Project Management: How To Goof Off and Still Get Your Stuff Done

March 12, 2012 By Shanna Mann Leave a Comment

One of the tenets of GTD is that projects are not done. Only the tasks associated with them can be done.

To my way of thinking, the trick is to keep all the things you have to do from getting in the way of your projects.

Be Dutiful

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Courtesy jaymiek via Flickr

To that end, I suggest systemizing and scheduling every recurring task you have. Even make the system a little redundant if you have to. My bathroom doesn’t need to be cleaned every week, but doing so ensures that it only takes 20 minutes to clean everything, including the soap scum inside the tub.

It might seem like a pipe dream (and yes, it will take time and effort to implement) but you’ll see, on any given day, a list of the recurring tasks that need to get done. The same way you check your calendar for meetings and doctors appointments, you’ll check “to-do” list, see that you have 6 hours worth of duties on Wednesday and book club. You might not have to do all those recurring tasks on Wednesday– the don’t all have hard deadlines– but they do have to get done eventually. No falling through the cracks.

Of course, you do have to work to make it easy on yourself. Don`t reinvent the wheel– — make checklists. Take the time to figure out the most efficient way to do things. These things have to be done (they do, right? You’re not rearranging deck chairs are you?) but it’s up to you to make sure they don’t take all day.

And the more time they take, the less time you have for novel tasks. Manage your duties. Don’t let your duties manage YOU.

Plan, But Don’t Get Attached To The Plan

Planning is underrated for the one thing I find most valuable about it: It helps you flesh things out. So sit down and figure out what you need to do first, second, last, what you need to research, how much time things will take. Often, there’ll be smaller sub-projects that need to be done first, which make good ‘proof of concepts’, to see whether you actually want to do the project or if it was just a cool idea. Sometimes you flush something even more interesting out of the bushes, so don’t be afraid to follow that trail. It’s called a plan, not a straight-jacket.

The Immersive Experience

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Courtesy ilovegreenland via Flickr

Projects are involving, satisfying — – you might even say fun. So? What’s the problem here? If your duties are taken care of, scheduled nice and proper and you’re disciplined enough to take care of them before you retreat to your lab to play with radioactive isotopes, dive right in.

Immersive, focussed attention gets things moving in a helluva hurry. And if your enthusiasm wanes, scale back to where you like it. I’m digging a drainage ditch behind my house to the tune of an hour a day. Do what you like– there’s no one to tell you otherwise, as long as your chores get done.

Prioritize Satisfaction Over Fun

Do I enjoy digging ditches? Of course not. But I’m going to appreciate the fact that it dries out the yard as well as waters the perrennial beds I’m planning. In addition, the pain of digging in clay is nothing to the irritation I’ll get from looking across the yard and seeing an unfinished ditch.

On the other hand, if you’re done, you’re done. Prioritize satisfaction over and arbitrary standard of completion.

When in doubt, calibrate to the vision.

All Good Things Must Come To An End

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Courtesy AndyRobertsPhotos via Flickr

Projects aren’t for life. In some cases, they just end. In others, they become habits, recurring tasks that go into your duties list and get optimized and checklisted.

But how to you get to that point? Projects are not all about doing. You need to feel them, find the choke points, the inefficiencies, the places where things are not quite good enough. You need to reflect on them. And you need to document them. In a sense, you are testing hypotheses, and you need to record your variables and findings.

It might seem artificial, even restrictive, but it needn’t be. That’s where the Weekly Review comes in. That’s where you reflect on and analyse your projects, decide whether they continue to match the vision, and make plans for carrying on.

The Weekly Review is crucial tool, and we’ll talk about it next.

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Filed Under: Blog, Hammers and other Tools, How-to's For Life, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: advice, aspiration, Commitment/Engagement, Creativity, Growth, Personal Challenge, Personal Productivity, reflection

Creating Your Visions Without Want To Stab Your Eyes Out

March 9, 2012 By Shanna Mann Leave a Comment

In the last post I argued why you don’t want goals, and that you should frame them as projects. But this is the actionable stuff that I know you’re chomping at the bit for.

The Standard Model

vision1 300x225 Creating Your Visions Without Want To Stab Your Eyes Out Conventional wisdom states that you begin with a vision and that you set a goal that will achieve that vision.

I don’t think that works very well. I don’t think in most cases that we know enough to know what will constitute a good goal that will achieve your particular vision.

It’s relatively easy to produce good goals — – there are thousands of resources available to you.

Only you will know whether or not your goal actually achieves your vision, though. You can nail your goals…but so what? If they didn’t deliver on your vision, they were merely an exercise in discipline.

What’s worse, though is when people fail at the goals and assume they’ve failed at the vision.

That just makes me want to rend my clothes and take a hairpin to my eyes. Which is why every vision should spawn projects, not goals.

A goal is static and one-dimensional. A project is flexible and nuanced. But building a flexible and nuanced project from a vision can be tricky.

The first problem to be tackled is motivation and follow-through.

The second problem is responsiveness to the changing understanding of what the vision is.

And the third is guarding against scope-creep and consolidating your gains.

Maintaining Motivation and Follow-Through

The most engaging projects have three things in common:

A problem to solve
Something compelling to learn
Build something.

The first condition usually comes directly from the vision: You need to get from point A to point B, and the project is aimed at solving that problem.

Now, if you already knew what to do to get from A to B, chances are you would already be doing it. Since you’re not, you probably have to learn a skill, (more likely several) in order to get there.

Building something is the bonus lesson here. By building something, you create a built-in reward, a target, and a sense of progress. This is what goals were meant to emulate and fail so miserably at.

If you want to learn SQL (a programming language,) you can teach yourself out of a textbook (but then you’ll lack “experience” if you want to look for a job.) Instead, why don’t you decide to build a database using the SQL skills you’ve yet to develop?

In contrast to Joe Schmoe who hated running, if you actually did want to run a marathon, an example of “building something” would be to get donations for charity contingent on you running the marathon. Essentially, the “build something” condition is the shorter-term, concrete target that will motivate you to keep going, even when the more abstract vision isn’t helping.

You don’t have to have all three. Shorter projects require only one or two. But for big projects, over the long haul…it helps. It helps a lot.

Staying Responsive

The reason the project paradigm works so well is that people understand that a project is an inherently flexible framework. I defy you to show me a project that didn’t get the parameters changed at some point during the process.

And that’s what you want. Goals don’t have that built-in responsiveness.

That way, when you start making 80K a year at your job but you realize you gave up too much autonomy to do it, you didn’t have your goal turn to ashes in your mouth. You just realized that being able to dictate your own schedule is more important to you than the money. The project parameters changed. Now you know that your project is constrained by your need for autonomy. And so you carry on.

The Insidious Threat of Scope-Creep

Goals fail horribly on another front: satisfaction. No sooner do you achieve them (or sometimes before) you’re on the prowl for the next win. This is where ambition can get the best of you, and you start expanding your vision, not because of your own desires, but because of the envy it will excite in others.

That’s why the “Build Something” condition is so helpful. It gives a logical end-point and a point to re-assess your vision.

You see, if you run a marathon, then good for you. However, the question is now, are you going to continue as if you were training for a marathon? Are you going to schedule another marathon? Or was running a marathon just to prove that you could run a marathon? (And in which case, is the health and fitness aspect of your life where you want it, or do you need to start another project to address that?)

Fruits Of Labor 300x201 Creating Your Visions Without Want To Stab Your Eyes Out Reflection and consolidation is a crucial part of the project process.

Say you did love running. Even if you don’t run a marathon, you regularly run 15 or 20 miles a week. You’ve fit it nicely into your routine. But without the marathon to motivate you, you take the risk of losing what you’ve gained. You’ve made a habit. Now make it a routine. Schedule it if you have to.

This is something you want to keep doing, right? But it doesn’t need more than minor tweaking, correct? That makes is a routine. And there are some best practices for routines, too….

Any thoughts on goals that you can transform in to projects?

Do they fulfill the three conditions?

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Filed Under: Blog, Hammers and other Tools, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: aspiration, Creativity, frameworks, Growth, Personal Productivity

Book Review: Stop Stealing Dreams

March 7, 2012 By Shanna Mann 7 Comments

I really hope this book catches on.

I really do.

To me, nothing Godin says is revolutionary. Of course schools inculcate obedience and trainability over all things. Duh.

Of course those skills don’t provide you with any job worth having. I would have thought this was obvious. You might get a job worth having if you get a degree– even one in skilled trades. If I had it to do again, I’d probably become a machinist. There’s always work for people who make things. Well, if you make what people need, that is.

But most degrees (I’m looking at you, liberal arts) don’t do much beyond prove that you can divine (at a higher level) precisely what your bosses want from you.

The Permanent Recession

Godin points out that J-O-Bs, the ones where you put in your time and produce what you’re told in exchange for a steady paycheck and a pension someday — those are gone for good.

