Tag Archives: Management

How to Deal with an Overwhelming To-Do List and Overcome Procrastination

I have an LLC, which adds a bunch of administrative tasks on top of my already busy schedule at the start of each quarter. Sometimes, the workload in this period is overwhelming and I am tempted to procrastinate. Today, I want to share how I deal with those feelings of overwhelm and temptations to procrastinate.

The first step to managing a huge to-do list is to divide it into the Eisenhower matrix. In the top left, we have the important and urgent tasks. In the top right, important but not urgent tasks. In the bottom left, urgent but not important. In the bottom right, neither urgent nor important.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Start with the Important and Urgent

Obviously, the administrative tasks are important and urgent at this moment. They receive the highest priority. Since, I publish a blog post every day, that also goes to top left. There are also other tasks and some of them are important, but administrative tasks and writing a blog post have priority over the rest.

I write down every task that I have to do in Evernote. That way, I’m sure that I won’t forget them. However, my focus will be on my important and urgent list until that list is completed. I know that I’ll get back to the rest of the tasks and therefore, I don’t need to worry about them.

Whenever, I feel like doing a task outside of my important and urgent list, I let that urge go. In these busy times, letting go is an important skill I need to exercise.

Avoid the Urges to Procrastinate and Multitasking

Another pitfall during busy times is to start as many tasks as you can. We feel scared when we see all the tasks in our to-do list. In order to deal with that feeling, we start as many tasks as we can. Needless to say, neither starting multiple tasks at a time, nor multitasking improves our productivity. On the contrary, they hurt our productivity.

It doesn’t matter how many tasks you start, neither how many tasks you carry out in parallel. What counts is how many tasks you finish.

Dealing with a huge to-do list is simple. You simply select the most important and urgent task in your to-do list and work on it until it is complete. The best way to finish a task is to work on it exclusively until it is complete.

It is simple, but not easy, because you’ll feel worried about the rest of the tasks. As a result, you might be tempted to jump from task to task without finishing any of them.

Five Tips to Deal with Long To-Do Lists

Whenever you feel those worries and temptations, let them go. First, write all of your tasks down. That gives you the assurance that you’ll return to them later. Second, remind yourself that the best way to complete your to-do list is to focus on a single task at a time.

Assign a duration to your task at hand. Aim to complete the task you are working on within the assigned duration. That way, you’ll know that you’ll have sufficient time for the rest of your to-do list. Moreover, having a deadline for your task will motivate you with a micro-challenge, just like the weekly goals motivate you.

Promise yourself some downtime. If you have a to-do list that looks endless to you, it’s hard to get motivated to start it. As a result, you might end up procrastinating. In order to overcome that feeling, promise yourself some downtime, either in the evening or in the weekend.

Build momentum by completing a task, no matter how small. This might sound contradictory to starting with the most important and urgent task, but it’s a small trick that helps you break the pattern of procrastination. Once you complete a task, you feel motivated to complete even more. The more you accomplish, the more motivated you get to accomplish more.

Conclusion

Sometimes, we are overwhelmed by our long to-do lists. In order to deal with that feeling, we either procrastinate or jump from task to task without completing any of them. There are a few things you can do to overcome the feelings of overwhelm and procrastination.

  • Write down all the tasks that need to be completed.
  • Start with the most important and urgent task at hand.
  • Focus on a single task at a time.
  • Assign a duration to the task and challenge yourself to complete it within that duration.
  • Promise yourself some downtime.
  • If you feel like procrastinating, break that feeling by completing a small task.

Lessons in Leadership from Medium

Medium knows how to motivate people. They let you know when people clap for and highlight your posts, when they follow you, and when your posts hit some milestones such as 10, 50, and 100 fans.

Once a week, you receive a summary of statistics of your posts and a list of most influential people on Medium that followed you.

The recognition that is the most precious to me is becoming a top writer in a certain tag. So far, I’ve received that title in Finance, Business, Investing, Life Lessons, and Self-Improvement.

Yesterday, I’ve received an email that congratulated me for becoming a top writer in Leadership. This was a very nice surprise to me, because I didn’t use that tag often.

My Top Writer Journey in Medium So Far

When I received the top writer title in Finance, it was a surprise, because that was the first title I received on Medium.

Then I started to target the tags Investing, Business, Life Lessons, and Self-Improvement. I received the title in each of them. I would have been content if I could defend the top writer titles that I already received.

I neither made an effort nor expected to receive the title in another tag. That’s why receiving the title in Leadership was a nice surprise.

I’m grateful for the top writer titles I have received so far. I owe a lot to all my readers who read, clap, and highlight my posts and follow me on Medium.

