Useless Efficiency

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all" ~ Peter Drucker

As we grow older and responsibilities start piling on us we begin our pursue for efficiency; we seek to do thing faster, cheaper, and better. Therein we start confusing efficiency for effectiveness. for instance, We have efficiency rather than effectiveness when:

• We read more books but understand and remember so little.
• We share hours with our family but we are mentally absent with work.
• We think that our lives age matters more than what we have accomplished in life.

Effectiveness in our examples would be when:

• We read actively to understand and teach.
• We give our times to our family and rejoice out times with them.
• We think about our legacy more than our fun times. This is not to say that fun is not important but we have to be effective with fun as well by having efficent fun time not excessive fun.

This trap fools everyone including myself. Then the thing to remember is that we must question what we do by asking why we are doing it. Then evaluate our effectiveness by measuring our desired results and if we are not having the desired results then we shall stop being merely efficient and work toward effectiveness.

The Year 20,000 (Humorous Speech for Toastmasters Competation)

Imagine that today is January 1st, of the year 20,000. That's ONLY 18,000 years from now. It is a blink of an eye.  it is even quicker, it is just half a blink conditioned that you never open your eyes again. LOL

 

if earth makes it that far, you’ll be there... but you’ll be completely transformed:
Heavy people will turn into heavy oil,
light people will be light oil,
and gassy will be the source of natural gas. :D

You guys thought you will retired at 60, huh?  :D

So, what are some of the awaited changes that will happen?
1- For starter, Dammam and Khobar (two cities that full of traffic and detours) will be detours-free but based on my experience, Jubail- Dhahran highway will be still under-construction  (The highway always under construction)  :D even though we will be working from home by then.
 
2- Saudi Women will be finally on the driver seat but cars will be self-driven. :D
 
But according to a visionary professional, my optician :D Cars will no longer exist. The reason they won't exist is: "humans’ population". Think about it. If population continue to grow at the same rate as it is now, The population will reach a number that I called "Hassan" for discovering it  :D: represented by 1 followed by 34000 zeros. That’s more than the number of atoms on the universe.
 
Logically, Earth will get extremely heavy and fall off the solar system. :( We will be away from our beloved sun and we will be lost in outer space and then and only then we will freeze and die.  :D

That's not funny, People!! Danger is immanent. Earth relies on you and you must save it. So what can we do?

I think there are two solutions to this problem:
 
First,It is known that the sun is the heaviest plant in our solar system. So one thing we can do is simply we must hook earth to the sun witha chain  :D. So when the earth falls off, the sun will hold us still or we will drag it along with us and leave the other plants go figure.  :D
 
The other solution is to be able to travel faster the speed of light. Because if that happens people will be able to go back on time. So we will be able to say something like: our next meeting will be last Tuesday.  :D

The problem with this solutions though is that people might exploit this possibility. For example:

 
• Kids will always go to stormy day to have an official day off from school.
• Ladies will be able to redo their weddings until they are satisfied.
• And if I don't win today, you know what will happen. :D So, Evaluator save yourself the pain. We don’t have to do this all day? :D

Now, The field that will be out of control by the year 20,000 is neuroscience: the science of the brain and how it works. Neuroscience will advance so much that we will be able to literally read someone thoughts, download other people thoughts, and erase bad memory by manipulation brain neurons and their connections. That will be great for quite people like me who doesn’t like to talk a lot.

I just love silence. I love to go home, play a blank CD, :D turn the volume all the way up, :D rewind my favourite part of it, :D and think of absolutely nothing. Even Toastmaster will become Thought-Masters because words won't matter anymore. A Thought master will have to come up to the stage, close his or her eyes, and the challenge is to think straight thoughts for 5 to 7 minutes.

Scientifically proven, Women and men struggle with this: ladies have zillions of thoughts running in there minds at a particular moment and men can have absolutely none. :D

So for instance: Ann could be sitting here listening to me, paying full attention, while thinking: I wonder: what brand is Hassan’s Shirt? :D Why doesn’t my husband wear something nice like that? :D Ohh I need to call my husband to put food for our fish? Hmm, do we need to put some water for it too? :S Well fish don’t get thirsty. :D Ohh my god, fish lives in water. :D Ohh Satan, you made me kill my fish? Satan.. What’s Satan’s last name? :D  and many other questions.

