Don’t extinguish your bad habits – change them

Any given day, we base about 40 percent of what we do on habits. Habits send us into routines where we don’t need active thinking. Some such habits save us from always thinking about to do each day. This way we don’ waste mental energy getting ready in the morning, having lunch at work, and more. But they can also, slowly but surely, send us in the wrong direction one small step per day if they are the wrong habits.

Charles Duhigg has researched habit changes thoroughly and presented his findings in the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. His basic idea after seeing what work and not can be summarized in:

“Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”

So, there are three parts to all habits:

  1. A cue that tells you to do something. For example, it can be a time (when you wake up, or in the afternoon), settings (work meetings, grocery shopping), a feeling (loneliness) or social event (when you meet your parents).
  2. A routine you kick in as a result of the cue. For example, as an answer to waking up, your routine is to make coffee, and when you are hungry in the afternoon, you eat a snack.
  3. A reward that sets in as a result of the routine. For example, you feel more awake after the coffee, and the snack makes you less hungry.

The key to changing your outcome of any habit is to focus on the routine. Don’ try to change all parts of the habit right away since you risk being exhausted and the good results might not remain. The cue might be hard to erase since we wake up, can feel hungry, meet others, and face different times of the day. For example, the time cue can tell you it is afternoon. But instead of taking a snack automatically, you can learn to point the cue in another direction, such as eating an apple. The reward can stay the same – you feel less hungry.

It is no surprise that many insightful people describe Charles’ book as revolutionary. Once we map the cues, routines, and rewards for any behavior in our lives, we can also change them into something better. I have started to apply this, and it surely works. Therefore, I ask you to do the same and see what happens. Once you build a healthy habit based on outcomes you want, Charles’ method might do wonders.

Back in black, and loving it

Last week, I did something rewarding and simple. I booked two meetings with very knowledgeable and nice people, Hanna from TetraPak and Fredrik from IKEA. We sat down on two separate mornings, had our black coffee, and enjoyed the sheer pleasure of talking uninterrupted for an hour or two about our work challenges and potential roads ahead. It doesn’t matter if our companies employ 2.000, 20.000, or 200.000 people – we all have challenges and headaches and win from talking about them.

My advice this week is don’t believe the hype: Spend less time reading about “grand strategies of implementing digital disruption” (what? be much more concrete please), “the intranet is dead” (no it isn’t, be quiet), and “our digital workplace solution will solve all your problems” (no it won’t since you don’t know even 1% of how our company functions). Instead, sit down with people you respect and from who you can learn. And drink coffee.

Big ideas require deep work

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

The productivity paradox states that even if we give workers new tools from the rapidly developing IT sector, their productivity slows down instead of speeding up. Some argue that we are way past this today, or that we are moving towards a split between GDP and gains in human welfare, but Dan Nixon at the Bank of England shows that 2007 (the year of the iPhone) was a major breaking point:

Of course, it is not the iPhone or any other smartphone that causes this decline. Rather, it is how we are using them: We check them about 150 times a day and not only to be productive. All kinds of social media and semi-interesting apps are causing big-time distractions, stealing time from the valuable work we can do. After each distraction, it can take us 20-25 minutes to regain our focus, just to be met by another distraction. As stated by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work, a “2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.”

The answer to all this disturbance could very well be Deep Work, described by Cal as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

This should be viewed side-by-side with the opposite shallow work:

Non-cognitively demanding logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

We can combine this with the Eisenhower matrix where two axels outline if things are Urgent/Not urgent and Important/Not important:

A problem we all meet is that being productive today often equals getting things done such as reaching inbox zero. This might feel great but can also fool us into believing such work is important per se. But given the enormous amount of ill-structured e-mails flying around, you might just have spent two hours in square 4 above while thinking you were in square 2. Yes, your inbox is empty, but you weren’t pushing your cognitive capabilities to their limits at all and you didn’t improve skills that are hard to replicate. Answering e-mails is very easy to do and is easy to replicate, but is it worth it compared to what you could have done instead?

A better start to the day might have been to quietly think through what is most important. And to do this while not being connected to e-mail, social media, or even other people. Cal Newport offers four rules to break our stressful and shattered work days:

  1. Work Deeply, meaning you shut off everything that can disturb you from performing your most valuable work.
  2. Embrace Boredom. Learn to put away the distractions and do nothing.
  3. Quit Social Media. Perhaps not completely, since it can be good for knowledge-building and more, but at least in periods.
  4. Drain the Shallows. Identify the areas that are most shallow in your life and cut those to a minimum.

