Time To Have A Deep Inward Look

Beating The Odds

What do you think people said to Elon Musk when he said he was going to found Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a company that would focus on advancing the state of rocket technologies. Can’t be done? Why? What a waste of money!  Probably.

What do you think people said when the SpaceX Dragon made history as the first commercial vehicle to berth with the ISS? Wow! Amazing! Unbelievable! Probably.

Today SpaceX is the largest private producer of rocket motors in the world. And SpaceX is only one of Musk’s enterprises. He’s also on the Tesla board of directors. He’s co-founder and chairman of SolarCity, the largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.  He’s co-chairman of OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence research company, to name a few.

How can one person be involved in so many forward thinking, innovative, humanity advancing projects? According to Elon Musk, “When something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor.”

You may not be interested in sending rockets to Mars, or helping establish electric cars as the norm, but your aspirations are equally important to you. You may not want to change the world, but you certainly can change your world and if what you want to do is important enough, you will.

Check out Elon Musk’s top ten rules for success!

Don’t Let Your Decisions Become Fatigued

If you climb ten flights of stairs you will be fatigued (most of us anyway).  We all know about physical fatigue because it’s so easy to see the cause and effect. Spend twenty minutes on a treadmill and there’s no question what tired you out. Did you also know you can get decision fatigue?

 

Limited mental energy

In the same way you only have a limited amount of physical energy on a given day, you also have a limited amount of mental energy, and too many decisions saps that energy.

 

The more choices you have to make during a day, the worse the quality of your decisions becomes. If you are decision fatigued you won’t take the time to weigh out all the consequences of what you’re doing. You’ll make rash, impulsive choices or you’ll choose to do nothing rather than make any choice at all.

 

There are a few things you can do everyday to help battle decision fatigue

 

Sleep

The amount of mental energy you have every day will be related to the quality of sleep you got the night before. You might think staying up late to wrap up all the things you want to get done will clear up space for tomorrow, but it might just be mucking up your ability to make strong decisions tomorrow. Get a good night’s sleep and bring your full mental energy to each day’s decisions.

 

Prioritize your decisions

When possible make the most important decisions early in the day and save the ones that matter less for later. For example deciding where to go out for dinner is much less important than which person you are going to choose to be team leader on your next project. You may think those are completely different sorts of decisions and the order in which you make them won’t matter, but your mental energy isn’t going to differentiate. The decisions you most care about should be made early on, while you’re still willing to spend the mental energy.

 

Remove some decisions from the day altogether

Do you get kind of peckish in the middle of the afternoon? When the coffee truck rolls around do you find yourself reaching for that chocolate chip cookie even though you know it’s not healthy and it goes against the promises you made yourself in the morning? That’s because your decision making facilities are depleted.

 

Instead of putting yourself in a situation where you could make poor decisions think ahead. Bring snacks you know are good for you to work. Have them sitting on your desk or in your drawer so the cookie doesn’t even have a chance to infiltrate your weak defences.

 

Create solid schedules

Should I go to the gym today or shouldn’t I? Should I make my scheduled calls now or in two hours? If there are certain things you do, or want to do every day, then schedule them into your day. Make it so there are no questions, this is what I do at this time every day.

 

Successful people build schedules that remove unnecessary decisions from their days so they can focus their limited mental energy on what’s most important.

 

Before You Write That Follow Up Letter After Your Interview

Creating Consistency One Day At A Time

 

Everybody knows the key to accomplishing anything is consistency. It’s easy to talk about goals and it’s just as easy to set them. The real work comes along when you decide to follow through. Everyone starts with the greatest of intentions and many get off to a great start but then the enthusiasm wanes. “I’m not inspired today,” they tell themselves. “I’ll wait until tomorrow when I’m inspired again.” What they don’t realize is that every day they don’t get back to work makes getting back to work harder and harder. Consistent effort creates inspiration. It creates enthusiasm.

 

Inspired consistency

To help people create consistency in their efforts, writer and artist Austin Kleon has created a 30-day challenge, “an easy, low-fi way to keep track of your progress.”

 

Decide on your goal. Promise to work on it in some capacity every day, create a reward to inspire you to keep going, then print this 30-day challenge calendar. (Austin Kleon’s 30-Day Challenge PDF)

 

Every day that you follow through on your commitment you get to put a big X in the box. By the end of 30 days you’ll have tangible verifiable evidence of your efforts. You’ll be in the consistent groove and a personally chosen reward. I’m going to choose singing lessons, so I can sing about my success!

Introverted and Very Successful

 

When we think of leaders, whether they be leaders in our peer group, leaders on a work detail, or leaders of a whole company we will often picture extroverted, Hello, How Are you, Great To Meet you! Let’s spend the next several hours getting to know each other! types.

 

While extroverts might be great at commanding attention while oozing confidence, that doesn’t necessarily make them the best people to actually lead and inspire others. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are both highly inspiring and great leaders, and both are famous introverts.

 

Great listeners

Generally introverts actually prefer to listen than to speak. That makes them great listeners. An introvert is more likely to thoroughly listen to what others and telling them and then give those people more room to develop their ideas. An introvert likes to work on his or her own, so they give others the opportunity to do the same. People who work for introverts feel heard and recognized.

 

Well thought out decisions

Where an extroverted CEO might be inclined to burst out of the gate running full steam ahead, an introvert will more likely have spent a lot more time with an idea in his or her head, regarding it from every perspective before moving forward. Their decisions are well thought out and well informed.

