3 Things On My Mind This Week
Note: I’m focusing more of my writing on my Substack here at the moment. You can subscribe to those updates here. The below was posted there first.
Failing to Grow
In Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life, Rule 21 highlights the need to “outfail” the competition. While failure is often ridiculed in our culture (hell, just trying is ridiculed), it offers a surefire route to growth.
When we fail at something we learn critical information. You learn how not to do things, you learn what you might need to be successful next time, or you might learn that you’re closer or further from success than you first thought.
Bartlett writes the principle in the context of business growth, noting that companies that fail fast often outgrow their competition. Jeff Bezos underscores the point: “To be innovative, you have to experiment. You need to do more experiments per week, per month, per year, per decade. It’s that simple. You cannot invent without experimenting. We want failures where we’re trying to do something new, untested, never proven. That’s a real experiment. And they come in all scale sizes.”
According to Bartlett, “The higher your failure rate, the higher your chances of success… Every time something is tried and found not to work, valuable information is gained that can be shared with your team. Businesses that experiment faster, fail faster, and then continue to experiment, nearly always outpace the competition.”
I am not a business leader, nor do I write about business practices. But it’s easy to see how the same concept works in our personal pursuits. If you want to become good at your chosen hobby or interest, you must start trying and failing first. The person who does not wait for perfect circumstances and begins their art project today will get feedback much quicker than the person who waits months for the right equipment or for the right timing to take that class.
When I first started taking fitness seriously years ago, I failed numerous times with nutrition or exercise programming before figuring out systems that worked for me. Had I begun that process when I was much younger, I would be even more knowledgeable and fit today.
When I was into rock climbing the same principle was valuable. You don’t learn much by sticking to the grades you have already climbed. Your growth comes from attempting, and failing, to climb routes that are beyond your capabilities – as frustrating as it might be.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Flow State Versus Anxiety
A while back I read this from James Clear: "You can be relaxed and dedicated. Just because you worry more, doesn't mean you care more."
It resonated with me because I try to approach situations, especially crisis ones, with equanimity, and I know that sometimes that comes across as indifference or passiveness to those who are in a state of worry.
I was recently reading about flow state, which is a state of peak performance associated with not thinking. When you are in a flow state, doing your work or partaking in physical challenges, you are focused on the task and not distracted by unfocused thoughts. You are “in the zone.”
But being anxious is a mental state in which you are consumed by frantic thoughts. The anxious person in a meeting is having a conversation in their head separate from the one going on in the room. If peak performance is associated with non-thinking, then anxiety would be an opposing state.
The reason this is on my mind is that connecting these two made me realize that Clear’s point is only half the story. Not only can you be relaxed and dedicated, but in a meeting where some folks are anxious and others are not, you can assume that those that are anxious are not performing at their best.
Not only does the most worried person not care more, but they may be dragging the team down.
3-21-0
This is a related issue.
Email, while it serves a terrific purpose, can also be a barrier to productivity and success. It comes in like an avalanche, and if you are not properly managing how you use it, it can create significant anxiety and distractions. Sometimes you can spend an entire day emailing and not accomplish anything.
In Cal Newport’s A World Without Email, he poses the question:
“What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades?”
In the book, he references a 2016 study by Gloria Mark who monitored heart rates for knowledge workers during twelve workdays and found, “The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.” As noted above, stress does not foster productive thinking.
I have played around with different ways to approach email, such as checking less frequently and turning it off for periods to do focused work. But I recently came across the 3-21-0 method, which I have been using this last week. So far, it seems to be helpful.
The concept is to check your email three times a day, for 21 minutes at a time, to achieve inbox zero. By limiting the number of times you check email, you are minimizing distractions. This may also mitigate anxiety and performance-impeding work stress.
Now, I work with media outlets who are often emailing with rush requests, so I have modified it to a 4-15-0 system. But this week, with a large workload incoming, it helped a lot.
By checking my email less frequently, I am creating extra time and space for focused work, thought, and creativity. I had a few ideas this week that felt like they were the product of being relaxed and undistracted. By keeping the inbox near zero, you are also minimizing that weight in the back of your mind that you might be forgetting something, and you are likely improving your response rate, as it becomes difficult to forget about a message in an empty inbox.
Two other tips I’ve come across are to take care of any task that requires less than five minutes immediately, and to keep emails to five sentences or less — and if you can’t, save it for a conversation.
Give these tips a try and let me know what you think.