A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for

Cynical Perfectionism wipe us

What a specific reminder of role of a machine; what a good reminder it is that safety, security, and survival are not respectful goals of our lives. If we are going to get anywhere, we have to risk venturing into the unknown. Life is about adventure, not just too much perfection. How many of us keep delaying work because we want to get it just perfect? Many a time, what we fail to recognize is our desire for perfectionism is preventing us from getting things done. If you are stalled at a stage of the draft and you keep revising it again and again, it would be advisable to park it for a later stage and move on to a new part. Return to it later on and see it from a different perspective. You might probably notice that what you were hung up about really was not that big of a deal after all. Constantly referring to your outline plan is also helpful in getting perspective. You need to reiterate that your objective is to finish the draft report and therefore it is necessary to constantly keep yourself focused on the final goal.

If your obsessive perfectionism is preventing you from even getting started, then I would suggest you try the following: First, break the task into many little steps and then focus on one part at a time. If you still put it off after breaking it down, then break it down even further into mini pieces. Soon, you will be left with such a simple task that you will be wondering what was keeping you from doing it before! The second step is to give your-self the permission to do a draft version first. Creating a realistic draft is better than not doing anything at all. Getting started is the first step, after which things will positively start progressing.

USA may be the only country in the world where there is no passport control on leaving the country. Leaving India is rather a complex process and you need get customs stamp. You may wonder what is that USA losing and what is that India gaining with this process? In the Schengen group of countries more specifically in Europe it is possible to pass from one country to other without passport control.

When every decision and every order has to come from central office and pass through other layers of the system, such as for any wind company to get an approval from the forest departments it easily takes more than 36 months because of complex and over perfectionism and due to that so many man years, opportunities are being wasted. India Airport security checking is yet another bad example of perfectionism, all where articles, bags scanned through the X-ray machines and yet before you board the flight, your boarding pass will again be stamped, checked, checked and checked at all doors and stairs. Giving another example of how we can make things simple: Cartoonists and artists (R K Laxman and Subhani) are always sketching simple images to show, articulate and convey their messages from all the complex scenarios and situations, characters, tones and moods. Perfectionism is many a times the hurdle in our life that prevents us from finishing what we start, and so we need to learn how to simplify.

Between U & Ur dream: 7 habits, 6 practices & 5 techniques

Dream to reality

The foundation for a person’s success boils down to his/her habits. So the fundamental truth is discipline that is followed as a result of one’s habits, practices and techniques – can take a person to hilltop or drive the person deep into the valley of failure. When I say discipline is the integral to success. I cannot stress enough on the discipline of the ones that leaders follow in their very own life, which positively helped them establish their identity as a person, excel in the various endeavors they undertook in their journey through life and finally, enabled them to win and achieve many ambitious goals. I have therefore established a practical approach, which when implemented as a discipline – can help any individual to learn to excel, to win and to achieve. I say there are ‘765 Ways to Win’.

Seven implied the fundamental habits that need to be practiced:

1. Walk the talk

2. Speaking your mind

3. A sense of urgency – Hollow to Halo

4. Quit shoddy short cuts

5. Finish what you start

6. Do not complain

7. Find good in others

Six practices that enable to win are:

1. Plan the best reality

2. Open Keys to execute

3. Get more out of yourself

4. Self-governance

5. Do not get tired

6. Helping others to succeed

No matter what one endeavors in life, unless one follows proper techniques, no amount of disciplined approach or practices can help one reach ones goals successfully, efficiently and effectively. Therefore along with the seven habits that rely on the discipline of six practices, one also needs to adopt some fundamental techniques that guide a systematic, rhythmic approach that drives one towards the desired mountaintop.

5 most important techniques:

1. Effective time management

2. Effective and efficient task management

3. Touch the problem and solve it

4. Just in time communication

5. Manage risk and deal with uncertainty

These are looks simple and straight forward do we really believe them and if "yes" the making of a chief dream to reality is very much on the way in your life. 

The fountain of wisdom drops

Drops of wisdom

People live in the world of illusion-change believing it as an improvement. They also create a "false sense of urgency" that leads to stress. Following could be a scenario of expressing artificial stress created in deploying a very important change management initiative across the functions, hospitals, organizations and companies. Restructuring and reorganization are being leveraged by companies as a weapon for improvement. 

