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

This photo is courtesy of Red Stick Republican’s Rantings
Goal setting is not a one time activity, it’s a skill that, with much practice, can be mastered. Some people set better, on target, goals than others. It can be a very simplistic process, if done right. If you do it wrong you can confuse the hell out of yourself. It pays to learn how to set goals. Thousands of books, audio tapes, CDs, seminars have been made on the topic of goal setting. Avoid reading and listening to ALL of the material out there, obviously you won’t live long enough. Instead get advice from the best selling business and personal best practices authors out there like Brian Tracy, Stephan Covey, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins just to name a few.

There is really no right amount of goals, some people set 500 a year and other set 2-3, most people set none. Some people like to set small goals so they can check something off every day so they can build up momentum to larger goals. There are also those people who think 20 years down the road before they achieve any of their goals.

I use a system for tracking my progress and just started using it recently. In order for this system to work your goals NEED to follow these guidelines:

Smart Goal Setting Guidelines:

1. They need to be written in the present tense and personal(I–or we if you’re an organization–am/have/own(present tense) …)
2. They need to be measurable(e.g. I have grossed $120,000(specific amount) this year)
3. They need a deadline(e.g. Jan 1st 2011)
4. They need to be specific(WRONG: I have gone on vacation…RIGHT: I have taken a vacation with X in X resort as of June 12th 2010)
5. It needs to be meaningful
6. You need to be clear on how to get there(at least have an idea on the first step or know someone who you can model)

Quick Note: The Best Things Come in Three’s

One is not enough, four is too much to focus on. You should not focus on more than tree goals a month. The fewer goals you have per month, the sharper your focus. There’s only 30 days in a month, don’t plan on changing the world within that time. Three goals is just right. Like I said above, there are no “right” amount of goals. However the less number of goals you have and the more meaningful they are, the surer you can be that you will accomplish them.

The Monthly Review–Be Accountable

What happened if you set goals and never checked the progress? You might not get there. Why? Because it’s easy to stray. It’s easy to set a goal and forget about it in three weeks. This is important: KEEP YOUR GOALS IN FRONT OF YOU DAILY!

SideNote: There is a common opinion in psychology that says that the brain can’t differentiate between internal references(like constructed and remembered images) and external references(things that, in the life out side of you, actually happen and you pick up on through your senses). There’s a major difference between merely reading the words, of the goals you’ve written down, and the seeing and feeling them in your mind before they happen; we know that from many reliable sources, as well as the new discoveries in quantum physics, that say that the subconscious mind is always working to live up to the self concept you choose. When you write down goals on paper your subconscious mind comes up with ways to achieve them, I believe that this is where intuition and bursts of creativity come from. We all know though, that what you focus on expands. When you talk about, think about, and dwell on your ideal future, you begin to find your self working towards it.

Five to ten days before the end of the month do a monthly review on how far you are from your monthly goals. If you set a goal for the 31st and it’s currently the 22nd, review your progress:

CASE 1. Didn’t achieve goal but made progress:

1. How far am I from X goal? (Use some math if there are numbers involved to get a percentage)
2. How much did I do vs. Averages? (e.g. Averages say I need to sell 20 cars to reach my income goal, I sold 16 thus a shortfall of 4)
3. How much harder will I have to work/What will I do differently next time to accomplish this goal in the comming month? (e.g. if I continue to work the same way I’ll continue to get 16, if I follow up more often and take a sales course I might be able to get those extra 4—or just stay later and start earlier)
4. What will I do next week to prepare to acheive this goal in the next month?(Add this to next weeks list of things to do…e.g. Contact more prospective car buyers in the last week of this month that may generate some sales next month.)
5. What is a major constraint(or constraints), that I can leverage, that if eliminated would make all the difference? (You will now focus on eliminating this constraint, brainstorm how to do it and then take action … e.g. get out behind the desk and actually go talk to people who are look at vehicles in the lot.)
6. Due to the Lead* measures, are the Lag* measures leading me to think I’m closer/future than I really am to achieving this goal? e.g. Am I too busy checking the score sheet(Lag) when I should be perfecting my skills(Lead)?
7. What did I do right(what’s the winning strategy), that allowed me to get as far as I have? (focus on what you did right and either do more of it or continue it at least … e.g. Gave out a lot of cards which resulted in multiple calls from certain people interested in buying Hondas)
8. What assumptions did I make this month that may have acted as a constraint to this goal? (e.g. I assumed that it was going to be a good month for vehicle sales, ended up I didn’t work hard enough to find prospects and sat back)
9. Is there a lack of emotional desire to this goal, or mabye mixed feelings? Can I adjust this goal to appeal to my emotions better so as to increase motivation? If not, is this a goal that really matters to me? (If you’ve lost interest in this goal, strike it off the list and save your energy for what you really want.)