I owe a big “thank you” to the Startup Publication who publish my posts on a daily basis on their Medium publication with 200K+ followers. Without their help, it would take much longer to receive all those titles.

By the way, you might not see the Leadership tag in my profile, because Medium doesn’t show more than five tags in someone’s profile. If you go to the top writers tab of the Leadership tag, you’ll see me there, hopefully for a long time.

The Most Effective Way to Lead

The introduction of this post is not only about me receiving a Medium title. It is also about lessons in leadership. When you think about a leader, you might think about an angry person shouting at a crowd. Unfortunately, this is what many people in top positions think what leadership is.

Shouting angrily at a person or a crowd is not leadership. On the contrary, it’s a guaranteed way to alienate people, push them away from you and your cause, and loose them for good.

Look at how Medium motivates its writers. Medium cheers them up whenever they reach a milestone on their platform. Medium creates all these small milestones to reach out to its writers and to recognize their efforts.

I can guarantee you that without the recognition we receive from Medium, many writers would have given up by now. It’s just grueling work to write and publish day after day. Without seeing any recognition in return, that would be impossible to bear. That is our first lesson in leadership today.

In order to motivate people, recognize their achievements, no matter how small.

That is quite counterintuitive, because most people would think that if they recognize someone’s achievements, that person would get spoiled and take it easy. Nothing can be further from truth.

People lose their motivation not when their efforts are recognized, but when their efforts are ignored and the only feedback they receive is critical.

Does that mean never to give critical feedback?

Not necessarily, but there has to be a ratio between positive and critical feedback. The optimum ratio seems to be 5-to-1. This is a figure that I come across often in multiple sources. The last source I came across was The Art of Conflict Management by Prof. Michael Dues, available at audible.com.

When I talk about 5-to-1, you might think that every five instances of critical feedback has to be balanced by a positive one. This is what we tend to do. The optimal ratio is the other way around.

Every instance of critical feedback has to be balanced with five instances of positive feedback, not only in your relationships with others, but also in your relationship with yourself.

Direct People Toward the Areas They Are Good At

Granting the top writer title is Medium’s way of telling you “people like your posts in this tag. Focus on this tag. Write more and regularly in this tag.” I’ll take the clue and I’ll start writing more on leadership from now on.

It’s a waste of human capital pushing someone to a field they aren’t good at. To make the most of the human capital, people need to be deployed in areas they are good at.

Instead of criticizing someone’s weakness in one area and pushing them towards that area, you’re better off recognizing their strengths in another area and encouraging them to focus on that area. This is what Medium is doing with their Top Writer titles.

Provide Frequent, Fair, Objective, Accurate Evaluation

Medium sends a weekly stats email to its writers. These are pure numbers. They are objective. It’s not someone’s subjective opinion about someone’s work. As a result, that evaluation is fair. It’s not biased by someone’s subjective opinions.

Coming up with accurate, objective, fair way of evaluating people’s work and providing that evaluation frequently motivates them. People can disagree with your opinions all day long, but they can’t disagree with numbers, if they reflect the truth.

As a leader, one of your main tasks is to find a way to evaluate your people’s work objectively. If you can do that and if you make those numbers available all the time, your people will do their best to improve those numbers, because what gets measured, gets improved.

Summary

There are three lessons we can learn from how Medium motivates its writers.

  1. Recognize the accomplishments of your people, no matter how small.
  2. Direct people toward the areas they are good at and encourage them to focus on those areas.
  3. Provide fair, objective, accurate, frequent evaluation based on numbers and statistics and your people will do their best to improve them.

What’s Your Take on Leadership?

What are the leadership lessons you have learned in your life? Who or which organization is your inspiration for leadership? What did you learn from them? What are the leadership mistakes that you have done so far or that you see others are doing?

A Buddhist Monk’s Take on Business

Today’s post will be about a different approach to business and life. It will be about the work of a Buddhist monk / businessman, Geshe Michael Roach. Geshe is an academic degree, like PhD, in Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

In some cases, the business lessons of Michael Roach seems to differ from what we learn from traditional Western sources. In other cases, both traditions seem to match each other. I want to discuss a principle from his book, Karmic Management: What Goes Around Comes Around in Your Business and Life.

Michael Roach has another book called The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life. In that book, he discusses common business problems and their solutions. I recommend both books, not only for businesspeople, but also for everyone who works as an employee.

A Holistic Approach to Business

In the Western tradition, when we think of starting a business, we think of how we can maximize our profits. In some cases, we also think about how we can benefit the customers. Michael Roach has a more holistic approach to business.

