to-market, don’t stop. Keep reaching out to them for real feedback so you know what is coming before it is here.

Walter Isaacson’s brilliant Steve Jobs biography quoted the Apple co-founder as saying, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”

4. Don’t let your age stand in your way.

The biggest difference between you and the average successful founder, at least outwardly, is age. That will only continue to be an issue if you let it. Don’t focus on your age as a hindrance. You may be young, but that doesn’t mean you’re not capable.

Bill Gates of Microsoft, Larry Page of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook were all millionaires by 25 (at the latest) and billionaires before they were 31. Zuckerberg joined the three-comma club at 23.

At the same time, don’t be cocky about it. Hubris can be harmful as it breeds ignorance of what is really going on.

Stay humble, but not ashamed. Your age is your age. Nothing more. Move on.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats. It originally appeared in my Inc.com column on February 20th, 2018.

3 Secrets to Being Healthier & Staying Fit for Road Warriors

This article is a longer version of a piece I originally wrote for Inc. Magazine and on my blog.

I have traveled a lot over my career–it is often an every-week situation with two to four flights, hours of driving, multiple hotels in the same week, early mornings and late nights, and plenty of meals on the go. When I say I’m an experienced road warrior, I mean it!

I also used to be obese as a kid. When you combine that with my business travel, people always ask me how I’ve kept from becoming overweight again. And more relevantly here, how have I kept the grind of travel from leading to a downward health spiral that takes down my ability to perform in a high-stress job?

It has not always been easy or taken no effort, but it has been far easier than I thought it would be, and staying fit is one of the reasons I have been able to cope with the stresses of travel as well as I have and continue to thrive in my career.

It boils down to making better choices across three things—set yourself up to be active, make good food choices and use time with purpose.

Set Yourself Up to be Active

I make a conscious choice to stay active every day. That means some form of cardio every day. That takes planning, but once you get into a routine with it, it gets easy. Here are the things I depend on to ensure I get my daily sweat in:

Pack for Success–make sure you have a shirt, shorts, socks and workout shoes in your bag at all times. I recommend unstructured, minimalist sneakers that can squish down like Nike Frees so they do not take much space. You can use a carabiner to clip your sneakers to your backpack or briefcase if space in your bag is a problem.
Choose Your Hotel Strategically–I scope out hotels online to find ones with gyms I know I will find something I like to do in. For example, if you like the elliptical machine, make sure your hotel has at least one of them. If you like to run outside, make sure your hotel is in a location that allows for that. If you are not sure, just call and ask the concierge. Most hotel chains have made fitness a priority and have pre-made running routes or deals with local gyms for their guests to get a day pass.
Have a Plan B–sometimes, I find that I just cannot get to the gym for some reason. I am always prepared with backup options I can do right in my room. YouTube is full of free workout videos, yoga programs and more. Find a few you like ahead of time so you can use them in a pinch. Another great option is to do one of the many 30-day challenges you can find online for things like planks, wall-sits, squats, pushups and more. Grab 10 to 12 of them to combine into a routine, or pick three or four to do as a circuit you repeat three to five times. I travel with a resistance band to make sure I can get some resistance training anywhere. Think that is not good enough? Tom Brady swears by it, and he looks pretty fit to me.

Make Good Food Choices

I learned long ago the hard way that life on the road can be indulgent. Eating out for all of your meals means you will be faced with fast, fatty, sugary (and delicious) options at every turn. I limit my options or my desire to make bad choices a few ways. I travel with protein powder packets and a Blender Bottle to fuel and fill me at breakfast so I avoid hotel breakfasts, which are typically full of pastries and sausage. I also often travel with oranges and a few low-sugar, high protein bars to make sure I have good choices to grab if I find myself hungry or stuck with no good options for meals.

When eating out, I often focus on the appetizer section, choosing a dairy-free soup and salad to pre-emptively make me too full for a heavy main course (it also keeps the bill smaller–Hello, expense management!). I also try to steer the restaurant choices to places that inherently have healthier options, like Japanese restaurants.