To many, the above steps could be hard to put in practice and some might even say others shouldn’t dictate how to live one’s life, but here I agree with Cal:

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

This means that if you are interested in producing truly valuable work, you need to learn to switch off and tune out from the busy work. And the opposite is true: If you are not interested in being truly productive, then check your phone 200 times a day and keep thinking trivia, busy work and time wasters are important. Just don’t send those e-mails to the people who want to take valuable breaks to find out what is truly important.

 

 

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

 

Minimize your regrets as you get old

Since I joined the fabulous Mental Model of the Month Club, we have started going through 12 major mental models. The first is 80/20, where the material helps us analyze how each area of our lives can improve. For example, which 20% of actions will give you 80% of the energy for the rest of the day? Or which 20% of the tasks at work deliver 80% of your most valuable output?

As we start deconstructing and analyzing all corners of our lives based on the 80/20 rule, there are many ways to do this more practically. One such method, which I view as a meta-method for all kinds of major decisions, is called the Regret Minimization Framework. When you are facing a big potential change in life, such as switching jobs, starting a café, or moving to another place, don’t just look at all the small details. These details can come later. Instead, start by asking yourself: On my deathbed, will I regret not taking this chance?

To some, this might sound a bit morbid, but for me, it works. Therefore, next time you face a big decision, also ask yourself “As I get older, will I regret not doing this?“. If the answer is Yes, then you should probably do this.

It was Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and one of the world’s richest people, who made the Regret Minimization Framework popular. Here is a 2:38-minute clip of Jeff 10 years ago:

Now, see if you can minimize the regrets in other areas of your life. You never know what awesome things will come out of it.

Ray Dalio’s ‘Principles’ – a reading and some reflections

After I was recommended Ray Dalio’s book ‘Principles’ by many others, I decided to read it. After all, I should not miss an author that people refer to as having written a revolutionary book. One one hand I share the enthusiasm for Ray’s way of turning simple to-dos into principles and algorithms. Once you start doing this your life can change. On the other hand, I think we should complement Ray’s principles with the work of others, to create a fuller picture of what it means to be a human and what it means to work.

My biggest gain from reading Principles is that we can escape the often egocentric and rather flimsy decision models we have created through life, and instead use principles as “a good collection of recipes for success.” On every page, Ray focuses on the absolute ownership we have over our decisions. We must face hardships straight on and be radically open-minded and radically transparent towards ourselves and others. We should dream big but also stay firmly grounded, leading up to algorithms like “Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.” To be successful in any area, you need to set big goals, plan what is needed to get there, and then act without giving up. Yes, we have heard this before, but Ray’s algorithms helped me remember this more easily. The same goes for the deceivingly simple algorithm “Pain + Reflection = Progress.” We all meet pain in life, but if you learn from reflecting on it, you are moving forward.

Ray also has a view that organizations should be hierarchical, and that people should adjust to the organization and not the other way around in quotes like:

“Create an organizational chart to look like a pyramid, with straight lines down that don’t cross.” […] “Don’t build the organization to fit the people.”

Towards the end of the book, Ray covers the idea of idea meritocracy and some interesting tools they use at Bridgewater during meetings and as daily follow-ups. Meritocracy is a philosophy which holds that certain things, such as economic goods or power, should be vested in individuals by the talent they bring. At Bridgewater, the best ideas should win, and Ray shows us how they succeed in building such a workplace. My impression is that this can also happen under rather tough situations, and some passages in the book had me relate to military principles.

This led me to some reflections that could complement Ray’s ideas. Instead of only focusing on strict hierarchical business models, we should also investigate how well we could work in networks and wirearchies, as stated by Valdis Krebs and Jon Husband (pdf file). Combine this with the proven value of open, collaborative social enterprise networks as described by people like Rita Zonius, plus knowledge catalysts as described by Harold Harche, and we can find new ways of collaborating outside the formal structures.

