James Clear's Blog, page 20

How to Solve Difficult Problems by Using the “Inversion Technique”

One of the most difficult problems we face as humans is learning how to change our behavior. And one of the best ways to solve a difficult problem is to look at it from the opposite angle.

In this case, rather than focusing on the behavior you want to change, you can focus on the obstacles that are preventing the change. I call this strategy the “Inversion Technique” and author Josh Kaufman covers it in his book, The First 20 Hours.

Here’s how it works.

The Inversion Technique

The way to use the Inversion Technique is to look at a particular problem from the opposite direction.

For example, if you want to be a better manager, then you would ask, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?” This line of questioning will often reveal some surprising insights.

Here’s an in-depth example from Kaufman’s book…

By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren’t immediately obvious. Take white-water kayaking. What would I need to know if I wanted to be able to kayak in a large, fast-moving, rock-strewn river?

Here’s the inversion: What would it look like if everything went wrong?

I’d flip upside down underwater, and not be able to get back up.
I’d flood my kayak, causing it to sink or swamp, resulting in a total loss of the kayak.
I’d hit my head on a rock.
I’d lose my paddle, eliminating my maneuverability.
I’d eject from my kayak, get stuck in a hydraulic (a point in the river where the river flows back on itself, creating a loop like a washing machine) and not be able to get out.

If I managed to do all of these things at once in the middle of a raging river, I’d probably die – the worst-case scenario. This depressing line of thought is useful because it points to a few white-water kayaking skills that are probably very important:

Learning to roll the kayak right side up if it flips, without ejecting.
Learning how to prevent swamping the kayak if ejecting is necessary.
Learning how to avoid losing my paddle in rough water.
Learning and using safety precautions when rafting around large rocks.
Scouting the river before the run to avoid dangerous river features entirely.

This mental simulation also gives me a shopping list: I’d need to invest in a flotation vest, helmet, and other safety gear.

Now … I have concrete list of subskills to practice and actions to take to ensure that I actually have fun, keep my gear, and survive the trip.

— Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours

Using the Inversion Technique will often reveal daily errors that you may not realize you are already making. Or, as shown in the kayak example, it will showcase potential problems that could arise. Inverting the problem provides a different perspective by forcing you to think through the hidden barriers that could prevent your progress.

Becoming Smart vs. Avoiding Stupid

Say you want to create more innovation at your organization. Thinking forward, you’d think about all of the things you could do to foster innovation. If you look at the problem backwards, you’d think about all the things you could do to create less innovation. Ideally, you’d avoid those things. Sounds simple right? I bet your organization does some of those ‘stupid’ things today.

—Shane Parrish [1]

It is far easier to avoid stupidity than it is to create genius.

Eliminating the errors and mistakes that are preventing your success can be just as powerful as building new skills or habits. This was part of the success story of football player Jerry Rice. Rather than trying to build skills he didn’t have (like speed), Rice focused on eliminating mistakes that he made by running the most precise routes. As a result, when his opponents did make mistakes, Rice was able to take advantage.

Reducing Risk

There is an additional benefit to this strategy as well: While there may be adverse side effects from seeking success, there is very little risk from preventing failure.

For example, say you want to increase your focus and productivity. You could take a drug or mental stimulant that increases your ability to focus, but you run the risk of possible side effects.

On the other hand, using the Inversion Technique you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? What are ways I could distract myself?” The answer to that question may help you discover distractions you can eliminate, which should also increase your level of productivity. It’s the same problem, but the Inversion Technique allows you to attack it from another angle and with less risk. [2]

Give the Inversion Technique a try and turn your problems inside-out.

Click here to leave a comment.

P.S. You might enjoy these two interviews.

I usually do a few interviews each week and I think you might enjoy these two that were published earlier today.

The Unmistakable Creative podcast interview. This interview not only covers some of my best ideas on habits and behavior change, but also some more personal parts of my backstory. My favorite parts are the discussions at the 14-minute mark about planning for failure and the segment at the 50-minute mark on consistency. Click here to listen to the interview.

The Art of Charm podcast interview. I think most people will enjoy this interview (fair warning: it does include a bit of strong language). The conversation at the 8-minute mark about how bad habits form and how average speed in one direction or the other can make a big difference over the long-term is something that I think is very practical to real life. Click here to listen to the interview (the play button is beneath the picture of me).

Sources

Mental Model – Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity by Shane Parrish.
Here’s a personal example of how I decrease distractions: I often leave my phone in another room while I write. Answering calls completely breaks the flow of my work. Simple, but effective.

Thanks to Josh Kaufman and Shane Parrish for inspiring this article.

