Ryan Stephens

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11 of My Favorite Posts from October 2015

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This is my effort to provide a little signal by curating some of the best/most interesting posts I encountered during the month of October  2015. I recommend identifying and diving into 2-3 that resonate with you. Focus less on the dopamine rush you get from hopping from article to article and more on how you apply the wisdom in these posts to your own life.

Please use the comments section to recommend and share other posts you’ve recently found useful and/or your best posts of late.

The commentary below the link is typically the author’s own words that I’ve extracted as a key takeaway; however, sometimes I add my own commentary and make connections as well.

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[Blog Posts/News Articles]:

Promotion, Demotion and Opportunity – Seth Godin

In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind.

The question, then, isn’t, “when am I going to get promoted?”

No, I think the question is, “will I grab these openings to become someone who’s already doing work at a higher level?”

Act ‘as if’. If the people around you don’t figure out what an asset you’ve become, someone else will.

How Mindfulness Fixes Your Brain, Reduces Stress and Boosts Performance – Dr. Travis Bradberry

Mindfulness is a simple, yet effective form of meditation that enables you to gain control of unruly thoughts and behaviors. People who practice mindfulness are more focused, even when they are not meditating. Mindfulness is an excellent technique to reduce stress because it allows you to stop feeling out of control, to stop jumping from one thought to the next, and to stop ruminating on negative thoughts. Overall, it’s a great way to make it through your busy day in a calm and productive manner.

  • Focus on your breathing
  • Go for a walk.
  • Repeat one positive thing about yourself, over and over. (i.e. “I am capable.”)
  • Interrupt the stress cycle.

This sounds very easy, but in fact, it’s quite challenging. I’m currently working on my own mindfulness by reading Sit Like a Buddha: A Pocket Guide to Meditation.

Everything You Know About Leadership Is Wrong – Darren Murph

  1. Ditch the Ego – The most effective leaders usually don’t brand themselves as such.
  2. Exist to Serve – If a leader seeks first to serve, it’s amazing what else falls into place.
  3. Empower with Impunity – Teams that are empowered to make judgement calls without approval are able to be more nimble.
  4. Distribute Credit, Absorb Blame – A leader’s true value is measured by the accomplishments of his or her staff.
  5. Lead in Life, Then in Work – Having a healthy mind, body and soul enables leaders to think more clearly, act less impulsively and show genuine care for the well-being of those working around them.

The 20 Habits of Eventual Millionaires – James Altucher

  • Solve difficult gratitude problems. When angry, or stressed, find one thing to be grateful for.
  • No excuses. Blaming is draining. Complaining is draining. Explaining is draining.
  • Warren Buffett’s 5/25 rule. Make a list of the 25 things you want to do in life. Now do the top 5. Don’t think about the other 20.
  • Don’t be in a rush. Celebrate small successes. Along the way to overnight success (20 years) you will have many many small successes.

Click the link above to see the other habits including: say “no”, sleep, plant seeds and more.

10 Habits to Be Happier and More Productive – James Altucher

  • Want Less. The fewer things I want, the more I love what I have.
  • Read an Archive. The archives of yesterday are the secrets of today.
  • Over Deliver. Give people what they deserve, not what they expect.

On Full Horizon Planning and the Under-Appreciated Power of Workflow Systems – Cal Newport

Most people don’t dedicate much thought to such systems. The default, instead, is to run your day as a reaction to events and deadlines on your calendar, an inconsistently referenced task list, and, most of all, the flux coursing through your inbox.

Consider my own workflow system (evolved over a decade of close scrutiny). I call it full horizon planning.

I don’t deal in abstractions, I like to work directly with the brute physicality of time. This makes sure I get the most out of the cycles I have available, and it prevents me from committing to more than is feasible. (Check out the full post above for more details on how you can double the amount of value the average employee produces.)

Why I Don’t Care if My Employees Come to Work – Adarsh Pallian

I’ve tried to inject an ethos of “do what works for you” into my team’s schedule. I encourage them to identify what their most productive hours are, and then work those hours.

I like to challenge those people with the fact that the 40-hour work week as we know it was invented in the year 1840. We’ve managed space travel, disrupted the tech industry 1000 times over, and made the microwave into a household product. I think it’s time to shake up our schedules.

Productivity is as much about being empowered as it is getting the right amount of sleep. So I empower my team to do what they need to do.