Connected to the wirearchies, we can also reflect on the work of the future in networks, as done by Stowe Boyd and Esko Kilpi in “Perspectives on new work” (pdf file):

What form, then, will companies take? Kilpi tells us that businesses will be transitioning from Coase-style corporations with clearly defined ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ to semi-permeable platforms, on which ‘architectures of participation and choice’ will be devised, and they will be fast-and-loose: “Work systems differ in the degree to which their components are loosely or tightly coupled. Coupling is a measure of the degree to which communication and power relations between the components are predetermined and fixed or not. Hierarchies and processes were based on tight couplings. The new post-industrial platforms are based on loose couplings following the logic of the Internet. Some people will work on one platform every now and then, while others will work simultaneously and continuously on many different platforms. The worker makes the decision about where, with whom and how much to work. The old dichotomy of employers and employees is a thing of the past.”

Reading Ray’s book was rewarding, and I will revisit my Kindle notes from this book for years to come. Above all, Ray’s idea of moving from busy to-do lists, over to principles, and finally algorithms can truly change people’s lives. I also like his daily updates with colleagues – something many companies miss. Meanwhile, we should remember that Ray runs an American investment fund and that the rules set up for this business automatically don’t suit all other companies in all markets. Ray often describes his company as a machine, but running a company is as if it is a living organism can also be very rewarding.

 

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

How to invest smarter thanks to the liberal arts

We all want to make smart investments, and there are many ways of doing so. One, for many probably a surprising way, is by knowing your liberal arts too. Yes, of course, traders can make money without knowing the companies and just act at Buy and Sell. But to see your money grow big time thanks to compound interest, it can take more. An interesting perspective on this is presented in “Investing: The Last Liberal Art” by Robert G Hagstrom. It is not a traditional how-to book on investing. Instead, it is more about “stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom.”

How the does the author suggest that we obtain this worldly wisdom? It happens in two broad steps:

To state the matter concisely, it is an ongoing process of, first, acquiring significant concepts—the models—from many areas of knowledge and then, second, learning to recognize patterns of similarity among them. The first is a matter of educating yourself; the second is a matter of learning to think and see differently.

To help us obtain this blissful state, Robert guides us through a set of major mental models created within physics, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. They help us move into step one where we learn about everything from our biases and miscalculations, via evolutionary biology and information overload causing an illusion of knowledge, over to Kahneman’s two types of thinking, and William James’ pragmatism. Also, we should never ignore the classic books such as the Brothers Karamazov, The Great Gatsby, or To the lighthouse:

“The great works of literature have enormous power to touch our hearts and expand our minds.”

The second step, which is harder than the first but which also has a tremendous potential, lies in building a model where all these parts fit together. Based on the models you have chosen, you create a way of looking at the world and then investing accordingly. We aim to avoid Charlie Munger’s classic trap: “To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail.”

I must say I loved this book, for several reasons. One is that it shows how investing in companies can be enhanced by improving our worldly wisdom. Of course, such worldly wisdom is a gift in itself since you understand more about your place in the universe. Another reason I love this book is since it also got me to think about the lines between robot investors and people. The book didn’t mention this but given how the financial tools evolve I came to think of it.

Surely, someone will state that the machines can do all the investing for us. For me, that will not be true in a long time. The reason the machines will need us? Humans are also deeply illogical, lazy, and can suffer from “dysrationalia”— which is the “inability to think and behave rationally despite having high intelligence.” Many business decisions are done based on fear, revenge, or vanity and then covered in the latest business lingo. We also base many decisions on older models such as regression to the means – what goes up must go down. This can be true in several areas but the stock market is more complex:

Stocks that are thought to be high in price can still move higher; stocks that are low in price can continue to decline. It is important to remain flexible in your thinking.

So I guess that the investment robots will do a much better job when they work alongside humans. The robots can present their investment suggestions, and then we can add a human side of it. To avoid mindware gaps, we should strive for a broad education and for checking our egos and their limitations at the door also when investing. Think you have no biases, assumptions, and always act based on reason? Don’t fool yourself. We humans are much more complex than we allow ourselves to realize, but knowing we can be both rational and illogical can be an important knowledge not only when investing, but when living. As Robert says:

“What all investors need to internalize is that they are often unaware of their bad decisions. To fully understand the markets and investing, we now know we have to understand our own irrationalities.”