In organizations issues are at the grass root level and we are even acutely aware of the real root issues, however we start the change process at a top management level, thus complicating things and creating artificial stress scenario and give birth to ‘Fountain of Wisdom Drops’. In the organizations, a committee oversees the progress of the change initiative and we ensure that business is as usual with issues under the carpet, though there is no link between issues and the changes are being proposed for execution. People receive beautiful mailers and everyone is busy talking about the initiatives, the terminologies, futuristic changes, impacts and more so about positive body languages and motivation levels whereas the actual issues continue to remain unattended and unresolved. People are also asked to conduct brain storming sessions on how to improve the situation, by end of the day long sessions, there are list of actions drafted which are needed to be done, company-wide communications deployed, within a month or so reports are being generated and the execution program is progressing full swing without considering its effectiveness and efficiency, a false sense of urgency creates a lot of stress. People who are not part of this execution also learn to speak and discuss on those so called ‘Intellectual wisdom’ initiatives tirelessly during lunch breaks and coffee breaks while phantom stress continues to creep up slowly to levels that are unimaginable. Unfortunately, whenever someone from the ground level and/or from the field wants to discuss the real issues, ground/field level people are pushed back by managers with statements such as ‘We are busy and there is lot work to be done and there are many high level things to be done. I do not have the time to focus on these grass root issues’. 

I call them ‘The fountain of wisdom drops,’ spread across the whole company and its branch offices. The end result is customer service group facing the customer directly, do not see any changes in the quality of services neither there are any signs of improvement. This is the after effect of portraying stress, an intelligent and witty type of escapism from the real issues and problems. Artificially, we believe that we are stressed and we agree not to face the problems and rather choose to shun the problems away. But we continue to sell efficiently and spread the ‘Fountain of wisdom drops’. In the case of people, we deal with the things which are outside our purview. An old wise story goes that a man was searching for a gold coin on the ground. His wife came by and asked him ‘Why are you searching for it here if it was lost near the tree.’ Man replied, ‘There is lot of illumination here so I was searching for it here.’ An act of being dumb and foolish is what we would call it, but rather it is a form of creating artificial sense of work and stress with the ‘Fountain of wisdom drops’.

In case of personnel goals we change businesses, bosses, jobs, roles; superficially we take pride in our own artificial growth. 

Winners put their shoulder to the wheel

Vision

Helps us to identify our goals, bring visibility in our being able to convert it into a practical reality. It makes us decide on the concrete actions that need to be taken to reach where we want. It helps us make sure that we understand our goal and what we need to do to reach it. It makes us work in a result-oriented way rather than in a loose or ad-hoc way where we just respond to issues and crises with no clear plan. Planning helps us to see in advance those things that can help us achieve our goal and those things that can prevent us from achieving our goal and effectively plan out what needs to be done about them. It helps us to be accountable for what we do, decide how best to use our resources (people, time, money, information, equipment) so that they make the most significant contribution towards achieving our goal. Get_more_out_of_yourself

‘Flowers of Hell’: Nguyen Chi Thien: The poems were under his shirt, 400 of them. The date was July 16th 1979, just two days he noted them after the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Freedom day he got arrested while attempting go inside the embassy in Hanoi. The mind’s treasury was a safer place for those poems. He kept them almost half his life time the only place he had. In prison he was allowed no pen, paper or books. He therefore memorized in the quite each one of the 400 poems, carefully revised it for several days, and mentally files it away. If it did not work he mentally deleted it. He sent his poems out of communist Vietnam. They were published as ‘flowers of Hell’, translated into half a dozen languages, and won the international poetry Award in 1985. He heard about the award vaguely, in his various jails. In Hao Lo, the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, one of his captors furiously waved a book in his face. To his delight, he saw it was his own. [The Economist Oct’2012 ] The will is your strength and path for your future and success of your dream for that you need to get out of yourself more with conviction till you achieve your dream.

Cited herein below is an impressive story that clearly establishes how one can get more out of themselves:

Champion

‘Lightning Bolt’: Usain St. Leo Bolt, OJ, C.D. (Born 21 August 1986), is a Jamaican sprinter and a five-time World and four-time Olympic gold medalist. He is the world record and Olympic record holder in the 100 meters, the 200 meters and (along with his teammates) the 4×100 meters relay. He is the reigning Olympic champion in these three events, and is one of only seven athletes to win world championships at the youth, junior, and senior level of an athletic event. Bolt won a 200 m gold medal at the 2002 World Junior Championships, making him the competition's youngest-ever gold medalist at the time. His 2008 season began with his first world record performance—a 100 m world record of 9.72 s—and culminated in world and Olympic records in both the 100 m and 200 m events at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. He ran 9.69 s for the 100 m and 19.30 s in the 200 m, and also set a 4×100 m relay record of 37.10 s with the Jamaican team and made him the first man to win three sprinting events at a single Olympics. The following year he further lowered his own 100 m and 200 m world records to 9.58 s and 19.19 s respectively at the 2009 World Championships. In London, the 25-year-old Bolt left no doubt that he is history’s greater sprinter. In the semis he ran a 9.87 while doing the backstroke across the finish line. In the final, against the best field in Olympic history, he ran a breathtaking, no-doubt-about-it 100 meters, an Olympic-record time of 9.63 seconds. His achievements in sprinting have earned him the media nickname ‘Lightning Bolt’, and awards including the IAAF World Athlete of the Year, Track and Field Athlete of the Year, and Laureus Sportsman of the Year. Sportspro has rated Usain Bolt as the 4th most marketable athlete in the world.

‘What may be done at any time will be done at no time.’ ~Scottish Proverb

Keep our nose to the grindstone

Grind

You have more knowledge about your social environment than ever before. But are you using that “know how” to out win your trivial? If not, you fail to exploit your potential. –Dr. V. V. Rao

Nothing can be achieved if you do not have defined goals. These goals have to be short term and long term. The goals must be SMARTER and broadly aligned to your dream, strategy, habits, practices and techniques: Specific (Significant, Stretching, Simple), Measurable (Meaningful, Motivational, Manageable), Attainable (Appropriate, Achievable, Agreed, Assignable), Relevant (Result-Based, Resourced, Resonant, Realistic), Timely (Time-oriented, Timetabled, Time limited, Tangible), Evaluate (Ethical, Excitable, Enjoyable, Engaging, Ecological) and Reevaluate (Reassess, Revisit, Rewarding)

Review and assess the goals daily, weekly, monthly and yearly depending on the type of the goal, necessity and requirement. Define unit of measurements, compare the goals with your results, also with bench marks of the world records and achievements. When you first sit down to write your professional goal’s statement, you may think it would be easy. You must be an extremely goal oriented person, with your entire life till now being spent focusing on ‘what is next’. So, how difficult could it be to simply write down those goals? When you begin writing, however, you may discover it is going to be a little more difficult than you anticipated. You may realize that it may be possible to have too many goals. Your list may be too long and confusing with some goals very specific, while others very vague. So you may have to re-evaluate your list and discover that your goals can actually be divided into three predictable categories: immediate goals, short-term goals, and long-term goals and further you could pose the following questions to formulate your goals in a SMATER way. 

Is the objective acceptable to you? Is the objective adaptable to unforeseen changes in the environment? Does the objective clearly state what will be achieved and when it will be achieved? Is the objective achievable? Can it be reached? Is the objective’s target high enough to challenge, yet realistic and achievable? Does the goal/objective fit with the mission / purpose and with other important long-term objectives? Have you really understood what you are trying to accomplish and achieve by setting the specific long-term objective? Why do some teams fail while others excel? What are the differences that lead to success? The following four points summarize 20 years of research by [H J Leavitt and Lipman-blumen, ‘Extreme Teams,’ Fast Company Nov’1999]

Work matters: Job satisfaction does not necessarily translate into successful teams. Employees can be quite happy and yet very unproductive. What is more important is what individuals find in their work. This creates intrinsic motivation that results in both satisfaction and productivity.

Titles do not matter: Great teams ignore hierarchies. The focus is on getting the work done, not who has the most prestigious title. Titles create expectations rather than team work.

People bond in the heart of battle: There is a mistaken notion that building relationships through social interaction makes great teams. Rather, working together through crisis and challenges is what brings people together.

Team take care of their own. Teamwork does not exclude individualism; teams make it safe to be an individualist. Individual contributions are brought together in a synergised. ‘Group think’ only hinders creativity.

One more example of why execution is the job of you: A farmer had an old age dog. One day his old dog fell into a dry well. At first, the farmer was at a loss as to what to do. I suppose the dog also was at a loss. Then the farmer said to himself, ‘It is an old dog. Why do I not put an end to its misery? He could either starve to death, or I can bury the dog and cover up the well at the same time?’ so the farmer started shoveling the dirt into the well. At first, the dog barked furiously, and the farmer felt sad but has had no real choice. Then there was absolute silence. Guessing that the dog was now under the dirt, the farmer looked down. The dog was wagging his tail and looking up at the farmer. He realized that each time he pushed the dirt into the well the dog would just shake it off and get on top of the pile. The dog eventually ‘rode’ the pile of new dirt to the top.