The jobs where you’re totally interchangeable with anyone who’s desperate enough to put up with more for less pay? Those will always be with us, and that’s what schools are training kids for. It’s not their fault. It’s what they were designed for. Big industry needs burger flippers, you know. And anything that can be outsourced, will be. Apple is never coming back to the States. Don’t kid yourselves.

“The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities, and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corneroffice, follow-the-manual middle-class jobs. And it’s not going to.”

Godin reiterates what he’s been saying for years: The only jobs that are left are for linchpins and artists. It’s up to you to put yourself in that category.

The Role Of Schools

I could see all of what he talks about in my own schooling, and I hated it even then. The school system was dedicated to taking me, a kid who loved to learn above all else, who was interested, and motivated and bright, dismantling me and remaking me into an automaton. Just like everybody else.

There’s a societal argument to make as well. All of us are losing out because we’ve done such a good job of persuading our future generations not to dream.

And there’s a moral argument, too. How dare we do this, on a large scale? How dare we tell people that they aren’t talented enough, musical enough, gifted enough, charismatic enough, or well-born enough to lead?

How dare we? We’re not really daring at all. We’re huddling at the back of the cave, trying to stay out of the searing light.

We Need To Start Over

Because we fear change. We fear having to make our own way. A little while back I inarticulately ranted about how pissed off I was that my generation simply whined about how “betrayed” they felt because they followed all the rules and yet didn’t get the reward they were promised. Godin says it better than me. This is from chapter 35:

Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility.

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.

And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone.

If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault.

That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. “I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.”

What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

Yes. This.

And also this:

The economy demands that we pick ourselves. School teaches us otherwise.

You should read this book. It’s free. It’s important. Regardless of whether you have children or not, Godin paints a very vivid picture of where the world is going. That’d be nice to know, wouldn’t it?

Filed Under: Blog, Book Reviews, How-to's For Life, Human Potential, Rants Tagged With: education, review, schools, seth godin, stop stealing dreams

What’s Wrong With Goals

March 5, 2012 By Shanna Mann 7 Comments

You’ve heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals, right? Specific, Measurable, Accurate, and I forget what-all. With a smart goal, you always know whether you achieved it or not.

You know the interesting thing about motivations and rewards? They’re tricky to manage. You’ve probably heard that rewarding people monetarily for creative tasks will backfire. Why? Because they were working creatively for the sheer joy of it. You tie money into that equation, and you’ve sucked passion out of it and replaced it with self-interest. Self-interest does not motivate in the same way that passion does.

Goals can be a lot like that. It feels horrible to fall short on a goal. You feel like a failure. You can tell yourself all you want to that “you tried your hardest,” but you’re still going to want to avoid that pain in the future. So in the future, what do you do? You make your goals a little smaller, a little more managable.

We tend to live up to our own expectations of ourselves. That can work for you, or against you.

Motivating the Right Aspect

: via zerojay

Typically, if you want to motivate yourself to do something, you construct either a reward or a consequence attached to completing or not completing the task or goal.

Since rewarding good behaviour is way more effective than punishing bad behavior (don’t give me any anecdotes about how good spankings were for you. It’s a lot easier analyze what you did right and more of it that to figure out how you screwed up and what course of action will prevent punishment in the future.) let’s just all pretend like we’re looking for effective ways to reward ourselves for the actions or results we want to perpetuate.

If you’re a checklist user, you know what I’m talking about. You are much more likely to do the smaller tasks on your list so that you can check them of. Here, completion is what triggers a reward– — – any kind of completion, which means that larger, presumable more important tasks have a competitive disadvantage.

At that pointing, people usually turn to ‘chunking,” that is, breaking large tasks into smaller ones. However, I find that this tends to merely balloon a to-do list. You’re still perpetuating the same problem rewarding completion.

Why Rewarding Completion is Ineffective

Completion does not imply quality. Often, it implies a quick and dirty fix, unless your personal work ethic contravenes it. Completion doesn’t imply anything more than that the task is off your list. This tends to breed busywork.

This is actually the main reason I gave up GTD in favor of Johnny B Truant’s Tao of Awesome (aff), which sets up a system that rewards working toward a particular purpose.

A traditional to-do list is actually completely disassociated with a larger vision. This happens to all kinds of visions, but I see it most with goals that would seem to be unobjectionable. Things like “I want to eat better” become, “No wheat or dairy.” “Drink 2 gallons of water a day.” In simplifying the overall vision down to a dry imperative, you’ve completely undermined its purpose and set yourself up for failure.

Reframing Traditional Goal-Setting

417657374 f509a0cbed Whats Wrong With Goals

Think about why you do things. It’s cuz you get something out of it, right? To-do lists and the myriad of task-management devices out there didn’t start off as Skinner-box pellet levers — – They started as a way to remind you to do your shit.

But think about this now. You’ve got two types of tasks on your to-do list, right? Habitual tasks, for which your todo list serves as a reminder, and project-related tasks.

Do you see the problem here? Habitual tasks can easily be relegated to a checkbox. Why? They’re brainless. Not the doing of them, but the optimizing of them. My Remember The Milk lists are set up solely with habitual tasks, like writing posts, doing bookkeeping, and doing my weekly review. There’s no experimentation required here.

These tasks should never be mixed up with your projects.

Why? Because your projects should not be reduced to mere check-boxes. It’s a process, not a regimen.

Besides. It’s highly inefficient. But I’ll get back to that later.

PROJECTS. NOT GOALS

In GTD terms a project is anything that requires more than one step. But I prefer to think of it as a mindset. When you create a goal, it’s a vision. You have the end in sight, but not the means. A project is what creates the end.

Projects are flexible. Their specs can change. They can be aborted without it necessarily connoting failure.

A vision is not typically well-defined in a methodical, concrete manner. But we’re all taught to have S.M.A.R.T. goals, so we grab the first symbol that comes to mind and make it our target.

An example: Joe Schmoe is tired of feeling old. He envisions being youthful, energetic, and athletic. He sees himself crossing a finish line, smiling, to the cheers of the crowd. That’s a great vision. He wants to be that guy. So, he sets a goal: He’s going to run a marathon.

He puts on his to-do list: jog 1 mile and does all the research about how to do it right. Maybe he even signs up for the Couch to 5K program.

But what if Joe doesn’t like running?

He’s got two choices: He can stick it out (winners never quit), or he can drop it. And you don’t need me to tell you, it’s pretty hard not to slip back into your old, couch potato ways after you fail at becoming the athlete in your dreams.

The goal wasn’t flexible enough to support the vision.

But what if Joe had tackled running as a project, one of probably several projects designed to get him to that athletic vision of himself?

You tackle a project, and it’s not a big deal if you hate running. You know it’s only one way you can get to athletic…so you try kick-boxing instead. And then something else, and then something else, all adjusting your aim toward making the qualities of the vision a concrete reality in your life.

But they don’t go on a to-do list. Because that rewards completion, not whether that activity felt right, or served the large vision in the best possible way. It wasn’t optimized.

A project (or, if you still insist, a goal) requires much more attention that the rest of the items on your to-do list, but if you put it on there, its importance is averaged down, I don’t care how you prioritize it.

Projects have to be managed differently.

I’ll tell you how on Friday.

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Filed Under: Blog, Hammers and other Tools, Mindfulness, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: goal-setting, Growth, GTD, rewards, skinner-box, Tao of Awesome, to-do

Vive la revolution: Quit Taylorizing Life

March 2, 2012 By Shanna Mann 6 Comments

Danielle LaPorte asks, “What do you want to revolutionize?”

I’m glad you asked.

I am sick and tired of hearing people apologize for their dreams. I’m sore in the heart every time someone says, ”And then she told me, “You should be glad you even have a job.” And I am royally pissed off when people say “Well, it’s easy for you. You have [advantage].

I hate the way we transform self-care and personal challenges into checkboxes and then we beat ourselves up for not checking them off fast enough.

We’re racing towards the finish line with our eyes closed.

Is it any wonder we have so many stumbles?

The ways we approach change, and personal growth, and balance, they’re broken.

There’s too much thinking and not enough feeling.

There’s too much deciding and not enough wondering.

And there’s entirely too much judgement about the whole thing.

Where’s the attitude of play and exploration? Where’s the devotion to craft? The diligent joy of deliberate practice.

Instead, we create targets. We create metrics. We’re Taylorizing our lives.

This has got to change. And change has got to start somewhere.

I guess that makes me a revolutionary.

OK state senator holds sign Vive la revolution: Quit Taylorizing Life

source

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Filed Under: Blog, How-to's For Life, Human Potential, Rants Tagged With: excellence, Growth, Human Potential, Priorities, Rants, self-care, self-discipline

Success Profiles Radio Interview

February 29, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

FTLT8FEF5Y3KVUO.MEDIUM 300x300 Success Profiles Radio Interview I got to do an interview with Brian Wright on Success Profiles radio. The interview is available at SuccessProfilesRadio.com and the transcript is available here. Please roll on over there and take a peek, especially if you’ve ever wondered about my backstory and experience.

