Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Optimization

Many business owners I meet appear flustered and stressed out which isn’t a confidence builder from a customer’s point of view. Why are they flustered? I suspect for a lot of them it is fear, stemming from worrying about trying to fulfill customer’s expectations and/or how to sustain/grow their business. And while we all know that some anxiety is motivational, we also know that too much is disabling.

There are findings (Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time, Harvard Business Review) that indicate that by looking after (nurturing) ourselves; i.e., getting enough sleep/rest (a lot of successful people were big on naps; Einstein, Napoleon, Churchill, etc.), exercise, and eating well, our performance can be optimized. For example, as you need to optimize conditions for optimal crop yield, so it makes sense to optimize the conditions for optimal business yield, which apply to people, machine, processes, etc. And while this sounds simple my observation is that it is not. For example, the paradigm that hard work is the road to success seems to mean an endless endurance marathon to many (no wonder they look stressed out). And while “fitness” can be defined as adaption to stress and is certainly desirable, we’re all constrained by limits. A typical mantra is that in order to succeed you have to outwit (be smarter), outlast (dig deep/endurance marathon), and outplay (maintain unwavering focus). With Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers there are examples of how you need to acquire 10 years/10,000 hours of experience/learning and how the “winners” did it faster than their competition (the Beatles, Bill Gates, etc…). So how do you do it without dropping from exhaustion? It’s about being so passionate about what you do that you literally don’t want to do anything else and persistence is a side effect because the activity is so intrinsically rewarding.

So how do you “nurture” the development of that kind of passion, persistence and intrinsic motivation? Well, some people are more predisposed to being more persistent than others (genetics) and certainly there are environmental or cultural influences that “encourage” that type of unrelenting focus. But bottom line it’s about loving what you do. Does it need to be discovered? Is it possible to cultivate? How do people develop “passions”? I believe it’s about caring and that the biggest controllable factor is choice.

And a lot of us don’t think much about our choices. We make them because of an emotional response that’s driven by our attitudes and biases. What do you want your attitude to be? Do you want your attitude to help you succeed? What can you do about it? Are you asking yourself what you can do to help make things better? How often do you do so? I’d suggest you’ll want to do it frequently, such as every time you’re unsure or don’t know. Would you rather watch TV or work on the crop/garden for a bit? That way you can continually refine what’s working until you get as good the Beatles! And I’d bet you’d be less stressed too.

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