Marcia Conner's Blog, page 2

Take A Cue From Cliff Divers

A young man dives from a 30-foot cliff over a waterfall inside Casa Bonita, a Mexican-themed “entertainment” restaurant in Denver, Colo. That’s his job; he dives again and again for the enjoyment of dining patrons. Between dives he admits, “I have yet to have a day where I don’t want to go to work.”

Most people aren’t that lucky or brave. We don’t often get to practice our craft again and again, let alone get cheered on to dive in or climb back up. Doing it every day doesn’t mean it doesn’t require courage, that it’s not hard, or that there aren’t risks; there are just more reasons to keep doing it in spite of the what-ifs.

Leadership, in large part, requires jumping in head first, lapping back and forth, occasionally leading a pack, but often leaping alone, usually in a race against the next guy. But for all the talk of collaboration and big ideas, new business practices, and social reach, most work hasn’t changed much.

Fundamental people practices in modern companies were forged in an era when control and conformity were thought useful. Today, we know they stifle creativity and customer focus at a time when companies fail on less.

As we seek options for ourselves, we don’t always think to remind people there are collective options to elevate us as a species. As Diana Korte, a women’s health advocate, once wrote, “If you don’t know your options, you don’t have any.”

Our digital world accelerates change and gives us an opportunity to be more of who we are. With almost unlimited access to information, we also have a greater understanding that the world needs our help. We expect twists and turns in our journey, but where we are today shouldn’t suck.

It’s time for work to change. Here are four ways leaders can push work forward.

1. START WITH HIRING

“Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine,” said David Ogilvy.

Leaders spend endless hours on hiring, and you may ask candidates to fill outexhaustive assessments, but even if you view their resume for four minutes, you probably make your fit/no fit decision in far less time: On average, it takes six seconds to decide.

When it comes to actually making the hire/no hire call, decisions are usually based on tacit and ephemeral qualities and can be completely derailed if the candidate has the wrong shoes.

Brandon Hall Group recently reported, “Nearly 80% of survey respondents rated their overall talent acquisition efforts as less than highly effective.” Hiring managers know the process is broken, yet we continue playing along.

How do you find people with the talents, skills, and culture traits who will perform like your best and brightest? Even if you’ve streamlined the process or hired a mind-reading recruiter, your success still requires taking a risk.

I’m surprised more organizations haven’t adopted practices like those of IBM, which uses behavioral science to address all facets of the hiring process.

IBM looks very closely at the individual, job, team, and organizational characteristics that define top performers. They ask how people are actually working today, what they are capable of accomplishing, and what the organization needs to do in order to succeed. From this they create dynamic profiles that ensure great candidates are hired and deployed in roles complementary to their unique traits.

IBM realized that the big data analytics engines they’ve already focused on street traffic and social media uptick, law enforcement, and wind power could be turned next toward predictive hiring. This scientifically grounded approach predicts which candidates will perform like top performers with consistency and accuracy.

Their behavioral assessments also look at measures like how much more profit their best employees in key job families produce than the average employee.

They’ve been slowly rolling these capabilities out for other companies through their consulting practice, and time will tell if others dive in.

2. RETAIN EMPLOYEES

Once fully staffed, leaders hopefully turn their attention to retention. Around 2.5 million Americans voluntarily leave their jobs each month. Imagine if you could anticipate why your top people might leave and take action to stop them. Leaders (and coworkers) want to keep the best, reducing the costs and craziness that comes with the revolving job jar.

According to The Conference Board, job satisfaction in America is running at less than half (47.7%). A recent study said 32% are actively looking.

Research shows people leave because:

They don’t like their boss
A lack of empowerment
Internal politics
Lack of recognition
The company is failing

From a leadership perspective, these are easy problems to solve, yet they’re ignored year after year.

Kick out the jerks
Let people do what they were hired to do
Make sure the work itself is interesting
Be gracious
Ask your employees what they believe needs to be done to turn the business around, then do that. Ask until they believe you really want to hear the hard truth (and you’ve built enough trust they won’t be fired for telling you).

New technology can help with predictive retention too, illuminating which employees are most likely to leave and what you can do to stop it.

Mobile phone providers have been triaging this sort of thing for years. They bombard you with attention before your contract’s up. They have predictive technology that recognizes, “Marcia might switch carriers.” Based on her previous spending habits or her love of water, maybe we can entice her to stay with a waterproof phone or ads that depict the ocean. If that doesn’t work they make a personal call.

Imagine if your employer called to say, “We’d be crushed if you left. Are there things you haven’t felt comfortable saying that I might take care of so you wouldn’t think about making the move?”

3. FILL TALENT GAPS

A third keeps-us-up-at-night area for leaders of organizations full of holes is filling talent gaps. Even I’ve realized at times it’s easier to find new people to deal with today’s demands than for me to develop the talents I need for tomorrow.

According to Accenture, 66% of CEOs anticipate losing business to competitors due to talent gaps. A recent study conducted by McKinsey shows 72% of academic institutions believe graduates are prepared for the workplace while 42% of employersbelieve entry-level professionals are equipped to enter the workforce. In a Deloitte report 39% of CEOs say they are “barely able” or “unable” to meet the demand for the people they need.

In a report from SHL CEB, 77% of HR professionals worldwide don’t know how their workforce potential is affecting the company’s bottom line. Fewer than half of organizations surveyed use objective data about staffing to drive business decisions about people. Yikes.

We get so stuck in the work itself we lose sight of those we serve. Who’s ready, how are they ready, and what will it take for others to be ready starts with identifying what’s really required to succeed, then creating an environment to make it happen.

