Clinton Skakun

Photo by scottburnham
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford

The word “team”, instead of staff, has become popular among many organizations now days and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are understanding why teams are important. The days of management and carrot and sticking is slowly but surely coming to an end. It has far outlived its time.

Personal Weaknesses

John C. Maxwell, one of the world’s experts on leadership, says that strong teams compensate for individual weaknesses. Everyone has special strengths and talents. But no matter how talented we are we’ll always have weaknesses. A strong team goes through self-assessment and finds strong points in the their team members. They then coordinate and use these strong points to compensate for members with weaknesses. For example, a web design firm would assign technical tasks to people are gifted in technical areas, presentations would be given by people who are gifted at presenting, design would be given to people who are good at design, etc.

The Power of Leveraged Time

The real power of a successful business probably shows its teeth in the way it leverages OPM, OPT. What do big businesses have that sole proprietors or one-man-shows don’t? They know how to leverage man power! I really got excited about this idea when I first really “saw” and understood what this meant. It’s so simple that the world class seem to be the only ones who want to leverage it.

Take for example you work as a self-employed gardener. In the morning, you need to water the plants, open the store, and set anything else that needs setting up. During the day you have to water the plants, be the cashier etc etc. At night you need to close the place down and do whatever else needs doing. You’re the entrepreneur and the technician, the brains and the labor, the person who makes or breaks your business. But lets say you got tired of standing behind a cash register, so you hire someone to take over that area. Now your business has 32hrs of potential man power(lets say a potential 16hr days at max). With the extra time it gives you, you start getting time to think about innovating your business. You add on a little to the green house and set up for plants. The problem is now you’re working even harder than you did before. So you hire someone to take care of the watering and tending to the plants. That now gives your business a potential 40+ hours in a day. Plant sales are good so you add on even more, hiring two more people to take care of customers and other tasks that need doing. You add another 32 hours to your day, that’s almost 65+ hours in one day. Needless to say, 65 hours per day impossible for one person. That’s the power of leveraging.

24 x 1 = 24hrs (limited cash flow, bus factor of one, if you get hit by a bus your business does to)
24 x 2 = 48hrs (Already impossible for one person)
24 x 5 = 120hrs
24 x 10 = 240hrs
24 x 100 = 2400hrs (is that time management or what?)

Synergy, when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

When people work together an interesting phenomenon happens. Stephan Covey talks about this in his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Synergy is a dynamic type of state where 1 + 1 = the power of 3 or 4 or more instead of 2. The word synergy comes from the Greek word syn-ergos, which means to work together. Covey explains it as, “When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Synergy works in all areas of live, not just business. Synergy works when people work toward a common goal. Take for example a brainstorm session, one person might not have any ideas … until sitting down with another person, then idea begin to flood from both of them as if there were 10 brains brainstorming.

It was like the two brains tapped into a higher form of intelligence and both ended up complimenting and inspiring one another. It wasn’t two brains thinking anymore, it was one super mind. Our minds are wired for communication and when we do so they work like magic.

Interdependence Paradigm

7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best books I’ve ever read on personal development. It’s the basis of much of my thinking and has been for a few years. A powerful lesson I learned from this book is that we’re all interconnected. Stephan Covey considers co-dependence the highest stage of maturity. He explains that the first stage is dependency, we’re born into this world and have to depend heavily on our parents, teachers, etc to survive. Next comes independence, the stage at which we begin to think individual thoughts and depend on our own reasoning instead of seeking advice or support from the people we depended on as we grew up. The final stage is co-dependence, understanding that we all depend on each other and, in some way, we’re all interconnected and if one link in the chain loosens others are there to fix it. Co-dependence often exists in organizations, intimate relationships like dating couples or married people. It exists in communities, government and other such groups. Co-dependency is acknowledging that you alone can’t accomplish anything great alone.

“No one man can accomplish great things alone” – Maynas Eric Chua

Hiring Madness and Freelancing

With technology with now days, outsourcing is common place and anyone with a laptop and a Internet connection can become a web developer. We call them freelance developers. People who work for multiple employers or clients. Many of these freelance developers are amazing, they blow your mind and compel you to tell the world. Then, there are those developers that set high expectations of themselves, make big promises to clients, and after the initial deposit you never hear from them again, or they spoof the project. And then there are those developers that are sincere, they work their asses off … but they can’t communicate with you. Maybe they can’t speak your language, or maybe there’s a lack of communication because of the medium you’re using(e.g. Text only gets across 7% of your communication), OR maybe your coder is just one fo those people who think you’re full of crap and don’t want to listen. Have you ever been in one of these situations? Most people who have had any hiring experience have.