What to Do When You Have Too Many Ideas (And Not Enough Time)

What do you do when you have too many ideas and not enough time? Or similarly, what about when you have too many tasks and not enough energy?

As an entrepreneur, I feel like I’ve been battling this issue for awhile. There is always another opportunity to chase or a new product idea that sounds exciting. For a long time, I felt guilty about ignoring good ideas that came my way and so I kept adding more to my to-do list.

However, during a recent conversation with Travis Dommert, I learned about a new strategy for dealing with the issue of having too many ideas and projects.

It all comes down to treating your life like a rose bush.

Let me explain what Travis taught me…

Ideas are Like Rose Buds

As a rose bush grows it creates more buds than it can sustain. If you talk to an experienced gardener, they will tell you that rose bushes need to be pruned to bring out the best in both their appearance and their performance.

You see, a rose bush isn’t like a tree. It can’t grow wider and taller each year. And that means if you never trim away some of the buds, then the bush will eventually exhaust itself and die. There are only so many resources to go around. And if you really want a rose bush to flourish, then it needs to be trimmed down not just once, but each year. [1]

Ideas are like rose bushes: they need to be consistently pruned and trimmed down. And just like a rose bush, pruning away ideas — even if they have potential — allows the remaining ideas to fully blossom.

Just like the rose bush, we face constraints in our lives. We have a limited amount of energy and willpower to apply each day. It’s natural for new ideas and projects to come into our life — just like it’s natural for a rose bush to add new buds — but we have to prune things away before we exhaust ourselves.

In other words: new growth is natural and it’s normal for tasks and ideas to creep into your life, but full growth and optimal living requires pruning.

We All Need to Cut Good Branches

I like the rose bush analogy because it brings up something that is often lost in most conversations about productivity and simplicity: if you want to reach your full potential, you have to cut out ideas and tasks that are good, but not great.

In my experience, this is really hard to do.

If you’re building a business, maybe you have 3 product lines that are profitable. Your business might grow by 5x if you focus on all three, but which product line will grow by 500x if you put all of your energy into it?
If you’re training in the gym, there are all sorts of exercises that could make you stronger. But which two or three exercises will build a foundation of strength better than anything else?
If you’re thinking about the relationships in your life, there are dozens of people that you are connected to in some way. But which people bring energy into your life and which ones suck energy out of it?

Most rose buds could grow if they are given the chance. In other words, most buds are like a good idea: they have potential. But in order for the entire bush to flourish and live a healthy life, you have to choose the ones with the most potential and cut the rest.

The Bottom Line

Gardener and writer Elizabeth Roth says, “Roses that are left unpruned can become a tangled mess of old and new canes all competing for air and light.” [2]

We can say the same thing about our lives. A life left unpruned can become a twisted knot of ideas, tasks, and projects competing for your limited time and resources. If you don’t prune some of the branches from your life, the important ones will never flourish.

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources

Travis first read about the rose bud analogy in the book Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud. I haven’t read the book, but I added this note to make sure Dr. Cloud gets credit for originally developing the idea.
Pruning by Elizabeth Roth, Rose Magazine.

Thanks again to Travis Dommert for sharing the rose bud analogy with me.

Plan For Failure: Being Consistent Is Not the Same as Being Perfect

You probably realize that consistency is important for making progress, doing better work, getting in shape, and achieving some level of success in most areas of life.

I write about the power of consistency often: why repetition is more important than perfection (here), how small gains add up to big results (here), and why falling in love with boredom is essential for mastery (here).

But once you realize the power of consistency, there is a danger that comes with this knowledge. And that danger is falling into an all-or-nothing mindset.

As usual, I don’t have this all figured out, but let’s talk about how to be consistent and how we can use science and research to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls.

The All or Nothing Mindset

Once you realize that consistency is essential for success it can be easy to obsess over becoming flawlessly consistent.

For example…

Trying to lose weight? It’s easy to convince yourself that if you don’t follow your diet perfectly, then you’ve failed.
Want to meditate each day? Beware of focusing so much on never missing a day that you stress over sticking to your meditation schedule.
Looking to become a successful writer? You can quickly brainwash yourself into thinking that successful authors write every single day without fail. (The same goes for artists and athletes of all kinds.)

In other words, it’s really easy to confuse being consistent with being perfect. And that is a problem because there is no safety margin for errors, mistakes, and emergencies. (You know, the type of things that make you a normal human being.)

Cutting yourself some slack becomes even more important when we consider the science behind habit formation and continual improvement. Research shows that, regardless of the habit that you are working to build, missing a single day has no measurable impact on your long-term success. (More on that here.)

