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Saturday Links – 14/10/2006

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Another week has just passed by, and while I didn’t get a chance to post any articles, it certainly doesn’t mean I stopped reading what others had to say! :)

Here are the posts I found interesting in the past week. Enjoy!

Phillip J. Eby from DirtSimple has an excellent article about Five Ways NOT to Create Motivating Goals, which summarizes some of his wisdom on goal setting:

A goal that merely seems like something you “should” do is not only unmotivating, it can be actively de-motivating, slowly draining the life from you as you beat yourself up about not achieving it.

And although a lot has certainly been written out there about so-called “SMART” goals, the truth is that you can have a goal that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Tangible), but still doesn’t do jack to motivate you.

Steven Aitchison from Change Your Thoughts did a terrific job starting a series of post on goal-setting and defining your ultimate outcomes. In the first post of the series, he explains why it is so important to write your intentions down, and provides a downloadable set of ultimate outcomes templates for you to print out and fill in:

Only 3% of the population write down their goals and did you know that the top 3% of the richest people in the world control half of the money going around the world, is this a coincidence?

Try the ultimate outcomes sheets for 3 months and see if it makes a difference in your life.

Books on Personal Development Store

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As some of you have already noticed, I’ve added another section to my website: a Books on Personal Development bookstore.

Believe it or not, it was easier for me to set this aStore (Amazon.com) page than to spend time trying to design a similar book description page of my own. More changes will follow in the next few weeks, like a list of the books I’m currently reading.

This is obviously just the beginning. As of right now, you can see (and buy) only 4 books I have listed there, and I’ve given a very short recommendation to every book. So far I offer you only the books I have personally read and liked so much that I want to recommend them for your reading.

I will be working on further improvements to this section, as I feel really limited by aStore’s allowance for a book description text. I haven’t decided yet, how exactly I will share my full reviews on the books I suggest for your reading, but as always, you will be the first to know as soon as something is formed :)

Let me know what you think, and please feel free to share your recommendations for other books to read. Thanks in advance!

Use Your Mobile To Take Voice Notes

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In my spirit of constant self-improvement, I’ve discovered yet another way of taking notes. As you remember, I’ve already started taking notes in a pocket notebook I always keep in the door compartment of my car. But I can’t take notes when I’m driving, and so I’ve optimized the process by switching to voice notes. Surprisingly, I find the voice recorder of my rather old mobile phone to be perfectly fit for the purpose.

Here are the main advantages of using your mobile phone for voice recording:


Taking notes as quickly as you can talk

This is probably the strongest advantage to using voice notes. Even when you speak relatively slow, you can easily fit 120-150 words in a 3-minute recording. Talk a little bit faster, and you can record even more information.

In many cases, your ideas and thoughts will have a rather vague form. It would be impossible to find time and write all of them down, while with voice recording you can do it quite easily.

Another extreme with taking notes is when your ideas are brief and short, and it can take you forever to find a pen and a piece of paper only to write down just a few words. With voice recordings it’s not a problem at all – just push the button and say it out loud.


The luxury of taking notes freely and easily

I’ve already mentioned that I use a paper pocket notebook to take notes when I’m in my car. I naturally can’t take notes when I’m driving, so while having notebook at hand somehow improves my chances of keeping all the good ideas noted, it is still limited to only the short windows of my parking stops. With voice recording I’ve finally got the freedom I was looking for: I push a button and talk. If I want to take another voice note, I repeat the same. Once I’m at home or at work, I can take all the time I need to process all the notes taken during my day.

Many phones support voice commands, which makes your voice notes taking even easier. Just push a button on your phone or your Bluetooth, say the voice command out loud, and your phone will be ready to take your notes. You will not believe how much difference voice notes will make!

Enjoy the quality of your notes going up

This is another great advantage you’ll automatically gain by using voice recording to take your notes: the quality of your notes will go up, simply because you won’t have to be in a hurry to jot something down before the street lights color changes and the traffic resumes. Instead, you’re going to get your ideas noted in full detail, so that there is no need to decypher something you scribbled in a hurry and can’t work out at all just a few minutes later.

Store your voice notes permanently

A 3-minute voice note will probably take around 300kb of memory, which means they’re perfect for long-term storage on your hard drive or CD. You can also send your voice notes over email, because the file size is pleasantly small.

I transfer my voice notes to my laptop. I do it twice a day, and initially give recordings names to match the date, like: 18-09-2006. If there are few notes taken in one day, I add some number to the file name.

Whenever I process my notes, I rename the files to also include a very short description of the note. I use the same line to describe the text note in my information manager software, so that I can easily match the voice and text notes if I ever need.