I believe the main pitfall of even experienced programmers is listening to the client from a “coder’s” perspective. Thinking about HOW to get it done instead of truly understanding WHAT the client’s vision is.

You’ve lost Time and Money and … You’re Not Alone!

A gentleman, I previously talked to about a web project, told me about an experience he had with a non-local freelancer. His complaint was that the coder he was dealing with just simply didn’t listen, he didn’t possess empathy and he couldn’t fully understand what needed to get done. He came to me because he wanted someone local and he liked what he saw on my blog(one of the reasons why I blog in the first place).

Don’t just hire anyone! How much money do you have to spend on people who don’t get the work done? How much of your time and hard earned money will you waste if you don’t hire the right programmer right now … instead of later?

Lesson 1: Empathy is always the 1st trait you want to look for in a freelancer, especially a developer. A developer must always shows he or she cares and make attempts to dive deeper into your vision.

Price vs. Quality, is there even a correlation?

It’s a popular thing to do now days. Hiring overseas to cut costs and widen margins. Everything from Virtual Assistants to Writing Articles can be outsourced to people anywhere from India to Texas to the North Pole. Does lower cost automatically mean lower quality? Of course not. The fact that anyone with a computer and a PayPal can become your employee doesn’t mean there aren’t tons upon tons of excellent, experienced people out there ready and waiting to serve you with every ounce of breathe they have. For people in India, or other foreign countries, your work might mean food or no food for them and their family. Most people won’t fowl that up. Then we have to deal with people who don’t have a concept of professionalism. When you work with businesses all around the world your professionalism has to be peak. For example, spelling mistakes or grammar errors on a resume is a professional leak. Or people you don’t hear from for 3 days because they went on vacation and forgot to tell you.

Lesson 2: Professionals almost NEVER undersell themselves. Why would you encourage people who do?

Does Education Matter?

Let me tell you something: YES! Can you imagine hiring someone who’s uneducated? Let’s avoid the topic of formal education or post-secondary. I believe that there are better forms of education than college. Self education, learning at your own pace, is the most valuable and most overlooked education out there. There is no limit to what a person can learn by simply going to a collage library, picking up a bunch of books and then instantly putting what you learn to practice. Educated people are more passionate, they know how to sell themselves(even if they don’t have a degree) and usually more street smart.

Lesson 3: Having a BS in Computer Science or MBA or Marketing degree does not assure you that the person capable of getting the job done. It’s how much they learned in those classes and how much they put to use. Don’t judge by education alone.

Does Experience Matter?

Let me tell you something: HELL YES! I have a saying, “You don’t *know* anything until you *do* it and do it well.” The people who know and the people who do are two very different people. The people who have perfected their skills though practice are the ones you want to hire, not the people who have perfected their knowledge. I have to tell you, in my own career, experience is something I’d pay 10 million dollars for if I could get it the first day. But of course you can’t get sufficient experience in one day, it takes a long time. That’s why it’s important that you pay close attention to how much experience a programmer has before hiring him or her. The less experience a programmer has the longer it takes, and you’re paying for that inexperience.

Lesson 4: A programmer must have lots of experience, and show signs of constant and never ending improvement.

The Pain is Greater than the Paying, Always!

A good programmer or web developer is your best friend. Good people are rare, GREAT people are even rarer. A great programmer has improved VERY FAST! He knows a lot about what he does and has spent hours upon hours experimenting and pulling his hair out. If you run into a bald programmer you’re in luck!

Can I be your Web Developer Already?

After all this I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to someday serve your web development needs. I know how hard it is sometimes to find a good web developer and that it can be a frustrating process. I know you might be saying, “what sets you apart from everyone else?” This is why I’ve devoted my web development career to helping people like you find true quality service. And isn’t that the kind of service you want? I’d love to hear from you and learn more about your project, your needs and what you look for when hiring a developer. If you want to know more about what it is I do, please head over to my Service Page. Maybe I can even find someone who could do the job better than I can. Do you have any concerns, any questions? I’d love to hear your comments and opinions on this post. Please feel free to network with me on Twitter.

