I sat at my job wracking my brain, trying to cobble together enough focus to finish my quota for the day.

The next day was my most productive ever.

Managing focus and attention is not an easy feat by any means, but it means the difference between floundering in a high-stress scenario and remaining calm and solving the problem.

Mental Models and Attention

Smarter, Faster, Better says that people who build mental models in their heads are better at directing their attention.

A nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit was making her rounds checking on the babies. She paused at one crib. Something struck her as off about this baby’s condition. She called for a doctor and ordered immediate intensive care, though she didn’t know why.

Turns out, the baby had a blood infection. One that, if the nurse hadn’t caught it right then, would almost certainly have killed the child.

And reason she stopped at that baby? It didn’t look the way she expected a healthy baby to look.

This nurse had a mental model of what healthy babies look like, and she kept on imagining that in her mind. When this baby didn’t look like she expected, her attention latched onto that.

An airline pilot once successfully landed a jumbo jet missing half a wing and an engine by imagining the whole thing as a tiny Cessna aircraft. If it wouldn’t work on the Cessna, it wouldn’t work on the big plane.

Telling Yourself Stories

We focus our attention by telling ourselves stories. We tell ourselves how our day will go before it happens.

As I drove to work that day, I turned off my audiobooks, turned down the radio, and imagined what my day was going to be like. I imagined sitting down at my desk, preparing for the day, how I was going to write my assigned blogs.

When I got there, I knew what I had to do. My attention was drawn to the pain points I had imagined. I didn’t need to first search for what I should be doing before doing it. I already knew what needed to happen.

Whatever your career or vocation, start making mental pictures and stories and models about how you expect things to go. Imagine what you will focus on and what obstacles you will face. Imagine how you will overcome those obstacles.

If you do this, you’ll find more mental energy focused where it’s needed. You’ll be more productive, and ultimately, more satisfied with how your work has gone. I know I have.

 

 

Have you ever had a book make an immediate change in how you live your life?

Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg did that for me. It’s made my work days more productive. It makes me exercise every day now. Twice a day, actually. And that’s from applying only 2 of the 8 principles of productivity. Today I’ll talk about the first one.

Decisions, Values, and Motivation

If you feel like your choices help you have control over your life, you will take charge of what you do.

If you ask yourself “why am I doing this thing?” your choices will reflect your values, and you will have motivation.

This is a much more powerful principle than a first glance might tell you. Let’s take the opposite of the first point. What happens if you feel your choices will have no effect? You have no motivation to try because it won’t do any good.

This sense of helplessness is awful. I’ve felt it a few times, mostly when I was in college still trying to find a normal career path. Grades didn’t matter (still don’t,)I had no motivation to do homework, and the careers I looked at all felt forced and empty.

The second point helps accomplish the first. I have an over-curved lower back, and I’ve wanted to fix my posture for a while. “It’s too much trouble,” the mind says. “Hey, remember that other thing? Let’s think about that instead of fixing our back.”

I read this book, and asked myself “Why do I want to fix my lower back?” “Because,” I told myself, “I want to stand tall.”

Since then, I haven’t missed a day of back exercises. As I continue to do them, the small set of stretches and strengthening exercises is slowly expanding, enhancing my regimen.

What You Can Do

So how do you apply this? Begin by making a few very small choices that will definitely make a difference. Choose to clean your kitchen. Choose to read a book. But make these choices because they declare your ability to shape things.

When you do a new chore, ask yourself “why am I doing this?” It can be something you want to have or something your want to avoid, it just has to matter to you.

Make your choices become an expression of what you value. If you do that consistently, you will find more satisfaction in what you do every day and move closer to your goals.

It’s 1:06 am. I don’t have brainpower to write. Here’s a haiku for now. Christmas parties are awesome.

Enjoyable Friends
Amazing food, song, and dance
A late night ends well

Have you ever read 11 books in 3 months?

Earlier this month I wrote about the booklist my mentor gave me last fall to kickstart my knowledge as an entrepreneur. Eleven books on motivation, planning, marketing, and psychology.

I’ve summarized and review the books on motivation and planning earlier, but I realized I wouldn’t have the mental energy to do a full post on each one just yet. I will at some point.

So instead of doing a post for each book, I’ll do talk about my main takeaway from them and what I liked or disliked.

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

This book is a straightforward look at the basic laws marketing needs to follow in order to stand out and be effective. Great book, and it really helps out when analyzing and creating business marketing strategies. This one is best if you memorize the principle so you have them on call when you need them.