In other words, it is all about average speed, not maximum speed. Daily failures are like red lights during a road trip. When you’re driving a car, you’ll come to a red light every now and then. But if you maintain a good average speed, you’ll always make it to your destination despite the stops and delays along the way.

The Idea in Practice

My friend Josh Hillis is a fat loss coach.

When working with clients, Josh doesn’t even bother tracking their daily calories. He only looks at the calorie total at the end of each week and makes adjustments based on that.

Consider how different this strategy is from the typical nutritional approach. Josh doesn’t care what you eat for any individual meal. He is not concerned if you make a mistake or binge eat once or twice. He realizes that individual meals don’t matter if you maintain the right “average speed” over the course of the week.

I find this to be an empowering way to think about consistency and progress in nearly any area. It’s never my intention to make a mistake, but if I do, I have given myself permission to view my progress over a longer timeline than a single day or an individual event.

How to be Consistent: Plan For Failure

Consistency is essential for success in any area. There is no way to get around the fact that mastery requires a volume of work.

But if you want to maintain your sanity, reduce stress, and increase your odds of long-term success, then you need to plan for failure as well as focus on consistency. As I mentioned in my Habits Workshop, research from Stanford professor Kelly McGonigal has shown that the number one reason why willpower fades and people fail to remain consistent with their habits and goals is that they don’t have a plan for dealing with failure.

Planning to fail doesn’t mean that you expect to fail, but rather than you know what you will do and how you will get back on track when things don’t work out. If you’re focused on being perfect, then you’re caught in an all-or-nothing trap.

Meanwhile, if you realize that individual failures have little impact on your long-term success, then you can more easily rebound from failures and setbacks. Being consistent is not the same as being perfect.

Click here to leave a comment.

Photo Essay: The Beautiful Architecture and Design of Ancient Morocco

As I mentioned in my 2013 Annual Review, one of my priorities for the year is improving my photography skills and setting a higher standard for my creative work. (So far I’ve taken over 5,000 photos this year, which isn’t a blistering start, but it’s not terrible either.)

My first photography adventure of the year was to Morocco (Colorado is up next!) and today I’d like to share some of my work covering the beautiful architecture and intricate designs around the country. One of the themes that I often write about is creativity and craftsmanship, and I tried to capture those themes in the images below. As always, all photos are my own.



Note: I have also published some photos that aren’t included in this essay on Instagram, if you feel like following along there:

James Clear on Instagram.

Moroccan Architecture and Design Photos

Al-Attarine Madrasa (Fez, Morocco)

 

Ben Youssef Madrasa (Marrakech, Morocco)

 

El Badi Palace (Marrakech, Morocco)

 

Nejjarine Funduq (Fez, Morocco)

 

Dar Seffarine (Fez, Morocco)

Want more?

Click here to view more photos from Morocco.

Or, leave a comment about this photo essay.

Smart People Should Create Things

It was 1974 and Art Fry was spending his weekend singing for the local church choir. On this particular Sunday, Fry was dealing with a relatively boring problem: he couldn’t keep his bookmarks in place.

In order to find hymns quickly, Fry would stick little pieces of paper between the pages like bookmarks. The only problem was that every time he stood up, the pieces of paper would slide down deep between the pages or fall out of the book completely. Annoyed by the constant placing and replacing of his bookmarks, Fry started daydreaming about a better solution.

“It was during the sermon,” Fry said, “that I first thought, ‘What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.’” [1]

With this idea in mind, Fry went back to work the next week and began developing a solution to his bookmark problem. As luck would have it, Fry happened to be working at the perfect company. He was an employee at 3M and one of his co-workers, Spencer Silver, was an adhesives specialist.

Over the next few months, Fry and Silver developed a piece of paper that would stick to a page, but could be easily removed and reapplied over and over. Eventually, this little project became one of the best-selling office supplies of all-time: the Post-It Note.

Today, 3M sells Post-It Notes in over 100 countries worldwide. You can find them at libraries and schools, in offices and boardrooms, and scattered around nearly every workspace in between.

What can we learn from the story of Art Fry? And is there something we can take away from this to make our lives and the world better?

Create Something Small

Art Fry wasn’t trying to create a best-selling office supply product. In the beginning, Fry was simply trying to design a better bookmark for his choir hymnal. He was just trying to create something small.

For a long time, I thought that if I wasn’t working on something incredible, then it wasn’t of much value. But gradually I discovered the truth: the most important thing isn’t to create something world-changing, but simply to create. You don’t have to build something famous to build something meaningful.