1. Build a completely reliable system of trust and clarity that promotes your ability to relax. Create an empty mind to the whirlwind and a open mind to creative and higher thinking.

A large distractor and productivity killer is having open loops in your short term memory(think of it as your RAM). Another thing that will happen is, when ideas come to you you’ll have a potentially large chance of forgetting them, if you just rely on memory. Ever get that where you had one good idea after another, assumed that you’d remember it, and when the time came to use that idea you couldn’t remember it? We can assume everyone has at one time or another. When you constantly try to store your task list in your RAM(short term memory), it drains the resources you need in order to focus on hard tasks and to stay focused for a long period of time. It also depresses your ability to think on your feet, think creatively and feel relaxed while you work. The ultimate goal for your system should be to store everything in an external storage(note pad, PDA, your computer), one that you can trust will alert you and keep you updated on what you need to be doing, thus freeing your mind of the massive task of trying to remember a simple list and allowing you to focus entirely on the task at hand AND giving you room to clear your mind and relax(with out the “gotta remember this, gotta remember that, but what was it again?”).

The word “system” doesn’t refer to any particular technology. It basically has to be a convenient, easily assessable(and even enjoyable) system that you can update and review on a day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis(or however often you need). This can be on your computer, hand held device or just on plain old pen and paper. If you don’t have 24/7 access to your system use something simpler. I use a pen and paper, basically because I can use it anywhere and any time of the day. Use all the resources you need: Filers, calenders, simple sticky notes, what ever works best for YOU.

Now here’s the important part! As said above, the system must be completely reliable and your conscious and subconscious mind must trust it, or else it wont work. YOU CAN’T TRICK YOUR OWN BRAIN. If you end up thinking, “oopps, forgot to add next weeks’ supper with the family, ohh well I’ll remember.” Suddenly you’ll mistrust your system, your brain will be working constantly to remind yourself that you have a supper to attend on this certain date. And since this part of your brain often doesn’t have a concept of time I’ll will constantly remind you. (ironically you might end up forgetting when that reminder is needed.) So what’s wrong with this? It ruins your ability to handle large amounts of tasks and, at the same time, complete those tasks. In short, it screws your ability to get things done. This is a must. It doesn’t matter what your system really is, as long as it works very well for you. Make sure you write down everything you want to get done, projects, next actions, someday/maybe lists, urgent little things, priorities.

How will you know when your system is reliable? When you don’t feel you need to think about anything other than what you’re currently doing. If you’re still rolling something over in your head, put it in your system(unless it should be done right a way) and trust your system to remind you of it later. You will continue this until you’ve achieved clarity. You won’t believe how much of a difference it will make. Ever feel you need to be right-here-right-now but cant stop thinking about everything going on in your day/week/month? That’s because you feel you will lose it OR you aren’t clear on IF what you’re thinking about is even important.

If you need to think something through, write down in your system: “think Calgary Tower re-design through, solve [this] problem and decide next action.” (WARNING: you can confuse the crap out of you with vague, ambiguous phrases. Do yourself a major favor, ALWAYS be concise and clear, specify an “action” you must take and “why” and for “who” and “what” and “where” and “when” it needs to be done.)

There are a few key points to your system:

• It NEEDS to allow you to relax, it needs to put your mind at ease. (“How much you can relax is dereclty related to how much you get done.” – Unknowen)
• It NEEDS to be updated whenever needed to continue to be reliable and trustworthy.
• It must alert YOU.(the word “alert” means your review as well, not just a buzzer that goes off.)
• It should be simple, fun, and it should be 24/7 accessible(i.e. you jump up in the middle of the night remembering something you need to do Wednesday, DON’T “remember” it tomorrow, you might not)