4. VALUE YOUR PEOPLE

As you take even a few steps toward creating a culture of learning and caring, people gain confidence and much-needed courage. Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, once said, “It’s unrealistic to expect extraordinary effort and performance without creating an environment where people feel extraordinarily valued.”

Now that leaders occasionally notice people matter we should look at the behavioral science behind how and why people do things, how they work best together, what factors increase the likelihood for success, and then do those things. Too soon?

Workers today are driven by a desire for personal fulfillment and success by doing meaningful work as part of an important and valued mission. Employees want to choose where to work, how to work, and when to work. How’s that going?

Are you optimizing the work environment? Ask the people in the organization if the environment meets their needs. Too bold?

Rather than a “we need more” programs perspective, I ask what’s preventing people from doing what they were hired to do. It’s not all radical; it’s just more common sense than seems to be common. Beside, if we don’t know how to quantify what people do with actual and useful measures, it’s going to be damn hard to assess after we remove the obstacles in people’s paths.

Ninety-five percent of respondents to a study from American Express, from all income levels, genders, and age ranges, agreed that the road to success would likely involve detours and unexpected changes. It is within our power to actually make work work, using new analytics and the smarts in our heads, so people can stop detouring around their potential. After all, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”

Are you ready to take the leap? Take one step closer to the edge and choose to make one courageous decision a day that as a leader you know, deep inside, you can’t NOT make.

[Photo: Flickr user Jimelovski Platano Macho]

Get Some Sleep!

Our lack of sleep deprives us of the capacity to excel.

There was a time I chose to sleep only a few hours a night. I commuted between continents for months and then from the East Coast to West Coast each week for years. Habits included late night reading, early morning email, and thirty years without a nap. I believed I could achieve higher productivity by simply sleeping less.

Now I chase after sleep like fireflies: enthusiastically but with little sparkle the next day. I have a young son and a husband with restless legs. I also have a new company about to launch and another fall season on the road with conferences and speaking gigs. At times it still feels like I’ve gone a decade without a full night’s rest. I’m not alone.

Nearly 50 million Americans suffer from sleep disturbances that negatively affect their work, home, and personal lives, according to research by the National Sleep Foundation. 29% of those surveyed fell asleep or became very sleepy at work in the past month, and 36% have fallen asleep or nodded off while driving in the past year. One in five American adults show signs of chronic sleep deprivation, making the condition a widespread public health problem.

In a report from the Virgin Pulse Institute, “Sleep disturbances cause fatigue-related productivity losses estimated at $1,967 per employee annually.” According to the Institute of Medicine, “People with an insufficient amount of sleep are more likely to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, depression, and even cancer.” Yet people have more power over their sleep patterns than they may realize, and addressing these issues with simple behavior changes often results in better sleep immediately.

After weighing the evidence and serving as my own lab rat, I now understand that sleepless habits deprive us of our natural capacity to excel. Learning–and applying the right things faster–provides us the only long-term competitive advantage, and optimal learning requires sleep.

If you need a justification to head for bed rather than staying up late again, I offer these career (and life) savers:

Think about tomorrow

The thinking part of your brain (the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe) is the first area to falter when you lose more than a few hours of sleep. That part of your brain is responsible for your most important mental assets: focus, flexibility, innovation, decision-making, and putting things in perspective. Perhaps you justify lacking these skills at 1:00 a.m., but what about the next day? New approaches to sleep research show that sleepy people tend to use a smaller vocabulary, with more clichés, and have more trouble finding creative ways to solve complex problems. You’re sleepy and dopey, too.

Make connections

Deliberate over a seemingly unsolvable problem and you eventually feel worn out. Surrender to sleep instead and you might find fresh insight and solutions when you wake up. Long-term research shows that while you sleep your brain strengthens relevant associations and weakens irrelevant links. Forget something important? Sleep can help you restore the memory. When you sleep your body relaxes in a way it doesn’t at any other time, making connections you literally can’t attend to otherwise. By letting your thoughts stir around in your subconscious you incubate new ideas and bring together ideas that haven’t congealed before.

Improve memory

REM sleep helps your brain consolidate the activities, skills, and memories picked up during the day. It also helps you sort through your experiences and their details in context so you can use them again someday. In sequential memory tests, volunteers were shown pictures of two sets of unfamiliar faces, separated by a distracting task. Faces were presented again, but this time in a jumbled order and with a third set of totally new faces. Both the control and the group who had lost the equivalent of one night’s sleep could easily recognize a face seen before. The latter group, however, found it hard to decide when they’d seen a face. In addition, when asked how sure they were of their answers, the tired people were much more likely to say “100% certain” as they offered responses that were wrong.

Sound smart

Sleepy people repeatedly have trouble conveying ideas and finding the right words. When I traveled the red-eye regularly I made my way through airports without incident only if I didn’t need to answer more than the most basic questions (e.g., “Did you pack your own luggage?”) en route. When you can’t hold a simple exchange, are you likely to engage in a meaningful conversation? One experiment asks people who haven’t had enough sleep for ten words beginning with a single letter. They tend to deliver similar meaning words such as none, not, nil … in between loooonnnnng pauses. They also produce more monotone speech which makes them sound like a bore.

Make change

Sleep helps you adjust to unforeseen changes while sleeplessness impairs your ability to make flexible decisions. Researchers learned this when they adapted a computer game where players marketed a product for a virtual company. The game increased in complexity as it introduced unpredictable events. After less sleep loss than the amount lost by high-tech employees releasing a new product, player performance was marred by rigid thinking and an inability to fine-tune plans when new information became available. It was their approach to solve problems, however, that created the wildest errors. Even with new and relevant information, the sleep-deprived wouldn’t change their strategy and usually latched on to an earlier approach.

