This Column Will Change Your Life

Well, at least that is the claim of journalist Oliver Burkeman.  And maybe he is right.  In today’s Guardian (a British newspaper), he wrote:

“One of the most stress-inducing books I’ve ever read is called GOALS!, by the management expert Brian Tracy. It’s not about football. It’s about achieving your GOALS! in life – and those capital letters, along with the exclamation mark, may convey some sense of this book’s strange capacity for tying my stomach into a knot, then tightening it.”

Later in the article, he says this book “reduces you – all right, me – to a gibbering, indecisive wreck, unable to define my GOALS! in the first place, and sulking resentfully about the shouty man who keeps telling me I’ve got to pursue them relentlessly or else resign myself to becoming a person of no merit whatsoever.”

What interested me most (ok, I’m slightly biased) was his final paragraph:

“Life, Brian Tracy is fond of saying, is like a buffet, not a table-service restaurant: you have to buckle down and work hard now, so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labour in the future. But this is surely exactly wrong – a recipe for storing up all your happiness for a brief few minutes on your deathbed, when you can look back smugly at your achievements. Contrast that with the insight of Stephen Shapiro, whose book Goal-Free Living makes the case that you can have some kind of direction to your life without obsessing about the specific destination. ‘Opportunity knocks often, but sometimes softly,’ he says. ‘While blindly pursuing our goals, we often miss unexpected and wonderful possibilities.’ That sounds a lot more smart to me.”

To read the entire article, click here.

If you liked the article, be sure to write him and let him know.  I did.

P.S. GOALS! is probably one of the best selling goal-setting books in history.

Quote of the Day

“Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you’re doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won’t be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won’t be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn’t solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that’s ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to.”

- The Power of the Marginal by Paul Graham

How to Swim Faster

At a recent workshop on creativity, I discussed “the performance paradox” – the concept that trying harder produces poorer results.

Afterwards, one executive in the audience came up to me and told me his own story.  He said…

“When I was a kid, I went to summer camp.  One of our daily activities was swimming.  We were told to swim our laps as fast as possible.  As we did, the camp counselors timed our speed.  We did this over and over, each and every day. 

“As expected, our lap times improved the more we practiced.  However, about half-way through the summer, our improvements stopped.  No matter how hard we tried, we could not go any faster. 

“It was at that point that the counselors told us they would no longer evaluate us on our speed.  Instead they were going to rate us based on the quality of our stroke.  We discovered afterwards that we were still being timed.  Surprisingly, by focusing on style rather than speed, we all went significantly faster.  When we stopped trying to go faster, we went faster.”

Reduced performance is often the result of focusing on a “goal” rather than being “present.” 

In what areas of life can you improve YOUR performance by focusing on what is in front of you rather than worrying about the result? 

Where, in the past, have you improved your performance by being present?

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