 Ann: you need to get some help.

While in the other hand: Bill could be sitting here staring at me with one question: What? what?   What's going on?

Bill please see Ann's doctor.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I just can't wait for the year 20000. I really can't wait for the year 20,000 so let's head back to reality.

You Inc. III

"All humans are strategic by nature, they all think they are doing what's best"

Many life coaches will advise you not to read a step-by-step self-help book. The reason is that the way someone else took to succeed may not be your way. Thus, in your personal plan you must have your own strategies, habits, and execution plan.

6- Strategy:You must understand that there is a difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is how to achieve an objective while a tactics is what, not a how, to achieve an objective. Say your objective is to utilize your time to the minute, your strategy could be to avoid distraction or to increase concentration, Your tactics, in the other hand, could be to utilize your driving time to listen to an audio book that you wish to read.
You must consider your strengths and capitalize on them and be honest about your weaknesses and alleviate them.

7- Habits: These are the habits you must habituate yourself to in order to have the character you envision yourself as. You really don't need to invent you own habits because success habits are common. You could begin by applying Steve Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

• Be proactive: Take charge of your life.
• Begin with End in Mind: Envision success to achieve it.
• Put First things First: Manage your time effectively.
• Think Win-Win: Choose whom to work with and make everyone wins.
• Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood: practice effective communication.
• Synergize: Cooperate and be creative.
• Sharpen the Saw: You are subject to forget and to weaken, thus you must stay motivated, informed, and active.

There are many more success habits, you just need to know that, simply, every habit has a result, good habit leads to good results, and bad habit leads to bad results. You must be aware of your habits: what do you usually do. Keep the good ones and stubtitute the bad ones with good ones. Don't just try to stop bad habits, you must introduce new ones to follow.

One habit I would like to emphasize is to celebrate your victories as well as your failures because your failures are useful to your success. I love a quote that say, "Everything is useful, even useless people can be used as bad example".

8- Execution plan: This is a plan that contains SMARTERS goals. Goals that are:

Letter	Major Term	Minor Terms
S	Specific	Significant, Stretching, Simple
M	Measurable	Motivational, Manageable, Meaningful
A	Attainable	Appropriate, Achievable, Agreed, Assignable, Actionable, Adjustable, Ambitious, Aligned, Aspirational, Acceptable, Action-focused
R	Relevant	Result-Based, Results-oriented, Resourced, Resonant, Realistic
T	Timely	Time-oriented, Time framed, Timed, Time-based, Timeboxed, Time-bound, Time-Specific, Timetabled, Time limited, Trackable, Tangible
E	Evaluate	Ethical, Excitable, Enjoyable, Engaging, Ecological
R	Reevaluate	Rewarded, Reassess, Revisit, Recordable, Rewarding, Reaching
S	Satisfactory	Satisfies Strategic Vision

Finally, writing your personal plan is not enough, it is just the first step. You next step is to actually execute it machanically and revisit it often until it changes from a plan into your actual life.
Good Luck.


This is a continuation to two earlier blogs You Inc., You Inc II

You Inc. II

"It pays to plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.”

In my previous blog, I talked about the importance of creating the great YOU and that you must start by writing a personal "business-like" plan.  Here how I would do it:

1. Know thyself: this is too big to fit here, will write about it later.
2. Vision Statement: This is your ultimate self, what would you do if you had all the time and therefore the money in the world. Usually, this would be something that will benefit humanity. For example, take Bill Gates now, I bet he is enjoying humanitarian work, facing some of the gratest challenges in the world, more than what he was doing when he was the CEO of Microsoft. To help you more, ask yourself the following question: What would you like people to remember you by? What would be your legacy?
3. Mission: How you will reach your ultimate vision: do you need to have a degree in something? do you need to be somewhere? or work on something? Make sure they are all milestones that you can celebrate. If you need a degree and you got it, celebrate it and know why you are celebrating it. Hint: to manifest your destiny.
4. Mantra: A short statement that you need to remember every day. If I was Steve Jobs, my mantra will be: Do what ding . If you are a doctor, yours could be: kill what kills. The only thing to remember is to make it so short and touch your soul so it is easily remembered and it can easily ignite you.
5. Values: These are the rules that govern your actions, such as
1. Honesty: to tell the truth
2. Enjoy life: enjoy what you do regardless if you like it or not.
3. Order: put things where they ought to be and let the right things have their times.
4. etc

           Some values are already in you, just write those that you need to work on and would help you reach your great success.