I wanted to do some call-outs of quotes to draw attention to them.

On me doing the opposite of what was comfortable:

“People would get comfortable and stop taking risks. Especially if they were tenure track, they would need to get grants. So they would make sure to do only studies that would get them grants. I could just see this great big, wide world of knowledge narrowing all the time for the people who choose to play it safe. It’s just too easy a habit to get into to. I had to form the opposite habit of taking chances.” (emphasis added)

This is something I don’t often talk about here: How important it is to lean into discomfort, fear, and uncertainty. Don’t go crazy about it, though. In those days, I seemed to almost have a phobia about comfort. I felt like I had to be off-balance all the time in order to prevent complacency. Now I realize it’s more about being so well-grounded that it’s impossible to throw you off balance.

“I have never really understood why people are so unconfident. I don’t pretend to know everything; but I do know what I know and I feel confident in saying that. For whatever reason a lot of people don’t. The other thing I think a lot of people have problems with is they are really fearful of adversity. I think in the back of their minds they always sort of think that this adversity is going to be the thing that takes them down. I don’t know if it was how I was raised or if it was an aspect of my personality. I’ve just always had this unshakable belief that I’m strong and therefore nothing is going to break me.”

It’s not only that I’ve had lots of opportunities to build confidence. It’s also that when I felt unconfident, I examined the experience to see whether that reaction was even reasonable. Like when I was doing contractor estimates. I was terrified half the time that I’d forget something really crucial that would double the cost of the job and embarrass my company. And that was a reasonable thing to be unconfident about, and I took steps to mitigate the risk, and eventually it stopped being an issue. The technique is applicable everywhere in life.

Brian: Shanna I read your blog this weekend. You talked about the issue of control and how you equate success to having the right to be in control. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Shanna: Yeah. I like the sense of control because I have a fairly quick cycle of growth. I need to change what I’m doing fairly regularly or I get bored. I’ve never found a job that really supported that. If I had a job, let’s just go crazy here, it would kind of be analogous to forcing my growth cycle. The same way that if you were a strawberry farmer, and on a sunny day in June you went out to your fields and said to your strawberry plants, okay guys Whole Foods needs six truckloads of strawberries. It’s the first of June. You should have some ready by now. Let’s see what you’ve got. It’s been a cool year maybe, and the strawberries aren’t quite ready yet. It doesn’t matter how you incentivize the strawberries, it doesn’t matter how you encourage them or even if you punish them. They’re not going to produce strawberries that week.

People will often laugh at my ‘down-home’ analogies, but you can’t convince me that humans operate on a linear, mechanistic model of production. It’s a cycle of growth, just like anything in the natural world. Groups of people, whether it’s society, corporations, government have trouble with this model because it’s not predictable. You can’t just control for variables and predict the outcome. Change is out of your control. You can only control your adaptation to change.

Anyway, I hope you check out the interview and let me know what you think!

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Filed Under: Blog, Experiments, Note to Self Tagged With: interviews

Why Are You Still Looking For An Expert’s Opinion?

February 27, 2012 By Shanna Mann 8 Comments

Sarah Goshman is a writer I’ve been keeping an eye on. She’s enthusiastic and open about her process. When she struggles, she shares that with you. And then she shares what she learns.

That’s the most effective writing there is, in my opinion. Here’s my story. Hope it helps.

Experts are Myopic

2148716591 f7454454ae Why Are You Still Looking For An Experts Opinion?

Possibly the only time an expert opinion is preferable.

Sure, an expert has a ton of data. They’ve seen a lot of cases and know exactly what works …. statistically.

The problem with that is people are not statistics. Each and every person is, by definition, a statistical anomaly.

People learn best from people like them.

Or who are like they want to be. When this process is formalized, it’s called mentorship. But at a basic level, it’s just about learning best from people who you relate to; their situation, their process, their philosophy.

After I posted on my own patterns, Sarah commented to say that she would never have expected those to be places that I struggled. After all, she said, that was where she had learned the most from me.

That’s not a coincidence. Because I’ve been aware of, and working on my understanding of these patterns (and many others besides) for a long time, I have a lot of accumulated insight to share.

But it’s anecdotal. It’s not scientific.

However, it is very, very insightful. Because I’ve been studying my own process for a long time. No one knows it better than me. And if you relate to me, some of my experiences, certain parts of my processes, there’s a certain likelihood that you might gain some insight from it too.

Sharing insight like this is a collaborative endeavour.

I share it, and in explaining it, I often refine the concepts in my own mind.

Someone responds, sharing their own experience, and I gain there as well. Sometimes it even catapults me to a new level of understanding and insight.

Furthermore, we’ve just experienced a communal understanding, a bond of shared experiences.

But as powerful catalysts as these things are, they rarely just happen. You have to look for them.

You have to seek them in unexpected places.

When Leo Babauta started blogging a few years ago, he was deep into minimalism and alternative diets. He wasn’t very compelling to me. Now that he’s talking about the philosophy of simplicity, mindful living, and habits, he is very compelling. He’s where I want to be. But a few steps farther.

What’s more is, he took a different path to get there.

If I had looked at his body of work and said, “Oh, another minimalist. I have nothing to learn there,” I would have lost the opportunity for some amazing insights into the type of mindful living I want to do. So what if he eats vegan and lives out of a shoebox? He also walks the tightrope of doing exactly what he wants to do in a particular moment, without it interfering with his commitments. This man has some shit figured out. He has only committed to things he’s excited to do. He’s found a way to appreciate and embrace the things that he isn’t excited to do. He has arranged his life mindfully so that his focus is always on the things that are important to him. Not one person in a thousand can truthfully say they’ve done that, and I want to learn how.

Sebastian Marshall is crazy, almost berzerker-like. He took on Simon & Schuster and dared them to sue him after they yanked his chain one too many times. And you can see that, although he seems to try not to inflict his mania on other people, things will never truly be settled while he’s around. I think of him as being like fire: fascinating, potentially game-changing, but inherently dangerous and worthy of respect for that reason.

But I get so much insight from his writings, it’s phenomenal. He’s apolitical. Do you have any idea how rare that is? It means that when a pragmatic person sees that he’s embroiled in a game that’s bigger than himself, in a game he can’t win, a normal person will cut his losses and capitulate, maybe even change sides. Not Marshall. Certain defeat means nothing to Marshall, not if he believes his cause is just. He’ll just go out swinging.

Marshall gives me insight on how many of our arbitrary limits are simply political self-preservation. Look how much you’re not making waves! What are you afraid of? You don’t realize how much influence social pressure exerts until you see someone operating outside of it.

Embrace your Process

I just can’t emphasize this enough. Embracing your process is what primes you to learn. You can’t think critically, or compare and contrast other people’s data until you know where you’re coming from.

You can learn from people who are like you.

You can learn from people who are different from you.

You can learn from people who represent where you’re going.

You can even learn from people who represent where you’ve been.

But it’s harder than hell to learn from an “expert” who doesn’t share their own process with you. Context is everything. Data means nothing without heart.

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Filed Under: Blog, How-to's For Life, Human Potential, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: advice, aspiration, experts, Growth, Human Potential, insight

Imagine What You’ll Know Tomorrow

February 24, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

K, The Men in Black

Knowledge is actually pretty fluid when you think about it. Not only objective knowledge, but situational understanding. Conceptualizations. Mental models. Memory. The analogies you use, simplified similes, polarized dichotomies.

All of it, transitory, slightly opaque, and slippery as sand under your feet.

Try it yourself. Ask, “What am I absolutely sure of?” If you take the exercise to its logical conclusion, it won’t be much. And what’s more, what little you are sure of, won’t remain the same if you asked yourself that question in a year.

Science & Philosophy

PtolemaicSystem Small Imagine What Youll Know Tomorrow Science used to be practically the same as philosophy. When you think about it, they both construct models of how the universe works. Descartes was as much a scientist as Newton was a philosopher.

They both used logic, a tradition passed down from the Greeks, to create complex systems of theories predicated on “facts”.

For instance, planets wander around the night’s sky in a circular motion, as do the moon and the sun. Therefore, the earth is the centre of the universe. Q.E.D., right?

In fact, all of how we interact with the world is through the lense of a mental model we have about how the world works. This isn’t inherently good or bad… there’s just no way around it, frankly.

The trick is just to remember that mental models get outdated. And not to resist updating them in light of new knowledge. Even better would be to proactively test your models regularly to make sure they still work. But I’ll be honest with you; that’s tougher than hell to do, and even if you’re meticulous about it, you’ll still have blind spots you can drive a bus through. Not that it’s not a worthy aim or anything, but don’t get all evangelical about it either.

Updated any data recently?

