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July 17 - July 30, 2020
We routinely overestimate the importance of acquiring resources but even more significantly underestimate our ability to make more out of those we have.
Stretching is a learned set of attitudes and skills that comes from a simple but powerful shift from wanting more resources to embracing and acting on the possibilities of our resources already in hand.
Better Use of Resources = Getting Better Results
People who routinely stretch, those I call stretchers, ask what more they can do with what they have, instead of asking what’s missing.
“Just cuz money’s there doesn’t mean that you gotta have nicer things than you used to,” he says.
Making the most of what we have is what many of us might already do when our backs are against the wall, but I want to convince you to choose to stretch in good times just as much as in bad times.
Success blinds us and reinforces what made us successful in the first place.
They direct their energy into accumulating more. Ironically, as chasers accumulate more, they frequently squander what they have, resting on their seemingly good fortunes and convincing themselves that the party will never end.
“a limitation could actually drive creativity”
First, frugal people emphasize long-term objectives over short-term pleasures,
Second, frugal people reuse what they have instead of buying more.
Third, frugal people feel freer from conventions, making them less susceptible to social comparisons that lead to chasing.
Stretchers find beauty and richness in places where others struggle to see anything of value. Too often, we understand, interact with, and use things at face value, locking ourselves into conventions that limit possibilities. By adopting a stretching mind-set, we can reach extraordinary potential with what we already have. It’s a matter of recognizing the untapped value in our resources and directing our energy to nurturing and developing what’s in hand. Once we make this shift in mind-set, it’s possible to start building some of the skills of stretching—something we’re now ready to start.
“should have teamed up with one of the mathematics teams because diversity is what’s important.”
practice doesn’t always make perfect.
People who knew lots of little things and drew from multiple perspectives routinely outperformed those who knew one big thing really well. It was the well rounded who excelled.
experts struggle to find new solutions because they’re already mentally visualizing how to use their resources—a
Outsiders exist in all parts of life. An outsider is anyone who lacks resources that experts take for granted: a newcomer to an organization, a professional from another field, or an English major in a psychology class.
If outsiders contribute so much, why don’t we engage them more? The irony is that we’re unlikely to put outsiders on our teams simply because they are just that: outsiders. We tend to be attracted to people more like us—insiders, by definition.
Diversity in our team’s resources turns out to be the most important shaper of performance, making it more likely we’ll openly debate and reach a better solution that incorporates multiple perspectives.
A rare breed now, jacks-of-all-trades such as Musgrave were not so long ago encouraged and rewarded by our society. Think: Leonardo da Vinci
Today, a push for deeply specialized expertise leaves us with people who get better and better at narrower and narrower things. Ironically, credit for the shift away from the multi-c rule lies with one of its strongest followers—Adam Smith.
By stepping outside, people discover greater richness in what they already have. Our short-term and long-term challenges become more manageable once we break down barriers that limit the movement of resources across areas. Outsiders play this role, but even if we’re not outsiders, we can still gain outsider experiences.
Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt calls for a return to developing multiple interests, declaring, “You need to bring art and science back together” like in times when “the same people wrote poetry and built bridges.”
As intimidating as it might seem to pursue deep and diverse experiences, some experts naturally pursue both.
Closed individuals take comfort in the familiar, and resonate toward the first word in each pair. Open individuals more likely gravitate toward the second word and seek out the unfamiliar, leading them to a diversity of experiences beyond their small worlds that enrich their thinking within those small worlds.
The more diverse the non-work experiences, the more resourceful people were at work.
too much planning prevents us from acting.
When it came time to tally performance, the quicker firms outperformed their slower competitors in terms of sales, return on sales (profits divided by sales), and the perception of executives and their competitors.
We learn from doing. When we plan, we’re not acting but delaying our actions and speculating about a future that may or may not exist.
The quest for the best choice sucked the joy out of doing their work, which led them to put in less effort and made them less likely to achieve their goals.* Planning bred anxiety from always worrying about following the plan, and then second-guessing whether it was even the best plan.
Too often planning stifles our action because we’re trying to put together a perfect plan, even when an adequate one will serve us well.
each of us regularly faces situations that can benefit from improvising.
For our biggest ambitions, we cling to the commonsense appeal of planning. It serves us well when the future is predictable, but it also leads us astray at times.
By shifting to acting and becoming better observers of our surroundings, we develop skills to improvise with what we have at hand. We don’t always need a complete script . . . or even one at all. Instead, we just need to call, “Action!”
The researchers had sparked a positive prophecy—a self-fulfilling prophecy that enhances the value of something.
When employees detect that their manager sets high expectations, they raise their own expectations, which makes them work harder and think more highly of themselves.
As soon as employees begin to perform at higher levels, their beliefs of positive expectations become further reinforced, leading to a virtuous circle. Meanwhile, their manager observes the higher performance, confirming and strengthening her initial expectations. Over time, she’ll provide better coaching and more helpful feedback to her superstar employees, which continues to give those employees a performance edge.
The interviewers who had positive expectations before meeting the candidate also spent more time selling the company and job, and less time vetting the qualifications of the candidate.
We’ve now learned that we typically perform to the level of expectations of people who are authority figures over
Many people expect to discover opportunities—they spend their lives searching or even passively waiting for them to come their way. Whether through skill or luck, opportunities—new products, ways of working, or knowing the right people—are out there, if only they can find them.
She focused on creating opportunities through changing her own expectations—overcoming what little others thought of her and replacing it with a belief that she could, in her words, “make my own living and my own opportunity.”
The self-serving way we evaluate our successes and failures, relative to others, protects our ego
When planting the seeds of positive expectations, we’ll harvest fruit, improve performance, strengthen relationships, produce rich opportunities, and pursue the goals we care most dearly about.
It turned out that the more diverse the person’s roles were, the higher her life satisfaction and the sharper her managerial skills.
attempting new combinations.
Unlikely combinations help us search for friendships when we’d be prone only to compete with others, and find ways of bringing our individuality to the routines we might otherwise consider impersonal and static.
Frugal people take pleasure in saving and cheap people feel pained by spending.
Stretchers aren’t pained to spend money; rather, they take pleasure in spending it wisely—and getting the most out of any resource.
Although there’s a lot of merit in developing an admirable skill set and sound reputation for doing one thing well, breaking out of a typecast brings tremendous benefits—new abilities and challenges and even bigger rewards. But when not done carefully, heading in too many directions leads to a critical injury: wandering to nowhere.