And this brings us to the most important lesson we can learn from Art Fry and his Post-It Notes: when the world presents you with something interesting or frustrating or curious, choose to do something about it. Choose to be a creator.

In other words, the world needs smart people to build things. We need employees who invent things, entrepreneurs who create things, and freelancers who design things. We need secretaries who make jewelry as a side project and stay-at-home dads who write amazing novels. We need more leaders, not more followers. We need more creators, not more consumers.

And perhaps the most important thing to realize is that we not only need to create for each other, but for ourselves as well. Creating something is the perfect way to avoid wasting the precious moments that we have been given. To contribute, to create, to chip in to the world around you and to add your line to the world’s story — that is a life well lived.

What will you create today?

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources:

Daydream Achiever by Jonah Lehrer
Thanks to Andrew Yang for inspiring the title of this blog post with his book, Smart People Should Build Things

The Power of Architecture: How the World Around You Shapes Your Thoughts and Actions

In 1952, polio killed more children in America than any other communicable disease. Nearly 58,000 people were infected that year. The situation was on the verge of becoming an epidemic and the country desperately needed a vaccine.

In a small laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, a young researcher named Jonas Salk was working tirelessly to find a cure. (Years later, author Dennis Denenberg would write, “Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years.”)

Despite all his effort, Salk was stuck. His quest for a polio vaccine was meeting a dead end at every turn. Eventually, he decided that he needed a break. Salk left the laboratory and retreated to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

The basilica could not have been more different than the lab. The architecture was a beautiful combination of Romanesque and Gothic styles. White-washed brick covered the expansive exterior and dozens of semi-circular arches surrounded the plazas between buildings. Inside the church, the walls were covered with stunning fresco paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries and natural light poured in from tall windows.

It was in this space that Jonas Salk would have the breakthrough discovery that led to the polio vaccine. Years later, he would say…

“The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past. Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.”

-Jonas Salk

Today, the discovery that Salk made in that Italian monastery has impacted millions. Polio has been eradicated from nearly every nation in the world. In 2012, just 223 cases were reported globally.

Did inspiration just happen to strike Salk while he was at the monastery? Or was he right in assuming that the environment impacted his thinking?

And perhaps more importantly, what does science say about the connection between our environment and our thoughts and actions? And how can we use this information to live better lives?

Columns and arches at the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi. (Image by Konrad Glogowski.)

The Link Between Brains and Buildings

Researchers have discovered a variety of ways that the buildings we live, work, and play in drive our behavior and our actions. The way we react and respond is often tied to the environment that we find ourselves in.

For example, it has long been known that schools with more natural light provide a better learning environment for students and test scores often go up as a result. (Natural light and natural air are known to stimulate productivity in the workplace as well.)

Additionally, buildings with natural elements built into them help reduce stress and calm us down (think of trees inside a mall or a garden in a lobby). Spaces with high ceilings and large rooms promote more expansive and creative thinking.

So what does this link between design and behavior mean for you and me?

Change Your Environment, Change Your Behavior

Researchers have shown that any habit you have — good or bad — is often associated with some type of trigger or cue. Recent studies (like this one) have shown that these cues often come from your environment.

This is important because most of us live in the same home, go to the same office, and eat in the same rooms day after day. And that means you are constantly surrounded by the same environmental triggers and cues.

If your behavior is often shaped by your environment and you keep working, playing, and living in the same environment, then it’s no wonder that it can be difficult to build new habits. (The research supports this. Studies show that it is easier to change your behavior and build new habits when you change your environment.)

If you’re struggling to think creatively, then going to a wide open space or moving to a room with more natural light and fresh air might help you solve the problem. (Like it seemingly did for Jonas Salk.)

Meanwhile, if you need to focus and complete a task, research shows that it’s more beneficial to work in a smaller, more confined room with a lower ceiling (without making yourself feel claustrophobic, of course).

And perhaps most important, simply moving to a new physical space — whether it’s a different room or halfway around the world — will change the cues that you encounter and thus your thoughts and behaviors.

Quite literally, a new environment leads to new ideas.

Putting This Into Practice

In the future, I hope that architects and designers will use the connection between design and behavior to build hospitals where patients heal faster, schools where children learn better, and homes where people live happier.

That said, you can start making changes right now. You don’t have to be a victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. Here’s my simple 2-step prescription for altering your environment so that you can stick with good habits and break bad habits:

To stick with a good habit, reduce the number of steps required to perform the behavior.
To break a bad habit, increase the number of steps required to perform the behavior.