Stay tunes for You Inc. III.

You Inc.

People don’t plan to fail they just don’t plan to succeed.

If you wish to create a great business, you must start with writing a business plan. A plan that comprises of the business: vision, mission, values, mantra, logo, strategies, market and many more. It is a daunting work involving a lot of thinking, analysis, and experimentation. Although, creating  a great business will result in giving you financial independence, prestige, and social standing, you may end up unhappy about the whole experience at the end. The reason is that there is one thing that you really need to do during the process, that is creating yourself: You Inc. Work gives meaning to our life, but what if you feel that your work is useless. What happens if you spends your entire life doing something and you ultimately looks into the mirror and don’t see yourself in there. Thus, just as it is important to plan a business it is more important to plan to create yourself.

More into this later

The Experimenter

" When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work” ~ George Bernard Shaw

Regardless how hard you try, you will always fail at something. That's why, your attitude toward failing shall be postive in order for you to succeed in accomplishing your bigger dreams. Author John Maxwell called this "Failing Forward", Enistien said "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried something new", and many successful business men and women have gone broke, some of them many times, before they made it big.

In my openion, there are three traits you must have in order to turn failures into building blocks for huge success

1. The experimenter attitude: you must treat every initative as an experiment. Experiments are called experiments because they could fail when they fail, they are after all experiments. Experiment are easier to abondon, easier to get over, and no one can be blamed when things go south. 
2. The experimenter ego, many people want to look infallible. No doubts, we never want to look bad in front of others. But, in this age a full mark put you behind a desk while mistakes make you the boss. So enjoy failure, take picture of them, and laugh at them later on. Just stay away from high risk experiments.
3. The experimenter knowledge wisdom, experimenters know they don't know everything thus they are working on learning and achieving at the same time. Edison, failed forward toward the light bulb and then he lighted the whole world.

Changing Managing Change

Many people try in vain to change something in them, they fail and yet they repeat the same method they were using or just quit trying. When you try to change yourself, you feel that everything is conspiring against you and believe it or not, it is. Because you are a social creature and we move in groups and thus we depend a lot on our surroundings. Then to change,you must start with changing the conditions around you not yourself. If you want to lose weight then ask your spouse and\or your close friends to join you in a group diet. If you want to develop a skill, join like-minded people who are trying to develop the same skill. For example, Toastmasters clubs put speakers together to develop their public speaking skills. One reason why speed runners do not break records during practice even though they are relaxed and stress-free is that they are relaxed and stress-free, the surrounding conditions are not enough. You have to choose your comparators, your enemies and make them close and make them turn you into what your family and friends couldn’t do.

Excellence Ecosystem

"You cannot change everyone around you but you can choose those who are around you."

Sometimes, we feel tired, our efforts are futile, and the world is just a bad place to be in. If you ever felt that way, it is because of the environment you are in not the WHOLE world. Jim Collins, Author of the best seller book “Good To Great” spoke of his method for people to find themelves by asking the following four questions:

1-     List all the things you are great at or can be great at?

2-     From the previous list, highlight the things that people will pay you to do.

3-     Then from the previous list, highlight the one you are most passionate about?

4-     Finally, choose whom you will work with or where you will do what you got from the final list.

You might be doing what you are great at and passionate about, and being paid to do it,  but you fail because you are in the wrong ecosystem. What to do if you are in a bad place varies depending on your authority level as you maybe be a decision maker, or influencer, or neither of both. The good thing is that motivation is contagious and if you start from your end you will definitely improve your environment but if you are certain that your environment will never change, then it is your responsibility to change your place even with a little loss.  It is your life, temporary losses are what stopping many people from winning big,and by that they lose themselves in the way.

Dream Big

"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men"

Everyone has a dream and if he or she doesn’t. Your mission as a leader for others and leader of yourself is to make him, or her, or yourself have one and believe in achieving it. Dreams are good for people psychological health. Moreover, If they shall have dreams, they shall as well make their dreams big. The bigger the dream, the better the glory.

Everyone has the right to be successful in having and pursuing his dreams for it is basically humans necessity.