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“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.
What Do You Want? A Better Question, First of All
Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.
Pareto and His Garden: 80/20 and Freedom from Futility
80/20
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality
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Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat. It is possible to have your cupcake and eat it, too.
staying busy and dedication
There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted. More than a quarter of each 9–5 period (28%) is consumed by such interruptions.13
Doodle (www.doodle.com) The best free tool I’ve found for herding cats (multiple people) for scheduling without excessive e-mail. Create and poll in 30 seconds with the proposed options and forward a link to everyone invited. Check back a few hours later and you’ll have the best time for the most people.
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Lose-Win Guarantee— How to Sell Anything to Anyone
sales
Commission-only sales center know for incredible closing abilities (see the movie Boiler Room and Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry, Glen Ross). Don’t call unless your product sells for at least $100.
If you had to find other ways to accomplish the same—if your life depended on it—how would you do it? Remote conferencing? Video conferencing? GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, DimDim.com (Mac), or related services?
Make this trade a habit. Let the small bad things happen and make the big good things happen.
Here are some of the things I learned and loved in 2008.
refer
A small cup of black Kenyan AA coffee with cinnamon on top, no milk or sweeteners.
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
The Fundamental Four: Let Me Explain
books to read
Secrets of Power Negotiating: Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator (256 pages)
