Jay shares five reasons and four ways to include curiosity as your go to Habit.
By being curious, you will be:
Source: Here.
I featured Adam previously when he interviewed strengths’ guru Marcus Buckingham. In this episode he explores the advice to “Just be yourself.” I learned that we have corrupted the work authentic to mean no filter, when it actually means “of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine.” But what does this mean when we talk about people? People over use the strength of Authenticity come across as self righteous….and even rude. Listen to learn ways to bring your authentic self to bare in ways that does not overwhelm nor distract.
In this enthralling TED talk, we not only learn of the journey of young pianists becoming “one butt” players, and the tricks of the composer to invoke emotion, but Benjamin Zander poses the transformative question for everyone who leads from conductors to teachers to CEO: “If the eyes is not shining who am I being?” It is a call for authenticity:
Fascinating video on lucky people (and the role of optimism and positivity in being lucky.
For 14 years; 1,015 myths; 2,950 experiments; eight Emmy nominations; and 83 miles of duct tape, Adam Savage regaled us with the scientific method as he and Jamie tacked various myths and movie magic: Which will keep you die walking or running in the rain? How does was escape a sinking car? Thee wee so many…and like all good things, it had to come to an end. Yet, he goes on: He has a book, aptly named Every Tool’s a Hammer, he is making bags out of sail cloths, and has a new show on Discovery: Savage Builds.
Yep, he build an iron man suit out of titanium and a D printer with the gang at Colorado School of Mines.
As you may have guessed, Adam’s greatest strengths must be Creativity and Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence . In this free wheeling interview in which he discusses his love of building and creating from Iron Man to sword scabbards to scrambled eggs, you get a sense of his Humor and incredible Zest for life. This is a guy clearly playing to his strengths. None of that surprised me. I knew this would be a fun interview. What I did not expect was how insightful and down right profound he would be showcasing Perspective his as he s
It’s still very difficult for me to confront the fact that I’m a flawed human being. There’s still some part of me that thinks, “Oh, as long as I perform all these things correctly, everything will go smoothly.” The answer is, no. That’s fiction. Nothing will ever go smoothly. No plan ever survives first contact with implementation and we’re all going to screw up and feel unworthy at a very constant pace in our lives. That’s being a person. The trick is to be honest about that.
“Akimbo is an ancient word, from the bend in the river or the bend in an archer’s bow. It’s become a symbol for strength, a posture of possibility, the idea that when we stand tall, arms bent, looking right at it, we can make a difference.
Akimbo’s a podcast about our culture and about how we can change it. About seeing what’s happening and choosing to do something.” So goes the introduction to Seth Godin’s contemplations on how the world works. This is not your usual podcast: No guests. No fancy production. Just Seth and his thoughts. His very well groomed thoughts. Seth is the thinker’s thinker. Author of 23 books, many best sellers, Seth has long been the go to person for all things marketing every since Purple Cow took the world by storm.
I have long been a fan, having read the said Purple Cow, Linchpin and Tribes (among others and watched his Ted Talks like How ideas spread:
Seth’s podcast listens like a series of essays. Really thoughtful essays. Episode 19, the Big Sort, gets to the heart of arranging. “People strong in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.” Seth gets to the heart of our compulsion to organize, the incredible Discipline it takes.
All of Seth’s shows go beyond the topic at hand, giving incredible Context to listener.
Aikimbo will feed not just your Context but also your
My love affair with podcasts continues as I binge listen these past several days the James Altucher Show. James made a name for himself by being an early tech reporter, Hedge Fund Manager and serial entrepreneur and author, with 20 books to his credit. There could be many of the 400 episodes I recommend, but Evan Carmichael stands out for its positivity.
428 – Evan Carmichael: How to Shut Out the Negativity in Your Life and Maybe Get Huge on YouTube
I did not know Evan Carmichael, well not directly. Sure I had seen some of his youtube videos posted on facebook like Steve Job’s 10 Rules for Success:
or Oprah Winfrey’s Top 10 Rules For Success
or 5 PROVEN Ways to FIND Your True PURPOSE!
These make their way around motivational posts as Evan has over 1.7 Million Subscribers. All good great stuff. Evan distills the essence of success through carefully editing interesting and successful people’s stories from other video interviews. And he does it right, focusing on the positive, because that is the heart and soul of what he does and who he is. James and Evan were a fantastic pairing, two uber enthusiasts who love finding just one thing to give them an edge. And they love to share. This is their includer in action.
James is a very enjoyable interviewer. He has a way of connecting with his guest through making his own observations and interjections. Every episode I learn so much from James and his guests.
Strengths fed:
I love podcasts–heck we all do. Now I thought I would shine the light on specific episodes that caught my ears. First up: Happiness Researcher, Shawn Achor being interviewed by Jordan Harbinger.
144: Shawn Achor | Why Success and Happiness Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
I first encountered Shawn (great name by the way) through his first work, the Happiness Advantage, a book of highly actionable ideas, as his subtitle suggests: “How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life.” Shawn has a gift at taking research and bringing i alive. He is even better in person:
In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive. His humor is part of why this has been viewed almost 20 Million times.