He argues that in order to be successful and sustainable, a business has to benefit its suppliers, employees, customers, and humanity at large.

In the Western approach, we try to minimize the costs of suppliers and employees. In most cases, we ignore the humanity at large. And we want to provide as little as possible to the customers that we can get away with. How sustainable is such an approach?

Suppliers

If you think about it, Michael Roach’s approach is simple common sense. I must say that this idea has changed the way I looked at business. Up until then, I used to purchase the cheapest option provided by my suppliers, for example in case of web hosting.

After learning Michael Roach’s approach I became more liberal with my spending. I changed my hosting to SiteGround and I don’t regret that decision.

Even though not the same, this idea also reminds me of Dan Peña’s approach of spending 125% of the income of a business in order to facilitate a fast growth.

Employees

The intuitive approach is to minimize the number of employees to maximize profits. As a result, we try to do as much as possible ourselves. You don’t have to be a businessperson to hire another person and make use of their services.

I met many people not wanting to hire a cleaning service for their homes, because they think it would be an extra cost on their budget. But think about how much an hour of your time costs and how much an hour for cleaning services costs. If you do the math, you’re losing money by not hiring a cleaning service, if your hourly rate is greater than the hourly cost of a cleaning service.

Think about all the tasks that you’re doing that you can delegate to a virtual assistant. Tim Ferriss is advocating the use of a virtual assistant in his book the Four Hour Working Week.

By hiring a virtual assistant, you’re taking advantage of the income inequality between developed countries and developing countries. This is completely ethical and moral, because by hiring them, you’re contributing to the reduction of this inequality.

Treating your employees well, providing them with the benefits and education is critical to attract good employees and to engage them. With websites such as Glassdoor, it is not a secret anymore what’s going on in a company. Candidates look at those websites before they are making their decision to apply to a job.

Customers

The third component of the business, customers, receive considerable attention in some Western companies as well. Getting and maintaining the goodwill of the customer is critical for the success and sustainability of the business.

Back in the day, some businesses were built on the idea that a sucker was born every minute. They thought they could cheat a person out of their money and that wouldn’t matter, because they would find another person to cheat after that.

Needless to say, this is a horrible idea in the age of the Internet and transparency. Nowadays, as soon as you cheat someone out of their money, they immediately go to Internet to complain about your business. A simple Google query on your business can easily expose all the complaints about your business and that’s a recipe for disaster for your business.

The opposite of that statement is also true. The best marketing is word of mouth marketing. If you provide the best products and services for the best price you can provide, you don’t need to worry about marketing. Your customers will do the marketing for you.

Think about a company like Google. Their services for the general public is free and they are already dominating the market, but they are still providing great experience to their users. For example, when I’m not sure about the usage of an English term or idiom, I type it in to their search box and their autocomplete functionality shows me the correct usage, which is a great help when writing a blog post.

Humanity at Large

Humanity at large is usually ignored when making business decisions. Think about the impact of your business on humanity at large. How would the world look like if all the businesses in the world acted like yours? Would the world be a better place for everyone or not?

I believe we will be considering the impact of businesses on the environment and humanity more and more in the future. People, at least the ones with disposable income, will be buying more from ethical businesses. Being an ethical business will be a marketing asset in itself. Think about recent trends such as electric cars, renewable energy, fair trade, and organic farming.

Transparency in the Age of the Internet

If you think about it, Michael Roach’s karmic management principles are based on the well-known win-win principle. As the Internet increases transparency, the benefits of karmic management principles are amplified.

Companies can’t maintain a positive façade, while abusing their employees, suppliers, customers, the environment, and the humanity at large. Those abuses are reported immediately on the Internet and they will be a dent in the marketing efforts and hence in the business of a company.

Summary

As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “karma is practical.” That statement will be more and more true as the world becomes more and more transparent thanks to the Internet. In the age of the Internet, the sustainability and success of a business will depend on the value it provides to its suppliers, employees, customers, and humanity at large.

Supervisors, in Service of Their Subordinates or the Other Way Around?

There are two approaches when it comes to the working relationship between a supervisor and their subordinates.

The First Approach

According to the first approach, supervisors are there to facilitate the best performance of their subordinates. The supervisors aren’t expected to do the job, but they are expected to guide, lead, and evaluate the work of their subordinates.

A supervisor who is working on a job that they can delegate to their subordinates is actually wasting their time. They are not only wasting their time, but they are also getting less performance out of their subordinates who may perform better if they are guided by the supervisor.

In this approach, the subordinates won’t be able to receive much guidance from the supervisor, because the supervisor is busy with a job that they can delegate to one of the subordinates.