So let’s accept our limitations while striving to build wordly wisdom. Not only can we invest smarter. We can also be better parents, lovers, and friends. I will let Warren Buffett end this post:

“The formula we use for evaluating stocks and businesses is identical. Indeed, the formula for valuing all assets that are purchased for financial gain has been unchanged since it was first laid out by a very smart man in about 600 B.C.E. The oracle was Aesop and his enduring, though somewhat incomplete, insight was ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ To flesh out this principle, you must answer only three questions. How certain are you that there are indeed birds in the bush? When will they emerge and how many will there be? What is the risk-free interest rate? If you can answer these three questions, you will know the maximum value of the bush—and the maximum number of birds you now possess that should be offered for it. And, of course, don’t literally think birds. Think dollars.”

 

Photo by Neil Cooper on Unsplash

Kate Bush was right: Don’t give up

On my quest to understand the world and the human nature, I just read ’Peak’ by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. They describe the research behind the (in)famous 10,000-hour rule, and what experts do differently from others. It is a fascinating read that focuses on skills like memorizing long number chains, working as an expert surgeon, or becoming a chess master, violin virtuoso, or tennis pro.

People who have achieved world-class in such areas have all used the same pattern – a pattern that Anders and Robert display. It is not just that they have spent at least 10,000 hours doing the same thing over and over. If you don’t use what they call ‘deliberate practice,’ you soon hit a plateau and never become better. But if you use deliberate practice you will add the following ingredients to all those hours:

  • Someone else has already done it so you what success looks like.
  • You set stretch goals that you almost find impossible and that are outside your comfort zone.
  • A mentor can coach you and give you feedback on how you can improve.

A fascinating conclusion in their book goes against most of what I have experienced growing up: They say that except for clear cases like basketball where you need to be tall, there are no naturals. Anyone can master anything. Meanwhile, all of us have seen kids who dance, play soccer, charm others, apply spatial skills, master PlayStation games or use a vocabulary that far outreaches their peers’ already at very young ages. Is it only deliberate practice that causes these children to excel? From a layman’s perspective, I would still say there are naturals, even though I can’t prove it.

Perhaps such children have mastered not only the above skills by practicing. Perhaps they have done the same thing as master chess players have done according to Anders and Robert – analyzed what others are doing:

“The ability to recognize and remember meaningful patterns arises from the way chess players develop their abilities. Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis—not the amount of time spent playing chess with others—is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability. It generally takes about ten years of this sort of practice to reach the level of grandmaster.”

Today, such analysis has become much easier since YouTube and other tools can show any expert. Add a deliberate practice routine to such a review of masters, and you are on your way to becoming if not a master, at least much better at what you do.

On the one hand, I think what Anders and Robert have done is superb. They uncover what is necessary to become great at something. On the other hand, it is quite hard to apply their ideas to what typical knowledge workers do. They mention meetings and more briefly, but I constantly wondered how their ideas could, for example, make me a better communicator or work smarter to support a corporate strategy using digital tools. The three points above and the chess players’ analyzing could apply to such areas as well, but how is less clear in ‘Peak.’

I recommend the book to anyone wanting to know more about what can make us much better at something. It doesn’t provide answers to how we can excel at just about anything, but for sure made me think. And Kate Bush was right: Don’t give up. Want to become a master at something? It will take a nearly stupid amount of uncomfortable hours before you arrive. Will it be worth it? I guess that will be up to each person applying those rules.

 

Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash

Focus more on awesome work, than using the LinkedIn Resume Assistant

This week, I received the news telling me about LinkedIn’s Resume Assistant. At first, it didn’t bother me, but after a while, I returned to it. On one level I thought such a tool might be great for people starting their careers but then again not since you are basically copying what others have expressed. On another level, this makes me wonder about some bigger questions:

  • If you want to be unique and stand out from the crowd, using a template for resumes will probably not help you land your dream job since you will be hard to separate from others. You will just sound like all others in your field. Instead, I suggest you engage in what Anders Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’ meaning you will be so darn good that recruiters will contact you for that reason. Share your work from that practice, and people will recognize you.

 

  • The best recruiters are probably using far better methods to find unique talents, than just getting matches on LinkedIn searches. The best recruiters don’t care if you have all the exact words and expressions on your resume. Instead, they will notice you since you are good at sharing your knowledge from all your deliberate practice. If a recruiter contacts me, I would much rather hear that they do so since I seem awesome at what I do, rather than my resume matching their LinkedIn search.

