Success comes from the mastery of a core set of skills that can be applied to any position, field or company. When you practice and strengthen these skills in your work, you’ll rise to the top. Over at US News today, discover the crucial talents you need to launch your career. Read it here.
You know successful people create goals and rise early, but what about the things they avoid? In order to have good habits, you have to get rid of the bad ones. Over at US News today, I share ten things you’ll probably never see a successful person do. Read it here.
Update: this post was also featured on Yahoo! News here and MSN here.
When you’re comfortable in your job, it can be both a blessing and a curse. Job comfort can mean security and career advancement, but it can also mean boredom, depression and existential crises. Over at US News today, I talk about the pros and cons of settling into a job. Read it here.
Have you guys been listening to Serial? Ryan and I started this weekend, and only have two episodes before we’re caught up. I am a podcast fanatic, but Ryan and I don’t usually listen to podcasts together. I had to convince him that this would be worth it by telling him that everyone else is listening too, and now he is hooked. It’s such a different experience to sit together and listen to something versus watch a screen. After every episode, we check in on our respective verdicts – innocent or guilty? It’s so good.
(Make sure to listen to the episodes in order, starting with Ep. 1!)
I have a set of simple daily practices that I do every day. They are things like run, floss, write, read, kiss Ryan, meditate, take my vitamins. Some of these things, I have done my entire life. Some are new. But they all have the same thing in common: the back-up plan.
There seems to be a lot of shame around the back-up plan. Like, you didn’t get your first choice, so you have to be resigned to the runner-up. You have to settle. But when I build a new habit, or put a new goal out in the Universe, I always think about the back-up plan.
Here’s how it starts. I take myself down the road of anxiety. If I fail, what would happen? If I couldn’t live up to expectations and everyone hated me, if I embarrassed myself, if I bankrupted the organization, if my entire life tumbled down in flames, if I ruined my reputation and only squirrels – and I hate squirrels – would approach me, I would be okay. Right? Yeah, that would be okay. I could start over. In fact, I know exactly what I would do.
These descriptions sound outlandish, but as someone that deals with a lot of anxiety, it’s often not. I have been paralyzed from doing simple and so-called normal activities as the result of what can only be described as sheer panic. My head and heart and mouth fill up with “shoulds” and I’m not sure what I “should” be doing at all. The pressure of how something ought to go overwhelms me. If it doesn’t go the way it should, I need to know everything will (still) be okay.
The research agrees with me. Instead of visioning how great something is going to be, it’s surprisingly healthy to vision what could go wrong. A researcher asked one set of women enrolled in a weight-reduction program to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; she asked another set to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. “The results were striking,” the researcher reports. “The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.” Ouch.
It’s okay to set up ambitious goals, but you need to have a back-up plan. We get excited about what success could look like, and that leads to an initial boost of willpower. But then “positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.”
On the flip side, so-called negative thinking – or the back-up plan, to be less, well, negative – allows you to think through, prepare and plan for what might go wrong.
In another study, a scientist gave rehab patients booklets in which to detail their rehab schedule, and found a striking difference between those who had written plans and those who had not. Those who had completed the exercise were able to get in and out of their chairs, unassisted, almost three times as fast.
The scientist “examined the booklets, and discovered that most of the blank pages had been filled in with specific, detailed plans about the most mundane aspects of recovery,” describes Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit. “One patient, for example, had written, ‘I will walk to the bus stop tomorrow to meet my wife from work,’ and then noted what time he would leave, the route he would walk, what he would wear, which coat he would bring if it was raining, and what pills he would take if the pain became too much.”
The patient had a plan (timing, route, clothes), and a back-up plan (what coat he would wear if it was raining, pills if the pain were too much). In other words, he had a plan for success, a plan for failure, and a plan for recovery.
I don’t always feel like running. I give myself a choice. I can either run or do strength training. I always choose the lesser of two evils on any given day. If I don’t run or do strength training, I walk to the grocery or to my meetings. That is, I have a back-up plan to my back-up plan.
But exercise hasn’t been too difficult lately. So let’s talk about meditation – that’s been hard. My goal is to meditate for ten to fifteen minutes per day, but I rarely do that. Instead, I do five minutes. Or if I’m busy and can’t even find five minutes, I’ll take a moment out of my day to take two or three intentional, deep, slow breaths. That’s it. That’s my meditation practice.
When I talk about this approach in my Accountability Friend program, many students are resistant to the idea. For example, one client was a lawyer who wanted to start a 30-minute per day writing habit. She was a high-performer who had idealized what she should be doing. She, like many others, wanted to take an all or nothing approach: “Well, I didn’t get my thirty minutes done today, so I suck at this and am horrible.” Or worse, try to play catch-up and punish themselves: “I didn’t write yesterday, so I’ll write for sixty minutes today.”
