Because some things never change

Irish playwrite George Bernard Shaw, said:

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

No-one determines who you will be, but you. Go create!

Lately, I’ve been working on a small project at work. When it started I had to make some initial decisions, one of which was a choice between two very similar options. I didn’t fully understand the difference between them, so I just chose one and continued.

Somewhere, I felt that I probably should have taken a few moments to understand that difference, because it did feel rather important. But I felt rushed, so I didn’t.

Halfway into the project, we encountered a problem that forced me to redo most of the work. Guess what was the cause? That very uninformed choice, of course. Had I spent 10 minutes more up front, I’d saved myself several hours of of rework.

Moral of the story? Trust your instincts. Don’t ignore that uneasy feeling that something is not quite right.

Again, from the great book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally “being lived”. They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society.

Are you living your life, or are you being lived?

Getting Things Done, commonly abbreviated GTD, is a method to organize your life and be more productive. It is created by David Allen and first described in a book with the same name.

In this post, I don’t intend to describe the method in any detail (see diagram below, though). Instead, I simply want to urge you to give it a read! It’s not too long and a rather easy read. Best of all, I can almost guarantee that it will have a positive impact on your life.

As with virtually any method, very few follow it by the book all the time, but many of the principles are very powerful. Some of my favorites include:

• If it takes less than 2 minutes, don’t put it on a to-do list, just do it
• Never put something back into your inbox (or mark it as unread)

Below is a diagram summarizing the method. (But do still read the book!) There are tons of programs and tools to help you follow GTD, of which Things for Mac, iPhone, and iPad is my favorite.

From a seminar with the often thought-provoking economist Charlie Söderberg. (FTBM)

There is no such thing as a “bad day”. Why not have just a “bad minute” or even a “bad breath”, and be done with it?

From the always great Seth Godin comes the simple two-step process.

Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.

Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.

As Seth points out later in his post, the problem is that is easy not to go far enough in each direction.

From The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

For those filled with regret, perhaps the most needful exercise of proactivity is that past mistakes are also out there in the Circle of Concern. We can’t recall them, we can’t undo them, we can’t control the consequences that came as a result.

Don’t make a second (bigger) mistake by not accepting that you made a mistake, or by constantly reiterating the mistake in your mind.

Samuel Johnson, famous English 18th century author, wrote:

He who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

How many will you have to change before you are finally happy?

Whenever you read something that you want to learn, read it as if you would teach it to someone else next day. Imagine you should talk about the subject for 10 minutes, giving an summary of the material you are reading. You’ll see that it is when you think about how to explain it to someone else that you will notice where your own understanding is lacking.

More great words from Randy Pauch in his Last Lecture.

Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it.

Do you listen? (Even when you don’t like what you hear?)