Slash and Burn Your Calendar – Rohan Rajiv

Slashing and burning calendars periodically challenges a company to allocate its most scarce resource, employees’ time, more effectively. By torching all the scheduling chaff that accumulates over time, companies can start fresh and cultivate a schedule to maximize company and employee performance (and happiness). – Tom Tunguz

James Reinhart and the team at ThredUp, a clothing marketplace metamorphosing through hyper-growth, slashed and burned their calendars by deleting every standing and recurring meeting in their agendas. During the next few days, the team questioned what meetings should exist, who ought to attend them, and what their agendas and goals should be. In addition, the team pushed to cut meeting times in half from 50 to 25 minutes.

How Can we Thrive in a World of Chaos – Fred Destin

Humans were not designed to deal with a chronic, sustained exposure to stressors — this is slowly killing us. What are we to do ? The answer is : reprogram what we perceive as stressors.

We should all stop trying to predict the future bur rather let ourselves be malleable and open to whatever may happen. A sense of purpose is in my mind the most important element in thriving in a world of chaos. We need to let Chaos wash over us, embrace it to achieve performance and happiness.

On parenting in chaos:

I think we’re not just trying to teach skills at this stage and put people on rails for success, we’re trying to bring up little individuals who know how to thrive in chaos. We need grit, character, the ability to fail and to get back on their feet. We also need to give them the ability to determine what they will be great at. I believe anyone can be exceptional at something, and being in touch with your true self and having a strong sense of purpose is how kids will achieve greatness and happiness. It is unfortunate that we live in a world where we try to constantly shield them from risk, responsibility and failure. By trying to protect what is dearest to us, we’re keeping them from learning much of what they need to thrive.

How to Get Any Job You Want (even if you’re unqualified) – Raghav Haran

Credentials and paper qualifications DO matter for some (mainly academic) industries like medicine or law, but for most other fields, job requirements are surprisingly negotiable. If you can prove to them that you can solve their problem, you instantly decommoditize yourself, and none of those things on paper matter as much. Do the job before you get the job.

Doing a pre-interview project makes you stand out because the secret sauce is hard work. So most people will never do it.

It’s just human behavior. People want their problems solved, and they’re much more likely to hire someone who’s already working on solving them than someone who MIGHT solve them.

To Get More Out of Workers, Invest More in Them –  Tony Schwartz 

When I ask business leaders whether they believe that their employees perform better when they are happier, healthier and more fulfilled, the answer is always yes. When I then ask if they systematically invest in making their employees happier, healthier and more fulfilled, the answer is almost invariably no.

What fuels people at work is deceptively simple. We want to feel valued and valuable — cared for by our bosses and colleagues and encouraged to develop and express our talents.

[Ryan’s note: This is deceptively simple and yet most managers (and companies) are still terrible at it. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about it. See this month’s “thoughts I’m chewing on” below.]

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[Thoughts I’m Chewing On]:

On Leadership:

  • CFO asks his CEO, “What happens if we invest in our people & they leave the company?” CEO answers, ‘What happens if we don’t and they stay?”
  • There are few tenets of leadership that are as fundamental as –“Take responsibility when things go wrong & give credit when things go well.”

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[Quotes]:

“The wisest decisions are made by those closest to the problem — regardless of their seniority.” – General Stanley McChrystal

“The ego that arises out of insecurities makes a lot of noise attempting to announce, explain, and justify.” – Rohan Rajiv

“Turn back the pages of history and see the people who have shaped the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed.” – Hunter S. Thompson

“If you can’t learn from people you disagree with, you’re not just dumb — you’re going to stay dumb.” – Umair Haque

“Great work doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of interactions with the people you seek to change.” – Seth Godin

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If you made it this far and found this post valuable in any way, please let me know in the comments which of these reads caught your attention. Better yet, why don’t you share something you’ve read recently that you think I’d find interesting.

If you like this post, you might also like my favorite reads from September or this curated list of 125+ of my favorite posts from 2014.

11 of My Favorite Reads from September 2015

By Leave a Comment

This is my effort to provide a little signal by curating some of the best/most interesting posts I encountered during the month of September 2015. I recommend identifying and diving into 2-3 that resonate with you. Focus less on the dopamine rush you get from hopping from article to article and more on how you apply the wisdom in these posts to your own life.

Please use the comments section to recommend and share other posts you’ve recently found useful and/or your best posts of late.