Hooked

This book teaches a framework to help you make products habit-forming. I almost didn’t like it, until I realized it could help with things like making educational apps that you keep coming back to. That’s the sort of thing it should be used for.

Fascinate

This was one of my favorite books. It talked about the 7 different types of fascination there are, such as mystique, prestige, power, and trust. It gave amazing stories of how different companies use the different types of fascination to claim a space in people’s perception and gave a framework for how to use fascination for your own business.

Made To Stick

Oddly enough, this book didn’t stick very well. I remember that it talked about how to make stories that stood out in the mind and stayed there, such as urban legends. The legends stayed in my head, but the method for making that sort of story didn’t sink in as well. The information here is good, but you have to work to keep it and be able to use it.

Mating Intelligence Unleashed

You know all of those books, guides, and coaches that promise to transform your dating life? Well now the scientists have gotten in on that act too. This book is a summary of a lot of studies on our dating habits and preferences. Surprisingly, there is some really fascinating stuff here, both for social/dating life and for marketers. They talk about the 4 qualities girls really want in a guy (confidence, assertiveness, easy-going-ness, and altruism,) and about how much of our daily life is influenced by the desire to, well, further our species. Overall one of my favorites, but it was a very dense book.

The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

This was the one book I honestly did not like. I could see why it was recommended, and a few ideas are valuable, but this book was far too machiavellian and manipulative for my tastes. Robert Greene, the author, tells stories of the greatest seducers of history (not always playboys. Benjamin Disraeli and the story of his relationship with the Queen was in here.) The tone of the book is “take what you can. Lie, manipulate, do anything you can to get what you want.” I greatly disagreed with it on that point, but I did find knowing about ways I could be manipulated enlightening, so there is that.

Influence by Robert Cialdini

This book was one of the strangest to read. It was wonderful and terrible. A master psychologist writes on what influences our decisions. If you read this, be prepared that you may have an existential crisis. It made me wonder if free will was real, if so many things have such a strong influence on our actions. I eventually decided that we do, especially when we understand what can influence us if we live without thought. Overall, this was a magnificent book.

I’ve got something like writer’s block today. So I’m writing about having that.

I know what I want to write about. I want to write about how innovation happens, and things you can do to think in innovative ways. I want to say that innovation happens most often from combining ideas, not from creating something new.

I want to talk about how building a memory palace like i wrote about in my last blog makes innovation much easier. It does that because much more knowledge is available right at your fingertips, so grabbing ideas to combine becomes much easier.

I would write a little about the Esty shop I made, and how I marketed the dragons I sold. I’d write about how the social media site imgur.com loves stories, and how a book I read told me that people buy things they can see already fitting into their lives, and how I made an advertisement doing just that.

I’d write about these things, but I can barely bring myself to peck out the basics onto my keyboard.

I’ve learned today about concise writing. I’m not doing a very good job of it here, and yet the paragraphs above could be one of the most concise articles I’ve written. I presented the main points of what I want to get across. But it feels lifeless.

I don’t know how to write both concisely, and with heart. And yet the feedback I got today on an article suggested that I don’t write with heart yet either. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve written a lot in my life. I write for a living after all. At least for now.

I’ve broken all the rules about writing to give flair. To play jazz with words. Apparently I’ve been playing the wrong notes the whole time.

That’s probably not entirely true, but it is frustrating to have written a good amount, to realize I’ve still got a long ways to go.

Ah well. No sense in letting it get me down any longer. Time to practice.

I very nearly didn’t like this book. I’m not a fan of ideas that have the potential to make people addicted to things that could be bad for them. When I was young, I hated The Phantom of the Opera because of how much control the Phantom had over Christine.

I almost didn’t like this book because I don’t like the idea of people being under other people’s control.

The book talks about using triggers to get customers to use the product, actions they can take while using it, variable rewards to keep them guessing, and has them invest in the process so they keep coming back, and only then does it discuss the ethics of using the method. (“You know, you really should have stolen the whole book. The warnings come after the spells…”)

Nir Eyal talks about how nothing can be called a superpower unless it can be used for both good and evil. The ability to make habit-forming products is no more no less than that–a superpower.

He goes on to lay the foundation for what he holds as ethical use of building habit-forming products. I don’t remember the entire thing, but I do remember the right use, because it struck true to me.

If your product benefits your customer’s lives, and you, personally, would use your product habitually, then it is ethical to make it habit forming. I agree with this framework.