Give your legs a break

Sleep provides your body rest. With work, family, networking, community, pets, sports, and catching up on what you missed yesterday, your body gets tired too. While you sleep, the chemical and electrical connections that keep you going reset themselves so you can embark again tomorrow. Weary muscles prove distracting to everything (including learning), and they can prevent you from focusing on what matters most. A tired body is also more likely to affect your immune system, your heart, and lead to other health problems that ultimately mess up your well-manicured plans.

But, but, but….

Some of you are doubtful, or maybe you’re too tired to make the connection between your life and those of people who regularly don’t sleep enough. Perhaps you even know a medical resident who saves lives while working a 36-hour shift. Surgery rotations are not only being reexamined as a troublesome educational model, but they were initially designed so that young doctors could gain the skill of working while stressed, not because the doctors were sharper that way. Watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy to be reminded that people who go without sleep frequently lack good judgment. Did you know that studies of medical residents regularly find they perform at least as badly when sleep deprived as when they are moderately drunk?

Mask physical sleepiness with a cup of coffee or a can Red-Bull–but don’t expect those drinks to remedy an over-stimulated brain or reenergize a physically tired physique. There are huge hidden benefits of even just one extra hour of sleep.

If you believe you will catch up on sleep when you die, you can be as productive on five hours of sleep as you are with eight hours of sleep, and you actively choose to skip opportunities to sleep: let me beg you to reconsider.

There are people in the world–people like me–who need everyone who can get a full night’s sleep to be quick, well rested, and leading the world with all their faculties intact. Go to bed early tonight. Pleazzze.

 

[Photo credit: Patrick Bouquet, Sleeping lion]

Originally published in Fast Company’s Learning Resource Center.

Advice for Executives: Get Some Sleep!

Our lack of sleep deprives us of the capacity to excel.

There was a time I chose to sleep only a few hours a night. I commuted between continents for months and then from the East Coast to West Coast each week for years. Habits included late night reading, early morning email, and thirty years without a nap. I believed I could achieve higher productivity by simply sleeping less.

Now I chase after sleep like fireflies: enthusiastically but with little sparkle the next day. I have a young son and a husband with restless legs. I also have a new company about to launch and another fall season on the road with conferences and speaking gigs. At times it still feels like I’ve gone a decade without a full night’s rest. I’m not alone.

Nearly 50 million Americans suffer from sleep disturbances that negatively affect their work, home, and personal lives, according to research by the National Sleep Foundation. 29% of those surveyed fell asleep or became very sleepy at work in the past month, and 36% have fallen asleep or nodded off while driving in the past year. One in five American adults show signs of chronic sleep deprivation, making the condition a widespread public health problem.

In a report from the Virgin Pulse Institute, “Sleep disturbances cause fatigue-related productivity losses estimated at $1,967 per employee annually.” According to the Institute of Medicine, “People with an insufficient amount of sleep are more likely to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, depression, and even cancer.” Yet people have more power over their sleep patterns than they may realize, and addressing these issues with simple behavior changes often results in better sleep immediately.

After weighing the evidence and serving as my own lab rat, I now understand that sleepless habits deprive us of our natural capacity to excel. Learning–and applying the right things faster–provides us the only long-term competitive advantage, and optimal learning requires sleep.

If you need a justification to head for bed rather than staying up late again, I offer these career (and life) savers:

Think about tomorrow

The thinking part of your brain (the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe) is the first area to falter when you lose more than a few hours of sleep. That part of your brain is responsible for your most important mental assets: focus, flexibility, innovation, decision-making, and putting things in perspective. Perhaps you justify lacking these skills at 1:00 a.m., but what about the next day? New approaches to sleep research show that sleepy people tend to use a smaller vocabulary, with more clichés, and have more trouble finding creative ways to solve complex problems. You’re sleepy and dopey, too.

Make connections

Deliberate over a seemingly unsolvable problem and you eventually feel worn out. Surrender to sleep instead and you might find fresh insight and solutions when you wake up. Long-term research shows that while you sleep your brain strengthens relevant associations and weakens irrelevant links. Forget something important? Sleep can help you restore the memory. When you sleep your body relaxes in a way it doesn’t at any other time, making connections you literally can’t attend to otherwise. By letting your thoughts stir around in your subconscious you incubate new ideas and bring together ideas that haven’t congealed before.

Improve memory

REM sleep helps your brain consolidate the activities, skills, and memories picked up during the day. It also helps you sort through your experiences and their details in context so you can use them again someday. In sequential memory tests, volunteers were shown pictures of two sets of unfamiliar faces, separated by a distracting task. Faces were presented again, but this time in a jumbled order and with a third set of totally new faces. Both the control and the group who had lost the equivalent of one night’s sleep could easily recognize a face seen before. The latter group, however, found it hard to decide when they’d seen a face. In addition, when asked how sure they were of their answers, the tired people were much more likely to say “100% certain” as they offered responses that were wrong.

Sound smart

Sleepy people repeatedly have trouble conveying ideas and finding the right words. When I traveled the red-eye regularly I made my way through airports without incident only if I didn’t need to answer more than the most basic questions (e.g., “Did you pack your own luggage?”) en route. When you can’t hold a simple exchange, are you likely to engage in a meaningful conversation? One experiment asks people who haven’t had enough sleep for ten words beginning with a single letter. They tend to deliver similar meaning words such as none, not, nil … in between loooonnnnng pauses. They also produce more monotone speech which makes them sound like a bore.