The commentary below the link is typically the author’s own words that I’ve extracted as a key takeaway; however, sometimes I add my own commentary and make connections as well.

#####

[Blog Posts/News Articles]:

Brené Brown on the Physics of Vulnerability and What Resilient People Have in Common – Maria Popova

Embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important — toughness, doggedness, and perseverance.

Although we live in a culture of perfectionism where our idealized selves become our social currency, we know, at least on some level, that risk-taking, failure, and success are inextricably linked.

In Rising Strong, Brown builds upon her earlier work on vulnerability to examine the character qualities, emotional patterns, and habits of mind that enable people to transcend the catastrophes of life, from personal heartbreak to professional collapse, and emerge not only unbroken but more whole.

Empathy Is Still Lacking in the Leaders Who Need It Most – Ernest J. Wilson III

 They identified five attributes executives must have to succeed in today’s digital, global economy as critical: adaptability, cultural competence (the capacity to think, act, and move across multiple borders), 360-degree thinking (holistic understanding, capable of recognizing patterns of problems and their solutions), intellectual curiosity, and, of course, empathy.

What is empathy? It is a deep emotional intelligence that is closely connected to cultural competence. Empathy enables those who possess it to see the world through others’ eyes and understand their unique perspectives.

Check out the article for a better understanding of why empathy is so important.

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy – Eric Barker

Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety, which improves focus and planning. Focus and planning help with decision making. Decision making further reduces anxiety and improves enjoyment. Enjoyment gives you more to be grateful for, which keeps that loop of the upward spiral going. Enjoyment also makes it more likely you’ll exercise and be social, which, in turn, will make you happier.

  • Ask “What am I grateful for?” No answers? Doesn’t matter. Just searching helps. Gratitude can also create a positive feedback loop in your relationships
  • Label those negative emotions. Give it a name and your brain isn’t so bothered by it. Labeling is a fundamental tool of mindfulness.
  • Decide. Making decisions reduces worry and anxiety. Go for “good enough” instead of perfection.
  • Hugs, hugs, hugs. Don’t text — touch. Touching someone you love actually reduces pain.

How to Not Do It All – Leo Babauta

There isn’t enough time in the day (to do everything you want to do), nor do we have the attention bandwidth to devote to everything. Even if we were perfectly disciplined, we couldn’t possibly get to even half of what we want to do. Give up on trying to do it all. Simplify. Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t try to have the most perfect life you can create. Instead, make your days count.

  • Curate your days. Put only the best things in each day — don’t just let any junk into it. Would you pay $20 to read the things on your reading list for an hour?
  • Be OK with imperfection. Even if you filter and curate, you’ll never create the “perfect” day or the “perfect” life. We can either accept that, or be dissatisfied.
  • Be ruthless. You need to filter out the things trying to overwhelm your life. Say “no” to most requests.

The 10 Most Important Books to Expand Your Brain – James Altucher

 

Click the link above to read James’ full list and his excellent, and unique, explanation on the 3 different kinds of non-fiction books.

Meditation. Why Bother? – Shane Parrish

Why meditate? Because you are human. Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time; you can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back, and usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life.

The same themes repeat throughout our lives: jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

What are some of the easy things that anyone can do to keep improving their intelligence? – Shane Parrish

Knowledge is like lego. Mental Models are the best and most useful blocks. They typically form the foundation and shape the way we see things. In addition to these pieces, explained later, you want to overlay a broad array of both exposure to different subjects as well as life experiences. This will give you a better understanding of not only how the world works, but how you can best use your knowledge and understanding to get what you want.

Click the link above for a broad, and thorough, explanation and also some great useful tips like, learn how to read a book, keep a decision journal and more.

The Basic Rule of Management that Propelled 3M – Shane Parrish

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

[Sounds a lot like Daniel Pink’s research on what motivates us: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.]

When Should You Say No To Your Boss? – Dr. Travis Bradberry

The typical workday is long enough as it is, and technology is making it even longer. More than 50% of us check work email before and after work hours, throughout the weekend, and even when we’re sickWe need to establish boundaries between our personal and professional lives. When we don’t, our work, our health, and our personal lives suffer.

The items that follow are yours. If you don’t set boundaries around them and learn to say no to your boss, you’re giving away something with immeasurable value.

  • Your health
  • Your family
  • Your sanity

 

Click the link above to read Dr. Bradberry’s full list and explanations.