You can process your notes whenever you have time for them. Some of them are long-term or distant ideas and goals, and so you can just add the description at the time of your daily notes transfer to your PC, and listen to them to produce the text note at some later time.

Transfer voice notes to your PC in minutes

Most phones come with Bluetooth support these days, and so it will literally take you less than a minute to transfer all your recordings for the day to your PC. I don’t use anything fancy just yet – just the very standard File Transfer option of your Bluetooth will do. Once voice notes are copied into the folder on my PC, I can start processing them. Not sure about the full list of options for listening to your notes, but Apple’s QuickTime serves the purpose just fine.

That’s all I have for you today. Let me know if you find this way of taking notes useful, and be sure to let me know if you use an even better note taking solution!

Make Yourself Comfortable

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Today I’d like to share with you this brilliantly simple personal development idea: making yourself comfortable.

I would like to talk about two meanings I personally have for this saying in a personal development context.

Productivity

Feeling comfortable about doing something is definitely one of the key factors shaping up the success of each task of yours. Of course, other factors include having enough knowledge to do the task, being in a right mood and physically capable of producing the necessary result and being motivated enough to get started, but if you start analyzing each of these factors, you can really see how most of them can be easily brought under the definition of being comfortable.

Make yourself comfortable – in productivity it means being in the right place at the right time, having enough time and enough motivation, being sure in the positive outcome and having knowledge to back your ambitions up.

If you feel comfortable about doing something, your productivity will only benefit. If you are comfortable with the challenge, you may not even have enough knowledge to tackle it just yet, but feeling comfortable will support you and motivate you when you most need it.

As you can see, with productivity, making yourself comfortable is an essential step. Without feeling comfortable, you will not be able to reach your productivity potential.

Personal development

Another meaning for making yourself comfortable I have is less obvious. In personal development, one of the major areas of your focus is a constant improvement. Many things you can learn and improve by reading additional materials in books or magazines, asking someone for a good friendly advice, or simply getting out there and interacting with all the people you meet on your way.

But it is also widely known, than in many cases the self-growth isn’t about some knowledge or skill which you can obtain by using a direct approach, but rather a pearl of wisdom you may only acquire by doing or not doing other things.

For example, take something work-related. Let’s say, a project management. Yes, there are many wonderful books on the topic, which teach you useful techniques and planning strategies, but any seasoned project manager will tell you that you can read all the books you want and still not be a good project manager, unless and until you start managing some real projects.

This is a perfect example of what I’m trying to say – your project management skills will grow not from reading books and attending lectures on this subject, but by managing things – starting with single tasks and progressing onto bigger projects.

Take another example: a skill of dealing with stressful situations. Again, reading books on this subject will be of some help, as you will probably be more conscious of your feelings next time you’re stressed about something. But this will only be part of the learning curve. If you start getting stressed about everything on purpose, such a direct approach will not make you a master in dealing with stress.

Why? Because you cannot obtain this experience directly. Instead, you have to make sure you use opportunities which come your way to minimize the stress for both yourself and people around you, and to make note of every personal success of yours in this matter.

Only by seeing yourself handling stressful situations progressively easier and more successful, will you finally obtain a feeling of being comfortable enough dealing with any kind of stress.

Personal development is about making yourself comfortable

Making yourself comfortable in personal development is a constant reminder for me.

It’s a guiding star, which shows me how I should improve myself in each of the areas of interest. And the reason I told you earlier that the meaning of making yourself comfortable in personal development is not very obvious is this: your personal development is about making yourself comfortable, not staying comfortable.

As soon as you’ve made yourself comfortable in anything, it is a sign to move on. It is a definite confirmation that you’ve raised above the previously arranged goals, and that you have to set new ones, where you will feel unsure and uncomfortable at start, and concentrate on making yourself comfortable yet again, thus improving the necessary aspects of your personality.

Does this make sense to you? Making yourself comfortable means taking one small step after another, moving towards a clearly defined goal. The more you work on this goal, the more comfortable you’re going to feel. But the idea of personal development is to always remember that there is no end to your self-growth.

If you were not sure about doing something, and you had concentrated on making yourself comfortable, you would eventually end up with greatly improved skills, newly obtained experience and wisdom, and an urge to find the next step in the same direction, which you’re not comfortable with.

The success formula

That’s it for today. The only thing left is to give you this simple “Make Yourself Comfortable” success formula.

  1. Concentrate on this step towards your next goal
  2. Work towards it till it feels natural and comfortable
  3. Repeat the same process starting with step 1.

Of course, it is stating something obvious, but like any fundamental knowledge in any science, it is no revelation – it is just a summarizing interpretation of the experience and knowledge you already have.

How To Become Successful Through Failures

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Today I’ve failed my driving test for the second time. So no full driving license for me this time, not for another half a year anyway.

