Hack Your Life Project | Be decisive
by Fabrice Calando on February 20, 2012
Taking a break… I thought this challenge would be easier, but it turns out taking a break and spending a few minutes with yourself and your thoughts usually takes a backseat to day-to-day life. And that’s sad. Taking a step back allows you to grow, recharge and tackle the challenges ahead.
I’m usually able to take 5-15 minutes each day just to think, but this past week was hectic and the time was hard to find. Luckily, I found the ideal “alone-time” space…the shower! When all else fails, use your time in the shower to reflect on the day ahead and the day that’s past; on the week that’s coming and the one gone by; on the unknown road and the one just travelled.
Did you manage to find some time for yourself?
#HYLP Challenge #8: Ban the words “I don’t know” from your vocabulary
When I was young most of my answers involved the words “I don’t know.” In fact, our neighbours kept making fun of it…it was my thing. It allowed me not to answer questions like “what do you want to eat?” that I really had no interest in answering. It might be cute when you’re a kid; when you’re older, it’s a way to avoid important decisions, to hide and to foster fear. In The 4-Hour Workweek (Affiliate link), Tim Ferriss proposes to
[s]top asking for opinions and start proposing solutions.
And that’s what we’ll do this week. When someone asks for your opinion, answer decisively. Offer a solution.
Asking for your opinion involves questions like “What do you want to eat?”, “What do you want to do?”, “What did you think of the conference?”, “What’s your solution?” or something similar. Some answers Tim recommends are:
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“I propose…”
“I’d like to propose…”
“I suggest that… What do you think?”
“Let’s try… and then try something else if that doesn’t work.”
If you use “I don’t know” as a way to postpone your answer and think about your answer; don’t. Use “Let’s think about it. How about…” instead. It allows you to take control of the conversation.
Why?
Simply put, this challenge is to take control of your conversations. Indecisiveness is a burden on yourself. Not proposing a solution of your liking pretty much guarantees you won’t like what’s going to get done. The whole purpose of the Hack Your Life Project is to take control of your life by stretching its capabilities. If we can’t give an opinion when asked, then we prefer to do the minimum necessary…
Propose a solution, take control.
Past challenges
If you’re new here, on the first week of January I started the Hack Your Life Project. Each week I challenge myself to explore the details of the programmable system that is my life and stretch its capabilities, as opposed to most of us, who only prefer to learn the minimum necessary. I no longer want to breeze through my life, but take control of it.These are the past challenges:
- Hack Your Life Project | Get rid of excess clothing
- Hack Your Life Project | Turn off the electronics
- Hack Your Life Project | Hello stranger
- And then…everything changes | The happyness metric
- Hack Your Life Project | Do
- Hack Your Life Project | Weekends and evenings
- Hack Your Life Project | Take a break
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Tagged as: #hylp, challenge, day-to-day, do, easy, electronics, excess clothing, grow, hack your life, happyness metric, hello stranger, I don't know, indecisiveness, Life, meditate, opinion, questions, recharge, solutions, spending time with yourself, tackle challenges, take a break, take a step back, take control, the 4-hour workweek, thinking, thoughts, tim ferriss, uncertainty, vocabulary, weekends and evenings
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What is average work?
by Fabrice Calando on February 17, 2012
Average work is work that comes after someone says:
- It’s always been done that way
- The boss wants it like that
- It’s good enough
- I don’t have the time to…
- I guess it can be done that way
- I’ll just do it quickly
- Someone else will do it
No one wakes up in the morning hoping to do average work. Most people want to do a great job – no matter what that job is. Whether you’re a factory worker, a teacher, a student, a doctor or an office worker; we all want to do good. But somehow, average work happens.
Why do we do average work?
Average work is work that is OK. It’s work that’s good enough for everyone and doesn’t really stand out. It’s not that people want to do OK work. It might be that the Manager tells them to do OK work. The Manager tells them to do OK work because the VP expects normal results. The VP expects normal results because the CEO doesn’t want to be remembered for the bad performance of the company. The scenario may vary, but that’s the gist of it.
It’s not that anyone wants to do OK work, it’s that they’ve come to believe good enough is all there is.
As average work creeps up on us, the challenge is to not let it happen unless you want to be remembered for the bad performances.
(Photo credit: Timothy Tolle)
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Tagged as: average, better, CEO, good enough, great, manager, ok, timothy tolle, VP, Work, worst
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A few thoughts about passion at work
by Fabrice Calando on February 15, 2012
TIMC — my new employer — asked me to talk about passion at work during a week-long workshop centered around the theme of passion. I’ve spoken about LinkedIn before and I’ve spoken about failure, but this was by far the hardest talk I’ve ever given. That being said, I’d love to have the opportunity to talk about passion again. What a great topic. Here’s a rough transcript of what I told them.
Searching for passion. Finding your passion. Looking for passion… Passion is something people spend a life-time pursuing. In fact, many of you have probably been spending the past little while thinking of what your passion is.
I know I definitely have.