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Filed Under: Blog, Experiments, Human Potential, Mindfulness, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: frameworks, Human Potential, insight, knowledge, reflection

All The Terrible, Horrible, No Good Things You Never Knew About Me

February 20, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

I’m hearing that transparency is a good thing, and that it helps people and inspires them. So before anyone starts to think I’ve got it all worked out, I’ll drop my trousers again and tell you about some persistent patterns that keep cropping up.

I don’t make a stand against people I love until my back is against a wall

I’m opinionated as all hell. At least that’s how it seems. It even seems that way to me, most of the time. But I have a very sneaky, unconscious tendency not to fight for what matters to me when my desires aren’t the same as those of my loved ones. If they not mutually exclusive, compromise is possible. But if they are, I give mine up, no questions asked. Because they’re not really needs, right? It’s not like I would die, okay?

I have a pathological need for people not to find me bossy or authoritarian

We’ve already covered that I have strong opinions, right? And I’m confident. I like to take charge. However, I get a little freaked out when you just let me take over. Who does that? I would never do that. Don’t you even want to know why I have that opinion? What my reasoning process is? If I’ve examined all the pros and cons? Are you sure you aren’t just agreeing with me to shut me up?

I have a tendency to choose the hardest path

I have the tiniest tendency towards machismo. Or masochism, whichever. This tendency has gotten better in recent years, but whenever I don’t take the most grueling path to my goals (it’s the journey that teaches, not the destination, dontchaknow?) I always quiz myself ruthlessly: Is it cuz you’re scared? Don’t have what it takes? Can’t handle it, sweetheart?

Even though I’ve recognized it, and hardly ever fall for it, it’s still my preset.

I have a tendency to overextend

And offshoot of the last item, but a separate pattern with its own motivations. I tend to fill space up. Not physical space, but mental space. I always want to be doing, building, learning. Those are all well and good in and of themselves, but the inability to sit and just be argues that I’m covering for a perceived inadequacy — what am I am without my achievements?

They say that when he was young, Benjamin Franklin sat down and made a list of his faults, and worked, systematically, to overcome them. I think keeping trade of these sorts of patterns works the same way.

What do you think? How are you doing with tackling your own recurrent patterns?

If you liked this post, please share it!

Filed Under: Blog, Mindfulness, Self-Knowledge Tagged With: Flailing, insight, Personal Challenge, reflection

State of the Union Address

February 17, 2012 By Shanna Mann 4 Comments

This post is different from my norm, but there is so much overlap between my friends, my clients, and my readers that going ‘on the record’ about my decision-making process is simply … more efficient. :)

Since I stopped actively promoting my coaching, several people have spoken to me privately about it, concerned that I was having some sort of crisis.

It’s nothing like that, I promise you.

In a nutshell, my reasoning process is this: I know who my right people are, but I don’t know how to market to them.

All you need to do is read my What I Do page to know whether or not we’d be a fit, and whether I could help you. But you’d never find me unless someone told you about me, or you happened to have read something I wrote, because I’m not really great at marketing myself.

The single best place to find clients is through referrals. It’s slow, but utterly reliable. And having thought long and hard about it, I’ve decided I’m fine with allowing my coaching growth to be organic. To be perfectly frank, without a clear and succinct marketing message, the ROI on my time is very, very, low, which means it’s far below the standards of efficiency I set for myself.

To be even more frank, spending my time doing ‘marketing’ things to scare up clients is a) ineffective, b)time-consuming c) has a contrary motivation to my actual philosophy, which is that change unfolds at its own pace and time, and change that is motivated by a limited time offer is simply unhealthy.

About all I can do is remind you that I’m here, I’m available, whenever you’d like my help. And the very best way to do that is just to write a few posts whenever I’m feeling inspired. I’ve gotten three times as many comments and kudos since I punted my editorial calendar, but once in a while, like this week, I’m too busy with other interests to have something on-topic to say here. Other things, which, by the way, are not only intensely interesting, but have great ROIs.

What I’m Doing Instead

I often give the advice “play to your strengths,” because, if you start from your weaknesses, with a lot of hard work and effort, you can get yourself up to mediocre. But if you play to your strengths, your weaknesses don’t matter. You’ll be valuable enough that your weak areas can be delegated or outsourced.

But I will admit that my strengths are particularly good ones, and my weaknesses are not really that egregious. (I’m not bragging, really. I think it’s true of most people, but they’ve been conditioned to denigrate themselves.)

I was asked to speak on SuccessProfilesRadio, (Monday, 6pm EST) which of course is a real pleasure (you know how I love to talk about myself.) But of course this raises the question of “successful.” Define your terms, sir!

I personally feel quite successful by the standard of measure that is very important to me: Control. I get to do what I want, when I want, and I’m unconstrained by a boss or a job. I am stunningly unsuccessful at niching myself. I will likely never attain success in this area.

Those of you reading closely will recall that I started selling used books when I move to Virginia. While enjoyable and reasonably profitable, it’s definitely only a part-time occupation, taking perhaps 10 hours a week for me and as many as twenty for my partner. (He could trim that a bit, but he’s not as obsessed with efficiency as I am). However, the business does not scale reliably, and so I’ve been researching my next challenge, which I’ll no doubt talk about when I’ve got it a bit more nailed down.

There are the added intangibles like fact that the house I’m sharing has a large yard for me to garden in, a shady screened porch for me to work in fine weather, and the fact that there are absolutely no obstacles to me stopping “work” at any point to write a post, read a chapter of a book, or research something I’m interested in.

And yet I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur, although I might introduce myself as one for brevity’s sake. I don’t “start businesses.” I do what I like, and I like to be rewarded for my mastery of it, which usually manifests as making money. But the reward for writing isn’t money (if it were it would fail the ROI test.) It’s the satisfaction of conveying my ideas in a clear and persuasive manner, especially if those writings spawn conversation. It’s really only a pleasant coincidence that writing well has so many other advantages.

So while it seems like I’m giving up on my coaching business, it’s only that I’m not on the hamster wheel to make it profitable (money-wise), or a full-time venture. In the sense that it’s a business, it’s more accurate to say that I’m waiting for my investment to mature, because word of mouth moves slowly. If I suddenly had an epiphany about how to market it efficiently, I wouldn’t ignore it; the right marketing would be fun to do, as well as rewarding. But I’m not going to chase it, either.

The Facts of Life

I don’t live on air. I like a good bottle of wine, and I like to do the sort of travel that involves hotels, not hostels.

I truly believe there is an art and a science to making money, and I do enjoy my apprencticeship so far. It begins with doing things you enjoy. I really enjoy selling books (I enjoy the profit margin more.) I would willingly do more of that, but it doesn’t scale.

I love coaching. But word-of-mouth scales slowly, and other forms of marketing… I do not enjoy them as much. Even those I do enjoy lose their lustre when I do them from a motivation to make Change Catalyst ‘pay my way’

Your motivation counts.

Maybe some people can do their art as a business, but I can’t. Not, at least, without getting my motivations clean and clear. Intrinsic motivation is a very tricky thing, and relying on money as a metric is an all-too-easy way to kill it dead. No love. No art. And No Money (if you’re lucky).

Besides all that, I never wanted to have more than a handful of clients a week. I can’t handle any more than that, physically and emotionally, and getting too busy means I don’t write as much, and I can’t have that either. So, forcing Change Catalyst to scale in such a manner that it would ‘pay’ would destroy my quality of life — even though (and this is counter-intuitive) — it’s my passion. My life’s work. My raison d’etre.

I am truly blessed, however, to have created a lifestyle (with multiply income streams! Buzzword alert!) where everything dovetails beautifully. Books don’t take too much time, but they allow me to squeak buy while I figure out something else I’d like to do. I write a lot, and in so doing nurture my own self-actualization. And best of all, I allow Change Catalyst to flower and unfold at its own pace.

So much of this process is counter-intuitive or against conventional wisdom that I decided I should probably share it so that you could learn from it. Maybe it doesn’t apply to your situation, but at least it’s good to be aware that conventional wisdom could potentially be wrong here.

Thanks for reading,

Shanna

Filed Under: Blog, Epiphanies, Musings

Passing on Good Advice

February 10, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

I got some great advice from Sebastian Marshall once. He said to set your metrics and track your progress against your goal and to aim for 60-80% achievement. I thought he was nuts to begin with, but then I figured out why it was such great advice. Two great reasons for this; 1 is that it inures you to failure so that you don’t fear it. You see it as a cost of doing business. 2. If your goals aren’t going to require discipline, commitment, and a rethinking of how you do things, your vision for yourself is probably too small.

Egypt0648 L Passing on Good Advice

source

I know, it seems crazy because we think of our goals as these to-do lists that we can check off and get a rush of control and feel super-empowered. But this actually tends to have the opposite effect.