Jordan Harbinger unpacks with Shawn his new Book, Big Potential: How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being
Jordan doesn’t just skillfully interview Shawn, he enters into a a dialogue, looking for ways to help us understand why this matters and how to put it into action. Jordan’s show notes takes it a step further by adding a worksheet to help you take action on the big ideas presented during the conversation. Jordan is an incredible engaging conversationalist that makes his guests feel at ease.
Jordan’s show is well worth subscribing to and mining the back episodes.
Shawn has several books worth reading:
Strengths fed:
Kobe Bryant has started a production company since retiring from basketball. The first project is a love poem to the sport that made him: Dear Basketball:
Watch Kobe Bryant’s Oscar-nominated short film, ‘Dear Basketball’ – SBNation.com
Listen to a great interview by journalist Cal Fussman as they explore how curiosity shows up in his life.
One of the things that undermines us being at our best is procrastination.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that Self-Control is the least occurring VIA Strengths (only 4% of the population) and Discipline is near the bottom of Gallup’s 34 Strengthsfinder themes (31st of 34). So, if you are like me, you cannot call on these strengths to help you.
Warning: While reading.viewing this post will help you effectively move beyond procrastinating if put into practice, you will probably go down a rabbit hole exploring procrastinating.
Tim Urban of Wait, but why offers one of best explanations for why we procrastinate:
He offers a follow up in another post on How to Beat Procrastination.
Dr. Linda Sapadin has created a personality quiz to help you identify the type of procrastinator you are:
According to Dr. Sapadin, the 6 styles represent the outer polarities of 3 traits:
Attention to Details: The perfectionist pays too much attention to details; the dreamer doesn’t pay enough attention.
Focus on the Future: The worrier is overly concerned about what might happen if…; the crisis-maker is not sufficiently concerned (until crunch time).
Relationship to Others: The defier goes against what others want; the pleaser is overly oriented to what others want.
In her book, she offers prescriptions to each of the styles. Short of buying the book, what can you do?
Planning
First steps always involve having a plan. Part of the plan comes down to understanding your priorities. For big picture, short of having your own mission statement (which is a good idea), I like Warren Buffet’s 25/5 priority solution:
You can do this on a life time, or five years or one week. It really does not matter. The idea is to zero in on the essential. Charles Schwab employed a similar idea brought to him by a consultant Ivy Lee
A more macro approach has to do with understanding the nature of your to do list at any given time as General Eisenhower did: “”I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This is best illustrated by this matrix:
If you actually organized all the tasks into one of the four quadrants, you will be a far more productive place. Here is a video of it in practice:
But how to stop procrastinating?
Anisa Horton at FastCompany offers an idea of scheduling procrastination which he borrowed from Charles Duhigg:
“this is something I actually found when writing the book. The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit. So, willpower is like a muscle, right? It’s this muscle that you can build up, and it gets tired, but the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. The same is true of our ability to focus. The more you practice focusing, the easier focusing becomes. And so the other answer for procrastination is, don’t beat up on yourself. Let yourself practice going longer and longer and longer without taking a five-minute break to check Facebook because after three or four weeks, after three or four months you’ll be able to sustain focus much longer, but the key is, you can’t change everything overnight. You can’t suddenly say, I want a brand new habit tomorrow and expect it to be east and effortless. It’s something you have to give yourself permission to take a little bit of time to practices because you’re building up neuro pathways associated with certain behavior and those neuro pathways just build up over time. You can’t speed up that process any more than is natural.”
Another personal favorite is the Pomodoro Technique.
Other techniques
Visual Cues: Let’s say you need to learn a list of vocabulary words. You commit to reviewing 25 words every day. You can get a bowl of 25 paperclips–25 to be exact. Each word you review, you flip the clip to an empty bowl. And you keep going until the first bowl is empty. Repeat tomorrow.
Surrender your cell phone. Seriously, you know you cannot live without it, so let’s meet half way. When you get home, give your phone to your parent. You can give yourself an allowance of say 30 minute phone break to do all the things you normally do. A growing body of research is showing that Cell phone usage is driving anxiety levels up.
Exercise Self Control. Don’t have any? There is an app for that. You can block websites and apps that distract you. The nice thing is you can give yourself an allowance. So you can block Youtube for say 1 hour and then give yourself a break to do so. There is an app called Focus for your iphone that does the thing. More iphone apps for productivity here.
Focus Writer helps you concentrate on your writing on a mac. StayFocusd increases your productivity by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites through this Chrome extension.
Practice mindfulness daily. Why? “Emotional regulation, to me, is the real story around procrastination, because to the extent that I can deal with my emotions, I can stay on task,” says Pychyl, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada).
Podcasts worth listening to
Where to start?
Simply pick one of these strategies and test it for one week. Run it like an experiment. Next week try a different strategies.
Well worth reading is this article on the Science Behind Procrastination.