Beyond this, there are actually two crucial things I changed that made food a total non-issue. First, I stopped drinking alcohol years ago. That cut out lots of sugar, and therefore lots of empty calories. It also removed the burden on my body of processing the alcohol, which is something it does not need to face on top of trying to recover from a hectic lifestyle. The other change I made was becoming vegan years ago. I learned quickly that you have to work hard to gain weight as a vegan as you naturally avoid the main culprits of weight-gain. Not choices for everyone, but definitely hugely helpful changes I made.

Use Time with Purpose

The final piece of the puzzle is being purposeful with your time. I do a few key things to keep me moving forward rather than chronically running out of time for wellness.

Set Aside the Smartphone–this is a tough one for many, but not pulling your smartphone out every free moment you have will keep you from the time-black hole of reading social media updates, emails, etc.–next thing we know, that hour we had free to hit the gym is gone. Keep the phone out of your hands to help keep yourself active.
Hit the Gym at the Right Time–hotel gyms are usually jam packed from 6-7am and often again in the evening from 5:30-7pm. Try to get there before 6am so you can get right on the machine you want to use, or if that is too early for you, think about going in the evening outside of the busy period. Waiting for equipment likely means not working out that day.
Try to Fly at Consistent Times–this is a tougher one to deliver on, but it will help your body a lot if you get to wake up around the same time every day. Waking up at 2am for a super-early flight when you would otherwise sleep until 6am will likely require a couple of days to recover from, which will make it harder to workout on those days. The more variable your daily schedule, the worse this impact gets.

Some of these suggestions may sound too hard to do. The good news is, any one of them can help, so start small and make a change you can handle. One success will lead to another, and soon you will find yourself making a series of smarter choices as you start to feel and look better despite your road warrior status.

Is Your Team Change-Resistant? Here’s How to Lead Them Through It in 2 Steps

Human nature makes change hard to deal with for any employee, but you can overcome that and lead your team forward.

Have you ever been given a short cut from your normal route only to feel like it took much longer than your normal route? Have you looked at the clock only to find out it was faster than normal?

This is a bias we all carry, regardless of our cultural background or upbringing. It is called the mere-exposure effect, or sometimes called the familiarity principle. And it might be the reason you or your employees struggle with change.

The idea behind mere-exposure effect is that we tend to prefer things we are familiar with, and find them more comfortable. Even if it takes longer to drive our usual route, because it is comfortable to us, we do not notice the added time. And because the new, faster route is unfamiliar, we are acutely aware of the time needed to drive it and feel a subconscious discomfort the whole time, making time seem to take even longer.

Think about how this might impact you with a change in how you work. You have done things a certain way, and now there is a new system or process that is meant to be more efficient, but it just feels so much worse.

We have all been there.

I implemented some process improvements as part of a Lean project to remove waste from my department’s operation. We did timings to understand where we were wasting time and how much faster we would be if we made a few changes. My team was bought into the ideas and excited to feel less strained.

Until we flipped the switch and implemented the changes.

The emails started to flow in about how much worse this was, and how they are so much less efficient now. I got explanations about the old versus new process that really demonstrated the mere-exposure effect at work.

“We used to just upload the document into the system. Now we have to find the document on our desktop, attach it to an email, and send it to an email address to have it auto-uploaded. It takes so much longer now.”

Of course, what this employee was doing was blowing off each of the familiar steps, and combining them into, “just upload the document.” They used to have to get the document onto their desktop (usually from an email it was attached to), go to the system, go into the file, click an button to browse for the file, find it, click “Upload” and wait for the page to refresh. Total time was between four and six minutes, depending on file size and system responsiveness that day. Oh, and the uploads failed about twenty-percent of the time.

Now, they could forward the email with the attachment, and drag and drop it from their computer into an email addressed to an inbox that had some automation running in the background, put the client name in the subject field, hit “Send” and that was it. Total time was between one and two minutes.

In another situation, we stopped doing a process that had no purpose anymore. One member of the team was still doing it, and he said, “Oh, it’s fine, it does not really take much time.”

It was pure waste–it was time spent with zero value at all. But because he was used to it, breaking his habit felt more uncomfortable than the wasted thirty to sixty seconds spent doing the task.

So what can you do to combat the familiarity principle to ensure you are ready, willing and able to take advantage of changing your business for the better?