Make change

Sleep helps you adjust to unforeseen changes while sleeplessness impairs your ability to make flexible decisions. Researchers learned this when they adapted a computer game where players marketed a product for a virtual company. The game increased in complexity as it introduced unpredictable events. After less sleep loss than the amount lost by high-tech employees releasing a new product, player performance was marred by rigid thinking and an inability to fine-tune plans when new information became available. It was their approach to solve problems, however, that created the wildest errors. Even with new and relevant information, the sleep-deprived wouldn’t change their strategy and usually latched on to an earlier approach.

Give your legs a break

Sleep provides your body rest. With work, family, networking, community, pets, sports, and catching up on what you missed yesterday, your body gets tired too. While you sleep, the chemical and electrical connections that keep you going reset themselves so you can embark again tomorrow. Weary muscles prove distracting to everything (including learning), and they can prevent you from focusing on what matters most. A tired body is also more likely to affect your immune system, your heart, and lead to other health problems that ultimately mess up your well-manicured plans.

But, but, but….

Some of you are doubtful, or maybe you’re too tired to make the connection between your life and those of people who regularly don’t sleep enough. Perhaps you even know a medical resident who saves lives while working a 36-hour shift. Surgery rotations are not only being reexamined as a troublesome educational model, but they were initially designed so that young doctors could gain the skill of working while stressed, not because the doctors were sharper that way. Watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy to be reminded that people who go without sleep frequently lack good judgment. Did you know that studies of medical residents regularly find they perform at least as badly when sleep deprived as when they are moderately drunk?

Mask physical sleepiness with a cup of coffee or a can Red-Bull–but don’t expect those drinks to remedy an over-stimulated brain or reenergize a physically tired physique. There are huge hidden benefits of even just one extra hour of sleep.

If you believe you will catch up on sleep when you die, you can be as productive on five hours of sleep as you are with eight hours of sleep, and you actively choose to skip opportunities to sleep: let me beg you to reconsider.

There are people in the world–people like me–who need everyone who can get a full night’s sleep to be quick, well rested, and leading the world with all their faculties intact. Go to bed early tonight. Pleazzze.

 

[Photo credit: Patrick Bouquet, Sleeping lion]

Originally published in Fast Company’s Learning Resource Center.

Girls Gone Engineering

Singer Kristen Lems introduced me to Peggy Seeger’s song, “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer” almost 25 years ago. It wormed its way into my ear when I learned only 7% of the engineering workforce is female. More than 4 times as many men than women are enrolled in graduate school for engineering-related fields.

[Y]ou only need to learn to be a lady

The duty isn’t yours, for to try and run the world

An engineer could never have a baby

Remember, dear, that you’re a girl.

Kristen and Peggy sang that women rarely pursue technical fields because we’re expected to have families, provide a loving home for our husbands, and that engeneering isn’t ladylike (whatever that means).

I had convinced myself the world of work was better these days for women until I learned that only 6% of engineering companies offer flexible work options. 36% report not doing anything at all to improve workforce diversity.

A segment on the PBS NewsHour about the engineering and science gender gap pointed out that a lack of female mentors, subtle discrimination or work conditions in which men talk in a way that women found disrespectful were also common factors.

Then I found a beacon of hope is Andrea Beaty’s children’s book, Rosie Revere, Engineer. Beaty reminded me that another reason for the gap can be addressed now in our homes and in our schools. Many girls aren’t encouraged to persevere as tinkerers and inventors… makers of what’s next.

Alone in her attic, the moon high above,

dear Rosie made gadgets and gizmos she loved.

And when she grew sleepy, she hid her machines

far under the bed, where they’d never been seen.

Girls, and the women we become, often interpret early failures to mean we need to change course, altering our behavior and the career paths we choose to increase the likelihood we’ll succeed.

This may be the larger challenge for our society–providing an environment for all children to play, try, fail, and try again, with encouragement from family and friends, teachers and mentors. Design thinking, trying new things, testing our limits, and believing in ourselves will likely be larger determinants of our futures.

In this story, Rosie’s great-great-aunt Rose is Rosie’s guardian engineer. Despite Rosie fearing that her inventions are failures, aunt Rose points out, “This great flop is over. It’s time for the next!”

Your brilliant first flop was a raging success!

Come on, let’s get busy and on to the next!”

She handed a notebook to Rosie Revere,

who smiled at her aunt as it all became clear.

Life might have failures, but this was not it.

The only true failure can come if you quit.

Not only is this a wonderful story with imaginative illustrations for young girls, my son (well past picture-book age) learned how millions of women during World War II worked to provide the food and equipment needed for the war effort. He appreciated the message to persevere and I found it inspiring enough to write about.

While I don’t believe engineering firms or technical roles will be welcoming as they should be for women in the near future, I also can’t believe as a society we’ll continue to support this sort of segregation.

Personally, I wish someone had encouraged me from a young age to become a physicist, but I don’t even remembering learning about those sorts of science and engineering jobs when I was growing up.

Opportunities to learn about the wide array of jobs increases every year and it’s up to us to model for young women they truly can be anything they set their minds to be.

If you have a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece or a young female neighbor I encourage you to read her this book and then talk about its implications. Introduce a girl to how engineering skills can give her superpowers, learn together about Rosie the Riveter, fly an airplane together and build gizmos and gadgets and doohickeys, too.

Strong structures support a strong society.

 

Peggy Seeger, Pete Seeger’s younger sister, sings “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer.”

