Recruiting Animal

What Is A Smart Person

From Business Insider:  (edited)

As a high school student, Yahoo's famous CEO, Melissa Mayer, attended the National Youth Science Camp. One day, a post-doctoral student from Yale named Zune Nguyen was a guest lecturer. He stunned all the smart kids with puzzles and brainteasers.

The campers couldn’t stop talking about him so one of the counselors pointed out that what made Zune amazing was not what he knows. "It’s how Zune thinks.”

You could put him in a new environment or present him with an entirely new problem and within minutes he would be asking the right questions and making the right observations.

Comment: Unfortunately, the article doesn't offer any details about how he does this so you can simply assume that Zune was born smarter than you. 

Focus on Process Not Results

From: Entrepreneur.com (edited)

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.

"After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain."

You'll notice that Seinfeld didn't say a single thing about results.

It didn't matter if he was motivated or not. It didn't matter if he was writing great jokes or not. It didn't matter if what he was working on would ever make it into a show. All that mattered was "not breaking the chain."

How to Stop Procrastinating

Top performers in every field are more consistent than their peers. While most people get demotivated and off-track after a bad day, top performers settle right back into their pattern the next day.

The Seinfeld Strategy works because it helps to take the focus off of each individual performance and puts the emphasis on the process instead. It's not about how brilliant your work is that day. It's just about "not breaking the chain."

See also:
Procrastination Tips
Focus on Process Not Results
Do Bad Plans Cause Procrastination
Rigid Rules For Productivity 
The Virtue of Short Term Goals
How To Succeed Without Willpower
20 Minute Rule for Productivity 

The Virtue of Easy Short Term Goals

FROM: Jimmy Clear (edited)

If you’re a coach, your long-term goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day. If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.  If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.

I never set a long-term goal for my writing. I focus on my system -- writing one article every Monday and Thursday.

From: Scott Adams (edited)

Going to the gym 3-4 times a week is a goal. And it can be a hard one to accomplish for people who don't enjoy exercise. And when you associate discomfort with exercise you are training yourself to stop doing it because It feels like punishment.

Compare the goal of exercising 3-4 times a week with a system of being active every day at a level that feels good. Before long your body will be trained to crave the psychological lift you get from being active every day. It will soon become easier to exercise than to skip it. That's a system.

From: Scott Adams (edited)

Losers have goals and winners have systems.

The other day I put on my workout clothes and drove to the gym. But when I arrived I didn't feel like working out. I ate lunch in the snack bar then drove home. Did I fail at my exercise goal?

It's a trick question. I didn't have an exercise goal. What I do have is an exercise system. My system is that I attempt to exercise five times a week around lunchtime. And I always allow myself the option of driving to the gym then turning around and going home.

I've discovered that the routine of preparing to exercise usually inspires me to go through with it even if I didn't start out in the mood. This particular day, my body wasn't going to cooperate. No problem. I didn't have a trace of guilt about driving home. If I had a goal instead of a system, I would have failed that day and I would have felt like a loser. That can't be good for motivation.

That failure might be enough to prevent me from going to the gym the next time I don't feel 100%, just to avoid the risk of another failure.

COMMENT: What these guys call systems are just short-term or loose goals. But even with misleading wordplay, what they are saying makes sense. Small goals put less pressure on your mind and that makes them easier to achieve.

 See also:
Procrastination Tips
Focus on Process Not Results
Do Bad Plans Cause Procrastination
Rigid Rules For Productivity 
The Virtue of Short Term Goals
How To Succeed Without Willpower
20 Minute Rule for Productivity

How To Get Rid of Mediocrity

FROM: Bob Pittman of Clear Channel (edited)

If you get it right 50% of the time, you’re close to a genius. So you’ve got to be prepared to be wrong many times or most of the time.  People will ask me in interviews, “What are the biggest mistakes you’ve made?” I have no idea. I make mistakes all the time. I don’t count them.

What you need is a bias toward very quick decision-making. If you make the wrong move, then quickly change it until you get it right.

If I try 10 new things and 2 are clear winners and 2 are clear losers that means I’ve got 6 in between. That stuff in between doesn’t really help you. If you let it build up then pretty soon the whole organization is mediocrity and gunk. So if you can bring yourself to say, “I’m only going to let clear winners live," you can keep a crisp organization.