 

In the GeekWire article, Do Introverts Make Better CEOs They refer to a study made by researchers from Stanford and the University of Chicago that found “A correlation between CEOs with reserved personalities and contemporaneous and future return on assets and cash flow.”

 

Passion has nothing to do with extroversion or introversion

The thing all successful CEOs have in common is great passion for what they’re doing. Passion has nothing to do with whether you love to take command of a room or whether you prefer more intimate encounters. Passion comes from within and when you find something you’re passionate about that’s what’s going to take you to the top.

 

Check out the inspiring life lessons from these Three Introverted CEOs!

If you’re introverted and thought leadership was out of the question, think again. The CEO prize is as available to you as anyone else!

Take The Chance Of Doing What You Love

Jim Carrey famously wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for acting services rendered.

 

When Jim Carrey wrote that check he wasn’t already an established actor on the way to the huge bucks. He was a poor, wannabe actor in Los Angles with thousands of other wannabes all striving for the same big breaks. Jim kept going to auditions, putting himself out there on stand-up stages, failing and succeeding, always with that check in his wallet. Ten years after writing the check, Jim Carrey made that ten million dollars for Dumb And Dumber.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Jim Carrey would actually ever make the ten million dollars he was striving for, but fail or succeed, he never stopped working toward it.

If fear of failure is keeping you from pursuing the things you love, you need to remember you can fail at anything – a thing you love or a thing you don’t really care about. Even if you fail at the thing you love, you spent tons of time doing and working toward a thing you love. That in itself is success!

Feel Unnoticed At Work?

You go into work everyday and you do a good job, but you’re neither a new person who needs lots of attention nor someone on the cusp of being promoted. You’re more of a steady Eddie who goes in, gets the job done and goes home. If that’s the case do you ever feel invisible at work? Like no one notices you or what you do at all? If that’s you and you’re perfectly happy then this probably isn’t for you. If however you’d prefer to start attracting a little attention to yourself, and along with it a little more appreciation and maybe some more responsibility, there are a few things you can do.

 

Get face to face with your superior

It could be that you are efficient at your job and don’t need any supervision so you are left to do what you do. If you want to feel a little more visible then check in with your superior (or boss) every once in a while. Let them know what you’re doing. How you are affecting the company.

 

A smile, a hello, a few pleasantries can make a huge difference in how you are perceived by others and also how you perceive yourself within the office environment.

 

If you feel like you could take on more work, let them know. If you see a way things could be improved, let them know about that too. Stand out a little as a human being, rather than settling for being simply another worker.

 

Pay attention to those around you

If you’re feeling a little invisible, chances are those around you might be feeling the same way. Make a point of acknowledging the work of those around you. If you see someone do a good job or handle a situation well, tell them. If they do something kind or helpful, thank them.

 

A few words of appreciation from you will probably encourage them to give a few words of appreciation to someone else. If everyone starts paying it forward, a few small acts of appreciation and encouragement can create a whole new office culture!

 

Notice yourself

Sometimes feeling invisible stems from inside ourselves. In the course of trying to keep up with the day to day of life we forget how important it is to give ourselves a break. A walk outside at lunch, or an evening or morning stroll, can do wonders for clearing the mind and changing perspective.

 

Make sure you drink enough water everyday. Take an apple or an orange to work. Eat healthier, sleep more. Make taking care of yourself a priority. Open your eyes and appreciate what you see around you. Sometimes if your perspective from the inside changes you’ll notice the way you perceive what’s happening to you on the outside changes right along with it.

Follow These Steps on Your Resume and Get That Interview!

A Couple of Networking Hacks

We all know how important it is to spend time networking. A huge swath of jobs are obtained through introductions. People genuinely like to help each other out. If they meet you and they like you and they believe they can help you, generally they will. Oftentimes that help comes as an introduction to another person, so when you connect well with one person, in a way you’re connecting to their whole network.

 

Connecting well

For some people schmoosing and networking comes as easily as putting a smile on their face and heading out the door. For others getting out that door is as difficult as if they were wearing ankle chains.

 

Networking can be a lot easier if you have a definite, concrete idea of what you need to say before you enter the room. Plan how you’re going to introduce yourself. The strongest introductions are simple and to the point. Don’t try and squash a life story into a few sentences because people will get confused, lose interest and stop listening. For instance:

 

“Hi I’m Jane. When I was little I wanted to become a marine biologist because whales are my favourite animal, but then I realized I was kind of afraid of the ocean. If I couldn’t study whales I thought, maybe I could get good at drawing them…”

 

Having never met Jane, the person she’s talking to will most likely have tuned out before she can gets to her main point. When you’re in a networking situation, skip the back story and get to the point, simply and efficiently.

 

“Hi, I’m Jane. I specialize in creating residential and corporate underwater murals.”

 

Create a conversation

Open the door to a conversation. Then once you do start that conversation, instead of looking for things you can get from the person you’re speaking to, make a point of sharing time and space with them.

 

No one wants to be treated like a means to an end. Even if you don’t particularly like to talk, if you can usually get the other person on a roll if you get them speaking about themselves. Have a few questions ready.

 

What made you choose law as your career?

What inspires you?

What was your favourite movie of the year?

 

When you show a genuine interest in people, they usually feel interested in you back. That shared mutual interest is what motivates people to want to help each other.