1. Admit there is a problem.

The first and most important step is simply to be aware of it. Not just the concept of it, but being aware of it when it is at play. When you go into a change situation, have your eyes wide open that you are likely to feel uncomfortable, and the new way of working may seem worse.

2. Suspend judgment for two weeks.

The second step is to give it time. I asked my team to just accept the change for two weeks, making note of concerns, but not giving up on the change, and holding those concerns until after the two-week period. If there was some show stopper, of course they should raise it up.  Other than that, they needed to just hold the comments they were compiling until after that trial period, then they could come to me and let it all out.

I did this with a new system implementation years ago. The users–who had all signed off on the system in testing–revolted when it went live, claiming they were now completely unable to do their jobs. I acknowledged their concerns, saw that they could in fact still work, and told them we would make the call after they stuck it out for two weeks.

What happened at the end of the two weeks? Productivity was up roughly thirty-percent, and the most vocal person on the go-live day was now saying how we could not take this away from her as she was so much faster at her job and there was a lot less frustration to deal with.

That was not because we did anything else during those two weeks. The system was exactly the same as the day they revolted. They just got accustomed to it, and then it felt comfortable.

Bonus tip: It’s okay.

Change is inevitable. And aversion to change is human. There is no need to judge yourself or others for the reaction–just help them through it.

Be aware of the natural, initial discomfort, give yourself a fixed trial period where you stick it out, and then you will usually surprise yourself with how much better things are.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats. It originally appeared in my Inc.com column on February 13th, 2018.

Have a Big Goal But No Clue How to Get There? Here’s Why Dominoes Can Help

Creating a clear mental image of your ultimate goal allows you to map all the steps you need to take.

The night before I started writing my first book, I was on a call with a mentor I’ve turned to for advice and guidance. He asked me about my ultimate goal, which I told him about. He said, “OK, that’s the last step. Now work backward, step-by-step, until you get to today. Then you know exactly what you need to do to get there. It’s like lining up dominoes in reverse.”

See your goal as the last Domino.

The image struck me so clearly–the ultimate thing you are trying to achieve is that final domino you need to knock over. Then you line up each thing you need to do in reverse order all the way back to this moment.

The thing about knocking over dominoes is that any of them that are slightly out of line, going the wrong way, or the wrong distance from the ones before or after will mean the whole chain stops. It is no different with actions you need to take to achieve your goal–anything that is not aligned to your goal should not be in the plan. And if you find yourself doing something that does not lead to the final domino, stop and get back on track.

For me, it was about getting my message out into the world and having it impact people’s lives at a broad scale. He asked me how I would know I got there. That is, what is a way to show that the last domino has fallen. I said a good measure would be to get on stage and present my idea at a TED talk, which I will be doing two of this year. I also said sitting across from Oprah on a couch in the woods for an episode of Super Soul Sunday would also be a good measure, but that just made him laugh, so let’s focus on TED.

Work backwards to plot your path to success.

In that conversation, it was not clear how I could get there from where I was at that moment to being on that stage sharing my ideas. I was doing some life coaching work as a side-hustle, but the scale was not big enough to get me to my ultimate goal, or at least not for a very long time. So I worked backward.

I needed to pitch TED organizers with my idea if I wanted to present to their audience. The domino before that is to have an idea worthy of pitching. The dominoes just kept aligning one by one, closer and closer to my starting moment. And when I got there, it was clear to me that I needed to turn the philosophy I had been using in my coaching work into a book. That would begin the journey of dominos knocking each other over to end up at the final goal of having a meaningful impact on as many people as possible.

And now I have two TED talks lined up for this year.

The Domino idea applies broadly, but especially to business.

In business, it is no different. I’m an advisor to a safety technology start-up. In the early days, we had an ultimate goal of the product achieving a certain level of penetration into the market–our last domino.

To get there, we had to successfully sell at least a certain number of units to customers. To do that, we needed to have a revolutionary product that would compel enough customers to want to adopt it. To do that, we had to have a clear understanding of what would be compelling so we could design a product that resonates with the market. To do that, we needed to interview customers, do market research and more.

I’m simplifying the steps (there was a lot of white board space dedicated to all of the dominoes), but you get the point. Regardless of the specifics of these two examples, the exercise applies universally in personal and business settings of all kinds.