That’s why start-ups are so crisp — because they don’t have a lot of gunk yet. But over time, they build up gunk. So we always talk about weeding the garden.

Part of it is being honest with yourself. What really is a winner? You’ll hear justifications for keeping certain things going. When you start saying things like, “This sort of helps with ...” or, “Well, it does have a ...” these are all the words that are clues that something is not a clear winner.

 

Passion Is Not The Key To Success

FROM: Cartoonist Scott Adams on Why 'Passion' at Work Is Overrated | TIME.com

In my experience, success requires a minimum amount of brains, energy and ambition. You need a plan that makes sense on paper. And you need luck. Passion is optional.

But if you want to experience passion, you’ll have plenty of it after success. Over the course of my eclectic career, I have felt excited every time I tried a new business venture. As the venture failed — and most did — my excitement drained away. But for the few that worked, success made me feel something that one might call passion. In other words, success causes passion more than passion causes success.

If you’re lucky in your career and success finds you, a reporter might someday put a microphone in your face and ask why you succeeded when others did not. You don’t want to say you were lucky, because that sounds as if anyone could have done what you did. You don’t want to say you’re brilliant, because that sounds arrogant. And you don’t want to say you worked hard, because lots of unsuccessful people work hard too. The reporter is waiting for an answer. So you say the only thing that doesn’t make you sound like a lucky idiot or a total d-bag: “I’m passionate.”

 

How To Succeed Without Willpower

FROM: Cartoonist Scott Adams on How to Build Willpower for the Weak | TIME.com

My favorite guilty pleasure is potato chips. If I open the fridge and see nothing that looks tasty, 10 seconds later I’m on the Ruffles like a dog on a preacher’s leg. It isn’t a pretty sight. But if my fridge contains, as it often does, some cucumber slices marinating in white vinegar and water, mmm-mmm. I don’t need willpower to salt those bad boys and pop ’em in my mouth.

In my experience, anything that requires a lot of willpower isn’t sustainable. That’s why I use a number of tricks to avoid situations that pit pleasure against deprivation. The cucumber trick is just one of them.

I also like to train myself away from using willpower the way Pavlov trained his pooches.

After a workout at the gym, I always treat myself to a delicious protein shake and 20 minutes of unstructured chilling out in the snack bar while reading interesting tidbits on my smartphone. The combination of the cool-down, the delicious shake and the free time with my thoughts and the Internet is deliriously pleasurable.

Now when I think about going to the gym, I don’t imagine the boringness of the exercise in isolation. I think of it as a package deal that includes the wonderful 20 minutes that follow.

 See also:
Procrastination Tips
Focus on Process Not Results
Do Bad Plans Cause Procrastination
Rigid Rules For Productivity 
The Virtue of Short Term Goals
How To Succeed Without Willpower
20 Minute Rule for Productivity

What Matters In Life

From: Frances Kopun

“The Saudis shortened Bill’s life in their torture-chambers in Riyadh, followed by the barbaric detention he endured for a crime he did not commit,” said Sandy Mitchell, one of the seven arrested and tortured for the same crime.

“My incarceration and near-death have made me view the rest of my life as something extra, as something not to be wasted. What I now see as achievement, what I now see as useful, has been markedly changed. I look at the desperate manner in which people try to climb on top of each other and realize what a waste it is. I have no wish to move back into that way of life.

 

 

Pep Talk - Teamwork

 

Click here to see the video on YouTube

 

Success Disease

From The Toronto Star

“Mike developed ‘host’s disease,’” says Linden MacIntyre, a Duffy drinking buddy from the Maritimes, now with CBC’s the fifth estate. “That’s where you start to believe all the flattery, believe you’re bigger than the story. The affliction gets worse, the head swells up and anything that threatens your celebrity becomes a problem.”

From: Betashop

I freely admit, when you grow revenue 500% year over year and become a media darling overnight, it’s hard to keep perspective.

No doubt, we had lost perspective at Fab. We had started to dream in billions when we should have been focused on making one day simply better than the one before it.

 

People Who Hate Criticism Want To Hide Errors

From: Camus Centenniel

Camus was hired in 1938 as a reporter for a new daily newspaper, the Alger Républicain, covering everything from murder trials to a famine in the mountain region of Kabylia, 50 miles east of Algiers.

That exposé of government neglect infuriated colonial authorities. They shut down the paper and blacklisted Camus, making him unemployable as a journalist.