Counter Intuitive – Rohan Rajiv

The more you know, the more you need to shut up and listen.

The more you feel like working, the more you need to take a break.

The more you feel like running around in different directions, the more you need to pause and enjoy the moment.

Perhaps they are not counter intuitive after all?

5 Essentials for Cultivating Intrapreneurial Employees – Dixie Gillaspie

Want your employees who take more ownership?

With artificial intelligence increasingly makes many jobs obsolete, companies are looking for employees who approach creating value for the business as their “undertaking” rather than their job description, employees who are self-managed, who make decisions and exhibit behavior that is in line with the best interests of the business, someone who has an entrepreneurial mindset but no desire to have financial or legal responsibility for a business.

Check out Dixie’s article to understand how to create a culture where intrapreneurial employees can thrive.

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[Thoughts I’m Chewing On]:

  • What makes a great leader?
  • How can I start clearing visual clutter to create an environment that entices a calm and motivated mindset? (More time for creation.)

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[Quotes]:

  • “If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.” — Brene Brown
  • “Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.” — Seth Godin (The Dip)
  • “‘It is what it is’ really means, I’m too lazy to try to make it difference, so for gosh sakes stop talking about it.'” — Jeff Haden
  • [Paraphrased] Taking a job you don’t like in order to build up your resume is like saving up sex for your old age. — Warren Buffett
  • “All the people that I know who have a “passive income” from products also work harder than anyone else I know.” — Paul Jarvis

 

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If you made it this far and found this post valuable in any way, please let me know in the comments which of these reads caught your attention. Better yet, why don’t you share something you’ve read recently that you think I’d find interesting.

If you like this post, you might also like my favorite reads from August or this curated list of 125+ of my favorite posts from 2014.

12 of My Favorite Reads from August 2015

By 2 Comments

This is my effort to provide a little signal by curating some of the best/most interesting posts I encountered during the month of August 2015. I recommend identifying and diving into 2-3 that resonate with you. Focus less on the dopamine rush you get from hopping from article to article and more on how you apply the wisdom in these posts to your own life.

Please use the comments section to recommend and share other posts you’ve recently found useful and/or your best posts of late.

The commentary below the link is typically the author’s own words that I’ve extracted as a key takeaway; however, sometimes I add my own commentary and make connections as well.

#####

[Blog Posts/News Articles]:

Leisure, the Basis of Culture: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism – Maria Popova
Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of “work/life balance” and have come to see the very notion of “leisure” not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy.

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed – Shane Parrish
Understanding comes from focusing, chewing, and relentlessly ragging on a problem. It comes with false starts, dead ends, and frustration. Thinking requires time and space. It’s slow. It means saying I don’t know.

In short, thinking is everything the modern workplace is designed to eradicate. We’re expected to have an opinion about everything and yet our time to think is near zero. We hold more opinions than ever but have less understanding.

Fast eats time. One consequence of fast is that we make poor decision after poor decision. Those decisions don’t go away never to be seen again. It’s not like we make a bad decision and we’re done with it. No, the consequences are much worse. Poor decisions eat time. They come back to haunt you. They create issue after issue.

A 3 Part Framework for Great Managers – Rohan Rajiv 

  1. Great managers understand each member of the team. Every member needs to be managed differently. This requires an understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, personalities, working styles and motivation. The first pre-requisite is, thus, empathy.
  2. Great managers learn how to scope work well. The worst managers over-promise to their higher ups/clients and burn their teams by making them work 12+ hour days to achieve unrealistic, unproductive and generally unnecessary results. The ability to scope work is a learned skill. It also requires guts as it necessitates pushing back and saying no to unnecessary work.
  3. Outstanding managers care more about their team’s goals and individual ambitions than their own progress. While characteristics 1 and 2 make good managers great, an outstanding manager is one who simply cares a lot more than the next person.

4 Science-Backed Reasons to Read More (Even If You’re Busy) – David Ly Khim

Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading. You should prioritize time to read because it improves brain connectivity (making your brain more efficient at processing information), improves social perception and empathy, and even helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Make downtime reading time. If you want to read more, promise to yourself that you’re not going to make time for reading but instead say, “I will read.” The just do it.