I call it overachiever syndrome: You get a high from accomplishment, so you want to accomplish more. But the more takes more and more time, effort and commitment, and that’s a long time to go without an endorphin hit, so you start focussing on smaller goals in order to get that rush.

Problem is, that diffuses your focus, sometimes sidetracks you. If instead, you keep an eye on the big picture, focus on enjoying the process (which includes failure) and perhaps look at life not as a series of goals to be conquered, but a way of being to be mastered, then maybe ‘self-discipline’ and ‘lightening up’ would seem to be parallel goals instead of polar opposites.

They are for me. <3

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Filed Under: Balance, Blog, How-to's For Life, Note to Self, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: advice, aspiration, Commitment/Engagement, failure, Growth, Human Potential, mindfulness

Review: The Millionaire Next Door

February 8, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko. Taylor Trade Publishing, 1996.

Who should read this book?

Anyone. Everyone. And if you’re a woman, you should read Millionaire Women Next Doortoo.

What problem does it solve? What were the insights, or what did it cover?

The book was written by demographic analysts who surveyed people who have a net worth of more than $1M in the US. This is what they found out about them.

What will you learn? (ie, what deficit in your education does this fill in?)

This will completely reprogram your beliefs about what “rich people” do and have. What you think you know now? It was all put there by clever marketers. Read this, and find out the truth.

As far as I’m aware, there are no other books like it. However, women will probably want to pick up Millionaire Women Next Door as there are substantial differences between women who are rich and men who are rich; how they got there, how they stay there, and how they behave.

I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

First of all, rich is not what you’d think. First of all, the authors define “millionaire” as a household with a net worth of over a million dollars. But then they further break it down into people who are “wealth accumulators” Basically, take your yearly income, divide by 10, times your age, and that’s what your net worth “should be” if you’re saving and investing at a reasonable rate.

People with less than that are “under-accumulators” and people with more than that are “over-accumulators.” Surprisingly, (or not) a large percentage of people in high-earning professions are under-accumulators.

The author’s explanation is that the more you’re required to spend to “keep up appearances” the less you’re able to accumulate wealth. In fact, most of the nation’s wealthy are not the so-called “1 percent”. They are working class or middle class business owners who have been frugal throughout their lives, saved a lot, and invested well. But they nearly always fly under the radar because they don’t “look rich.”

They also budget, almost never splurge on fancy cars, clothes, or jewelry. They are (especially the women) self-taught investment experts, cautious business people and pay little-to-no attention to status.

In fact many people drew a direct link between caring what people thought of your lifestyle and “staying poor.”

Most noteworthy, though is that the personal households were run as businesses. This is a pretty crucial mental shift, I think. In our consumerist culture, it’s easy to look at your income, and look at your desires, and have your only question be “can I afford it?” In these households, they looked at the benefits, asked themselves what the impact on the bottom line would be, and decided whether [whatever] would be a good financial business decision.

Stanley reports that when he gives lectures, he often gets a lot of angry response about that, along the lines of “What’s the point of having money if you’re not going to enjoy it?” But he points out that when you spend money “to enjoy yourself,” you don’t have that money anymore. Also, it seems like millionaire households are satisfied with the simpler things in life — – and that satisfaction is what enabled them to become millionaires in the first place

What doesn’t the author cover, or what are some problematic areas in the book?

Although the author is obviously measuring wealth, at points I found this emphasis to be problematic. For instance, millionaires average 52 years old. Stanley covers extensively the problems of financially independent parents having offspring who expect handouts to underwrite their own lifestyle. But not only that, the problem of The Will is sure to bedevil the strongest of families. In many of his examples, having your fortune outlive you seemed as much of a problem as outliving your fortune.

There were also a number of sideways remarks about “liberals,” “taxes,” and a lack of charity I found off-putting — – apparently male millionaires are very likely to be conservative, and they make almost no charitable donations, (although they do often make gifts of tuition to their grandchildren and health expenses to their offspring). Women millionaires, on the other hand, donate about ten percent of their income to charities.

Another thing I had a problem with was his mention (in Millionaire Women Next Door) of farmers as being rich. It’s certainly true that farmers look great on a balance sheet: all that land and equipment is worth a pretty penny. But it’s not liquid and I find farmers are often very cash-poor. In fact, the saying is that farmers “live poor, die rich” because it’s not until they sell their land and get out of farming that they have the money to enjoy themselves. But, that is anecdotal and perhaps I overstate the problem.

How long will it take out of my life?

It’s a pretty hefty book (about 280 pages) with a ton of appendices. But I found it a fairly fast read because I was so interested. The text is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes and he puts his statistics into human terms, so it’s not at all a difficult read.

Summary

All in all I found the books fascinating. Plus, now that I’ve seen the habits of the truly wealthy, I can with clear sight adjust my own habits. For instance, saving looks more appealing, now. I’ve reinforced my choice to be self-employed, and now it appears I need to look more into investing. They don’t mention how travel works as a lifestyle option, at least with all this data I can come to my own conclusions.

Personally, I’ve noted how many problems come from being visibly wealthy. The happiest, most well adjusted families are the ones where they acted exactly the same regardless of how much money they had in the bank, so personally, my goal is not for “millionaire-hood” or especially “deca-millionaire-hood” but just enough in the bank to feel independent of the winds of fate and economic conditions. After that, it’s gravy.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the book yourself and make your own decision.

Filed Under: Blog, Book Reviews Tagged With: book reviews, millionaire next door

Look Sweetheart: Feeling Stuck Is What Makes You Grow

February 6, 2012 By Shanna Mann 8 Comments

stuck in a window 300x226 Look Sweetheart: Feeling Stuck Is What Makes You Grow

I have something I need to get off my chest. I know I’m a coach and I’m supposed to be enlightened and understanding and stuff, but every time somebody says to me, “Ugh. I’m so stuck. I don’t know what to do, but I just hate this feeling.” I want to shake them by the lapels and drag them up close until our noses are touching and hiss, with little yanks for emphasis:

THAT. *shake shake* Is the fucking. *shake shake* POINT

[That's tough love, right?]

Anyway. Look, human beings are such that when they feel comfortable, they are completely unmotivated. Well, that’s not true. They’re actually VERY motivated by the thought of losing that comfort. But you will note that they generally don’t risk actual DISCOMFORT to do so. At least not new discomfort. Paradoxically, people will often accept heaps of discomfort, as long as it is MORE OF THE SAME DISCOMFORT they’re used to.

[Am I ranting? It feels like I'm ranting. Oh well.]

But anyway. Humans, being human, LOVE comfort and routine. And if they can’t have both they’ll take routine, because it gives them a false sense of control.

All this adds up to the fact that “feeling stuck” is nature forcing you to feel uncomfortable enough that you will abandon the security blanket of routine and make some damn changes.

So when you tell me feeling stuck is uncomfortable, I pretty much have to laugh. It’s not uncomfortable enough yet, or in spite of your protests that you don’t know what to do, you would start making changes out of pure desperation just to make the discomfort stop.

And might I add that, just like your mother harping at you to clean your room, life is way more fun and adventurous if you don’t wait until your life is such pure hell that you have to make changes. I mean, the more you have to lose, the more you’ll wait to be sure until you pull the trigger, but it’s worth being aware that you’re biased for the status quo, so you don’t wait until the pot is about to boil before you hop out.

Filed Under: Blog, How-to's For Life, Musings, Rants Tagged With: Cycles, Growth, problem-solving, reflection

Change Your Life — Before It’s Too Late!

February 3, 2012 By Shanna Mann 5 Comments

I hate the phrase “mid-life crisis.” Worse yet is “quarter-life crisis.” These reactionary wordings transform a perfectly normal transition period into a cautionary tale.

Allow me to explain what these “crises” really are; they’re growing pains. They’re as normal as menses or menopause. (I have no idea what the equivalent for men would be, but you’ll have to follow me here)

What happens is that, over time, you become aware that your internal sense of who you are doesn’t match your actual life. It’s like wearing clothes that don’t fit right; they bind in strange ways, they ride up and they make even perfectly ordinary activities feel awkward. Sometimes, this is accompanied by a realization of your own mortality; often that’s the catalyst, the impetus that forces you to make changes. Your insides and your outsides don’t match and it’s not okay with you anymore.

And Then There Are The Complications

As often as not, this realization comes at a point where there’s nothing overtly wrong with your life. It’s not unusual for it to happen at a particularly high point in your life – a point where your dreams are practically in your grasp.

And so, because of this, you don’t get a lot of sympathy for your awkward stage. If you’re upset, people remind you to be grateful, and if you’re invigorated people are resentful. You have all this and it’s not enough for you? What a little princess!

That’s harsh. And more than harsh, that is a hugely unfair reaction. It might help you to realize that most people are deeply threatened by your change, as it represents the loss of something very important to them (you.) It might help them to realize that this isn’t something you can help. No one gets too my choice in the time and place of their growth. Oh, sure, you might be able to postpone it for a bit, or even reject it, but dharma’s a bitch, and she’ll make you regret it. Refusing to grow is the emotional and physical equivalent of foot-binding – and about as crippling.