If you did achieve your the goal this month ask: What is the winning strategy that I can extract from accomplishment and duplicate over the next few months, years, decades, etc?

*A Lead measure is what Kaplan and Norton call a “Performance Driver”, a Lag measure is a “Performance Indicator”. Lead measures can often be referred to as preventative measures or measures(e.g. changing tires on a car). The speedometer can tell you how fast the car is traveling but can’t predict a flat tire, tending to the tires are Lead measures. The Lag measure will tell you your weight(on the scale) but can’t tell you the driving forces of your weight loss.

“How do you cut through a rock? You either use time or a water-jet-cutter. The problem? For most, the proverbial water jet cutter hasn’t yet been invented.”

As a nation where the word “instant” is commonplace and where we can get results within seconds, we’ve undervalued this thing called consistency. We’re always looking for instant cash, instant breakthroughs and instant improvement. The problem with breakthroughs is that their extremely rare and most people cant live on lucky breaks. Instantaneous change also brings low value. Usually, the faster something is made, the lower its quality. It creates unpredictable and artificial results. It ignores the laws of momentum and the worst part is, it only works once in while.

“Trying to make a single momentous change is often not only successful, but often does not result in the desired effect. In fact, it is far better to make small habitual positive life changes that will catapult you to success. “ – Lighthouse Marketing Blog

Success could be much easier and would come much sooner if we could control our urges to rush things beyond their capacity. A lot of problems can be solved if we’d quit working so hard on having it all now and just learned how to pace ourselves. There are countless day to day routine actions you could take to improve your future. Maybe like working-out daily or finishing one small task on an unfinished project every day.

How many times have you spent entire weeks on a project to the point of complete burn out? It distracts your attention from other projects and other things that need to get done. It ends up feeling like you’re moving backward instead of forward. The climax of this overkill is a day of the week where you’re warding off a million urgent little things, fighting burn out and on top of that there’s regular work to do.

There’s nothing wrong with hard work, and sometimes/often you’ll feel the need to pull an all nighter to meet a deadline or get back up to speed. The point is, an effective work philosophy takes all the important areas of life and moves them ahead on a consistent basis, thus creating momentum. Much of this progress is so small that we tend to underestimate its significance. A lot of people throw in the towel before results have a chance to reveal themselves. However once the snowball grows larger it starts moving faster and starts cutting down and crushing whatever stands in its way. Only once it has come to a complete stop is when it’s hardest to get going again.

The momentum factor is what we miss when we overload ourselves with too much work, or try too hard to move things too fast. We’d all love to get a massive load of work done in a short period of time. Although the reality of it is, it somewhat goes against a few laws of nature. What happens when things grow too fast? Growing pains, other parts have to catch up and it can turn into a mess. After the fact, we expect to eat an entire elephant in one bite.

Jeff Olson explains the Sligh-Edge formula: the philosophy of “constant and never-ending improvement” similar to Dr. Deming’s philosophy. Dr. W. Edwards Deming partly responsible for his influence in reviving the Japanese economy after the second world war:

“Dr. Deming is credited as one of the leaders who brought one of the first quality movements to the Japanese. His basic premise was that the secret to help the Japanese achieve world power and economic success was if every single person and organization commit to constant improvement.” – Tony Robbins CANI System Explained.

It has been said, “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.”

“Jeff Olson talks about the Slight-Edge Formula for success. Imagine an incremental system where you consciously plan to improve just ¼% each day, or even each week. Can you do that? Sure you can. Everybody can. It has been said that “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.” The same idea holds true with this concept. The premise is to experience minute improvements on a consistent basis that tend to compound over time like interest. A ¼% improvement in any skill each day is a 1-¾% improvement each week! A 7% improvement each month! An 84% improvement in just 1 year! It’s actually higher than that because all of your advances are compounding at an exponential rate! Are you beginning to see the potential of this compounding power at work within you?” – The Slight-Edge Formula

The Slight-Edge formula is easy, but it’s hard if you lack patience. The Slight-Edge formula will work faster than the overload, 20-hour-day-burnout formula. Even a baby can use this simple but dangerously powerful model.

Photo Credit: ACME-Nollmeyer
I can often type with my eyes closed. I guess I’ve been using computers for so long that it just happens without me thinking. As soon as I try to think about where the “R” key is or the “L” key is I all of a sudden I cant do it without messing up. It’s kind of a shitty example but demonstrates a good point when it comes to excellence and building skills. I can do it out of reflex, I don’t know how to do it though. I really don’t need to.