Thirty minutes per day is a lot. So I worked with the lawyer to lower the barrier to entry, create a plan and a back-up plan. We forget that doing a little bit every day – or every two weeks, or whatever your schedule – adds up. Moderation is always the answer. The goal can be thirty minutes per day, but if you only do five minutes per day, that’s okay.
We act as if we have complete control over our day – or that we “should.” But you know that’s not true. Shit happens. You have to work late. You sleep in early. It’s too cold to go out and get a salad for lunch. What then? Will you continue to set yourself up for failure, believing you’re not cut out to be a runner or a writer or a finisher? Or will you pull out Plan B or C or Z from your pocket and carry on? What will your back-up plan be?
Share your process on how you get things done in the comments below. Do you have a plan you follow? What about a back-up plan? If you have a goal that’s been giving you trouble, how can you approach it differently?
Sending out lots of résumés with no responses? Or perhaps you’re getting interviews, but not the job? While it may feel like you’re doing everything in your power to land a new job, if you’re having trouble closing the deal, it’s time for another look. There are probably obvious reasons why you’re not getting the job, and over at US News I talk about three to take into consideration. Read it here.
Update: this post has also been published on Yahoo! News here.
We all know connections and networking are the key to a good career, and increasingly, email is your first and only chance to make a good impression. Over at US News, I share three tips to make the most of an email introduction. Read it here.
Do you often find yourself daydreaming of doing something better? Here’s the thing: Most people should not make their passions their professions. Over at US News, I share three common reasons why people want to pursue their passions, and why those are completely misguided. Read it here.
You can eat fat by the pails of lard now, but no carbs. Or try an all-meat diet. Or just eat raw veggies. I have never understood diets. Or “lifestyles” as diets are now called. These days you’re not on a diet, you change your lifestyle. No longer are you buying into a temporary act, but a permanent change.
Ever notice how every diet has a detailed system for you to follow? Complexity is added so that a product is new and novel to the customer. The result is the answer. That thing you’ve been missing. You just didn’t know the right rules to follow.
I have a better lifestyle for you. It can be boiled down to one word, and that word is not FAT, MEAT, or RAW. This is a special word, a magic system that not only serves as a recipe for what you eat, but a playbook for how to live your life. This single word? The only rule you’ll ever need? This passphrase that unlocks decades of research you’ve never read? It’s moderation. Oh, so boring right? You probably think you’ve tried moderation before. That you gave it a fair shot and moderation did nothing for you. But you’d be wrong.
Moderation comes from the Latin “moderare” which means “to control.” It avoids excess and extremes, and encourages a life in the middle. Synonyms for moderate include self-restraint, self-control, self-command, and self-discipline. Which explains why we avoid moderation like the plague; we possess none of those things.
Back to food, the number of choices on what to eat alone are mind-boggling. The grocery store is a veritable jungle of sights and tastes and nutritional value competing for a place in our bodies and minds.
With so much choice, it’s no wonder we turn to diets – er, lifestyles – to reduce the number of decisions we have to make. Doesn’t it make it easier? Aren’t we special? So we believe. But the limits of one only encourage the excess of another. And the yo-yo-ing between these two extremes can be nauseating.
Under the facade of science, we tweak these lifestyles to ever-more detailed minutiae. Now add acai! Now subtract lactose! Armed with such complex rules the next time you open the fridge, you feel control. You’ve got this nut figured out. (Wait, can you eat nuts?)
But make as many food substitutions as you’d like, external rules will never be a replacement for your own self-discipline. Here’s the thing. You already know everything you need to be successful. Take a breath. You know the choices to make. We fill our time with personal development books and new tomes on eating and the latest green smoothie recipe because we don’t trust ourselves, maybe don’t even like ourselves. (And hey, that’s a good instinct to have; companies are now spending millions and billions of dollars perfecting the addictive crunch of a chip until the whole bag is gone, the auto-play of the next episode until you’ve watched the entire season, the notification alert until all of your time is spent.)
We do need rules, tricks and defenses to put up against the new, the shiny, the distractions, the temptations – even if those are couched in kale and productivity. Extremes are extremes, no matter which end of the spectrum they lie. So break out your arsenal. Just be careful you aren’t trading one extreme for another. Don’t fear one extreme so much that you live under the supposed protection of another. When in doubt, eat a donut.
Moderation is a simple concept. There is nothing that cannot be moderated. Your actions, your desires and thoughts can all live by one simple rule, one magic system. But we don’t do it. I think that’s because moderation is not fun in the moment. But smart people know moderation need not exist in every moment, only over time. The moments stacked one on top of another become a fortress against the latest fads, diets and lifestyles. All good things come over time.