Sure, the supervisor might be more efficient on completing the task by themselves. However, they are not only responsible for their own output. They are responsible for the output of their entire team. By focusing on maximizing the productivity of the entire team, the supervisor can create greater output compared to just focusing on their own productivity.

The Math

Let’s do the math. Suppose that a supervisor has five subordinates. The supervisor can produce 100 units of value per time unit. A subordinate can produce 50 units of value per time unit without the guidance of the supervisor. The same subordinate can produce 80 units of value per time unit with the guidance of the supervisor.

If the supervisor allocates all of their time on guiding their subordinates, they will produce no value by themselves, but their team will produce 5 x 80 = 400 units of value per time unit.

If the supervisor allocates no time on guiding the subordinates, they will produce 100 units of value by themselves and their subordinates 5 x 50 = 250 units of value. In total, this amounts to 350 units of value per time unit for the team.

In this example, it was more productive for the supervisor to not do the job themselves but to allocate all of their time to guiding their subordinates.

The Reality

Of course the number of subordinates a supervisor has, their productivity, and the guided and unguided productivity of the subordinates are not always the same in each situation.

In some teams and situations, that calculation will favor the supervisor not guiding their team at all. In other situations, it will favor the supervisor spending their whole time on guiding their team. Yet in other situations, the optimal solution might be somewhere between these two extremes.

I’m convinced that the supervisor not guiding their team at all is not the optimum solution, but again this depends on the team and situation. There might be exceptional cases, where this might be optimal.

To which extend should the supervisor commit their time to guiding their subordinates?

100% might be impossible, because the supervisor has other duties as well. But should it be closer to 100% or closer 0%? Or somewhere in between? My hunch used to be closer to 100%.

I was happy to learn that Gary Vaynerchuk, a successful American entrepreneur, also thought in the same direction as me, as far as I could understand from his book, #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness.

Then I read the article Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? By William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass in the book HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself. This article advocated an approach that is closer to 0% of the supervisor’s time allocated to guiding their subordinates.

It was a good article and I started to apply the ideas in this book in my working days to the extent possible. I must say that this article made a difference in how I approach my working relationships with my colleagues.

Empirical Results

After experiencing both approaches, I must say that both approaches have their merits. Intuitively, the first approach seems to be the better one to me. It makes more sense. However, I must admit that every team and every situation is different.

What works on one team wouldn’t work in another team and the other way around. Supervisors and teams need to find their own balance. They need to find which approach works best for them.

If a supervisor can extract more productivity from their team by sacrificing their own productivity and guiding their subordinates, they should do that. If that guidance doesn’t result in extra productivity to the extent that it justifies the productivity sacrificed by the supervisor, they shouldn’t do it.

Bottom Line

The bottom line of this post is not to argue that one approach is better than the other. The bottom line of this post is to point out that the percentage of time that a supervisor allocates to guiding their subordinates is a variable that a supervisor can optimize in order to maximize the overall productivity of their team.

In order to do that, the supervisor needs to let go of their preconceived notions of what is the right thing to do and approach this problem as a variable that can be optimized. Flexibility and open-mindedness is the key qualities here.

Your Turn

What’s your take on this subject? Which approach works best for you? Are you ready to experiment with the opposite approach or would you rather stick with your current approach?

This is How You Miss Your Biggest Opportunity for Success

Everything is feedback. Your complete life is feedback. Your bank account is feedback. Your relationship is feedback. Your career is feedback. All the results you get in your life is feedback. All of that is telling you something. You have to open your eyes, get the message. Let it sink in.

I have the feeling that the average person hates receiving feedback. This is a recipe for disaster. I admit that sometimes, I have a difficult time receiving feedback as well. Sometimes, a person discards the complete post, gets triggered by a sentence, and posts a negative comment. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with that. They have all the right to do that.

Welcome Feedback

If you want to succeed, be open to feedback. Welcome it. Thank people for their feedback. Show them that you’re going to do something about it. In reality, the opposite happens. Instead of appreciating feedback, we either ignore it or we get angry and start criticizing the person who gives the feedback. As a result that person stops giving us feedback. This is a huge loss for us.

I used to hate the peer review process when I was working towards my PhD. Every negative review I received to my work meant I’ll receive my degree later. Who wants that? But my attitude towards feedback change since then.

Now, I welcome feedback. When I consider making an investment, I discuss it with a friend. I even publish my game plan online and open it up for criticism. That way I can receive feedback about it and I can gauge in advance if it’s a good or a bad idea. That prevents me lose time and money down the road.