Here are some examples…

Want to watch less TV? Unplug it and put it in a closet. If you really want to watch a show, then you can take it out and plug it back in.
Want to drink more water? Fill up a few water bottles and place them around the house so that a healthy drink is always close by.
Want to start a business? Join a co-working space where you’re surrounded by dozens of other business owners.

These are just a few examples, but the point is that shifting your behavior is much easier when you shift to the right environment. Stanford professor BJ Fogg refers to this approach as “designing for laziness.” In other words, change your environment so that your default or “lazy” decision is a better one.

By designing your environment to encourage the good behaviors and prevent the bad behaviors, you make it far more likely that you’ll stick to long-term change. Your actions today are often a response the environmental cues that surround you. If you want to change your behavior, then you have to change those cues.

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources:

Utopias and Architecture By Nathaniel Coleman
Historic Cities and Sacred Sites: Cultural Roots for Urban Futures
Jonas Salk on Wikipedia
Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture by John P. Eberhard
This article explained a variety of ways that design impacts our behavior.

Want to Stick to Good Habits and Break Your Bad Ones? Try This.

In 1952, polio killed more children in America than any other communicable disease. Nearly 58,000 people were infected that year. The situation was on the verge of becoming an epidemic and the country desperately needed a vaccine.

In a small laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, a young researcher named Jonas Salk was working tirelessly to find a cure. (Years later, author Dennis Denenberg would write, “Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years.”)

Despite all his effort, Salk was stuck. His quest for a polio vaccine was meeting a dead end at every turn. Eventually, he decided that he needed a break. Salk left the laboratory and retreated to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

The basilica could not have been more different than the lab. The architecture was a beautiful combination of Romanesque and Gothic styles. White-washed brick covered the exterior and dozens of semi-circular arches surrounded the plazas between buildings. Inside the church, the walls were covered with stunning fresco paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries and natural light poured in from tall windows.

It was in this space that Jonas Salk would have the breakthrough discovery that led to the polio vaccine. Years later, he would say…

“The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past. Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.”

-Jonas Salk

Today, the discovery that Salk made in that Italian monastery has impacted millions. Polio has been eradicated from nearly every nation in the world. In 2012, just 223 cases were reported globally.

Did inspiration just happen to strike Salk while he was at the monastery? Or was he right in assuming that the environment impacted his thinking?

And perhaps more importantly, what does science say about the connection between our environment and our thoughts and actions? And how can we use this information to live better lives?

Columns and arches at the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi. (Image by Konrad Glogowski.)

The Link Between Brains and Buildings

Researchers have discovered a variety of ways that the buildings we live, work, and play in drive our behavior and our actions. The way we react and respond is often tied to the environment that we find ourselves in.

For example, it has long been known that schools with more natural light provide a better learning environment for students and test scores often go up as a result. (Natural light and natural air are known to stimulate productivity in the workplace as well.)

Additionally, buildings with natural elements built into them help reduce stress and calm us down (think of trees inside a mall or a garden in a lobby). Spaces with high ceilings and large rooms promote more expansive and creative thinking.

So what does this link between design and behavior mean for you and me?

Change Your Environment, Change Your Behavior

Researchers have shown that any habit you have — good or bad — is often associated with some type of trigger or cue. Recent studies (like this one) have shown that these cues often come from your environment.

This is important because most of us live in the same home, go to the same office, and eat in the same rooms day after day. And that means you are constantly surrounded by the same environmental triggers and cues.

If your behavior is often shaped by your environment and you keep working, playing, and living in the same environment, then it’s no wonder that it can be difficult to build new habits. (The research supports this. Studies show that it is easier to change your behavior and build new habits when you change your environment.)

If you’re struggling to think creatively, then going to a wide open space or moving into a room with more natural light and fresh air might help you solve the problem. (Like it seemingly did for Jonas Salk.)

Meanwhile, if you need to focus and complete a task, research shows that it’s more beneficial to work in a smaller, more confined room with a lower ceiling (without making yourself feel claustrophobic, of course).

And perhaps most important, simply moving to a new physical space — whether it’s a different room or halfway around the world — will change the cues that you encounter and thus your thoughts and behaviors.

Quite literally, a new environment leads to new ideas.

Putting This Into Practice

In the future, I hope that architects and designers will use the connection between design and behavior to build hospitals where patients heal faster, schools where children learn better, and homes where people live happier.

As it turns out, you don’t have to be a victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. Here’s my simple 2-step prescription for altering your environment so that you can stick with good habits and break bad habits:

To stick with a good habit, reduce the number of steps required to perform the behavior.
To break a bad habit, increase the number of steps required to perform the behavior.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg refers to this approach as “designing for laziness.” He says, “There’s just one way to radically change your behavior: radically change your environment.”