2. Work on your own tenancies to be anti-productive.

“90% of everything you do is mental and 10% technical/physical, to have true control over the 90%, your mind, is to have control over destiny”
The best of us procrastinate and put off until the last minute, eventually causing the minor insignificant issue to escalate into an enormous, sometimes dangerous and costly problem that we are “forced” to deal with or else, our heads! Yeah, urgency has its own emergency system of telling us when we’ve put off for too long. Why do we put off when we know how it could kill us tomorrow? Because it wont kill us today. And because today we have our own pile of emergencies to handle and fires to put out. Fires will start and emergencies will happen, although most of the emergencies could be prevented with a bit of smart planning, some thought and some quick small action before hand. We really don’t have time for this crap. When there’s only time to put out fires and no time to run the store, we loose money. And if we don’t put out the fire, we loose money. The best question would be: how do we run the store, make money, and put out fires when they happen without diverting from priorities? The answer is quite obvious, practice prevention! Do the thing today while it’s easy, do it this week instead of next week. You’ll find that when you do today, what you putting off is now history and it feels like it was done and gone last month instead of a few hours or days ago. It’s almost effortless. This one simple practice can make you rich and free up lots of time.

The funny thing is, people who spend ALL their time on short term pleasure also spend lots of time getting rid of following, succeeded short term pain. The future comes faster than you think, thinking one week into the future is like preparing for tomorrow … or the next minute.

A few keys for killing procrastination and making your mind work for you:

• Do harder things impulsively, over calculating often brings hesitation and uses more energy.
• Ask yourself in the morning, what are the hardest 3 things I could do this morning? As the day goes on, you’ll thank yourself.
• Create a 1 day rule, do urgent things within the day they occur(or 1 week rule for harder or more time consuming tasks)
• Improve communication with your self, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your communication, with yourself and others” – Tony Robbins

“If you believe you can or can’t, you’re right on both accounts.” – Henry Ford

3. Separate the truly important from the *sarcasm* merely urgent

Ever wonder why people say, “I don’t have any time”? Any time for what? What’s your purpose for your time and how do you find value from time? We can talk about time management, actions, tasks etc etc but unless we truly know why we’re taking that action, the action lacks purpose. We might as well sit on the couch and watch TV. It’s stupid to put so much effort into DOing without knowing what it’s leading up to or what caused the decision to take the action.

Motivation basically comes from emotion. If you have the right emotion you will take action to either avoid pain or gain pleasure. It only makes sense, right? Have you ever done something for no good reason that didn’t cause you pain or pleasure? Probably not. Link anything in human motives to an emotion. Whether it’s fighting in a war, driving to work, having sex, or running a mile a day. There’s either a long term, short term gain or both involved.

Why do you need more time? Maybe, to spend more time doing things that feel meaningful to you. And you’re emotional about what you want to accomplish either short term or long term. (e.g. you go to ‘John’s Booze Mart’ to buy a 26 or Bacardi, drinking may mean pleasure to you or else you wouldn’t bother going there in the first place.)

Basically the meaning we put on actions, and how we determine how much time they’re work, the priority level, stems from this:

Your mission in life … then
Your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
Your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
What you do right NOW, determined by your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then

The value of what you put on NOW is decided by what is deeper down. It’s hard to know what an action is worth unless you know how it relates to the truly important.

This is the truly important. Don’t confuse the important with the urgent, things like paying bills, washing the floors or updating your facebook status(unless, of course, these things lead up to your actual goals). When you learn how to measure actions between importance and urgency you will understand what deserves more attention.

4. Rest your mind, Review your lead and lag measures, sharpen the saw and see the big picture.

There are those who like to spend every waking moment on doing something and getting a little more work done. It’s great to push the limits and to strive to a little harder. It’s also harder to stop once you get into the addicting groove of work. People who tend to overwork tend to burn out every so often. Try not to do this to yourself, there’s more to life than work. If you neglect the big picture, how will you know when you get there? Will you just continue to fill your void of boredom with more work?

“If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.” – Unknown

“Work for the sake of work is a form of laziness, how many lazy people try to become more productive?”

“Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise” – Tim Ferris, Author of 4-Hour Workweek

Some things that are completely crucial to your focus and mental health:

• Review the big picture Friday or Saturday morning, plan the next week, organize, get everything off your chest. The only thing you should think about is how awesome the coming week’s going to be. Don’t stress about things you have to do and make sure they’re in your system.
• Enjoy the entire weekend, or one day if you have demanding work. Don’t think about anything business unless you absolutely need to.
• Talk to people you haven’t talked to in a long time, hang out, splurge a little at the mall, do something different.
• Since you have nothing on your mind, a flood of creative ideas will probably hit you. Make sure they are kept down on paper, otherwise just forget about them all together.

