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?
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!
When working with a difficult boss, it can seem like nothing is in your control and you don’t have the power to affect positive change in your working relationship. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Today on US News, I share three techniques to be proactive and make your boss love you. Read it here.
Update: this post was also picked up by Business Insider here!
Last week I was inspired by Jess Lively, who opened her inbox to readers and runs my new favorite podcast, so I thought it would be fun and useful to do something similar – welcome to Ask Me Anything (AMA) day!
This is your chance to email me directly and ask any sort of question you might have.
Ask Me Anything Guidelines
1. Ask your question before tomorrow (Fri, 9/5) at 9:00 am ET.
2. Use the subject line “ASK ME ANYTHING” or “AMA.”
3. Ask your question in three sentences (or less) and I will respond back to you in three sentences (or less).
If you follow these three guidelines, I promise to get back to you with my response as soon as possible (probably within 24 hours, depending on the number of people who email).
You can ask me about careers, money, happiness, relationships, life, business – anything!
And in return, I’ll do my best to give you my very best advice – within the three sentence framework – which may include links to ideas, books or resources that might be useful for you.
My email is rebecca(at)kontrary(dot)com and I look forward to answering your questions.
If you think I can serve you in some way, please reach out!
And remember, please follow the guidelines by sending the email before 9:00 am ET tomorrow morning and by stating your question in three sentences or less.
It’s always fascinating to see why a startup fails, always useful to see what goes wrong. Not everything can or should be a huge business, or “a big hit.” For that reason, I appreciate that Pando Daily reporter Erin Griffith wades into the deadpool to bring us stories, like how YC alum Tutorspree shut down.
Tutorspree graduated from Y Combinator in 2011, calling itself an “Airbnb for tutors,” reports Griffith. Basically, Tutorspree was a marketplace that matched a tutor with its tutee. Besides the glaring pitfalls in such a model, several of which Griffith outlines in her article, we should also be thinking about whether this startup was really worthy of a $1 million investment and $7 million valuation in the first place.
Our obsession with building “big hits” hides all the other wonderful opportunities to make a real difference in people’s lives. Aggregating existing exchanges, like tutoring, and trying to monetize off the backs of others isn’t world-changing. Founders should try creating and providing real value.
Journalist Noreen Malone argues in the New Republic that tech bubbles exist, but mostly to protect the relatively young, well-off, and like-minded generation that builds apps that don’t matter. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Malone also quotes Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”
Scale, for the sake of size alone, is a small ambition. When you get investment, from venture capital or angel investors, your entire company changes. Your goal is to seek users or sales at the expense of everything else. I have been part of startups that failed – or will fail – for this reason. You sacrifice learning, and as a result, you don’t build a useful machine. You don’t build a meaningful machine. You build a marketing machine (which most people will fail at, since good marketing is predicated first and foremost on a good product). But the strongest biz dev strategies can’t save a crappy product. The best sales people won’t conceal thin intentions.
SIlicon Valley is losing its ability to inspire. “Popular culture has soured on Silicon Valley’s hotshots,” Malone argues. And that’s because long ago, Silicon Valley lost its ability to innovate.
Want to create real value? Start here.