I do believe in magic

If you’re like me, sometimes skipping the prologues to books, wanting to jump directly into the stream, you probably also miss some magic.

The best part of Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon is in the forward, an introduction to the why behind the words. Rather than encourage you to read the whole book in the middle of winter (it’s sweeping heart-tugging summer read), here’s the magic you shouldn’t miss. Enjoy.

“I want to tell you some important things before we start our journey…My name is Cory Jay Mackenson. My hometown was a place called Zephyr, in south Alabama. It never got too cold there or too hot…It was a magic place.

“I wanted to set my memories down on paper, where I can hold them. You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of change and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get out on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wilderness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heart sad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to the train passing on the track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take the memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon

 

Photo credit: Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes

Great people do things before they’re ready.

As I work on finishing up a book chapter about taking action and a report about using your brain at work, I found this fantastic quote from Amy Poehler. Perhaps not a new year’s resolution as much as a solid kick in the ass to move along NOW.

In short: Step into life. Go.

This is from Amy’s Smart Girls “Ask Amy” series in a response to a question from teenage Mae about staying courageous.

For those of you who want the words to requote and with a bit more at the end than was in the image:

G reat people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. And by doing it, they’re proven right. Because, I think there’s something inside of you—and inside of all of us—when we see something and we think, “I think I can do it, I think I can do it. But I’m afraid to.” Bridging that gap, doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that—THAT is what life is. And I think you might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s special. And if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself. Now you know. A mystery is solved. So, I think you should just give it a try. Just inch yourself out of that back line. Step into life. Courage. Risks. Yes. Go. Now.

photo credit: Shannon Kringen, Crackle Walk

Focus on What Matters Most

Right at the time I thought I had it all, I realized I had no time to spend on any of it. Thankfully, in a book by Elaine St. James, Simplify Your Life, I found someone who had experienced this feeling and set out to find a way through. Over six months, I de-stuffed and de-scheduled. Elaine’s was no back-to-basics message, encouraging me to grow my own food and pedal to work. Her message simply suggested that we might want to slow down and enjoy the things that really matter.

All along my journey, her words provided me inspiration and insight into how to focus on what mattered most. Several years later, while writing for a magazine, Elaine granted me some of her time to talk about simplifying, writing books, and finding a place in the world. That conversation took place fourteen years ago. I’m thrilled to report I’ve stuck with a simplified approach to life ever since. I still have too many magazines, spend too much time en-route, and collect too many t-shirts at conferences. Overall, the time I once spent keeping up with society’s expectations, the latest fashion, or traditions long since useful are much better focused on today.

It’s the world around me I’m worried about now. While minimalism may seem in, the gluttony of civilization overall saps more than our energy. It’s sapping our planet too.

Last week as I revved up for going into de-stuff maintenance mode, I re-read Elaine’s first book. As I dive into the piles on my desk and the overstuffed t-shirt drawer, I thought it was time to share our original conversation with you. Enjoy!

Marcia Conner: What do people need to learn in order to change their lives so that they can get to and do what really matters?

Elaine St. James: There are a number of different approaches. I think that any one of them could be a trigger for someone to get it, and then go on and follow their own mode to the result. I also think that we are all at different points along the path. There are many people who just picked up one of the books and got it—like you. There are other people who don’t necessarily get it as quickly, or who understand the overall picture but can’t quite figure out how to get their own lives there. I think one of the first things people need to learn is what it feels like to begin to take the time.

Conner: So how can we do that?

St. James: It’s kind of a step-by-step process—especially in relation to work and life. I devote the first chapter of Simplify Your Work Life to cutting back on the amount of time you work so you have more time for the other areas of your life. That includes things like cutting back to a forty hour work week, for some cutting back to a thirty hour week, for others getting in the habit of leaving their briefcase at the office two or three nights a week, not working weekends, or eliminating their commute if possible. Take your vacation. How often do we brag about the fact we haven’t had a vacation in three years? Or take a sabbatical. There are numerous sabbatical programs, many of which are even paid for and sponsored by employers. So, start with beginning to take the time.

You can also cut back on some of your social obligations. Cut back on some of the material stuff in your life that you have to spend time taking care of so that you can begin to feel what it feels like to have the time for what really matters.

I was at the point where I just knew I had to do this. A lot of people are at that same place. Others may have the desire to do it, but they don’t believe it’s possible. So, for some people this means taking a leap of faith and saying, “Okay, I’m going to start cutting back here and there and just see what it feels like.” Others need to reach a point where they see that it actually can be done. When we’re in the midst of these crazy lives it feels like we can’t slow down, like we can’t stop. It feels like if we stop for even a minute we’re going to lose out on everything. We won’t be able to keep up with the information; won’t be able to keep up with the technology; won’t be able to do what we have to do to keep going.

Conner: Lotte Bailyn at MIT Sloan recommends experiments, or trial periods of time where little by little we see it actually can be done.

St. James: When we begin to slow down we learn that the world won’t come to an end if we stop. That was a revelation for me. I realized that, “Hey, the world is still turning, I’m still living, and I can stop for a bit and everything will still be OK.” We reach this point where we think we’re holding it all together: our lives, our families, our social community. But the fact is if we step back from it or even out of it for a little while, the world is going to continue on without us and everything will be fine.

Conner: Sounds like you have to let go of some ego, too.

St. James: Oh, yeah, big ego letting go. When we’re in the center of it we feel like we’re it. It takes some humility to be able to step back and say, “My assistant could do that.” But it’s quite another challenge to ask, “Does it even need to get done?” There are certain type A personalities that fall into this, and it’s often the “Type A” personalities that need to let go of the ego a little bit, too.