How to Cope Gracefully

mid life crisis mug template p168420954235661586zwvhd 400 300x300 Change Your Life Before Its Too Late!

These wise little mugs are for sale on Zazzle.com

Part of the reason these transitions are called crises is because you don’t know what the outcome will be. That’s why it’s so panic-inducing, right?

You knew who you were. And probably a lot of your identity was also tied up in your job, relationships, education, achievements, and potential. The foundation-shaking aspect of this transition is that you first realize that these markers are not your actual identity. Sometimes they are accurate reflections of you, and sometimes they are not. A LOT of the transition stage is spent teasing out which are which. Did you become a financial planner because you love helping people secure their future or because you were pretty good at math and your parents pointed out that it was a lucrative career?

If it isn’t already clear, the visible trappings of your life are not who you are. They’re a reasonable short-hand, but they’re only one set of many possible ways to express your identity.

That’s why, as you’re going through your transition, you’ll need to spend a lot of time in what I call the “space of potential.” This is where you “try on” the trappings that might possibly be an accurate expression of you.

This might include trying different lifestyles, moonlighting or training for a different job, taking classes or trying new hobbies, or hanging out with and learning from different people.

Repeat After Me: “This is Not a Rejection of You”

It’s that last that is likely to cause the most friction for you. It’s very likely that your friends and loved ones will feel snubbed – especially if you weren’t exactly the outgoing type before. And honestly, there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s their stuff. All you can do is repeat, over and over, that this is not personal. You can’t help changing, and you’re as uncertain about things as they are.

To help you let their stuff be their stuff, find someone to talk to who’s not invested in the status quo. You can also use my Making Changes resource (now in a printable pdf) to help smooth the path.

Just Remember….

The important thing to remember is that this is an awesome process. Spending time in the “space of potential” is so much fun, because it’s like trying on costumes and imagining your life with [that thing] in it. You learn so much. I’ve driven truck, I’ve worked on the rigs, I’ve been in academia, I’ve worked in sale, I’ve worked in project management. I’ve done drywalling, I’ve done roofing, I’ve done phone surveys, I’ve been a prep-cook. I have insight into a dozen industries, and I’ve been able to prove, categorically, that they’re not for me.

That’s powerful knowledge.

There’s also stuff I enjoyed. I like running businesses. I like writing (but I already know I don’t want to do it for a living). I love coaching, but I’m not such a fan of having to keep appointments. Maybe I should try workshops instead?

I’ve tried different living arrangements, different relationship arrangement, different aspects of my sexuality. I’ve tried dozens of different experiences, and I’ve read about twenty times more.

Even though who I am might be a little out of focus, depending on the day, I have a ton of data on who I’m not, or at least, who I’m not anymore.

If you’re struggling with defining who you are, maybe you should think about what you categorically know you’re not, and seek to make that category as large as possible.

At the other end of this journey, you are going to love your life. Your job, relationships, lifestyle, hobbies and achievements will once again be an accurate expression of who you are. You’ll be excited, inspired, empowered. That’s worth some awkwardness, right?

If you’d like to share a little bit about who you aren’t in the comments, I would love to hear it!

Filed Under: Blog, How-to's For Life, Mindfulness, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: growing pains, making changes, midlife crisis, potential, quarter-life crisis, transition

How Fairy Tales Completely Destroyed Your Life

January 30, 2012 By Shanna Mann 6 Comments

The soundtrack for this post is provided by Against Me!

(I was a Teenage Anarchist)

Lately it seems like a bit of a theme for 20-somethings who are unemployed or underemployed to bitch and moan about how “betrayed” they feel by their elders, by the authorities, by society as a whole. We’ve been told our whole lives that if we do X, Y and Z, we will get “dream” jobs, make great money, and be happy and fulfilled ever after, The End.

Cindrella bluebird gown 300x251 How Fairy Tales Completely Destroyed Your Life This is a fairy tale that is also known as “normal”. As in, we’ve repeated the fairy tale for so long, that we really do believe it will come true.

To me, SOPA is the most incontrovertible evidence that the fairy tale is dead. The housing/bank bust at least started from the admirable goal of making home ownership available to low-income families.

You can’t blame my generation for feeling betrayed; our parents, schools, government and market forces all conspired to spoon-feed us the fairy tale and shield us from reality where-ever possible. In fact, it’s only the few of us who’ve had reality shoved into our faces who were lucky (yes, lucky) enough to realize what a crock of shit society was peddling. They were telling us what they wanted to be true, not what actually was true.

sleeping beauty 300x221 How Fairy Tales Completely Destroyed Your Life So, no, I don’t blame my generation for feeling betrayed. What I do blame them for is whining about it. The only way we could believe a fairy tale like that, in spite of all the evidence against it, is if, on some level, we never grew up. When we spew their bile all over the internet, crying about how all the boomers are taking the good jobs, and how I work hard, damnit. Why won’t anyone give me a job? I have a degree from Princeton! all we’re doing is bewailing the fact that someone woke them up from their wonderful dream.

Karol Gadja had a great article last week about waking up from the fairy tale. He realized as soon as he started college what a game it all was. But instead of whinging about his disenchantment, he set about giving himself the education the educational system couldn’t.

He writes:

Being supposedly “gifted” everybody jammed it into my head that I couldn’t fuck up and needed to get good grades so I could go to college. Or maybe I jammed it into my own head.

A fear of fucking up pervades my thoughts to this day. It’s a constant battle and you and I are probably on the front lines together.

Sadly, thanks to groupthink, arbitrary grades and accomplishments (and they are arbitrary) doled out by teachers who mostly don’t know jack are very important.

The plan was already in place by the time I was 15. I’d get straight As in high school and get a full college scholarship. In college I would study something that would get me a “good” job. And after college I would get that job, because that’s the only way to “make it.” You know the drill. I don’t have to explain it.

When you’re an insecure, depressed, adolescent it’s not easy to fight that kind of force feeding. I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d get a job and be normal and hate my life. A lot of people resign themselves to that. Misery loves company and that company is large.

He soon wised up however…

A couple years into college I stopped going to a lot of classes (except the really fun ones like music business law) and, as a result, I failed 4 or 5 of them. But there’s a trick to college. You can drop a class before you officially fail and it doesn’t count against your precious GPA, which you need to get that precious job.

I wasn’t there to learn their “get a degree get a job” system anymore. Something had changed. The more I listened to and read about success & freedom the more I wanted it. Conversely, the more I went to classes the more I hated what teachers taught. I fought to figure out my own way.

In the beginning it was a struggle. I tell people I used to spend all my time at home in college reading and trying shit because I was motivated. I partied, sure, but not like most kids who go to college. Truth is it wasn’t strictly because I was motivated, which I was. It was because I had, maybe, $200 to my name. So instead of spending my last dollars on getting drunk I bought domains or books or stuff to resell on eBay. I didn’t mind failing their system, but I wasn’t going to fail my own system without going out hard.

Here’s the Problem

neo bullets How Fairy Tales Completely Destroyed Your Life The way I see it we’ve got three main problems:

We were taught to look to authorities for guidance, not to make our own way, but to follow the well-trod path.
The Fairy Tale was so normalized by our society that it’s hard for us to even conceive of a successful, fulfilling life anchored in reality.
Because of 1 and 2, we never learned to operate on the basis of our own instincts and internal guidance system. As such, most of us lack crucial understanding of our principles, values, and biases. Take the Fairy Tale away, and suddenly we’re flying blind.

But I believe this can all be fixed by learning to build and operate our internal guidance system so we can navigate Reality. If you have that, I truly believe you won’t need anything else.

By the way; I’ve been talking about Millennials, but the truth is, the Fairy Tale can shatter on someone at any age. Almost all of us suffer with a bit of Fairy Tale Stockholm syndrome. It’s just that young people, by and large, have been nearly crippled by it. It’s criminal.

What This Rant Is All About

My coaching practice thus far has been mostly established people to whom the Fairy Tale is a distant memory, but are working on trusting themselves more deeply, on testing the weak links of the chain and courageously, systematically pushing outward from their limits.

Working with the Millennials is very different. They’re very disoriented, and often feeling bitter and helpless. They’ve been treated like children for their whole lives and they’ve rarely been given the opportunity to take chances, test their resilience and rely on their own ingenuity. As a result, as smart and driven as they are, they lack confidence in themselves.

I want to do a series of informational interviews/coaching sessions with disenchanted Gen Yers. Hell, I’m even flexible about age, as long as you just recently woke up from the Fairy Tale. Please pass it on to anyone you think would be interested. This is free, of course. I’m not sure how much help I can even offer at this point.

I’m not sure how many I’ll be doing. As few as five, as many as twenty, I should think. Email me at feedthespark [at] gmail [dot] com to introduce yourself and get a link to my calendar.