What is a worse outcome? Being ridiculed for an idea or investing my time and money in an idea that fails down the road? I prefer the first one. Unfortunately, this is not how many people think. People immediately get defensive and shut down when they receive feedback. That is a loss of huge opportunity, not only for that instance, but also for future, because they will not receive valuable feedback from that person.

Be the first one to admit that you’re wrong and carry on with your life. That’s the fastest way to succeed in life.

Invite Feedback

Build a mastermind group to discuss ideas and receive feedback. I know most introverted IT people hate this idea, but give it a try. At least once.

Ask people for their feedback. When you explain them an idea, ask for their opinion instead of pushing your idea to them. We intuitively assume that the more we push our idea to others, the more they are going to accept it. Nothing can be further from the truth.

The more you push your ideas to others, the more they will shut down and reject your ideas. Try to work as a salesperson for a day and see how that works out. The approach that works the best is to ask the opinion of the other person and to see what their objections are and then to counter those objections.

Of course, it make sense to counter the objections of your peers only if your arguments make more sense than theirs. If they come up with credible objections, you’re better off letting that idea go. That’s why you ask for feedback in the first place.

You have two choices. You either save your ego and reject the feedback or you accept the feedback, make use of it, and make progress in your life.

Ask people to kill your ideas, before the reality kills your ideas. It’s much less painful. Kill ideas as soon as possible by making small tests.

Pitfalls

There are two pitfalls when processing feedback. First, you should able to distinguish constructive criticism from malicious attack. You might be criticized by your competitors and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are attacking you with malicious intent.

No matter where the feedback comes from, ask yourself the following question. “Does this feedback have a grain of truth?” If it does, it’s a legitimate feedback and you should take it into account no matter where it comes from, even if it comes from your most vicious enemy.

If a feedback doesn’t have a grain of truth, you should discard it as malicious, no matter where it comes from. Sometimes, people who love us give us positive feedback that they don’t believe in just to make us feel good. That is malicious feedback as well.

In order to distinguish genuine feedback from malicious feedback, you need to cultivate the skill of discerning the truth from falsehood, which is the only skill you need to succeed in life

The second pitfall is that it takes time until an idea works out in reality. You might start a business and it might take years until your business takes off. This is how the reality works. Quantum leaps are preceded by long, painful plateaus.

When you’re on a plateau and don’t see any progress for a long time, you might take that as feedback, quit that endeavor, and miss a quantum leap. That plateau might also remain as a plateau for the rest of the time without any potential payoff down the road. Again the skill of discerning from falsehood is the only skill to distinguish these scenarios from each other. And sometimes it all comes down to making a decision.

Conclusion

In either case, be open to feedback, welcome it, and invite it. Treat everything, all the results in your life as feedback. Make use of feedback for course correction. Cultivate the skill of discerning truth from falsehood to determine what is genuine feedback and what is malicious, misleading feedback.

How to Monetize Medium

What could be an alternative to the premium membership model of Medium?

Medium is a social platform that focuses on long form text based content. This type of content isn’t appreciated as much as it used to, because of the switch to mobile devices.

I’m a big fan of Medium as a writer as well as a reader. As a writer, I import all of my blog posts to Medium. I appreciate the views, reads, claps, responses, and private notes I receive on Medium as well as the followers.

Medium gives me the opportunity to be featured by online publications with tens of thousands of followers. This gives me an almost instant reach to their audience. If you’re just starting out as a blogger, those numbers are well out of reach, unless you stir up waters in social media.

Moreover, I like the interaction with the editors and reader of those publications. I learn a lot from them. The themes of those publications are steering me towards certain topics such as entrepreneurship and investing.

As a reader, I get to read the posts of writers who are enthusiastic about what they are writing about, not to promote their latest online product. The Medium posts that reach my recommended list have a higher standard than other social platforms; much higher.

In summary, Medium is a fantastic platform for people who like to write and read long form text based content. They do a great job managing this community. But at the end of the day, someone has to pay for all of that great job.

Current Business Model of Medium

Medium’s current model is based on selling premium membership. Premium members get to read the premium posts. As far as I understand, the only difference between a premium post and a free post is that the author decides to offer their post as a premium post. In return, the author gets some fees based on how well the post is received by premium members.

Medium’s premium membership is not compelling enough for me to buy a subscription. First of all, my reading, listening, and watching lists are already full of free content. Second, my reading and listening lists are also full of premium Kindle and Audible content. Both lists would take me a few life times to consume. Medium’s premium membership is squeezed somewhere in between the tons of quality free or low price premium content.

Now, you can accuse me of being stingy and tell me to cough up the $5 per month to keep my favorite social platform afloat. Sure, I can do that, no problem, but it’s not only up to me. In order to succeed with a fundraiser, it has to be announced as such.