Now it’s your turn: Line up your dominoes in reverse order

So ask yourself, what is it you are ultimately trying to achieve.  Visualize that domino clearly. Then ask yourself what comes before it, step-by-step. Write each domino out–that becomes your plan of action.

You may find you missed some things along the way, and you may find that you included some things that were not crucial or would lead you astray. That’s ok. As long as you keep your focus on the final domino, and dynamically evaluate whether each particular action leads to that domino, you will get there.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on February 7th, 2018 .

Elon Musk Shows That This 1 Trait Is the Key to Success (It’s Not Confidence)

Photo courtesy of the AP
Success depends on more than confidence–you need to see the challenges, adapt, and move forward.

Back in 2013, The New Yorker published a piece about a number of studies showing that startup founders are notoriously overconfident, and how this was crucial for their success. My Inc.com colleague Geoffrey James responded with a great article with five steps for entrepreneurs to capture the power of overconfidence to help ensure their success.

Five years later, I have a different perspective on this argument. While there may be value in overconfidence, I think it’s something deeper going on: resilience.

The articles above suggest this trait keeps founders from realizing how grim things are, so they succeed simply because they do not realize they probably should just quit because they’re likely to fail anyway.

However, overconfidence can be dangerous and misguided. It can lead you to burn through cash, push forward with a concept you should pivot on, rush to market with a half-baked product no one wants, or other make company-costing mistakes.

Like overconfidence, resilience allows you to keep going despite the pressure and negativity, but you are aware of it, which allows you to adjust your strategy.

Tesla proves it works.

One of the greatest startup success of recent time, Tesla, provides a great example.

You can look at Elon Musk and hear his bold statements about product launches and production numbers that are consistently (and wildly) missed. You might take all of that as a sign of overconfidence, and think that’s why he kept going when the odds were against him. That is, you might think he did not even realize how bad things were, so he just kept pushing forward.

But that’s not the case, and he said so himself. He has said in numerous interviews how the company was all but dead when Daimler made a $50 million investment that saved the business. And he was acutely aware of the impending end of the company.

He was not just aware of it then, but he has admitted that in the early days, he actually had no expectation the company would succeed at all. In 2015, he told told Marketplace:

“If you would have asked me at the beginning of Tesla if I would have thought that we would be here, I would have said ‘no.’ I thought we would most likely not succeed. I thought we would most likely die.”

He even went so far as to describe Tesla’s original product, the Roadster, as a, “Disaster.”

So clearly it was not overconfidence that kept him going. How do you keep working the kind of hours he and the team put in, investing your own money, and putting on an inspiring face for the public and investors?

Resilience.

It is defined by Merriam-Webster as the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. Failed delivery of major goals, cash running low (or out), inability to raise capital–I would definitely consider these types of misfortune.

Weirdly, Uber also proves it works.

On the other end of the spectrum is Travis Kalanick, Uber‘s embattled founder and ousted former CEO. Amidst internal and external stories of serious cultural issues at the company stemming directly from Kalanick’s style, he didn’t do anything appreciable to improve the situation (and help Uber’s brand, which was starting to pay a price from the all negative press).

Instead, he seemed to get even more brash. After finally being ousted as the head of the company, he continued to act overconfident in being right, and tried to engineer a way back into the company.

Kalanick just saw his influence at the company reduced after an investment from Japan’s Softbank saw him cash our $1.4 billion in shares, but have less of a stake in the company and his board role has been diluted. He may be a billionaire in reality and not just on paper now, but he is no longer and will never be running the company he created ever again. For a founder, that can be devastating.

The cost to Uber? Overall, they’re recovering from the tarnish of Kalanick’s hubris, but the company’s valuation plummeted roughly 30 percent since the last time they raised money from $69 billion to $48 billion.

That’s not to say confidence is not valuable. And perhaps there are examples where the sort of ‘ignorance is bliss’ situation overconfidence can create may have helped keep someone on the path. But to really succeed, you need to see the real issues and not get taken down by them so you can rise above them and succeed.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on February 1st, 2018 .

How Apple Should Respond to Investor Demands to Protect Kids From iPhone Addiction

Photo courtesy of Yahoo

Taking action before it’s forced to could be a smart move for Apple. Here’s why it isn’t.