Then I think we need to learn that we don’t have to know it all either. There is so much emphasis today on information technology and we think we have to know it all, we have to be on top of it. I finally figured out that I could work 24-hours a day and I still wouldn’t get it all done, and I still wouldn’t know it all. I realized that even if you don’t know it all, you are still a valuable person, and you can still contribute to the world. You can still accomplish tremendous amounts.

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than information.” I experienced this first hand after I canceled my magazine and newspaper subscriptions. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but I just kind of unplugged from everything. I found out that I could take the time at the end of the day to just sit and daydream, opening myself up to really thinking rather than constantly reacting. We all fall into that habit. We react to the things that are going on around us and feel there is a certain response or a certain expectation that we have to live up to—usually somebody else’s expectation. If we let go of that, we can really get the feel of how important imagination is in our life. It’s not that information is not important, but imagination is what we do with that information. We have to learn to take the time to tap into our own intuitive knowing.

Conner: Are you suggesting we get rid of all of our magazines? My office would be empty!

St. James: No, just those you don’t have time to read. We often feel a lot of guilt about all the magazines that are stacking up that we never have time to read, and the guilt adds to the stress. But it is so simple: cancel the magazines you don’t have time for. If you can’t find the time for it, it’s not that important to you.

So often we depend on outside sources when we really have a tremendous source of knowledge and understanding within ourselves. The trouble is that we’re moving too fast and we’re too exhausted most of the time to really tap into it.

There are simple things you can do to tap into that intuition. I write about some of these in Simplify Your Work Life. They are things like taking a break, getting up and walking around the block when you’re tired, taking a nap, or daydreaming. And of course, making sure you’re getting enough sleep, eating right, and taking time for that balance in your life. These kinds of things will contribute to your ability to hone that inner knowing.

One tool that I learned to use if I’m dealing with a problem or a challenge is to write it out in a journal before I go to bed at night, getting clear on what the crux of the problem is. In writing it, I consciously direct my subconscious mind to help me find the solution. Then I go to bed and forget about it. Then first thing in the morning when I wake up, while I’m still in that kind of semi-sleep state, I start writing in my journal the first thing that comes to me. Sometimes I give it a jump-start by saying, “So the solution to this problem is…” And insights just start pouring out. You can use this for lots of different kinds of situations in your work life, your family life, and your relationships.

Conner: That’s quite a contrast to searching the Internet for every possible solution imaginable!

St. James: Yes, the internet is a powerful tool, too, obviously. Sometimes we simply need to strike a balance between acquiring the information that is available to us through modern technology and the wisdom that is available to us through our inner technology via our intuition.

Conner: Absolutely. Did you use intuition before, or are you able to now access it because of the change you’ve made in your life?

St. James: I’m definitely able to access my intuition much more readily since I slowed down the pace of my life.

In a sense that’s what happened when I had the epiphany to simplify my life. I had a real estate investing business, also a seminar business, I had written a book on real estate investing, I’d just returned from the book tour, and I had all of these things going on. I came back and was sitting at my desk, just overwhelmed, looking at this huge time management system, and it was like a light went on—I’ve got to simplify my life. I didn’t even know at that point what it meant. But the feeling was strong enough that I spent four days at a retreat house and forced myself to just sit there and think about what was complicating my life, and come up with ideas about how to make it simple. Part of that the motivation was desperation. I just knew I didn’t want to go on living the way I’d been living. It was just too much.

Now that I’ve simplified, I see that I’ve survived by cutting back and doing less. I’ve prospered by finding an entirely new career that I love, and I’ve been able to develop a deep, rich, rewarding, and inner life in the midst of a chaotic world. From time to time I’m still involved in that chaos, but I have made sure that what I do is valuable and worth it to me.

We spend so much time spinning our wheels. It often feels like we’re getting something done; we’re at the office, it’s late at night and we’ve got the computer on, the fax on, the cell phones are ringing and all that, but are we really accomplishing anything?

Conner: There are so many things written suggesting busy people should become minimalists—getting rid of everything, growing all their own food, trading in a comfortable car. But to me that would take even more work and keep me from doing what matters. There’s nothing wrong with it if that’s what matters most to you, but simplifying should be the means, not the goal.

St. James: Exactly. I talk about that in Living the Simple Life because that question kept coming up. Simplifying doesn’t mean you have to go live in the woods. That is not what it’s about. What made this simplify-your-life concept work—certainly what made the book successful—is that it was the first time somebody put these ideas together under the context of “simplifying.” Not so we could grow our own food necessarily, but so we would have time for whatever is important to us. Many of us have reached the point where we have great lives, we just don’t have the time to enjoy them.

We all want to simplify for different reasons. Some people want to simplify so they have time with their kids. That’s why I wrote Simplify Your Life With Kids. We realize that our kids are growing up and we never see them. We don’t know what’s really happening in their lives. We feel guilty about it so we buy them stuff, but we’re not spending time with them. Simplifying helps people create that time.

For single people or for people whose kids are grown and gone, simplifying may have a different focus. We see life passing by, and we haven’t done what we wanted to do with our time and with our lives.

Conner: The same can be said for work. We don’t often know the people we spend so much time with each day. There needs to be a sense of recouping that time, finding a place in our hearts to be able to share who we are, and to have that inner knowing with other people.

St. James: I think the challenge gets bigger as the technology separates us even more. We’re plugged into technology all day; we don’t have the interaction with people we used to have. I think our souls miss that. We are social animals after all.