How to Be Calm Under Pressure – Dr. Travis Bradberry

Mistakes and pressure are inevitable; the secret to getting past them is to stay calm. New research from the Harvard Business School shows that most of us go about staying calm the wrong way. People who welcome the challenge of a crisis—so much so that overcoming the challenge excites them—perform far better than those who try to force themselves to be calm.

If you struggle with putting things into perspective, just ask yourself two simple questions: What’s the worst thing that could happen as a result of this? Will this matter in five years? To help put things in perspective, think about situations that were worse than yours were. Next, you need to recognize that people are less focused on you than you think they are.

Finally, magnify your logic and take action. And don’t be so hard on yourself. Beating yourself up might be a tempting option, but it never accomplishes anything, and it certainly doesn’t make you any calmer. Instead, keep your energy focused on the future and the things you can change.

It’s Time to Kill the Performance Review – Melissa Dahl

No one every gets one’s, two’s or five’s meaning that most employees were considered average to just-above-average, collecting a bunch of threes and fours.

This, as it turns out, is pretty much the way most performance appraisals end up working, according to a new review of the literature on the subject. Most are nothing more than an “administrative ritual,” and they often end up discouraging employees instead of motivating them to perform better, the authors on that new paper write. And this is why, they argue, it is high time for the annual review process to die.

Fortunately, there appears to be a simple alternative. Informal feedback sessions — conversations that take place directly following some disappointment in performance — have been shown to result in an actual improvement in performance.

How One Life Hack From A Self-Made Billionaire Leads To Exceptional Success – Michael Simmons

While the 10,000 hour rule works well in areas with defined rules that don’t change such as sports, music, and games, the rules of business constantly and fundamentally change. Being an expert-generalist allows individuals to quickly adapt to change.

Expert-generalists face far less competition. The more fields you can pull from, the fewer people you’ll find taking the same approach. When it comes to drilling into one domain,the competition is generally fierce. Narrowly specializing also leaves you vulnerable to the ever-more daunting forces of change.

Finally…

Seth Godin is always tremendous. Here’s 3 of his posts that I especially liked this month:

Some people are able to reflect the light that lands on them, to take directions or assets or energy and focus it where it needs to be focused. This is a really valuable skill.

Even more valuable, though, is the person who glows in the dark. Not reflecting energy, but creating it. Not redirecting urgencies but generating them. The glow in the dark colleague is able to restart momentum, even when everyone else is ready to give up. Do you glow in the dark?

And it’s still not enough…

You really have no choice but to do it again. To do your best work again, as impossible and unfair as that seems.

It compounds over time. Best work followed by best work followed by more best work is far more useful and generous than merely doing your best work once and insisting we understand you.

Sooner or later, the ones who told you that this isn’t the way it’s done, the ones who found time to sneer, they will find someone else to hassle.

Sooner or later, your work speaks for itself.

Outlasting the critics feels like it will take a very long time, but you’re more patient than they are.

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[Interesting]:

Which Character Strengths Are Most Predictive of Well-Being? – Scott Barry Kaufman
One of the core tenets of positive psychology is supported: developing your character strengths is predictive of well-being.

Next, I wondered which character strengths stood alone as predictors of well-being after taking into account the other strengths. After all, I noticed that many of these character strengths were related to each other.

Out of all 24 character strengths, the only significant independent positive predictors of well-being were gratitude and love of learning. (Note that love, honesty, hope and humor came very close.)

Study Credits Uber With Decline in California Drunk Driving Deaths – Bryan Goebel

A study from researchers at Philadelphia’s Temple University that suggests the entry of Uber’s low-cost ride service, Uber X, into 14 California counties led to a 3.6 to 5.6 percent decline in drunken driving deaths.

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[Thoughts I’m Chewing On]:

  • Your life worth is not your net worth, but the impact you have on others.
  • Don’t get involved with politics or be negative. Tigers are too busy killing it to be bothered with such things.
  • Creating more boundaries to avoid burnout.

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[Quotes]:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor Frankl

“My rule: be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.” – Austin Kleon

“A team is not a group of people that works together. A team is a group of people that trusts each other.” – Simon Sinek

“A good will, with their last breath, push you to the top of the mountain, even at their own personal risk.” – James Altucher

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If you made it this far and found this post valuable in any way, please let me know in the comments which of these reads caught your attention. Better yet, why don’t you share something you’ve read recently that you think I’d find interesting.

If you like this post, you might also like my favorite reads from July or this curated list of 125+ of my favorite posts from 2014.