If you woke up some time ago, maybe you should take some time to reflect on how lucky a break that was, and the skills and inner strength you developed because of it.

Cheers,

Shanna

P.S. I want you to appreciate the irony that under SOPA this post constitutes piracy, and Disney and Warner Bros could shut down my site without notice and without due process.

Update: Read Seth Godin’s excellent Stop Stealing Dreams for more insight into the ‘fairy-tale’ phenomenon.

Filed Under: Blog, Experiments, Rants Tagged With: boomers, fairy tales, Growth, millennials

Who’s Afraid of the Dark Side?

January 27, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

darth vader vs luke skywalker Whos Afraid of the Dark Side? One of the things I love to talk about with clients is their so-called “dark side.” Do you have one? I do. I identify very deeply with the expediency-minded philosophies of Machiavelli and the vengeful, self-destructive tendencies of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. (He gets rich, then systematically sets about destroying the people who have wronged him.)

Other people describe their dark sides as selfish (honey, that’s my good side) childish, jealous, lazy, grasping, underhanded and needy. The people who most struggle are the same ones who say things like “I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but….”

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~Victor Frankl

You are not your dark side. You are not your thoughts– especially not your vengeful, manipulative, or jealous ones. Fighting tooth and nail against any particular aspect of yourself is nothing more or less than self-abuse. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

tumblr kydt2swvwJ1qzd99no1 r1 400 222x300 Whos Afraid of the Dark Side? What about your light side? What are your good qualities? My sunny side is naive, impulsive, curious and expressive. I actually personify her as a sprightly 4-year old with a red balloon.

Now, imagine that sprightly naif was alone in the world. If her naivete didn’t get her in trouble, her impulsiveness would. She would assume everyone was her friend, and she’d wear her heart on her sleeve.

My dark side is what makes it safe for that little girl to be present as much as she is. The suspicious, vindictive side of me understands and recognizes the baddies. It’s watchful. It’s reserved. It provides a depth and perspective that the ingenue lacks.

Yin/Yang Unified

To a certain extent, you create your reality. If my dark side came to the fore, she would no doubt find enough back-stabbings and machinations to keep her vengefully occupied in keeping the upper-hand. Even if they were ambiguous to begin with, soon enough like would call to like and she’d get all the politics she wanted.

The girl with the red balloon does the same thing. Because she’s open and vulnerable, most people are to her too. Because she asks lots of questions with a genuine interest and delight, people open up to her instead of huffing about her nosiness. She finds delight everywhere because she is a delight.

And if, in the background, there is a caustic voice muttering about the darksides of the people she interacts with, well that only makes her wiser, gives her perspective, shows her that she is never seeing the whole of the person. Just like they never see the whole of her.

So here’s my question: Are you struggling with your “dark side?” Or have you embraced it? Instead of treating it as something evil to be fought, look instead to see what you can learn. A “selfish” side has a lot to say about self-care and making yourself happy, for instance. A dark side that’s vengeful has a strong interest in justice. And so on.

What does your dark side have to teach you?

Filed Under: Balance, Blog, How-to's For Life, Self-Knowledge Tagged With: aspiration, choice, dark side

Review: IT’S YOUR SHIP

January 25, 2012 By Shanna Mann 6 Comments

9780446529112 388X586 Review: ITS YOUR SHIP It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
by Michael Abrashoff (2002; Business Plus)

This book isn’t really classic material. In ten years, I’m sure it will be forgotten. But it’s worth reading for a few aspects that make it unique.

It’s written by a former Captain in the US Navy. He commanded the USS Benfold in the late 90s and he had quite a few noteworthy successes.

I think it’s important to seek out people who’ve overcome situations that are markedly different than yours because if something works and you recognize it, it’s probably as close to a universal principle as you’ll see, and you should remember it, or; it’s a solution that’s never been seen in your field before and you should remember it because novel solutions are where it’s at.

In the beginning of the book, Abrashoff outlines the big problems he’s dealing with; the stifling bureaucracy of the Navy, 70% turnover after one tour of duty, and rampant inefficiency. In addition, there is extensive stratification between the servicepeople and the officers, and a culture in which it’s easy to take no chances, do the minimum and bide your time until promotion. (Not even retirement! Promotion!) Initiative is not encouraged, and depending on your superior’s particular philosophy, might even be punished.

Now, does that description sound too different from any aged and respectable corporation? It actually reminds me of an article on the construction trade I read. The business owner who’d been interviewed said that he didn’t mind an economic slowdown because it weeded out the herd and encouraged him to cut the fat wherever it had developed over the prosperous years.

The author also spends a bit of time talking about the type of leader he wanted to be. It’s illustrative to see his evolution; there are many places where he could have turned off the path and played the same game everyone else was playing.

But the story really gets started when he takes command of his own ship. The man he replaced is jeered off the ship, and he admits that his first thought was not compassion, but the awkward hope that he won’t receive the same treatment when his time comes.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who’s ever had to manage a hostile workforce will appreciate Abrashoff’s dilemma, and if you already manage people but have never come across this particular malaise, reading this might help you nip it in the bud, as his initiatives to improve morale demonstrate true leadership, in my opinion.

To a lesser extent, it’s just a great read to see what creativity in leadership looks like. It might not change your life, but what else were you going to do with your time, right? Read a Dean Koontz novel?

How much of my life will I give up to read it?

It’s about 200 pages, and it’s a pretty light read; light enough to be read before bed. Not because the lessons are lightweight, but because they’re encased within such engaging stories.

The GEM

The thing that most struck me about the book was that Abrashoff had to work with exactly what he had and no more. He couldn’t just fire the people who weren’t working out and rehire people that matched ‘the culture’.

In comparison to how many books emphasize how important “building the right team” is, Abrashoff’s crew was very, very ordinary. More than half were there to take advantage of the GI bill. Most of the rest were there because it was the only way out of their neighborhood, city, or homelife that they could see.

In other words, he did not have “the best and the brightest” that everyone supposedly looks for in their company. Nobody on that ship had any real stake in the future of the Navy, or their future in the Navy. In fact, the whole thing was a straightforward transaction; give Uncle Sam a few years of your time and he’ll see you get a college education.

And then you see what he did with them.

That’s real leadership.

The Bottom Line

Like I said, it’s not really a classic, but if you’re tired of cookie-cutter leadership manuals and you want to read something a bit different, I would look up this book. It’s just the sort of thing I like to read; insight into another world and a different culture, a reflective narrative about what happened and the thought process that went into the author’s actions, and a series of takeaways that might be fruitfully applied to my own problems.

Filed Under: Blog, Book Reviews Tagged With: book review, It's Your Ship, leadership

Striking a Balance

January 23, 2012 By Shanna Mann 8 Comments

balancing rocks full 300x199 Striking a Balance Any piece of advice I get, I can immediately think of a half a dozen situations where it wouldn’t apply; or where, if I continued it, reducto ad absurdium, it would be counterproductive, even dangerous.

Of course, the rejoinder to this line of thought is “Just use your common sense!” apparently oblivious to the fact that a) there is no formal training in common sense, and b) common sense is just a collection of conventional wisdom, and aren’t we always telling people to ignore conventional wisdom and think outside the box?

There is a reason that every aphorism has counterpart advising the opposite course: Fortune favours the bold? Or a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?

Therein lies the rub

There’s so much advice out there, each more meta than that which came before, each constructing elaborate frameworks to make decisions within. Each with a grain of truth, and each with its faults and blindspots.

I love to look at people’s frameworks. Their decision-making process is fascinating– you really get to see where their priorities are. My own first priority is elegance. My first question is, “How can we make this simpler?” Others I’ve seen are “I’m sure there’s some way to make everybody happy,” or “I’m sure there’s a way to fit everything in,” Or even, “How is this my problem?”

A framework is an outgrowth of your values and priorities and thought processes. Those three factors combine to make a decision-making framework that is absolutely unique to each person.

So why are there so many people giving advice?

Any single piece of advice is by definition a generalization, and each decision-making framework is as nuanced as a symphony orchestra. When you give advice, you generally make the assumption that the other person is using your framework – but they’re not. Sometimes it’s close enough to translate, like playing flute music on the piccolo, but other times it’s like trying to get the kettle drums to play the triangle’s part.

BachManuscript TheTimeline Striking a Balance

There are a few ways to scratch the itch to give and get advice without “switching music,” as it were.
Don’t phrase the question “What should I do?” Think of it instead as gathering insight into how other people would handle the situation. The bonus to this is that you can question their thought process and figure out how they came to that conclusion. Sometimes I know instinctively that someone’s advice is wrong for me, but I don’t quite know why until they explain it. (Generally, it’s a point of philosophy that we don’t share)

If you’re giving advice, make sure the other person knows you don’t consider yourself the be all and end all. Seriously– — why do you people listen to me?

