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January 5 - January 20, 2019
When we know we’ll be tested—even if it’s just pretend—we’re forcing ourselves to live in the present. We’re alert, aware, and mindful of our behavior and everyone else’s, because we sense that in the very immediate future we will have to account for our actions. The present is the ideal place to be. This is where we shape ourselves into a better person.
Adapting Daily Questions into Hourly Questions creates a powerful structure for locating ourselves in the moment.
The simpler the structure, the more likely we’ll stick with it. And Hourly Questions are fairly simple, comprising a series of steps that segue so smoothly from one to the other we barely register them as discrete stages in the process.
Pre-awareness. Successful people are generally good at anticipating environments where their best behavior is at risk.
Commitment. Successful people aren’t wishy-washy about a course of action. Choosing Hourly Questions as a structure and articulating the specific questions is a commitment device
Awareness.
Hourly Questions, impinging on our consciousness with precise regularity, neutralize the ignorance and make us vibrantly aware. We don’t have time to forget our situation or get distracted from our objective—because the next test is coming in sixty minutes.
Scoring. Grading our performance adds reflection to mindfulness. It’s a force multiplier for awareness.
Repetition. The best part of Hourly Questions is their rinse-and-repeat frequency.
Hourly Questions have a specific short-term utility. It would be impractical and exhausting—and no doubt depleting—to rely on them for long-term behavioral challenges
You answer your Daily Questions each night and gradually reap the benefit many months later. It’s not an overnight religious conversion. You’re playing a long game.
Hourly Questions are for the short game—when we require a burst of discipline to restrain our behavioral impulses for a defined period of time.
What’s worrisome is when the striving stops, our lapses become more frequent, and we begin to coast on our reputation. That’s the perilous moment when we start to settle for “good enough.”
The mustard on a sandwich can be good enough. But in the interpersonal realm—we’re talking about how a husband treats his wife, or a son deals with an aging parent, or a trusted friend responds when people are counting on him—good enough is setting the bar too low. Satisficing is not an option. It neither satisfies nor suffices. It disappoints people, creates distress where there should be harmony,
four environments that trigger good enough behavior. 1. When our motivation is marginal.
Skill is the beating heart of high motivation. The more skill we have for the task at hand, the easier it is to do a good job. The easier to do a good job, the more we enjoy it. The more we enjoy it, the higher our motivation to continue doing it,
when our lack of skill at any task dramatically reduces our motivation to do that task, defaulting to some form of good enough is a shrewd option. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than kidding ourselves—or misleading others into expecting a full-throated performance and disappointing them with something marginal. Marginal motivation produces a marginal outcome. (It’s amazing this insight still surprises us.)
We also underestimate how the quality of our goals affects our motivation. We fail at New Year’s resolutions because our goals are almost always about marginal stuff, which we pursue with marginal motivation. Instead of aiming at core issues—say, escaping a hateful job—we aim for vague, amorphous targets like “take a class” or “travel more.” A marginal goal begets marginal effort.
Finally, we don’t appreciate how quickly our motivation can turn marginal at the first signs of progress. This is the invisible lur...
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It’s my job to tell them that their glimpse of the finish line is a mirage. They don’t get to determine if they’re better. The people around them make that call. When that reality sinks in, their motivation recharges and we get back to work.
The takeaway: If your motivation for a task or goal is in any way compromised—because you lack the skill, or don’t take the task seriously, or think what you’ve done so far is good enough—don’t take it on. Find something else to show the world how much you care, not how little.
2. When we’re working pro bono.
We create casual equivalencies between volunteering and our level of commitment. We think that because we raised our hand to help out we can raise our hand to opt out at the inconvenient moments. This is how our fine and noble intentions degrade into good enough outcomes. This is how our integrity gets compromised. Integrity is an all-or-nothing virtue (like being half pregnant, there’s no such thing as semi-integrity). We need to display it in whatever obligations we’ve made.
Pro bono is an adjective, not an excuse. If you think doing folks a favor justifies doing less than your best, you’re not doing anyone any favors, including yourself. People forget your promise, remember your performance.
3. When we behave like “amateurs”.
At work, we have all sorts of structures in place to maintain our professional poise—formal ones like performance reviews and regular meetings, informal ones like online gossip and water-cooler chatter. There’s also the powerful motivator of money, status, power—and keeping our job. At home—whether we live alone or have a family—the structures and motivators vanish. We’re free to be anyone we want to be. And we don’t always aim high enough.
Most of us fall into this amateur-versus-professional trap each day without knowing it. And not just when we switch between home and work. We switch between amateur and professional on the job, too, usually in areas that don’t reflect who we think we are.
We are professionals at what we do, amateurs at what we want to become. We need to erase this devious distinction—or at least close the gap between professional and amateur—to become the person we want to be. Being good over here does not excuse being not so good over there.
4. When we have compliance issues.
When we engage in noncompliance, we’re not just being sloppy and lazy. It’s more aggressive and rude than that. We’re thumbing our noses at the world, announcing, “The rules don’t apply to us. Don’t rely on us. We don’t care.” We’re drawing a line at good enough and refusing to budge beyond it.
What is the most memorable behavioral change you’ve made in your adult life?
We can’t change until we know what to change. We commit a lot of unforced errors in figuring out what to change.
We waste time on issues we don’t feel that strongly about.
We limit ourselves with rigid binary thinking.
Mostly, we suffer a failure of imagination.
six Engaging Questions: 1. Did I do my best to set clear goals? 2. Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals? 3. Did I do my best to find meaning? 4. Did I do my best to be happy? 5. Did I do my best to build positive relationships? 6. Did I do my best to be fully engaged?
When we assess our performance against the Engaging Questions and come up wanting in any way, we can lay the blame on either the environment or ourselves. We love to scapegoat our environment.
As skilled as we are at scapegoating our environment, we are equally masterful at granting ourselves absolution for any shortcomings. We rarely blame ourselves for mistakes or bad choices when the environment is such a convenient fall guy.
Honestly assessing the interplay in our lives between these two forces—the environment and ourselves—is how we become the person we want to be.
My main goal in writing this book has been relatively modest: to help you achieve lasting positive change in the behavior that is most important to you.
I’ve also tried to highlight the value of two other objectives.
The first objective is awareness—being awake to what’s going on around us.
Who knows what we’re missing when we’re not paying attention?
The second is engagement. We’re not only awake in our environment, we’re actively participating in it—and the people who matter to us recognize our engagement.
When we embrace a desire for awareness and engagement, we are in the best position to appreciate all the triggers the environment throws at us. We might not know what to expect—the triggering power of our environment is a constant surprise—but we know what others expect of us. And we know what we expect of ourselves.
We achieve an equilibrium I like to describe as the Circle of Engagement:
when we are aware and engaged. We recognize a trigger for what it really is and respond wisely and appropriately. Our behavior creates a trigger that itself generates more appropriate behavior from the other person. And so on.
