Posts Tagged: Behavior

Psychology / Relationships — 1 Comment
25
Apr 10

Setting the stage for insight

Jonah Lehrer’s post this past Friday, Dreaming and Remembering, shares research around the role dreams play in sorting, consolidating and strengthening memories. In a New York Times post from March, Lehrer relates an experiment from Jan Born that showed sleeping between problem solving increased their pattern detection ability allowing the participants to use a short-cut instead of the more complex brute force method.

Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

Lehrer ends presenting…

One of the main remaining controversies for sleep researchers is whether or not REM dreams are a mere side-effect of a subterranean process – this would suggest that the narratives themselves don’t matter – or are actually a core feature of the sleep-remembering cycle. This is an academic question with plenty of practical relevance, as it will determine whether or not it’s worth recounting our dreams in polite conversation.

Regardless of the potential findings people respond to storytelling as a method of engagement and understanding. Stories provide context for other more important content. Done well it involves the listener in a mentally interactive exercise making it easier for them to find meaning and relate the underlying messages to other important ideas. Dreams may be a “side-effect of a subterranean process” but it would be such a waste of fantastic stories.

Business / Culture — No Comments
3
Apr 10

Life is not a dress rehearsal

Work has been running full speed on the Bonneville Salt Flats for so long that lifting my foot slightly off the gas made me realized my leg was asleep. Every day we wake up is one where we can choose to be greater, help others be greater and hopefully shape a better world. How do you ever lift your foot off the gas on that?

People do it all the time and yet complain that they haven’t traveled as far. That is not to say taking breaks from some of the journey is not important – heck required – they are! Your daily life diversity makes you better at everything you do. It is what makes you uniquely qualified to do something remarkable. In the variety of things you do, how far down is the gas pedal?

From the moment of conception, we are dying. Life is not a dress rehearsal, yet we deliberate over most of our waking moments. It is this that makes time so precious. We have plenty of time, but spend it and spread it thin, leaving fragmented leftovers. Time and attention management skills go beyond the workplace helping you more effectively execute your priorities. What are your priorities?

If you know what is important and have the intensity to focus and dedicate time to those things, then your foot is on the gas moving you in all the right directions. When your foot falls asleep make sure you look around and make sure you are where you intended to be. Finding yourself off course is less critical than moving quickly and correcting direction – think of it like Agile development for living.

Microsoft asked “Where do you want to go today?” with the help of Wieden+Kennedy, a bold question in a time where computers were in the infancy of becoming bullet train to station you. Aspire to the grander responsibility of making a better you by spending your time attentively on the activities you love. Along the way help everyone you can do the same. Stop fretting over the destinations and start getting there intently. How we do what we do is as important as the doing and destination. The world is happy to pay you to do less. What is your time worth?

Inspired in part by:

Music by The XX

Attention and Intelligence by Johna Lehrer

Riding my newly acquired 2004 MV Agusta Brutale

Business / Relationships — No Comments
7
Mar 10

A lesson on reality from a call girl

One of the many things people can do to sustain a high-performing work life, is to care about what they do. This shifts the energy we usually reserve for our life and moves it to the workplace. It makes a significant difference in an individual’s ability to genuinely connect with other people and drive success across teams and projects. Making work personal is one of the simplest gas pedals people have to get things done, yet the highs it brings are matched equally by the lows.


A reclining Belle from Secret Diary of a call girl

The key to fantasy is knowing that you’re in one. So when you start thinking it’s real, things become complicated. Fantasy and reality and never-the-tween shall meet.

-Belle, Season 3, Episode 2, Secret Diary of a Call Girl

 

People tend not to manage their reality at work as a relationship, especially if they care. Consider the intimate relationships you have had and think of the ways you protected yourself during the moments of turmoil.  Sometimes the protection is creating physical space – breaking up, separation and divorce. Other times it is far more subtle, a reminder that the person you love is upset about something and just needs compassion and support, not for you to feel angry and attacked. Are you managing your romance with work or are you pretending that it is different? How we react to changes in our reality is how we manage our relationships with it. In the workplace this is what distinguishes the best leaders.