Identify as many points of difference in your frameworks as you can. This one is hard, for the same reason it’s hard to question what shade of blue people are seeing. It’s clearly aqua – to you – and just as clearly teal to the other person. I could tell you at least 6 different points of difference between my frame of reference and each of my closest friends and family members.

Clarifying these points of difference is what allows you to see whether you can adapt their advice for yourself.

How about you? How do you go about finding a balance between one extreme and another?

Filed Under: Balance, Blog, Musings Tagged With: advice, common sense, critical thinking, experts, false prophets, frameworks, gurus

Nobody Knows Nuthin’

January 20, 2012 By Shanna Mann 2 Comments

The more I read about success, productivity, growth, etc., the more I become convinced that nobody really knows anything.

At best, they are expanding what works for them into a general principle for others to learn from.
At worst, they’re mixing up correlation and causation, usually as a form of fundamental attribution error.

Either way, refuse to absolve yourself of cognitive due diligence.

There are no capital-T Truths, only what you have decided is true and useful for you.

Believe in nothing, no matter who has said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own experience and your own common sense. ~ Buddha

19241 106122012740814 100000290460216 150930 7192857 nn Nobody Knows Nuthin

Filed Under: Blog, How-to's For Life, Musings, Practical Philosophy, Rants Tagged With: buddha, critical thinking, experts, false prophets, Growth, gurus, Rants

Goldilocks and The Cycle of Growth

January 16, 2012 By Shanna Mann 5 Comments

I have a cycle. Because it’s a cycle, it can’t strictly be said to have a beginning, but I always like to think of it as a story.

At first, things are groovy. Life is neither too challenging, nor too easy. As Goldilocks would say, it’s just right.

But I am a growing person, and after awhile, I get better and better at whatever I’m doing — – and I stop being as satisfied.

I’m not unhappy.

In fact, I’m not even bored yet.

But I have more energy than is being spent to run my life, and that energy is looking for an outlet.

If there’s something I’ve been meaning to look into, I do it. I’ll try new recipes, look at new markets for my business, or spent some time haunting junk shops looking for a new end table. Often, these “little cycles” run hot and fast. They’re closely related to something I’m familiar with or already doing, and after little legwork, the new pieces fall in place and for another short while, everything is just right.

But every now and then, after my life has run smoothly, all my systems have been optimized (for the time being) and nothing is really presenting itself to be the next thing to tackle.

The excess energy begins to build.

I become restless. I read a lot. I’m seeking out new stimuli to trigger the series of events that will be my Next Big Thing.

I call this the Seeking stage. I’m looking for the next quest, the next goal, the next opportunity. It could be anything, so I pay attention. I look outward. I’m searching.

Then, BAM, it hits me. That’s what I’m going to do! Whoo hoo!

I get really excited. And I settle in to plan.

It sounds very analytical process, but it’s not really. Because my new challenge, whatever it is, is almost certainly nothing I’ve ever done before. I’m researching. I’m making plans that are really more like hypotheses. And I’m evolving a plan of action that will be responsive, flexible, and hopefully, not too screwed up.

I plan enough, but not too much because I don’t know anything for sure, and I won’t know until I try it. And thus begins the Flailing stage.

Flailing isn’t inherently fun; it has a lot to do with your state of mind as you do it. A lot of people really hate the flailing stage, because they have a poor tolerance for not knowing what they’re doing.

The important thing to remember in this stage is that nothing too bad will happen because you’re paying close attention. This is the stage of testing hypotheses, so if it turns out you’ve made a mistake, you know almost immediately and you can correct it.

It’s tiring, but also rewarding. And after a while, you shift from testing theories to tweaking, and tweaking shifts to finding the autopilot settings. And it’s not too long before you’re back at the Goldilocks stage.

The Moral of the Story

I do this cycle 3 or 4 times a year. A friend of mine is cycling into the flailing stage for the first time in three years. It’s been so long for her that she’s forgotten what it’s like to flail and she hates it.

There’s no right speed. It depends on your personality, the industry you’re in, and your tolerance for change.

To a certain extent, even, it depends on how many smaller “things you’ve been meaning to do” you do. Those are small cycles, and the only difference between them and the larger cycles is the amount of flailing you do (or, alternatively, the steepness of the learning curve). I would imagine the older I get the less flailing there will be simply because there will be fewer and fewer places where my learning curve is so high, although the rate of change in the world at large might balance that out. (I don’t know; it’s a hypothesis).

Once you identify this cycle, you can see it in your family life (uh, babies? hello!) , your career, your personal goals, health and fitness; absolutely everywhere.

And you stop feeling so distraught when “things were perfect this time last year…” becomes “I just don’t know what to do!” Because you do know.

You’re going to try things. And if that doesn’t work, you’re going try other things, always keeping in mind the larger vision of what you want to accomplish. And if your risk tolerence isn’t that high, you’re going to hire a coach to reassure you and help you with your decision making process.

Relax. Whatever you’re going through? It’s completely normal. And you can handle it.

Filed Under: Balance, Blog, Hammers and other Tools, How-to's For Life, Practical Philosophy Tagged With: Cycles, Flailing, Goldilocks, Growth, Personal Challenge

Be Dutiful

Plan, But Don’t Get Attached To The Plan

The Immersive Experience

Prioritize Satisfaction Over Fun

All Good Things Must Come To An End

The Standard Model

What’s worse, though is when people fail at the goals and assume they’ve failed at the vision.

Maintaining Motivation and Follow-Through

Staying Responsive

The Insidious Threat of Scope-Creep

Any thoughts on goals that you can transform in to projects?

Do they fulfill the three conditions?

If you like this post, please share it!

I really hope this book catches on.

The Permanent Recession

The Role Of Schools

We Need To Start Over

The economy demands that we pick ourselves. School teaches us otherwise.

Motivating the Right Aspect

Why Rewarding Completion is Ineffective

Reframing Traditional Goal-Setting

These tasks should never be mixed up with your projects.

PROJECTS. NOT GOALS

The goal wasn’t flexible enough to support the vision.

Projects have to be managed differently.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it.

I’m glad you asked.

We’re racing towards the finish line with our eyes closed.

Is it any wonder we have so many stumbles?

And there’s entirely too much judgement about the whole thing.

If this post spoke to you, please share it.

If you found this post interesting, please share it!

Experts are Myopic

People learn best from people like them.

But it’s anecdotal. It’s not scientific.

Embrace your Process

You can learn from people who are like you.

You can learn from people who are different from you.

You can learn from people who represent where you’re going.

You can even learn from people who represent where you’ve been.

If you found this post thought-provoking, please share it.

Science & Philosophy

Updated any data recently?

If this post struck a nerve, sign up for the CataLyst for more in depth studies.

I don’t make a stand against people I love until my back is against a wall

I have a pathological need for people not to find me bossy or authoritarian

I have a tendency to choose the hardest path

I have a tendency to overextend

What do you think? How are you doing with tackling your own recurrent patterns?

If you liked this post, please share it!

This post is different from my norm, but there is so much overlap between my friends, my clients, and my readers that going ‘on the record’ about my decision-making process is simply … more efficient. :)

In a nutshell, my reasoning process is this: I know who my right people are, but I don’t know how to market to them.

What I’m Doing Instead

The Facts of Life

Your motivation counts.

If you found this post thought provoking, please share it.

Who should read this book?

What problem does it solve? What were the insights, or what did it cover?

What will you learn? (ie, what deficit in your education does this fill in?)

I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

What doesn’t the author cover, or what are some problematic areas in the book?

How long will it take out of my life?

Summary

But don’t take my word for it. Read the book yourself and make your own decision.

[That's tough love, right?]

[Am I ranting? It feels like I'm ranting. Oh well.]

And Then There Are The Complications

How to Cope Gracefully

Repeat After Me: “This is Not a Rejection of You”

Just Remember….

The soundtrack for this post is provided by Against Me!

(I was a Teenage Anarchist)

Being supposedly “gifted” everybody jammed it into my head that I couldn’t fuck up and needed to get good grades so I could go to college. Or maybe I jammed it into my own head.

A fear of fucking up pervades my thoughts to this day. It’s a constant battle and you and I are probably on the front lines together.

Sadly, thanks to groupthink, arbitrary grades and accomplishments (and they are arbitrary) doled out by teachers who mostly don’t know jack are very important.

I wasn’t there to learn their “get a degree get a job” system anymore. Something had changed. The more I listened to and read about success & freedom the more I wanted it. Conversely, the more I went to classes the more I hated what teachers taught. I fought to figure out my own way.

Here’s the Problem

But I believe this can all be fixed by learning to build and operate our internal guidance system so we can navigate Reality. If you have that, I truly believe you won’t need anything else.

What This Rant Is All About

Update: Read Seth Godin’s excellent Stop Stealing Dreams for more insight into the ‘fairy-tale’ phenomenon.