Actually passion is something I’ve been thinking about since 2009 when I read Gary Vaynerchuk’s first book: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion (Affiliate link)
If you don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s someone who’s built a sort of wine empire in the United States and a social media icon of sorts. He immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe at a young age. When he was around 16 his father made him work in the family liquor store in New Jersey. When he was old enough to start helping run the store, Gary noticed the importance the Internet was taking so he added an online component to sell wine on the online, he started an online wine-tasting video show and he took his knowledge of wine to social networks like Twitter. The rest is history. He made a killing – he grew the family business from a $4 million-dollars-a-year-business to a $60 million-dollar-a-year-business in just a few years . He now also owns and operates a digital media agency in New York.
So why am I telling you about Gary? Well it all starts with where I come from. One of the greatest lessons my parents have ever given me was “never settle; do what you love.” That’s brought me down some strange paths at times. For example at McGill I started studying Psychology before studying Marketing. Also I started obsessing about the Internet and Digital Marketing back in the late 1990s. Just so you know where the Internet was at that time, Wikipedia didn’t exist, it was only founded in 2001; Gmail didn’t exist and Google was founded in 1998. In fact they spelled it Google! with an exclamation point. Actually I remember a teacher telling us, “if you don’t know what Google is, I would start using it; it’s a nice search engine.”
In other words, I was in love with the web, but most companies had no idea what to do with it and I decided to bet my entire career on it.
But then at some point, I kind of lost my way and I left the “web” industry altogether. While I was able to rectify my path and move closer to what I loved, Gary’s book really forced me to think about passion – what my passion was and what it meant for me.
Here are a few things I’ve learnt about passion so far:
- Passions change throughout your life
- We tend to think about passion as a something we carry throughout our lives just waiting to be discovered. And while there’s some personality traits that we do keep, passions change. When I was a kid I loved to draw. Loved it! I could spend the whole day drawing. Now? I don’t have the patience to draw a stick figure. Gary Vaynerchuk had his wine show, now he stopped it. That’s just how it is as we grow older and hopefully wiser; our likes, interests and passions change. That’s why so many people have a hard time finding their passion. Like Steve Jobs once said, “the journey is the reward” so I let finding your passion be your passion
- You don’t have to be passionate about someTHING
- A lot of times when people think about passion, they think about what THING are they passionate about. Am I passionate about wine? Am I passionate about hockey? Am I passionate about sports in general? Am I passionate about sailing? Am I passionate about baking? Am I passionate about home renovation?
- Now there’s really nothing wrong with being passionate about something, but passion can be more complex than that. A lot of people say Gary is passionate about wine, but I once listened to an interview where he said he was passionate about building a better life for his family – wine was a way to do that. In pursing my quest to find what I’m passionate about, I’ve found out that what I really love is Personal Development. I kind of have this weird, relentless need to improve, change and get myself out of my comfort zone. To add to that, I love helping others be better – find better jobs, change their thought process, rethink their internal scripts.
- Invest in yourself
- Because passions change, it’s important to never stop looking and challenging yourself. As I had mentioned, I lost my way at some point. I just went with the flow without thinking about it and from beginning to end it took me roughly 3 years to get back on track. 3 years I’ll never get back. Actually after the whole stabbing/mugging incident, I noticed just how important it was to live a life you are passionate about, because you honestly never know when it can all be taken away. I know, I’m being a little dramatic, but it’s true. What I’ve done since is spend a little time each morning asking myself a question Steve Jobs said he asked himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?” That forces you to think about if you’re happy with what you do.
If you think about it, at the very minimum you spend 35 hours a week at work. Let’s say you have 120 waking hours a week, you spend around 30% of your waking life at work. Now 30% might not seem like much, but think about it. 35 hours a week, that’s just under 2,000 hours a year! If you’re going to be investing that much time in something, you’d better be passionate about it.
Like I mentioned, my passion is Personal Development: pushing myself to be better than my past self. And I think that feeling I had in the operating room is in large part because of what TIMC is at its core. I’m not sure when the last time you had a chance to look at our core values, but I’m in training so I know them well:
- Our employees are our most valuable asset, and that is why we believe in a balanced quality of life.
- Innovation and investment in the ongoing development of our employees ensures our growth and success.
- Through an open-book management philosophy, we communicate openly and effectively as well as maintain the highest ethical standards in our relationships with employees, clients, and strategic partners.
So there you have it. My passion for Personal Development is completely related to TIMC’s core values. The only way you can develop is by being in control and pushing yourself. At TIMC you are at the centre. You can grow and evolve as you see fit. When we say “Innovation and investment in the ongoing development of our employees ensures our growth and success”… well that pretty much sums it up doesn’t it?
Thank you!
What role does passion play in your day-to-day life?
(Photo credit: UggBoy♥UggGirl)
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Tagged as: Books, Business, career, core values, crush it!, day-to-day life, do what you love, employees, Employer, finding your passion, Gary Vaynerchuk, immigrant, Innovation, internet, invest in yourself, investment, life lessons, looking for passion, never settle, now, parents, Passion, passion at work, passions change throughout your life, public speaking, quality of life, role of passion, searching for passion, the moment, timc, today, Twitter, web, Work, you don't have to be passionate about something
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