At this moment, the premium membership is marketed as something that would add value to my life. I don’t see how a premium Medium membership adds any value on top of the quality free and low cost premium content available.

The issue here is not money, but the time to consume all the content that is already offered. I pay for premium membership of Spotify. I buy Kindle books. I have an Audible subscription. I’m convinced of the value offer of these products and services; and I use them.

If Medium announces a fundraiser, I’m willing to contribute, as I contributed to Wikipedia multiple times. But as we all know, Wikipedia has a different structure. They are a non-profit. I don’t think all the venture capital investors of Medium would be willing to accept that.

If membership wouldn’t work for Medium, what would?

Medium can use the promoted post model of Twitter and Facebook. I know this sounds scary to a lot of Medium fans, but stick with me. Forbes has something called Brand Voices, where corporations pay to promote their posts on their platform. The promoted post system also works fine for Twitter.

There is a conflict of interest when you use the promoted post model. On one end of the continuum, there is Medium, where writers pay nothing to publish their content. On the other end of the continuum, we have Facebook, where the only way to get your content in front of eyeballs is to pay.

The Medium model results in high quality posts and publications bubbling up to the homepages of readers. We all know what the Facebook model results in, but they make money. However, there are infinite points in between those two extremes.

Medium can receive promoted posts and they can adjust their algorithms to turn profits, sufficient enough to satisfy their investors without going full Facebook. The Facebook model reached a point where it isn’t sustainable anymore. They want to fix it as well.

Another argument against promoted posts could be that Medium has already tried this. Times change. An idea that didn’t work a few years ago could well work now with a few twists. It’s well worth trying if it would keep Medium afloat. The only alternative I can see is Medium going non-profit.

What I definitely wouldn’t like to see on Medium is those shady online marketing ads that we come across even on the websites of established publications.

Summary

The premium membership model doesn’t offer enough incentive to users to purchase it. It has to compete with an abundance of free and premium content available online. Promoted posts would be an alternative. A balance between user experience and profits needs to be maintained to keep the business sustainable.

There are two more alternatives. The first one is going non-profit, which would be the last resort given the venture capital Medium has already received. The second one is receiving ads, lots of them, which would reduce the user experience.

How to Develop Superpowers in Business and Relationships

It all comes down to one simple principle.

The pain and pleasure principle can be used to understand all human behavior and to modify our behavior. This is a superpower in itself. Today, we are going to go one step further and discuss how we can use this principle to modify the behavior of others, which is an even greater superpower.

Ethical Concerns

Before we continue I want to address a possible objection. You might think that using the pain and pleasure principle amounts to manipulation and it is unethical. I get this reasoning. However, there are several arguments in favor of learning the use of this principle.

First of all, almost every authority and business is using the pain and pleasure principle. It’s the easiest and most effective way to control and influence people. Think about all the ways the society is rewarding and punishing people.

By knowing how the pain and pleasure principle is used, you become more immune to manipulation.

Moreover, you can use the pain and pleasure principle constructively to motivate people to create positive results for everybody involved. It is only unethical, if you use it to manipulate people to their disadvantage.

Creating Addictive Products

The pain and pleasure principle is heavily used by B2C Internet companies to make their users addicted to their products. These products measure user engagement and feature the content that is most engaged with. They filter out the boring content and emphasize engaging content.

There might be a life changing, text only content on a social media platform. Such content will most probably go unnoticed, shortened, and squeezed between flashier images and videos. That’s why most bloggers use flashy images and online copywriting principles such as short paragraphs, subheadings, bullet points, and quotes.

Sales and Marketing

Salespeople and marketers know how powerful the pain and pleasure principle is. They take full advantage of it. They determine all the pain and pleasure points of a prospect. They exaggerate these points and the effects of their product.

You might hear an insurance salesperson exaggerating the probability and effects of a rare event and how their insurance will save you from that.

Unfortunately, a lot of money changes hands without real value in return, because of effective sales and marketing.

Management of Employees

The 20-70-10 rule of Jack Welch is an effective way to motivate employees to perform at their best.

The 20-70-10 rule is completely based on the pain and pleasure principle. In this model, top 20% of the employees are rewarded with promotions, raises, and bonuses. Bottom 10% of the employees are fired.

You might think that the 20-70-10 rule is a ruthless system, but think about the opposite. What would motivate an employee in a company where nobody advances in their career and nobody is held accountable for not performing?

Relationships

The pain and pleasure principle applies to all kinds of relationships, including private and professional. Now, think about a person who’s always nice to their partner, friends, and colleagues. You might think this is the ideal behavior. In reality, that person is doomed to become a doormat in their relationships.