Conner: And as a social animal, what has simplifying done for your life?

St. James: I think it has given me a much richer, fuller life. I make sure I take the time now to enjoy my friendships and my relationships. I have a family of cousins that I grew up with back in the mid-west that I hadn’t seen in years because my life was too hectic. I went for years without taking vacations. Since I simplified, I had the time to establish this wonderful reconnection with my family.

Conner: Wonderful. How did you create that time?

St. James: In part by simplifying my relationships! Before, I spent a lot of time with people I didn’t really want to spend time with. Often out of habit, often out of obligation, often just because it was easier than to do something to change it. Now I make sure that the people in my life are people I really want to be with, the people that really matter to me.

Sometimes we need to keep blinders on so we don’t get distracted by the cultural and media messages we’re so bombarded with to keep our lives complicated. So there has to be a certain amount of discipline about saying “no” to things that don’t matter to you.

Conner: What matters changes over time, right?

St. James: Right. When I simplified my life, I realized I was spending a lot of time doing things that had mattered to me ten or fifteen years before. I went for a long period of time not realizing that those things didn’t matter anymore.

Conner: So we have to revisit our priorities. And, we have to make choices about those priorities. We can either choose to live a simple life or we can choose to live a complicated life, and that’s made up by lots of tiny choices. We can choose to keep this paper, or that magazine, or the big house, or this friend, or we can choose not to. We are in control and we have the ability to make these choices for ourselves.

St. James: That’s exactly it. We are in control. We can create our lives exactly the way we want them. Often there are outside demands, family pressures, social pressures, community pressures and so simplifying often means we have to be willing to buck those. We have to realize that nobody else is going to give us a day off. Nobody is going to say, “You can leave the office at six o’clock tonight.” Nobody is going to give us the weekend off. We have to seize that time for ourselves.

Conner: It shouldn’t seem so crazy that if you’re healthy you can take a well day off!

St. James: Absolutely—the point being that we each have to find a system that works for us.

Conner: Thank you for helping us find a system that works for each of us.

St. James: It’s just been wonderful talking with you. I appreciate your support, and your thoughtful questions.

——–

Elaine St. James is the author of the national bestseller Simplify Your Life, which detailed how she scaled back her own life in the early 1990s. Hailed as the leader of the simplicity movement by The New York Times, St. James wrote five other best-selling books on simplifying: Inner Simplicity (1995), Living the Simple Life (1996), Simplify Your Life With Kids (1997), Simplify Your Work Life (2000),and 365 Simple Reminders (2000).

For the record, I simplified my life for the first time in 1995, complicated my life in 1996, simplified again in 1999, and believe I’m now it for the long haul because in 2014 I’m still on a simple path. Throughout, I’ve never lost sight of what matters: my family, my health, my writing, and my learning.

When I decided to republish this interview, originally written for a magazine I used to edit, I sent an email to Elaine thanking her for how much she’s improved my life and asking if it would be OK with her if I resurfaced our conversation. I didn’t need to do that, but I thought it a good thing to do. The email bounced back, which isn’t surprising from a decade old address. Yet when I sought out every other people-searching technique now available in the digital age, I found her no easier to find. In this era of digital social lives, Elaine has also mastered living off this electronic grid. That’s wow-worthy on its own and something the “I’m going to try to stay off Facebook for a month” crowd might find outright astonishing.

Here’s to Elaine, once again inspiring us by focusing on what matters.

[photo credit: Thomas Quine, Snowy Beach Stream]

Give an Epic Minecraft Gift

Minecraft makes even less sense than Twitter to the uninitiated. Big pixel visuals get no love from gamers anticipating in 2013 realer-than-life graphics. Long login routines seem to imply the developers, lead by Markus “@Notch” Perrson, holed up in Sweden, don’t know simple is in. A distributed worldwide network of new servers, coming online daily from everyone but Minecraft’s parent company Mojang, avoid the giant serverfarm fashion.

Yet the fanatical following Minecraft has gained since launching a public alpha in 2009  dismisses what’s expected, snickering at how software’s suppose to be done.

I grew curious as my son became smitten, then fascinated, then enthralled. Despite more than a decade working inside software companies, managing development projects and design teams, I found Mojang’s approach baffling and admirable at the same time.

When I began seeing how the larger software community could benefit by being more like Minecraft, I began wondering if the mine-your-world approach could save business software stuck in industrial age metaphors. When I began asking this question aloud, the people (who didn’t have kids who played Minecraft or thought in nDimensions) looked at me as if I had grown a blockhead myself. [For the uninitiated, the blockhead's name is Steve.]

To pull this thinking back from the nether, I began spending more time with Minecraft. It was there that I found a fantastic new book, called Minecraft, by Swedish journalists Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larson published by Seven Stories Press. Although my Minecraft-as-software-framework is far from ready to share, Goldberg and Larsson surprised me even more than the game itself.

Within a few hours of the book landing on my desk at home, my son, a previously reluctant reader took the book, climbed into bed, and began reading and reading and reading. Every night he logged off the computer, walked away from watching TV with his dad, skipped  a bedtime snack, or left any one of the all-so-compelling evening activities he enjoys, returning to the book. One night I found him sound asleep with it tucked under his arm.

When I  asked what he liked about the book he said in his usual older-than-usual way, “The characters–and they are real characters–are also so real. Notch was a boy like me. Now he’s changggging the world. Because of him I can be with my friends online and make new friends. We can change everything together.”