Most of the things you want in life usually has something to do with your day to day habits and disciplines. If you think I’m full of crap hear this:

90% of ALL you behavior is habitual!

So it seems like the answer to your personal excellence is in the habits you create.

“There’s no overnight success involved in excellence! The cost of overnight success is overnight failure—when you find that your success outweighs your capacity.” – Clinton Skakun

How many times have you heard of the guru who went from being broke to being a millionaire sitting on the beach with a bunch of hot blond chicks in red bikinis. Yeah it happened really fast! These stories are often very rare lucky breaks or a misrepresentation of what the person had to do in the first place to get there. They often don’t mention all the shit the person had to go through to get there. How many times did he fail, how long did he practice? Etc etc. It’s true that there are ways to skip a lot of the pain and roadblocks that others experienced by studying other people who have made it to the top. Modeling their mental syntax, physiology and belief systems. It’s NOT true however that success comes easy. The hardest part(I’d have to say for me) is being persistent, and doing the right things on a regular basis.

Persistence is the common factor of almost ALL real successes. Techniques tried ONCE seldom ever work.

I’m sure we can all relate to this. Most people have a very bad habit of doing something for a little while, then complaining it didn’t work. “I already tried that and it didn’t work” WELL no shit Einstein! The price for success is pure sacrifice, you must be willing to do things failures DON’T. Remember, “For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.” – Jim Rohn. You need to put your faith in disciplines and character building habits and then have the patience to follow through.

Make Routine Your Slave

If you’re anything like me you probably hate routine with a passion. Your daily routines really have an effect on your ultimate outcome. Think of it, if you could turn 2 hours a day of negative or boring routine into building empowering habits, what could you accomplish in 2-3 months? And if you continued who would you be in 10 or 20 years from now? Do you think changing your habits could have SOME kind of effect on your life within that timespan. I think so. What if you made a habit to have a balanced life, and made sure everything that was important to you got sufficient attention?

Try something every day for 21 days

Most people have their little daily rituals, like making their bed and brushing their teeth and then having breakfast. After years of doing this you don’t have to make an effort any more, it just happens every day and feels unnatural to go against this flow. The behavior eventually becomes a natural part of you. Almost as natural as eating or sleeping. The funny thing is it only takes 21 days to create a new habit. You could spend your whole life trying to become an overnight success and miss this concept completely. So why doesn’t everyone do this? Maybe because it’s too simple or maybe because there’s “not enough time” or something like that.

So what habits could you develop you may ask? Anything that would improve your performance in your day to day life. Something that would stamp out procrastination would be a good example. (e.i. I have something called the 1-day-rule, get it done now!). When we link pain to a task we tend to put it off, it causes us anxiety, the task gets bigger and harder to approach, late penalties occur or we miss the boat and then we have an even BIGGER problem on our hands, until we link more pain to not doing it and force ourselves before it kills us. Or maybe you have the bad habit of getting to meetings late, or slumping all the time(physiology controls your emotions). Or maybe you have a bad habit of not paying yourself first, or going on a spending spree and ending up with nothing to pay bills. Don’t ever fall into using excuses like “it’s the way I am” or “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. That’s a load of BS. You can change almost anything about yourself if you try hard enough to change it. I understand that some things CAN’T be changed, like mental problems or physical problems or genetic disorders etc etc. But from all the impossibilities, there are more possibilities than impossibilities.

Most habits can be broken and created in around 21 days. For more serious things like smoking or drinking may take months or even years to break. But most habits are very simple. It seems to be the answer to everything you want to become. Tom Hopkins said: “You don’t determine your future, you choose your disciplines and your disciplines determine your future”

Here’s how you change your habits: Practice them EVERY day for the next 21 days. If you slip once, start over. Just keep your mind on that short amount of time, 21 days, 3 weeks. It happens in no time at all and it beats 10 years of suffering because of a habit you cant control.

Here is how you do it:

1. What is the negative habit? (Procrastinating)
   
2. What are the consequences? (Overloaded with problems)
   
3. What is the positive habit you want to develop? (Eliminate problems instantly)
4. What are the future benefits? (A life free of problems that don’t really need to be there)
   
5. What are the 3 things you need to do to change this habit? (1. Take care of the problem the day it arises. 2. Think of the HELL you’ll go through if this problem persists. 3. Plan ahead and anticipate problems, be there to take care of them when they arise and work on prevention)
   

Life’s too short to be controlled by behaviors that work against you every day. Think of what you can do once you get over, for example, public speaking, or teaching people, or a fear of heights etc etc. What if you worked on changing 4 habits a month, in 10 years that would be 480 new habits. Would that make a profound difference?