Here are some examples…

Want to watch less TV? Unplug it and put it in a closet. If you really want to watch a show, then you can take it out and plug it back in.
Want to drink more water? Fill up a few water bottles and place them around the house so that a healthy drink is always close by.
Want to start a business? Join a co-working space where you’re surrounded by dozens of other business owners.

These are just a few examples, but the point is that shifting your behavior is much easier when you shift to the right environment.

By designing your environment to encourage the good behaviors and prevent the bad behaviors, you make it far more likely that you’ll stick to long-term change. Your actions today are often a response the environmental cues that surround you. If you want to change your behavior, then you have to change those cues.

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources:

Utopias and Architecture By Nathaniel Coleman
Historic Cities and Sacred Sites: Cultural Roots for Urban Futures
Jonas Salk on Wikipedia
Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture by John P. Eberhard
This article explained a variety of ways that design impacts our behavior.

Big Project Syndrome: Thoughts on Struggling to Finish My First Book

As regular readers know, I’m working on my first book right now. The book is about the power of small improvements in a world obsessed with overnight success.

For the most part, the book will include the best ideas from my weekly articles plus dozens of additional research studies and topics that I haven’t mentioned yet. I will also mix in my usual dose of practical ideas, interesting stories, and real world experiences. I have about 40,000 words written right now. My hope is that it will be the best work I’ve created thus far.

So what’s the problem?

I am really struggling to tame this beast and make progress. I haven’t written consistently on the book for weeks and lately it feels like the project is always in the same place today as it was 10 days ago.

Although I write about habits and consistency every week, I have said many times that I am no expert. Like everyone else, I’m just learning as I go. In this article, I’m going to share a few of the issues I’m struggling with and discuss just how hard it is to take a big project from idea to execution.

Big Project Syndrome

Over time, I have learned how to become better at maintaining habits and reaching short term goals.

For example…

I publish a new article every Monday and Thursday. I have missed exactly one time since starting on November 12, 2012.
It is the same in the gym. I typically lift every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And because of that consistency I’m squatting 100 pounds more this year than I was last year.
And so on…

Meanwhile, I seem to be very bad at managing larger, long-term projects.

For example, writing a book.

I know that I am capable of writing a book. As I mentioned in my article about systems vs. goals, I published over 120,000 words last year simply by writing two articles per week. So it’s not a question of ability.

I also know that I have many readers who want to read the book. I get emails from kind folks each week who say they are looking forward to buying the book when it’s released. (Thank you for the support!) So it’s not a question of audience size or potential sales.

And because I already write about these topics each week, I already know much of the material that should go into the book.

What could be more frustrating than having the knowledge to create a product, knowing how to create it, having the ability to create it, and having a group of people who want it … and then not doing anything about it? What kind of mental block prevents someone from taking consistent action on the things they are skilled enough to accomplish?

Right now, I’m calling it “Big Project Syndrome.” It’s simply an execution issue. But, of course, execution isn’t always simple.

What Holds Us Back?

I realize that I’m not facing a unique problem. Pretty much every entrepreneur I know has battled this feeling before…

You have an idea. You have a skill set. You’re pretty sure that you can make it happen. And yet, for some weird reason, you don’t execute on the project. It’s incredibly frustrating.

What is it that holds us back from doing what we are capable of?

For me, it seems to be two things.

Wanting my work to be perfect, which causes me to spend more time planning, outlining, and researching, rather than actually writing.
Focusing on how big the project is and how much needs to be done rather than working on one small piece each day.

There’s a bit of irony in all of this.

I write about habits every week and tell people all of the time: “An imperfect start can always be improved, but obsessing over a perfect plan will never take you anywhere on its own.” (More on that here.)

But when it’s my project — when it’s my baby — I want it to be incredible. I’m trying to set a high standard in the work that I do and the ideas that I share. And that is a difficult balance to maintain because sometimes I end up putting the quest to be perfect before the importance of being done.

That said, this is the very reason that I try to offer a blend of scientific research and real world experiences in my articles. You can have the greatest research and theories in the world, but if you don’t understand the struggle that comes with implementing those ideas, then you’ll never see the full picture.

Big Projects and Small Starts

In many ways, big projects are an exercise in getting started over and over. Each day, you wake up and have to find a way to work on something big, but in a small way and without letting the overall scope of the project overwhelm you.

That can be a tough task and it’s proving to be a struggle for me.

I want to make this happen and I believe that I can. But I have to remind myself that an imperfect project that is complete is always better than a perfect project that is never finished.

