3. THE FIVE ESSENTIAL PRACTICES OF THE EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE
“These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to acquired to be an effective executive:
1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.
2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, ‘What results are expected of me?’ rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.
3. Effective executives build on their strengths—their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths of the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they
cannot do.
4. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
5. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on ‘dissenting opinions’ rather than on ‘consensus
on the facts.’ And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics."
- Peter Drucker from his book The Effective Executive
5. DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR TALENTS AT EVERY TURN
“If you spend most of your life trying to be good at everything, you eliminate your chances of being great at anything. Unless your goal is to be mediocre at a lot of things, starting with what you are naturally good at is a matter of efficiency. Focusing on strengths is in many ways a basic time-allocation issue. Every hour you invest in an area where you have natural talent has a multiplying effect, whereas each hour you spend trying to remedy a weakness is like working against a gravitational force. Yet many people spend years or even decades working on weaknesses in hopes that doing so will make them well-rounded.
Do everything you can to avoid falling into this trap. While well-roundedness may be helpful for acquiring the basic tools in any trade—such as reading, writing, and arithmetic—it loses value as you get closer to finding a career. At that point, what’s more important and relevant is what sets you apart. If you want to be great at something in your lifetime, double down on your talents at every turn.”
- Tom Rath from his book Are You Fully Charged?
7. MANAGE YOUR ENERGY
“Those early hours are important for another reason: they’re usually when you’re most productive. When I spoke to Duke professor Dan Ariely, he said, ‘It turns out that most people are productive in the first two hours of the morning. Not immediately after waking, but if you get up at 7 you’ll be most productive from around 8 to 10:30.’ Don’t waste them being exhausted and cranky.
To think about this another way, do you accomplish more in three hours when you’re sleep deprived or in one hour when you feel energetic, optimistic, and engaged? Ten hours of work when you’re exhausted, cranky, and distracted might be far less productive than three hours when you’re ‘in the zone.’ So why not focus less on hours and more on doing what it takes to make sure you’re at your best.”
- Eric Barker from Barking up the wrong tree
9. ENDINGS: YOUR WORK DAY
“When the workday ends, many of us want to tear away—to pick up children, race home to prepare dinner, or just beeline to the nearest bar. But the science of endings suggests that instead of fleeing we’re better off reserving the final five minutes of work for a few small
deliberate actions that bring the day to a fulfilling close. Begin by taking two or three minutes to write down what you accomplished since the morning. Making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator on the job. But without tracking our ‘dones,’ we often don’t know whether we’re progressing. Ending the day by recording what you’ve achieved can encode the entire day more positively. (Testimonial: I’ve been doing this for four years and I swear by the practice. On good days, the exercise delivers feelings of completion; on bad days, it often shows me I got more done than I suspected.)
Now use the other two or three minutes to lay out your plan for the following day. This will help close the door on today and energize you for tomorrow.
Bonus: If you’ve got an extra minute left, send someone—anyone—a thank-you email...gratitude is a powerful reserve. It’s an equally powerful elevation.”
- Daniel Pink from When.
11. HEALTH PROBLEMS RELATED TO SITTING
“Most of us spend as much as 55 percent of or more of our waking hours each day sitting. We sit at the table during meals, we sit while driving our cars, we sit working at a desk at the office or at school, and we finish off the day sitting on the couch watching TV in the evening.
A growing number of studies show that the more we sit, the greater our chances of dying of heart disease, stroke, cancer, or diabetes. We tend to get back and joint pain. We are likely to be overweight or obese. Sitting also saps our energy, making us more tired than ever. In a commentary titled ‘Regular Physical Activity: Forgotten Benefits,’ published in 2015 online in the American Journal of Medicine, Drs. Steven Lewis and Charles Hennekins of Florida Atlantic University stress that lack of physical activity in Americans poses important clinical, public health, and fiscal challenges for the nation. They calculate that the cost of habitual inactivity and the resultant poor health ‘. . . accounts for 22% of coronary heart disease, 22% of colon cancer, 18% of osteoporatic fractures, 12% of diabetes and hypertension, and 5% of breast cancer . . . inactivity accounts for about 2.4% of U.S. healthcare expenditures or approximately $24 billion a year. Not a pretty picture.”