Now, think about a person who’s being a jerk to their partner, friends, and colleagues all the time, indiscriminately. There are some choice words for such people, which I won’t mention in this post. Such a communication strategy doesn’t work in real life, as documented in the book No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. (Oops, I did it :))

By pain, I don’t mean to whip your partner.

As in every area of life, the pain and pleasure principle is effective in relationships as well. Please, don’t get me wrong. By pain, I don’t mean to whip your partner. I mean giving the necessary feedback to your partner, friend, or colleague, whenever necessary. This is a painful process for most of us.

Don’t forget the pleasure side of the principle. We humans associate a higher weight to pain compared to pleasure for evolutionary reasons. That means giving more positive feedback than negative feedback is necessary. The ideal ratio seems to be five-to-one.

Summary

The pain and pleasure principle is not only useful for modifying our own behavior, but also for modifying other people’s behavior. Becoming aware of it can save us from the manipulations of others. Using it effectively and ethically can improve our success in our jobs, businesses, and relationships.

One Practice Startup Founders Hate

This practice can make the difference between success and failure in your startup and in your life.

Masterminding is forming a group of people to work together towards the same goal. Think about a board of directors. I know masterminding sounds harder than working by yourself to the introverted computer geek who thinks of starting their own business.

You might be scared of navigating all the conflicts in a group. Maybe, you want to start your own business just because you are fed up with the politics in your current job. Nevertheless, people who start with at least two founders have a higher probability at succeeding as a startup compared to people who start by themselves.

If you have problems dealing with other people and let’s admit it which computer geek doesn’t, I recommend you the audiobook The Art of Conflict Management by Prof. Michael Dues (available at audible.com). I am still on my way to complete this audiobook and so far I got great value out of it.

What are the advantages of masterminding?

Brainstorming is a huge advantage of masterminding. Brainstorming is a great way to create new ideas and solutions. It might be the most effective idea creation method. You need to have two or more people who are looking for an idea in the same direction. By exchanging ideas with each other and building on top of each other’s ideas, you can come up with ideas that the individuals can’t come up with separately.

Moreover, when you build a team you have something called the wisdom of crowds. Scientific studies have shown that when a number of people write down their predictions without being influenced by each other, the average of their predictions are more accurate than the individual predictions. (Check the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for more information on this.)

Markets price assets accurately most of the time. Price discovery is a task of the stock markets and they do a good job doing it most of the time. That’s why I prefer to trust the market by investing in an index fund like SPY at whatever the current price is, instead of picking my own stocks and price points.

A Large Scale Example

Think about a country where the goods to be produced and their sales prices are determined by a board of experts. Think about another country where both of these decisions are made by the citizens who may or may not be experts. Which country has a higher chance of succeeding economically?

Your rational mind would say that the country where the decisions are made by experts would have a higher chance of succeeding economically. However, that’s not the case as we have seen time and again. Many socialist countries that tried that system failed economically.

Market economies where production and pricing decisions are made by the citizens succeed more often than the socialist countries. By the way, I’m not at the libertarian end of the continuum, but closer to that end than the socialist end.

Summary

In short, by building a mastermind group, you’re taking advantage of brainstorming and the wisdom of crowds in a small scale. Having a mastermind group can make the difference between success and failure in your startup and in your life.

Disclaimer

This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be business or investment advice.

 

Doing Nothing is Not Wasting Time

There is an obsession to take action in the modern western society. This obsession has its upside as well as its downside.

Taking action is great, if the action you take is a significant step towards your most important goals. Let’s be honest. Most of the time, it’s not.

Most of the time, our motivation to take action is other than making a significant progress towards our most important goals. Most of the time, we either want to look busy or we want to distract ourselves.

Busy Work

Busy work is one of the main time wasters in companies, second to tech addiction. You’ll find employees wasting their time on busy work instead of working on something valuable. Companies that don’t incentivize their employees with promotions and bonuses are actually encouraging their employees to get involved in busy work.

If you want to learn how economic incentivizing works in human beings, I recommend the audiobook Thinking Like an Economist by Professor Randall Bartlett, which can be found in audible.com.

What is the rationale of the employee that is not going to get any promotion or bonus? They only work so much to keep their job. They do the simplest work. They are more interested in looking busy than being actually busy.

Doing something essential is hard and risky. Doing busy work is simple and easy. Without sufficient incentives, employees tend to be drawn to busy work, because they are paid by time, not by the value they produce.

Doing Nothing

Contrary to the employees, you won’t find many self-employed people engaging in busy work. They know intuitively which activities produce value and which activities don’t. They’d rather do nothing than getting engaged in busy work. They intuitively know that doing nothing is more valuable than busy work.