Obviously, this failure makes me feel sad, but only a little – luckily, I’m conscious enough about the scale of this failure, and I intentionally choose not to feel miserable and depressed about this, but instead learn a few more valuable lessons and proclaim this day yet another successful failure in my life.

Successful failure? Is there such a thing?!

In case you’re asking yourself the same question, let me assure you right away: of course there is! The truth is, you should treat most of your failures as successes! I do, anyway.

I remember the first time I’ve made a comment about successful failures. It happened earlier this year, and I had just arrived to work. With a visible smile on my face, I announced to my immediate colleague that I had just successfully failed my driving test the other day. He looked both surprised and confused by the controversial terminology and my inadequate positiveness about the whole thing. We then laughed a bit and agreed that I’d probably have a better luck next time around.

I happen to believe that each failure teaches us invaluable lessons, and also – inevitably so – brings us closer to the success. I therefore consider all my failures to be a great source of useful lessons to be learned and applied next time I’m in a similar situation.

Failure to achieve your goal does not have to be depressive. You just have to look for the right signs, and you’ll see for yourself how positive it really is. Well, obviously not as positive as the successful outcome of the situation, but much more useful and positive than you might initially think.

Any failure is a measure of a progress. If you can say you’ve failed in something, this usually means you’ve actually tried some things out and worked rather hard to do your best. And so, your efforts were not futile, albeit not enough to make you absolutely successful this time. It doesn’t mean you didn’t make any progress though!

The more you fail, the less options to fail are left

You see, when you’re working consistently on reaching some goal, and you decide to give it a shot one day and you don’t quite make it, you’re still learning so much in a progress that it brings you one step closer to be truly successful one day.

Apply yourself, make sure you learn from your mistakes – and you’ve got yourself one of the best recipes for success in the long term. Do this consistently, use some planning in addition to it, and you’ll be doing better than 90% of all the people around you!

Once you have a rough idea of how many things could go wrong in achieving something, and you start marking each possible option off by trying it, failing and learning the lessons associated with each failure, you’ll realize that every single failure brings you closer to the top.

Why fail miserably, when you can fail successfully?

Let’s just be honest here. Any kind of failure is tough. And the harder you tried, the bitter it will feel to lose. But it is really important to stop yourself from self-punishment and self-destruction, and instead make an effort and learn all the useful information you possibly can in the view of the outcome you’re left with.

Take me for example: preparing for the driving test, I’ve taken numerous driving lessons over the past few month. I’ve studied the necessary theory, and have become quite confident by consistently making small improvements in my driving technique.

Was it enough? No. What does it tell me? I should probably raise my standards and try harder next time. But how does it make me feel? Immediately, it feels really sad. It is depressing to look back at all this time and money spent to improve my driving to only realize I wasn’t good enough.

So now that I know I’ve failed, where does it leave me? I’ve got two options: fail miserably, or fail successfully. They’re not quite the opposites, but they hopefully show you the difference your point of view can make.

Having failed in anything, a person is naturally depressed. What many of us don’t understand (not for another few days, or sometimes even months of self-punishment) is that there is nothing we can gain from self-tormenting talks and blaming ourselves for not being good, strong or smart enough to accomplish something. All this will do is simply make you feel even worse.

Instead, why not make an effort and learn something useful? Extract some positive and valuable lessons from your situation?

You’ve tried your best and you still failed. Does it mean you won’t be much better next time? Of course it doesn’t. Does it mean you will be absolutely successful? There’s not way to tell. You’ll have to try again to find out.

But what it means for certain is this: you’ve learned one more of your weaknesses, and you’ve got a strong and positive signal that it’s really important for you to improve and get rid of this weakness.

That’s what you should concentrate on! That where all you energy should go instead of being wasted for blaming yourself.

You may not be able to get rid of such a weakness in an overnight, but stay positive and be realistic! Focus on the area for an improvement, and make it your daily routine to improve it by at least a tiny bit. Constantly doing so, you will reach your personal best.

The lesson I want you to learn from today is this: if you fail in anything, fail successfully. There’s no point in doing it any other way.

Professional Courtesy

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I have to make quite a few conference calls on a weekly basis, and one thing which makes me smile is the professional courtesy we all express.You see, what happens every time is that I’m calling in to join the call with a group of people from all over the US, and while it’s evening for me here, it’s still mostly mornings for people over there.

Because we’re so nice to each other, every time I join a call, I always start with my “Good morning, everyone!”, but everyone responds to me with “Good evening, Gleb!”. How weird is that? It’s evening for me, yet I greet them with a good morning, and it’s the opposite for them – they’re enjoying their mornings, yet greet me with a good evening.

Such things usually go unnoticed, but the morning-evening one I somehow notice every single time.