- Joan Vernikos from Designed to Move
13. JUST ANOTHER COLD, DARK NIGHT ON THE SIDE OF EVEREST
“Everyone has an Everest. Whether it’s a climb you choose, or a circumstance you find yourself in, you’re in the middle of an important journey. Can you imagine a climber scaling the wall of ice at Everest’s Lhotse Face and saying, ‘This is such a hassle”? Or spending the first night in the mountain’s ‘death zone’ and thinking, ‘I don’t need this stress”? The climber knows the context of his stress. It has personal meaning to him; he has chosen it. You are most liable to feel like a victim of the stress in your life when you forget the context the stress is unfolding in. ‘Just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest’ is a way to remember the paradox of stress. The most meaningful challenges in your life will come with a few dark nights.
The biggest problem with trying to avoid stress is how it changes the way we view our lives, and ourselves. Anything in life that causes stress starts to look like a problem. If you experience stress at work, you think there’s something wrong with your job. If you experience stress in your marriage, you think there’s something wrong with your relationship. If you experience stress as a parent, you think there’s something wrong with your parenting (or your kids). If trying to make a change is stressful, you think there’s something wrong with your goal.
Just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest.”
- Kelly McGonigal from The Upside of Stress
15. DON’T EVER, EVER RING THE BELL
“In 2014, at the University of Texas at Austin commencement, Admiral William McRaven brought the house down with his inspirational eighteen-minute talk, ‘Ten Ways to Change the
World.’ In it, he described the ordeals of SEAL trainees, including punishing runs in freezing cold weather, navigating underwater in pitch-black conditions, and being forced to do extra calisthenics after multi-hour endurance sessions. Admiral McRaven said if you want to change the world, you have to ‘sing when you are up to your neck in mud,’ ‘go down obstacles head first,’ and ‘punch the shark in the snout’ when you are underwater, alone, and scared. He finished his speech with the last of his ten change-the-world points, noting that everyone in the SEAL training wants to quit at some point because they don’t believe they have what it takes to persevere:
Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell, a brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at five o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT—and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell. If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.’”
- Caroline Adams Miller from Getting Grit
17. CONTROL STIMULI TO CREATE A CLEAR HEAD
“Cigarettes, alcohol, and commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals like Adderall and Prozac all come with warning labels. Has the time come for warnings to accompany the use of media, particularly social media? Is there unhealthy or unsafe exposure or dangerous doses so to speak?
On the surface, this may sound preposterous, but as you read these research findings below, ask yourself if you might rethink your exposure to media and start controlling it for yourself.
• A study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that the closer you are to your (turned off) smart phone, the more it acts like mental kryptonite. Simply keeping it anywhere near you distracts you and can lessen your capacity to think.
• The more time people spent on Facebook, the worse they felt and the less satisfied they were with their lives, according to University of Michigan researchers in a 2013 article for PLOS ONE.
• People watching news coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing reported higher acute stress two to four weeks after the tragedy than people who had direct exposure to the events at or near the bombings, according to researchers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America (PNAS) journal.”
- Paul Napper and Anthony Rao from The Power of Agency
19. SUSTAINED OBSESSION
“Brad Alan Lewis and his rowing partner Paul Enquist won the gold medal in the double sculls at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, becoming the first U.S. rowers to capture gold since 1964 and the first U.S. doubles team to secure gold since 1932. For Lewis, high commitment equals sustained obsession. He explains how he went from good to gold medal in his book Wanted: Rowing Coach: ‘If anyone here is secretly dreaming of making the Olympics, I can tell you exactly how to do it: two words: Sustained Obsession. The obsession isn’t so hard. But keeping it sustained is a tough nut to crack.’”
- Jim Afremow from The Champion's Mind
21. WANT TO DECREASE YOUR IQ BY 15 POINTS? HERE’S HOW!
“A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night of sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.
While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common ‘productivity tools’ can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to ‘switch off’ for hours at a time.)
‘Always on’ may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on ‘alert’ far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this has an impact.
As Stone says, ‘This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?”
- David Rock from Your Brain at Work
23. TEACHING EMOTIONAL STAMINA, FLEXIBILITY AND WISDOM
“So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.”
- Yuval Noah Harari from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
25. HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANXIOUS, TIRED AND HOSTILE
“In the United States, daily physical activity—as captured by an accelerometer—is correlated with a sense of purpose in life. Real-time tracking also shows that people are happier during moments when they are physically active than when they are sedentary. And on days when people are more active than their usual, they report greater satisfaction with their lives.
