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.

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.

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.