Just as the public attention to “Battery-gate” was dying down (or is it?), Apple faced yet another controversy that has yet to earn a “-gate” name. Two large, institutional investors publicly called for the company to do something about the addictive nature of its products and the impact this has on the developing brains of children.

In a letter to Apple from Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, who together own about $2 billion worth of Apple stock, they said,

“There is a growing body of evidence that, for at least some of the most frequent young users, this may be having unintentional negative consequences,”

They then warned the company that,

“growing society unease…at some point is likely to impact even Apple.”

Apple’s response was measured, and reassured the world that Apple has taken this issue seriously and has had various parental controls in iOS for a while, and recently said they are going to work on more.

But is it enough? Should Apple consider doing more here? And the reality is, this is not really an Apple-specific issue as any smart phone or tablet maker could ultimately be impacted by this issue.

Two examples may help.

Toyota Unintended Acceleration

In the mid-2000s, Toyota vehicles started to be involved in accidents where the cars accelerated despite either the gas pedal not being pushed or even when the brake pedal was pushed, with one such accident leading to death of a family of four, including a California Highway Patrol officer. This is called Sudden Unintended Accerlation.

While Toyota’s initial response was that the only issue was driver error in not securing floor mats properly, more potential causes were brought in, including a claim that the electronic throttle control in Toyotas was the actual cause of the issue. Conclusive evidence of an issue was never found, even by NASA, and in accidents where people claimed they had been pressing the brake pedal, data recorders in the car showed the drivers were in fact pressing the gas pedal alone.

Toyota ended up recalling 10 million vehicles and issuing a stop sale across its line in 2010 despite there being no finding of an issue in a preemptive, proactive recall. That is, they stopped selling everything they made, even if the product was not implicated in the news on unintended acceleration.

They then introduced their Safety Sense feature set which puts many safety features other car makers consider options for higher end vehicle into the standard equipment list of even its cheapest vehicles.

It was not a good time for the company, and they’ve since paid over $2.5 billion in fines and law suit awards, including a fine to the US Department of Justice for covering up facts during the event.

While that all sounds bad, $2.5 billion is a drop in the bucket for Toyota, and the company is still thriving today.

In fact, brand-value ranking company Interbrand just named Toyota the most valuable car brand in the world in 2017. That is not the first time they have won this award, and are consistently one of the top three largest car makers globally.

The Toyota example suggests taking a proactive approach to a potentially wide spread problem is a wise path to choose. In fact, the negatives came from wavering they did, as that was the reason for the fines they paid, while the proactive moves are often cited in car comparisons where the Toyota models in the ranking have safety features others charge dearly for or do not even offer.

McDonald’s

In 2003, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against McDonalds for causing obesity. Fast food and “Big Food” companies have long been vilified for selling addictive products that lead people to consume in excess, which drives the nation’s obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Do I wish unhealthy options were not as widely and readily available, and do I think restricting them would lead to a healthier population? Yes.

However, I also realize that this is exactly the point of selling food. You make it taste really good and your marketing is meant to make people desire it so they buy it. The onus is on us to choose whether we consume it, and in what quantity.

And apparently McDonalds felt the same way, and so did the judge hearing the case. McDonalds did nothing of consequence to change the healthiness of their food (yes, they added food facts and some salad options to their menu, but most of their menu continues to be unhealthy).

Consumer preferences are shifting, and McDonalds has struggled as these shifts occur. But the lawsuit did not lead to a direct threat to the company’s business model, and proactive response would have been hugely disruptive to the company’s very existence.

So What Should Apple Do?

I think Apple’s situation is closer to McDonald’s than Toyota’s. This is about the addictive nature of the product being harmful to our wellbeing, and hits on the question of who is to blame – the company for offering the product we struggle to stop consuming, or the consumer not controlling their consumption? And unlike the Toyota situation, this is not about Apple alone, as it was not really just about McDonald’s. Google, Facebook and others would be brought into the mix just as Frito-Lay, Yum!, Hershey, Kraft, Burger King and others would have been in the food debate.

Only time will tell, but I think Apple is making the right call at this time to offer ways to control usage. Now it is on us as users and parents of smaller users to control that usage.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on January 24th, 2018 .