Other experiments in the U.S. and UK have forced moderately active adults to become sedentary for a period of time, only to watch their well-being wither. Regular exercisers who replace physical activity with a sedentary activity for two weeks become more anxious, tired, and hostile.
When adults are randomly assigned to reduce their daily step count, 88 percent become more depressed. Within one week of becoming more sedentary, they report a 31 percent decline in life satisfaction. The average daily step count required to induce feelings of anxiety and depression and decrease satisfaction with life is 5,649. The typical American takes 4,774 steps per day. Across the globe, the average is 4,961.”
- Kelly McGonigal from The Joy of Movement
27. WHEN TO EAT
“Some mice were given access to food around the clock, while others only had access during the night (when mice normally come out to forage and feed). The results of the experiment were staggering. While the mice that ate around the clock became obese and unhealthy, the group that was only given access to food within an eight- to twelve-hour window ended up slim and healthy.
Both groups of mice consumed the same number of calories (and the same mixture of unhealthy fats and sugars), but the mice in the nighttime-only feeding group weighed 28 percent less and had 70 percent less body fat after eighteen weeks. Independent of what they were eating, sticking to their natural nocturnal feeding time protected them against obesity and even gave their health a boost.
Now, humans are not mice, but signs are pointing in a similar direction for people who practice time-restricted eating. A number of small trials have shown that merely eating an earlier dinner can improve blood sugar and blood pressure, independent of weight lost. It may even help fight cancer. One study from Spain involving over four thousand people found eating an earlier dinner (before 9 p.m. or at least two hours before bed) reduced the risk of breast cancer and
prostate cancers by 20 percent. A UCSD study yielded equally promising findings, this time for cancer recurrence. The study involved 2,400 women with early-stage breast cancer and found
that a nightly fast of fewer than thirteen hours was associated with a 36 percent higher risk of recurrence, compared to thirteen or more hours of food abstention per night. There was also a trend toward increased mortality for late-night eaters.”
- Max Lugavere from The Genius Life
29. STATS TO MAKE YOUR HEART SKIP A BEAT
“When communicating science to the general public in lectures or writing, I’m always wary of bombarding an audience with never-ending mortality and morbidity statistics, lest they themselves lose the will to live in front of me. It is hard not to do so with such compelling masses of studies in the field of sleep deprivation. Often, however, a single astonishing result is all the people need to apprehend the point.
For cardiovascular health, I believe that finding comes from a ‘global experiment’ in which 1.5 billion people are forced to reduce their sleep by one hour or less for a single night each year. It is very likely that you have been part of this experiment, otherwise known as daylight savings time.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways.
In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and micro-sleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.”
- Matthew Walker from Why We Sleep
31. WANT SUCCESS? START WITH HAPPINESS
“I felt like I’d entered an alternate universe when I read a lengthy research paper by three of positive psychology’s top luminaries—Ed Diener, Laura King, and Sonja Lyubomirksy—called ‘The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect.’ It was the fall of 2005 when I was in the MAPP program at Penn, and I was reading more and more research that helped me to understand exactly what it takes to flourish and succeed in life. This paper, though, was a doozy, and it upended all of my previous thinking.
In one of the most profound, slam-dunk findings I’ve ever read, these three researchers had parsed and reviewed hundreds of studies on success in life to discover the exact opposite of what I and many others had mistakenly believed was true: we don’t become happy after we succeed at something, but rather we succeed at something because we are happy first. Their comprehensive overview of longitudinal, qualitative, correlational, and causal studies on success in friendship, health, finance, work, and all other aspects of life helped me understand why achieving certain external goals when I was younger never made me happy for long, and had instead left me
emptier than before. The grades, the awards, the schools, the scores, and the right weight never brought me the lasting satisfaction I had thought they would, and now I could see why."
- Caroline Adams Miller from Getting Grit
33. BRAIN-DERIVED NEUROTROPHIC FACTOR (BDNF)
“A major component in this gift of neurogenesis—and it is a gift to be revered—is a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which, as we read in previous chapters, plays a key role in creating new neurons. And it also protects existing neurons, helping to ensure their survivability while encouraging synapse formation—that is, the connection of one neuron to another—which is vital for thinking, learning, and higher levels of brain function. Studies have in fact demonstrated that BDNF levels are lower in Alzheimer’s patients, which is no surprise, given our current understanding of how BDNF works...