Masters of Habit: The Deliberate Practice and Training of Jerry Rice

Masters of Habit is a series of mini-biographies on the daily rituals and routines of great athletes, artists, and leaders.

Jerry Rice is widely considered to be the greatest wide receiver in the history of the National Football League. In addition to winning three Super Bowls, Rice holds nearly every single season and career receiving record available. He is also the NFL’s all-time leader in yards, receptions, and touchdowns. Many experts say he may be the best football player ever, regardless of position.

Basically, Rice was a one-in-a-lifetime talent. Literally, the best of the best.

But in Geoff Colvin’s popular book, Talent is Overrated, he shares an interesting story about Rice’s work ethic and his approach to deliberate practice. As you’ll see, it wasn’t just talent that made Rice successful and we can all learn from his approach and use similar strategies to improve our health, our work, and our lives.

The Training Schedule of Jerry Rice

This short excerpt from Talent is Overrated explains Rice’s typical training schedule.

In team workouts he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers would trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would sprint to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own. Mornings were devoted to cardiovascular work, running a hilly five-mile trail; he would reportedly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steepest part. In the afternoons he did equally strenuous weight training. These workouts became legendary as the most demanding in the league, and other players would sometimes join Rice just to see what it was like. Some of them got sick before the day was over.

It is obvious that Jerry Rice put in an incredible volume of work. This is no surprise. Unwavering consistency is a requirement for achieving excellence. To put it simply, you can’t expect to become great at something without practicing it over and over.

But it wasn’t just the amount of time he spent practicing that made the difference, Rice used other strategies to master his craft.

Excellence Requires More Than Just Practice

Excellence requires more than just a lot of practice. It requires the right kind of practice. The natural tendency for humans, professional athletes included, is to fall into a routine once we achieve an adequate level of performance.

For example, you might practice a golf swing the same way over and over. Or a professional wide receiver might practice running their routes the same way over and over. In the beginning, this repetition is required to develop skills. As I’ve mentioned here, here, and here, it’s only by going through a volume of work that beginner’s can hope to reach a level of excellence.

At some point, however, you reach a certain skill level and simply repeating the same pattern again and again doesn’t foster much additional growth. (In fact, this is true at any level of skill: practice in the same way you always have and you’ll get the same results you always have.)

Anders Ericsson, the psychologist behind the 10,000 Hour Rule, explained this important caveat by saying, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal. You have to tweak the system by pushing, allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.”

This is where Jerry Rice separated himself from the rest of the pack. He finished college as an All-American wide receiver, but he didn’t let his skills plateau. Even at a high level, Rice found ways to practice deliberately rather than mindlessly and push the edge of his abilities rather than repeat old patterns without improvement. In other words, Rice always found ways to become one percent better.

Let’s talk about how Rice decided which areas to focus on improving.

Focus on Your Areas of Greatest Leverage

The classic test for speed in the NFL is the 40-yard dash. Before being drafted by the San Francisco 49ers, Rice was reported as running the 40 in 4.7 seconds. For reference, in 2014 there were multiple quarterbacks and even a defensive lineman that posted faster times than that. And yet, it is unlikely that any of these players will have a career half as prolific as that of Jerry Rice.

Compared to other wide receivers, Rice’s mediocre speed could be seen as a weakness. How did he overcome it? By leveraging his greatest strengths.

He designed his practice to work on his specific needs. Rice didn’t need to do everything well, just certain things. He had to run precise patterns; he had to evade the defenders, sometimes two or three, who were assigned to cover him; he had to outjump them to catch the ball and outmuscle them when they tried to strip it away; then he had to outrun tacklers. So he focused his practice work on exactly these requirements. Not being the fastest receiver in the league turned out not to matter. He became famous for the precision of his patterns. His weight training gave him tremendous strength. His trail running gave him control so he could change directions suddenly without signaling his move. The uphill wind sprints gave him explosive acceleration. Most of all, his endurance training — not something that a speed-focused athlete would normally concentrate on — gave him a giant advantage in the fourth quarter, when his opponents were tired and weak, and he seemed as fresh as he was in the first minute. Time and again, that’s when he put the game away. Rice and his coaches understood exactly what he needed in order to be dominant. They focused on these things and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed.

Consider how easy it would have been for Rice to practice in a different way.

Nobody would have questioned him if Rice spent all of his time training to improve his relative weakness (speed) and simply maintaining his other skills. Instead, he focused on mastering his assets — precision, endurance, and strength — to a degree beyond anyone else.

It doesn’t matter what skill you are trying to perfect, finding the areas where your particular skill set provides the greatest leverage and focusing on those areas will reap enormous benefits.