 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having an excellent resume. But the main value of the resume does not lie in the exact words you use to describe yourself. The main value lies in performing the hard work that needs to be done to reach excellence and then sharing that excellence through LinkedIn and other forums.

 

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How we learn – some reflections

Thanks to Clark Quinn’s article Two good books on learning, I decided to read one of his recommendations: Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. It turns out the book is quite focused on the way students learn in school, and on a brain focused cognitive science view of learning.

Benedict divides his book into four sections:

  1. The cognitive basis of learning, based on how the brain works.
  2. Techniques to help us hold on to facts better.
  3. Comprehension techniques to turn facts into useful tools in our daily lives.
  4. How to use the subconscious to support learning even better, such as by sleeping (causing the image choice in this post).

Regarding the tips the book covers, Abhijit Bhaduri made an excellent overview in The Times of India:

These are all tips and tricks we can test on school children. For example, start by launching the final test and let them fail at it. Then follow up with training on the things they failed at by using spacing in time with flash cards to regain from dips in the forgetting curve, changing the surroundings, and getting good nights sleep. Here is a rather typical quote from the book with an example of how to learn German:

The optimal schedule is the following: Three hours on Day 1. Three hours on Day 8. Three hours on Day 14, give or take a day. In each study session, we’re reviewing the same material. On Day 15, according to the spacing effect, we’ll do at least as well on the exam, compared to nine hours of cramming. The payoff is that we will retain that vocabulary for much longer, many months in this example. We’ll do far better on any subsequent tests, like at the beginning of the following semester. And we’ll do far better than cramming if the exam is delayed a few days. We’ve learned at least as much, in the same amount of time—and it sticks.

For corporate settings, I think some of these ideas are a match. For example, try to avoid cramming in full-day sessions, allow breaks to do something completely different, use mobile learning apps to remind people between course days, and teach them how to sleep well. And of course, if you are studying for a formal test at work, by all means, try these techniques.

What I would like to complement this book with, is other views of how we create new knowledge and learn things. Just to name a few examples (there are for sure many):

So, instead of seeing this as a debate between cognitive science and social learning, I think they can complement each other also in professional settings. We do have a brain, and the better we learn how to use it, the better we can store, categorize, retrieve, and use things we have learned and experienced. Meanwhile, we are no Robisonados living on isolated islands. Who we learn with and how can be central to our success and we not only learn from collaborating in teams – we learn even more by reaching outside our teams (thanks Donald Clark for the link).

Photo by Maeghan Smulders on Unsplash.

How to take charge of your learning and development

During several years, I have engaged in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM), especially via his PKM workshop. It has helped me not only to revise my methods on how to understand the world. It has also placed me in the driver’s seat regarding how I seek information, make sense of it, and lastly share it. A clear example is my e-book “How to avoid information overload using social media tools: Steps to feeling calmer and smarter.” It outlines the practical steps you can take to master the flow of information via Twitter, blogs, and other social media channels. I needed to make sense of these tools myself, so I might as well write a book about it.

Why I do this? Well, the world is developing very quickly, and you need to know whom to listen to in today’s vast oceans of information. Also, I never expect my employer to take care of all my learning needs and neither should you. Yes, they send me to an excellent management training over nine months in line with our cultural cornerstones, but I can never expect them to take care of all my daily learning needs.

Moreover, who knows what you will work with and where in just a few years from now? Just look at the quick changes in several markets and the heavy focus on machine learning, blockchain, and robotics. Instead of waiting for others, just make up your mind and take charge.

Recently, I thought I should level up my learning and development even more, so I ordered How to become a Modern Professional Learner by Jane Hart. I have followed Jane’s work on top tools for learning and more, and now I decided to be even more guided by her work. Her e-book begins with the 10 Principles of Modern Professional Learning, where the first principle reads:

Take responsibility for your own self-improvement, learning, and development.

For each of the 100 practical things we shall do to improve as learners, we can access an online discussion forum where we answer Jane’s questions and exchange thoughts. I find this deeply rewarding, just as I do Harold Jarche’s workshops. I will tell you more once I have come further in Jane’s book, and sure hope to surprise myself with how I develop.