We now have a very firm understanding of the factors that influence our DNA to produce BDNF. Fortunately, these factors are by and large under our direct control. Increasing your production of BDNF and thus increasing neurogenesis while adding protection to your existing brain neurons doesn’t require that you enroll in a research study to determine if some new laboratory-created compound will enhance BDNF production. The gene that turns on BDNF is activated by a variety of factors, including voluntary physical exercise—animals forced to exercise do not demonstrate this change, calorie reduction, intellectual stimulation, curcumin, and the omega-3 fat known as docosahexaenoic acid.
This is a powerful message because all of these factors are within our grasp; they represent choices we can make to turn on the gene for neurogenesis.”
- David Perlmutter & Alberto Villoldo from Power Up Your Brain
35. THE TWO-MINUTE GAME
“If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.”
INBOX ZERO
“It requires much less energy to maintain e-mail at a zero base than at a thousand base.”
THE WEEK BEFORE YOUR VACATION
“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before your leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do that weekly instead of yearly.”
- David Allen from Getting Things Done
37. PERFECTION + 50 POUNDS OF CLAY
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on the quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of pots rated an ‘A,’ forty pounds a ‘B,’ and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality,’ however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an ‘A.’
Well, came grading and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
~ David Bayles and Ted Orland from Art and Fear
39. HOW POWERFUL ARE EXPECTATION AND BELIEF?
“But is there any scientific foundation for placing expectation and belief on such a high pedestal?
More specifically and personally, just how powerful can your personal beliefs and expectations be in the healing process? Let’s allow a 2002 study in the New England Journal of Medicine to suggest an answer.
In this study, conducted by scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine, 165 patients with osteoarthritis (wear-and-tear arthritis) of the knee randomly received one of three treatments: arthroscopic debridement (removal of dead tissue inside the knee); arthroscopic lavage (washing-out of the knee joint); or placebo “sham” surgery. Arthroscopy involves the use of a fiber-optic device that is inserted to permit observation of the inside of a joint and to facilitate surgical procedures inside the joint. In this investigation, the placebo surgery involved having a physician make a surface skin incision on the knee and simulate a debridement without insertion of an arthroscope. The researchers assessed the outcomes of the procedures over a 24-month period. The results were startling: The investigators reported that at no point did the patients who had the real surgery have less knee pain or better physical function than the placebo group. The sham surgery worked as well as the real surgery. The researchers concluded that there was no clinically meaningful difference among the three groups. In fact, they said, at some points during follow-up, objective physical function of the patients was significantly worse in the debridement group than in the placebo group!
This study is by no means an isolated example of the power of belief and expectation. Hundreds of other investigations, involving a wide variety of diseases and health problems, have demonstrated the power of the human mind over disease. The treatment principle might be summed up this way: Just as an antibiotic drug may stop an infection or surgery may eliminate a malignancy, so the mind—your mind—has the capacity to treat or even cure many of your serious physical and emotional complaints.”
- Herbert Benson from The Relaxation Revolution
41. GENES VS. HABITS
“We all live with myths that undermine our capacity to fight cancer. For example, many of us are
convinced that cancer is primarily linked to our genetic makeup, rather than our lifestyle. When
we look at the research, however, we can see that the contrary is true.
If cancer was transmitted essentially through genes, the cancer rate among adopted children
would be the same as that among their biological—not their adoptive—parents. In Denmark,
where a detailed genetic register traces each individual’s origins, researchers have found
the biological parents of more than a thousand children adopted at birth. The researchers’
conclusion, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, forces us to change
all our assumptions about cancer. They found that the genes of biological parents who died of
cancer before fifty had no influence on an adoptee’s risk of developing cancer. On the other hand,
death from cancer before the age of fifty of an adoptive parent (who passes on habits but not
genes) increased the rate of mortality from cancer fivefold among the adoptees. This study shows
that lifestyle is fundamentally involved in vulnerability to cancer.
All research on cancer concurs:
Genetic factors contribute to at most 15 percent of mortalities from cancer. In short, there is no
genetic fatality. We can all learn to protect ourselves.”
- David Servan-Schreiber from Anti Cancer