The Benefits of Doing Nothing

By doing nothing, you give your mind the space to process your experiences and challenges and come up with new ideas and solutions. Your mind won’t have that opportunity when you keep yourself busy all the time.

Doing nothing also gives you the space to reflect on more abstract topics, such as long term opportunities, threats, and strategies. You need that long term view to find a direction for your life and work. If you do it right, doing nothing can be one of the most valuable things you do.

What Doing Nothing is Not

Doing nothing is doing nothing. It is not watching TV, not surfing the Internet, not chatting with your friends, not hanging out in cafes and bars. It is relaxing in a calm, silent environment. It is not distracting yourself in any shape or form.

Summary

Doing nothing is more valuable than distracting yourself with tech and busy work. Employees are encouraged to maximize their working hours, which incentivize them to do busy work. Busy work is simple and easy, but doesn’t produce much value. Self-employed people intuitively know that they have to maximize the value they produce per time unit.

I invite you to look at your working patterns. Are you more engaged in busy work or do you try to maximize the value you produce per time unit?

How to Reverse Engineer Your Life

In yesterday’s post, I’ve explained how to set life goals that relate to your core desires and to your reality. That post was about finding a direction in your life. Today’s post will be about creating a perspective in your life.

Ideally, you need to have both, a direction and a perspective. With a direction, you know where you’re going. With a perspective, you know how to get there. Choosing your direction and perspective consciously will boost your satisfaction and success in life. You can use the reverse engineering exercise on any goal, but it is especially effective on big, audacious life goals.

The Intuitive Way of Approaching Goals

When we set a goal, we carry out the first action step that comes the most naturally to us. This is the most intuitive thing to do when we set a goal that we are enthusiastic about. That is definitely more effective than doing nothing at all. Nevertheless, if we don’t get any significant results, we might get demotivated and give up on our goal.

The Effective Way of Approaching Goals

Reverse engineering is the complete opposite of what comes naturally to us. In this method, we don’t start from the beginning, but we start from the end and we work our way backwards. At every step, we ask ourselves the following question.

“What needs to happen in order to realize this goal?”

Once we find an answer to the question above, we ask the same question for the answer we found. We keep asking this question, until we come up with an action step that can be immediately executed. Let’s work on an example where our life goal is financial freedom.

  • What needs to happen in order to achieve financial freedom?
    • My savings should cover my expenses for the rest of my life.
  • What needs to happen in order to grow my savings to that level?
    • I need to increase my income.
    • I need to save regularly a significant amount of my income.
    • I need to build a diversified portfolio of investments.
  • What needs to happen in order to increase my income?
    • I need to get a promotion or find a better paying job.
  • What needs to happen in order to get a promotion or to find a better paying job?
    • …

If you continue the reverse engineering process above, you might come up with the following immediate action steps. As you see, we create three different goals at the second step. If you create multiple goals at any step, make sure to apply the reverse engineering process to all the goals that you create at any step, so that you can reach the immediate action steps for each of them.

  • Contact the Human Resources Department to determine the skill set needed for a promotion.
  • Save 10% of my income.
  • Spend at least half an hour every day to learn more about building a diversified portfolio.

The Effects of Reverse Engineering on Your Mind

With the reverse engineering process, you not only discover your immediate action steps, but you also see how your immediate action steps are connected to your final goal. This keeps you from getting demotivated if you don’t get any results from your immediate action steps.

“Working from the end goal backwards gives your deep mind the signal that the goal is already accomplished.”

Reverse engineering also puts you in another frame of mind. Working from the end goal backwards gives your deep mind the signal that the goal is already accomplished. That prevents your deep mind from coming up with all kinds of obstacles. If you start from the beginning and work your way forwards, your deep mind unconsciously eliminates the steps that are outside of your comfort zone. At the end, you come up with a first action step that is the most comfortable to you, but not necessarily the most effective one. With the reverse engineering technique, you don’t have any excuses but to find the most effective step that you can come up with. There’s no chance to fool yourself.

Summary / Call to Action

The intuitive way of approaching goals is to start from where you are and work your way towards your goal. When you use that approach, your mind discards actions that are outside of your comfort zone and comes up with the actions that you are familiar with.

The effective way of approaching goals is the other way around, start from the end and work your way back to where you are now. This gives your deep mind the signal that you have already achieved your goal. You let your deep mind figure out the logical steps between your goal and where you are now. This method prevents your mind from discarding the action steps that are outside of your comfort zone.

Apply the reverse engineering process on a goal and let us know how it works for you.