Have you ever spent the entire weekend catching up on work, just to find yourself on Monday morning wishing you could just take a day off and have some free time already? There’s an old saying, “Too much work and not enough play, makes Jack a …” yeah you know… life’s too short to not have fun. Your brain needs to understand that there’s a bigger world out there than that little problem you’ve been bashing your head out over for the past month.

“Life could be more enjoyable if we stopped taking so many un-serious aspects of life too seriously too often and just sat back … and to live and let live now and then! The variety offered to us in this short time on earth gives us opportunity to explore and to grasp a deeper sense of what life is, to explore, experience and continually be inspired and to eventually act in abundance and give back” – Westly Hartell

5. The Art of Elimination!

Some of the best thins in life, leave. Use the art of elimination to create a more productive life:

• The enemy of the GREAT is the GOOD! Get rid of the GOOD, make room for the GREAT!
• Use Pareto’s 80/20 principle to eliminate the 80% that only yield only 20% results and focus on the 20% that yield 80% results.
• Use the Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the alloted time. Give work less time to fill: “The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.” – cited from Wikipedia 3 hours can be more than 12 hours.

“One does not accumulate, but eliminate. It is not the increase but the daily decrease. The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.” – Bruce Lee

Photo Credit: The Wisdom Journal

Outliers is a MUST READ for anyone who studies history, successful people or the hidden side of what people call “genius”. Outliers explains how people who like Bill Gates, the Beatles and Dale Carnegie achieved on a massive massive scale and how it wasn’t caused by luck or genius like most like to believe.

What the hell is an “Outlier”?

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers-in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Bill Gates, Lucky or Genius?

You’ll learn that Bill Gates, the whizkid who had a higher than average IQ, didn’t actually make his business success on smarts, or at least not alone, but rather because of the one in a million life time opportunity to have constant use of a computer(which in those days, most grown ups didn’t have access to a computer, unless they designed or programmed them). Bill Gates spent more time using a computer back then, than more kids now days dp. How many kids Bill’s age had a computer 40 years ago? Not too many. How many more “genius” billionaires would there be now days if more 13 year olds had full time access to a computer 40 years ago? A lot! If you continue to read the book you’ll find out that Bill Gate’s mother had a lot to do with his business success. Having two rich parents who both, had connections and money to buy him computer time, it’s not a surprise Bill Gates had chances no one else had.

The 10,000 hour rule

Malcom Gladwell says that almost everyone who has succeeded at a large scale, some time in history, all had around 10,000 hours of solid practice under their belt. 10,000 hours is a lot and Gladwell says it’s almost a guarantee that you will do well at your craft, and maybe even become another billionaire(or millionaire). Not everyone is interested in becoming a billionaire, some people are just happy to live a productive life. By any rate, success never comes unless there is a great deal of practice involved. Someone once said, “If you haven’t practiced you don’t deserve to win.” Rarely does anyone do really well just on talent, without commitment and hard work and constant practice. If you want to beat everyone else, just practice for 10,000 hours, most people quit half way through.

This was true for the Beatles, who were given the chance of a lifetime to practice over 10,000 hours before going mainstream and becoming a hit.

Even Mozart needed at least a decade before he was up to standards:

“By the standards of mature composers, Mozart’s early works were not that outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang’s childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K 271) was not composed until he was 21. By that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years.” – Quote found at BeatleTracks Band

“I don’t know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody — somewhere — was practicing more than me.” – Larry Bird

Study their Environments

Gladwell says that there are tons of self-help books in bookstores that are more than eager to give you the 7 steps to success, or the 5 traits of successful people. But, he says, there aren’t a whole lot of books about the environments of these successful people, and how that contributed to their successes. It’s important to study the person, and it’s also important to understand the chances they were given in the age they lived in, their heritage, and so on. At first it may seem like Gladwell is saying that success is an accident or caused by luck(growing up in the right place at the right time) but what he’s really saying is that the people who were presented with opportunities took them. We ourselves are all born with opportunities and we have the ability to take them when presented. This theory backs up that most extremely skilled investors and entrepreneurs study the future needs, wants, changes etc and are the ones who can best adapt to them and can take advantage of these changes when they come(while everyone else wakes up one day and wonder why doing the same old thing doesn’t work any more).

Consider this book apart of your education! Read it and share its ideas with people around you.