I found myself pondering . . .

What the difference is between very good and perfect? . . . pain, agony, self humiliation, low self esteem, disappointment, failure, loss of some highly productive time.

All my life they have been telling me that nobody is perfect! So why do I keep it up?

Why indeed, from now on I’m going to treat perfect as the enemy.

Who else will join me?

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    Don’t work solutions for problems that don’t exist

    This morning while having coffee I was listening to a pod cast for entrepreneurs by SavvySoloCasts. I got reminded of a marketing message that is really important to those of you who are venturing out into the world of starting a business of your own. One of the guests on the pod cast was James Maduk who shared:

    “The first lesson of Internet marketing is: Find the problem first and verify that there are people willing to pay or play to have that problem fixed, before you create something. We all know this lesson, but when we get passionate about an idea, all common sense seems to leave us.”

    After mentoring thousands of students from my classes I see many who struggle with this process. I agonize about how many hundreds of hours are spent by my students working on solutions for problems that don’t exist. Do your homework before building a solution. If you are in the “Build it and they will come” mindset, save yourself some effort, just take all of your cash put it on the window sill and open the window. The result will be the same, but it will be over in seconds and you can move on with your life.

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    Creativity, idea generation, problem solving

    Martin Leith, a UK-based consultant specializing in co-creation is a pretty bright guy. He has assembled the most complete list of techniques on creating new ideas and creativity tricks and tools that I have ever seen at: http://www.ideagenerationmethods.com/ My favorite is:

     

    Backward Mapping

     

    Also known as Backcasting
    Working Backwards
    Timeline
    Related methods
    Originator(s) Not known
    Explanation This highly effective method is missing from most textbooks on problem solving.You imagine that the future has arrived and the problem has been solved or the outcome has been achieved.Then you look back at the significant steps you took to arrive there.There are three main ways of doing this:

    • In your imagination
    • On a large sheet of paper
    • By walking an imaginary Timeline on the floor, representing your past, present and future. (Timeline work forms part of Neuro Linguistic Programming.)
    Links and more info
    Neuro-Linguistic Programming entry in Martin Leith’s Jargon Explained webpage
    “What Is NLP?” section of NLP University website
    Browse next method Be The Problem
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    Attention, focus and concentration

    Understanding and having a knowledge of Pareto’s law is not enough. The real challenge is having the discipline to apply it. It takes extraordinary effort to ignore the low priority task on your to do list each day. Staying focused on the high payoff tasks we all know will be the glue that makes dreams come true. Without realizing it, we are making it much more difficult than it needs to be. By engaging unproductive tasks that don’t involve thinking, just doing and trying to convince ourselves that we are making progress.
    It was with great deal of delight that I read this article by Scott Berkun, someone who really gets it. In a world awash with an instant messaging, email and invasive Internet advertising and other attention grabbing issues it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain blinders and to give the deep level concentration that our most important activities really deserve. Berkun really makes a very simple argument against multi-tasking, particularly during those few moments we finally get to devote to those 80% tasks.

    Maybe its time we rethink multi-tasking, a personal management technique that has begun to have “Holy Grail” status amongst productivity gurus lately.

    This is a must read on for all of you are seeking higher levels of personal productivity and performance. Here are the passages that I highlighted while I was reading it:

     

    Your obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable things on your cell phone or laptop.
    The wise and happy throughout history have found ways to avoid situations that demand divided attention.There isn’t a single great work in the history of civilization, no novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television.It’s knowing what to ignore that makes us successful, not how many volumes of data we can consume at the same time.We’re supposed to be in a golden age of leisure time since most hard labor is done for us, but somehow we’ve fallen into a place where time gained from innovations falls away like sand between our hands, phones and keyboards. The truth knocks on the door and we say, “Go away. I’m looking for the truthIf you only spend a fast food amount of attention, you will never have a 5 star dining experienceTo quote Pirsig, “The truth knocks on the door and we say, “Go away. I’m looking for the truth”. In the race to clean out inboxes and scratch items off the to-do list, we miss chances to find the thing we’ve created the inbox and to-do list for.We are information insecure. The compulsion for more is driven by lack of confidence in what we already have. Out of a secret kind of fear we are convinced that the next e-mail or link is better than the one we’re reading now.Reclaiming attention starts with a leap of faith in believing the following sentence: you do not need more than what you have.
    ,,
    Read the entire article
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