...Everyone experiences dips in their productivity. Everyone has off days. What separates top performers is their ability to prevent and quickly recover from these dips. Every setback can be used as an opportunity to improve yourself and your systems...
...But it turns out that uncountable words like trust, honesty, commitment, passion, connection and quality are a fine thing to focus on...
...Once you know which takes top place, consider taking it to an extreme, to its logical conclusion, and optimizing your entire life around that top priority, letting go of almost everything else...
...Not everything we do with the aim of making ourselves safer has that effect. Sometimes, knowing there are measures in place to protect us from harm can lead us to take greater risks and cancel out the benefits. This is known as risk compensation. Understanding how it affects our behavior can help us make the best possible decisions in an uncertain world...
...Personalize and send it to the right person...Emphasize how responding will benefit the reader...Make it short and clear...
...Trends don’t determine whether we’ll be able to accomplish something tomorrow. But seeing and then understanding the trends allows us to work with the wind at our backs, instead of fighting it...
...But when it comes to knowledge work, we act as if preventative maintenance isn’t required. We let our email inboxes pile sky-high, continue dumping hundreds of files into every corner of our computer, stick any random thing onto our calendar, and have to do’s scattered across any number of places...
...I was wiped out. But, it was only 11 a.m., and I had a long list of things to finish before the weekend...
...We make a map so we can leave things out...
...Relentlessly prioritize to avoid the wrong high-quality work... (Ed. note: we would recommend these recommendations to others, not just people in a startup)
...The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things...
...Holding back is selfish, because it deprives the group of your insight at the same time that it normalizes non-participation...
...It would do us well to give ourselves more credit—we’ve all survived occurrences that once seemed like the worst-case scenario, and we can survive many more...
...Ideas will be generated much faster than there's bandwidth to execute on them, so you're doing something right if your backlog is growing indefinitely...
...Perhaps there are many solutions that do not even occur to us, because they resemble passivity rather than action, and we are so deeply trained to hustle...
...The antidote is persistent vigilance and heroic leadership...
...Throughout the U.S., there are over 10,000 state parks, home to thundering herds of bison (like in South Dakota's Custer State Park), colorful thousand-foot-tall cliffs (found in Palo Duro Canyon in Texas), and some of the country's highest waterfalls (at Tennessee's Fall Creek Falls). Plus, state parks are generally less crowded, more affordable to visit, and, often, more pet-friendly than national park alternatives...
...A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient...
...So, if you're planning on doing something within a certain period of time, it might be best to lengthen your original estimate. But beware! This might cause the actual time required to multiply yet again...
...You should, intentionally and tactically, decide which piece of information you can do without, for now. But you should also, intentionally and strategically, decide when to pay back that debt...