So the next time someone asks you, instead of saying you’re “fasting” or “juicing,” just say you’re “moderating.” People might chuckle, roll their eyes in exasperation, or secretly be glad they know the latest research that you are clearly unaware. But keep trucking on, eating your your cheese and your beans and your brussel sprouts and your chocolate almonds, and f*cking enjoy your life.
You know you should customize your cover letter every time you apply for a new job, but where do you even start? Over at US News, I share a no-fail three-step system to build a compelling cover letter that separates you from the pack and gets you in the door. Read it here.
Update: this post was also picked up by AOL jobs here!
The American Dream speaks the language of ambition and its tongue whispers it is not for lack of luck, but lack of effort that you are a failure. Put in the work and you’ll become a success. Luck nor social constructs or randomness or the genetic lottery create the richest men of the world – and they are men – but an exchange of value. The rules are: work hard and be rewarded in return. Except we know that’s not true.
“The U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon,” reports former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. “The 400 wealthiest Americans own as much wealth as 80 million families – 62% of America. The reason is the stock market. Since 1980 the American GDP has approximately doubled. Inflation-adjusted wages have gone down. But the stock market has increased by over ten times, and the richest quintile of Americans owns 93% of it.”
This quintile, they don’t work hard – they don’t work at all – and are rewarded in return. They don’t work hard and amass influence. They don’t work hard and acclaim power. They don’t work hard, and yet millions try to emulate them. Those millions do work hard, and in systems and institutions with large trompe l’oeil ceilings of the sky. That is the American Dream. The illusion creates hope. But we no longer have hope.
“More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it,” argues New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, “and by ‘it’ I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.”
We hit the faux-hope ceiling and facing reality has been unseemly ever since. No one likes work. Bosses are crappy. No, really, really bad. Most bully to cover their own insecurities. Workers never feel appreciated. And none of us are really sure what we’re doing matters anyway. Whatever the job, you’re expected to show up and know the job, not learn the job, not make mistakes or take risks.
A mere 13% of workers are engaged. But unlike the days of the company man, where you could put in your time no matter how boring or rote it became, then retire after 30 years with a pension, today’s employers rid themselves of such responsibility. The loss of loyalty not only means the loss of security, but the deep and meaningful work that comes with dedication and duty.
“The world’s leaders have coolly, calmly, rationally, senselessly decided that bankers, CEOs, lobbyists, billionaires, the astrologers formerly known as economists, corporate ‘people’, robots, and hedge funds are worth more to society than… the young. The world’s leaders are letting the future crash and burn,” argues Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review. Our youth “is getting a deal so raw that no one but a politician or a serial killer could offer it with a straight face. So let’s call it what it is. Not just unfair—but unconscionable.”
In such demanding and depressing times comes innovation, and it tells us to pour our resources and energy into entrepreneurship. Become a freelancer. Work on the side. Explore your “freedom.” And companies love it. Your corporate sovereignty means no salary, no pension, no retirement plan, no healthcare, no 8-hour work day (you willingly work more), no boundaries, no stability, no safety, and no fealty.
And with everyone out for themselves, there is something more immediate lost than the safeguards of our future; we trick ourselves into believing we’re changing the world. No matter the bills aren’t being paid or we can’t get up in the morning or retirement won’t exist when we reach 60, 70 or 80 years old.
We hold onto the idea that “money isn’t meaning,” and that’s a pretty story. It comforts us while we filter photographs or swipe credit cards for a new pair of hiking boots. But the more we encourage such misleading mindsets, the more off-kilter and out-of-balance not only our economy, but our personal lives will become. Money has always been an exchange of value, and it’s only recently that money has been an indicator of meta non-value.
What I mean is the wealthy don’t acquire money through an exchange of value, but an abstraction of money at a higher and higher level. Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues former Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender.
Now tell me our ignorance and unwillingness to fight doesn’t have something to do with the tradeoff between money and meaning. Money isn’t evil. Only the systems we’ve designed and encouraged to make it so. We keep following the rules no one else plays by, but expect the same result. When it doesn’t happen, we create worth and are happy if someone “likes” it on Instagram.
But your value is worth more than that. It’s worth more than massive debt, overwhelming anxiety, being underchallenged, underemployed or unemployed. It’s worth more than what’s in your bank account and it’s certainly worth more than what you’re getting paid (despite any lies the Microsoft CEO will tell you).
Want to fix the economy? What — too big? How about your life? Want a fair shot at the American Dream? Or just a better boss? Or maybe a chance to just give your kids something, if you can’t give them everything? Want to fix the wanting, the feeling, the gnawing? We have to align worth and wealth.
Our lives are a series of habits. Our brain craves habits because it wants to be more efficient. We each have good habits and bad habits, and each habit consists of the same loop: a cue, routine, and reward. Over at US News, I share the three key habits you should cultivate at work. Read it here.
Update: this post was also picked up by AOL jobs here and Business Insider here!