Melt down with as few people as possible. Try to pick people you have a close and safe relationship with. If you don’t have any like that, then do it on your own, but do it nonetheless. If you care about your work, the melt down is unavoidable – it is literally the relationship having been malnourished. In business, the chances that it is getting fed all the time are unlikely. The key is to manage it separately from the prevailing brand you present as a professional. People have enough challenges dealing with their own reality, so when yours bleeds into theirs there is a level of dissonance that if not received with care tends to irritate. Regardless, taking the time to heal the complications of treating work like life is vital to keeping your mojo flowing.

Caring about what you do is powerful. It parts the tribe in two and those that care have the upper hand. It comes with additional responsibility to yourself, which is to manage your work (fantasy) as you would you life (reality). People tend to blend them and engage in the resulting complication. When you find yourself unable to distinguish, remind yourself that these two are really never meant to meet. That you introduced them to each other was a gift to you and others. If you see others going through challenging times where the emotional component is as high as business at hand, then receive it with care – it builds meaningful relationships between people that transcend the workplace. Some would say this makes for a messy world view, but I would argue it was messy when we started caring.

Business / Innovation / Relationships — No Comments
26
Feb 10

Secrets are ment to be shared

Never say no to someone that is looking for a mentor. Most of the time, the limitation is not your time, but the ability of the protégé to consume the coaching and advice you impart. Almost always there is time between when you listen and share to when they come back looking for more. I also believe that it is the job of everyone to support others, regardless of their relative position in the community. Often people filter that they are willing to mentor, as to prefer only the absolute top talent. If we spent more time developing everyone, we might have better talent all around.

There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.

Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets.  It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.

People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.

Business — 2 Comments
30
Jan 10

Creating happiness by doing what you love

Artists are great teachers of doing what you love. Their success is determined by the demand for their work – viewed or purchased. They often struggle financially and with the fine line of being commercial while staying true to their vision. These challenges afflict all professions and the root cause of almost all unrest is in not loving what you do.

Consider the time and dedication that a college graduate has invested in the hopes there is employment that will align with their studies. Of those people, consider how many of them actually end up in a job that leverages their specific concentration. Many graduates end up appreciating the journey but not loving the content of their travels. Some refer to it as rounding out ones intellect – essentially proposing that it is not important what you study as long as you study something. What if our college bound youth actually had help figuring out what it is they love to do, instead of worrying about which electives they should take to get into a college? What if the measure of entry to higher education was a clear affinity or passion for any domain? Certainly, one could argue that college is a time for finding this out – an excellent plan to increase the participation in master and doctorate degree programs.

Figure out what you love and do it. It is a kindness you do for those around you. No one likes the person suffering and the banter they create trying to find like minded suffering. If you know what you love then all the decisions you need to make are done in that context, simplifying all the angst of trying to do the right thing. Do what you love, do it the best you can and enjoy all the time you have doing it.

Corporate types have some of the worst afflictions of not loving what they do. They get stuck in the cycle of getting to keep busy even if they are unengaged. In exchange for a certain lifestyle people turn their day job into a side job, focusing on whatever they are passionate about in their off hours. Who has free time? Those that make it and many do.

Sophisticated corporations spend an enormous amount of time and money on career development. This keeps the cattle moving along the grazing pasture – regardless of who actually eats the grass. Of the employees that know what they want to do, they have considerable resources to develop skills and leadership. For those struggling to find their passion they are often found in the herd oscillating between getting broad experiences and writhing in the pain of no direction. Those that are unengaged are simply part of the pack grazing and stomping on the grass.

Help someone else figure out what they love and build a better world for everyone. There will always be people looking to collect a paycheck, ignore them. They are the agents of average doing and are important to getting it all done, but are the wrong people to trust in leadership positions. The passionless are directionless and dangerous to everything and everyone around them. There is room for everyone, just not in leadership positions.

To riff on the airplane safety message – secure what you love to do first and then help those around you to find theirs. We need to help those than want it to create happiness – for a better life and better world. It is not always easy to figure out what you want to do, which is why we all need the help of others. Read, share and reflect. Help comes in the shapes of books, audio, video and people. If everyone invests in doing what they love people will live longer, be more productive and enjoy happier lives.

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