Those words replay as I read the book myself and as I think broadly about a world in need of deep change. [I'll begin the near-the-end chapter, "Becoming a Lego" tonight.] Although I don’t normally write about a book before I read all the way through, with Christmas in a week I wanted to suggest you buy this book for every minecrafter in your life now. 8 year olds and 48-year olds alike.

Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything is a root for the underdogs story that has you riveted with anticipation even as you know how it’s going to end. Intermixed throughout is a thoughtful and coherent assessment of why people benefit from working with each other and playing with the possibilities.

One of my favorite passages deals with rewards, a theme often mischaracterized and wrongly applied in most anything labeled “gamification.”

“Minecraft exemplifies what is meant by a game having its own universe, with its own laws and logic…As with all effort in gaming, even creating a tool must lead to some reward. It’s usually that the tool makes it easier to do something else, like digging up even more blocks. And pickaxes crafted from rare materials are, naturally, more effective than common ones.

“Here’s where the question arises of what ‘reward’ really mans in a game context. Rewards can manifest themselves in many ways: getting to see the continuation of a story, one’s avatar receiving more power, getting to see a visually impressive film sequent, hearing a beautiful sound….But more than anything, the rewards are about that feeling of having solved a problem or a puzzle….Perhaps our brains are simply made to enjoy succeeding at challenging things.”

 

And then I began realizing that this sort of a reward is not for a second, in Minecraft, created by anyone other than you. There are no external rewards. No scorecards or badges. The reward is a problem well solved. The puzzles are you asking yourself a question, “Can it be done?” and then proving to yourself it can.

This internal sense of doing what needs to be done, or finding your challenge and overcoming it, is the transcendent message of our time. Even nine year olds know it. You owe it to yourself and to the people in your life who would appreciate a gripping, fun, carefully written story to if not play Minecraft, to at least read it. Enjoy.

ps. Naysayers might be surprised to hear that my son learned to write clearly and spell correctly because he realized these skills were critical to working with others in Minecraft. He also sought out learning to program (through Video Programming for Kids and then CodeAcademy) because of Minecraft and his interest in being like Notch. Most importantly, he came to realize that anything is possible.

One of his BFFs is the 12-year old son of one of my former colleagues who lives 2781 miles away. The boys have never seen one another, yet find common ground, search out new horizons, and collaborate in the same way I did with my girlfriends for hours on the telephone when I was their age. No doubt, the Minecraft-fueled conversations are more likely to improve the planet.

Are You A People Person?

“Are you a people person?” “If you were an animal, which would you be?”

Have you heard these dumb dumb questions asked on the road to hiring smart people?

How often do we use stereotypes and silly interview questions to screen candidates and hire talent? The answer, unfortunately, is too often.

This fantastic IBM TV commercial is hilarious, sad, and inspiring on what we might be able to do better in the future. Jonathan Ferrar offers the perfect voice-over.

Twitterbursts

As Twitter goes public, I thought it might be useful to revisit with you why I think so much of Twitter and the short bursts of correspondence it sets free. Just don’t call it revolutionary. It’s all about the tools, and it’s not about the tools. To see how I use Twitter each day, visit me @marciamarcia.

Humans have conveyed short messages, rife with meaning, for over thirty thousand years. Smoke signals have traversed the airways. Expressive quips filled Seinfeld’s show. At all stages and ages, we burst forward.

Up, dada.

Look at my train.

No, no, no.

Keys please.

Outta here.

How cool is that?

I do.

Be back before dinner.

The flight was canceled?!

Rest in peace.

Apparently people just don’t notice how little is said while so much is conveyed. Why else would so many call the slew of social messaging tools revolutionary?

Consumer-facing Twitter and corporate-ready Socialtext Signals, Socialcast, and  Yammer (to name a few) are noteworthy, evolutionary, and crazy cool. They amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast. They can even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”

What they do, though — enable sharing micro-bursts with interested people — has existed for ages, though. Literally. What’s new is how they help us do it (forcing compactness and distributing to portable devices) and who we share with (often previous strangers who share our passions).

As the father of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski said, in tweet-like-fashion, “The map is not the territory.”

Twitter is no more game changing than BMX racing’s appearance as an Olympic sport.

While on a panel recently about, “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise,” I pantomimed to the audience, “Please tweet what he just said.” This replaced for me, “Note to self: messages are like rearview mirrors, offering us all extra peripheral vision.” In a less microphoned venue I might have whispered to someone near by, “Brilliant comparison.”

As a species we are cognitive misers, sifting through noise all day. We seek designs to incorporate, ideas to learn from, puzzles to untangle, stats to inform decisions. Cave dwellers did this. So did the Founding Fathers and their families. Paul Revere and William Dawes were replaced by the telegram, replaced by the radio, replaced by the telephone, augmented by Twitter, enabled by the iPhone. It’s the people, far from stupid. Making connections, reflecting, sharing, bursting along.

And before you tell IT that microsharing is as old as humankind, yet your new online social network is something fundamentally different, think again. Consider the shoulders you are standing on to see so far. Even the Athenians were creating a company of (social) citizens, forming networks or networks, with democratic values, governance structures and participatory practices.

Consider what we want to do, then determine which tools support you doing it better, farther, wider, faster. You have been microsharing and networking since you first asked to be carried and your toys were made of wood. In the event the Internet went away tomorrow, you could continue to burst and connect with those in close proximity, griping about how much you miss your tools.

———-

Originally published at “Twitterbursts: It’s not about the tools, it’s all about the tools” on Fast Company’s Learn At All Levels blog by Marcia Conner.

[photo credit: Beautiful Tools, geishaboy500]