Applying This to Your Life

Jerry Rice was blessed with incredible talent, but it was his work ethic and his commitment to continual improvement that allowed him to transform that talent into one of the greatest careers that the NFL has ever seen.

For you and me the skills and circumstances may be very different from that of Jerry Rice, but the principles are the same. If we want to execute in real life and master the skills that are important to us, then we need to:

Put in a volume of work.
Focus on the areas of greatest leverage for your skill.
Find ways to continually improve and move the needle forward rather than falling into routines and patterns once we develop adequate skill levels.

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How to be More Productive and Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the “Eisenhower Box”

Dwight Eisenhower lived one of the most productive lives you can imagine.

Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. During his time in office, he launched programs that directly led to the development of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, the launch of the internet (DARPA), the exploration of space (NASA), and the peaceful use of alternative energy sources (Atomic Energy Act).

Before becoming president, Eisenhower was a five-star general in the United States Army, served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and was responsible for planning and executing invasions of North Africa, France, and Germany.

At other points along the way, he served as President of Columbia University, became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and somehow found time to pursue hobbies like golfing and oil painting.

Eisenhower had an incredible ability to sustain his productivity not just for weeks or months, but for decades. And for that reason, it is no surprise that his methods for time management, task management, and productivity have been studied by many people.

His most famous productivity strategy is known as the Eisenhower Box and it’s a simple decision-making tool that you can use right now. Here’s how it works.

The Eisenhower Box: Urgent vs. Important

Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is simple. Using the decision matrix below, you will separate your actions based on four possibilities.

Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

The great thing about this matrix is that it can be used for broad productivity plans (“How should I spend my time each week?”) and for smaller, daily plans (“What should I do today?”).

Here is an example of what my Eisenhower Box looks like for today.

The Difference Between Urgent and Important

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

-Dwight Eisenhower

Urgent tasks are things that you feel like you need to react to: emails, phone calls, texts, news stories. Meanwhile, in the words of Brett McKay, “Important tasks are things that contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals.” [1]

Separating these differences is simple enough to do once, but doing so continually can be tough. The reason I like the Eisenhower Method is that it provides a clear framework for making the decisions over and over again. And like anything in life, consistency is the hard part.

Here are some other observations I’ve made from using this method.

Elimination Before Optimization

A few years ago, I was reading about computer programming when I came across an interesting quote:

“No code is faster than no code.” [2]

In other words, the fastest way to get something done — whether it is having a computer read a line of code or crossing a task off your to-do list — is to eliminate that task entirely. There is no faster way to do something than not doing it at all. That’s not a reason to be lazy, but rather a suggestion to force yourself to make hard decisions and delete any task that does not lead you toward your mission, your values, and your goals.

Too often, we use productivity, time management, and optimization as an excuse to avoid the really difficult question: “Do I actually need to be doing this?” It is much easier to remain busy and tell yourself that you just need to be a little more efficient or to “work a little later tonight” than to endure the pain of eliminating a task that you are comfortable with doing, but that isn’t the highest and best use of your time. [3]

As Tim Ferriss says, “Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”

I find that the Eisenhower Method is particularly useful because it pushes me to question whether an action is really necessary, which means I’m more likely to move tasks to the “Delete” quadrant rather than mindlessly repeating them. And to be honest, if you simply eliminated all of the things you waste time on each day then you probably wouldn’t need any strategies and tips to become more productive at the things that matter.

Does This Help Me Accomplish My Goal?

One final note: it can be hard to eliminate time wasting activities if you aren’t sure what you are working toward. In my experience, there are two questions that can help clarify the entire process behind the Eisenhower Method.

Those two questions are…

What am I working toward?
What are the core values that drive my life?

These are questions that I have asked myself in my Annual Review and my Integrity Report. Answering these questions has helped me clarify the categories for certain tasks in my life. Deciding which tasks to do and which tasks to delete becomes much easier when you are clear about what is important to you.

Obviously, the Eisenhower Method isn’t a perfect strategy, but I have found it to be a useful decision-making tool for increasing my productivity and eliminating the behaviors that take up mental energy, waste time, and rarely move me toward my goals. I hope you’ll find it useful too!

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Sources:

Thanks to Brett McKay at The Art of Manliness for his post on the Eisenhower Box.
I couldn’t find the original source for the quote, “No code is faster than no code.” If you know the answer, please let me know and I’ll update the article as needed.
The term “highest and best use” is a real estate concept for finding the most valuable use of a piece of property. My friend Mark Heckmann is a fan of using the phrase for personal time management and I like it too. Thanks Mark!
For other useful productivity tips, check out this article summarizing Scott Hansleman’s work.