The reason for that is that there is a product that I believe would be immensely beneficial to building brain power, but the product is incredibly boring and difficult to get into a habit of using. (I’ll talk about this product another time.)

I would redesign that product so using it is fun and addictive, because that’s the only way to get the benefits of its brand of brain training.

So use the principles of this book to make it easier for people to improve themselves. That’s where its real strength is.

 

As I was reading a book list that was 11 books long list last fall, I realized I wanted to remember more of the principles than I would be able to with just reading them. I needed an edge.

If you’ve seen BBC’s Sherlock, then you likely have heard of the mind palace, or memory palace, before. When Sherlock Holmes comes up against a particularly difficult problem, he retreats into his mind palace to think and remember. Once he spends enough time there to recall what was relevant he goes on to save the day with his magnificent deductive powers.

The memory palace can actually do much of what you see Sherlock do (not everything. It is TV after all.) It is an old mnemonic memory technique used by greek orators to memorize long speeches and stories. Back then it was called the method of loci, or the method of location.

The method of loci uses a vivid imagination and a memory of a physical place to code things you want to remember. Take, for example, making a shopping list. Imagine your home. You need to buy eggs, milk, and bread. In your mind, walk up to your door. There, you see eggs splattered against your door in a smiley face. Open your door and walk in. There, on the coat rack, you see Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter hitting himself over the head with the jug. Now go down the hall to the bathroom. In the sink, you find mice creating sailing rafts out of the bread in the bathtub.

That’s the general idea. The list can be as short or as long as you need, as long as you have spaces to put them.

And that was my main frustration with the system. I had heard about this memory technique as a teen and tried to use it, but couldn’t get past how cumbersome using my house was. There weren’t enough spaces to get everything I would want to remember, and I would have to make a new one in a real space each time. It felt too awkward to be practical.

During the summer right before, I had been playing a new video game called Ark:Survival Evolved. The game was about surviving on a deserted island with nothing but your wits and thousands of dinosaurs. It was a huge island, with mountains, forests, plains, even caves to explore. I realized that I had a massive location in my head that I could use to create my memory palace. I could use the terrain, caves, and forts of the map and have a nearly endless variety of places to hook memories to.

I filled caves, forts, and strolls along the beaches with images of dinosaurs conversing amiably at a water cooler, a stegosaur who laid a bee-striped egg, a cat sitting on a shark’s head, and many other weird and memorable images that I used to remind myself of principles and applications from the books I was reading.

As I discussed each book with my mentor, I was able to recall each principle and better think of applications for them. It was fantastic.

If you’ve been looking for a way to boost your recollection of facts, figures, or principles, I would highly recommend giving the method of loci a try.

One very valuable tool that people looking to optimized their efforts have been applying for a good while now is called the 80/20 rule. This rule stems from a few studies that found that 80% of results came from 20% of inputs or changes. Since these studies came out, a number of books have been written and many people began trying to apply this rule to get more results from smarter efforts.

The thing I love about The One Thing is that it takes this idea to its logical conclusion. If 20% of efforts gives you 80% of your results, then what 20% of that 20% gives you 80% of the 80%? What’s the 80/20 of the 80/20? And what about the 80/20 of that? And then it condenses this into one question.

What’s the one thing I could be doing, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

I want you to read that again.

What’s the one thing I could be doing, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

This is a powerful question, because it forces you to think about the effects of the actions you take and to take time to figure out exactly what the best use of your time is to get the result you want.

It’s also a very hard question to answer. It requires deep thought, which is hard. But if you can get this question to be a habit in your life, you will find that it makes reaching goals much easier.

Think And Grow Rich.

The Classic. The one that started it all. The original work on how the super-successful became that way, and the clarion-call of hundreds of self-help gurus ever since.

The things this book teaches have been hashed, re-hashed, and made into hashbrowns. Everybody who learns about self-development seems to know what this book is about, but so few seem to really get it.

You might have encountered the principles in a book or DVD of the latest trends in self-development. Books about the Law of Attraction, such as The Secret, made millions off of telling people that by simply seeing themselves as being successful, they will magically attract their deepest desires. This is complete and utter crap.

However, it is the easiest thing in Think and Grow Rich to seize upon. There is a massive focus on visualizing success and already having what you desire. However, in my reading and experiments with the method afterward, this is merely the first step.

One story Hill uses to illustrate his method is about a preacher who wanted to have one million dollars. He visualized, he felt, he touched, he already owned the money. He set a date by which he would receive the money. If that was all he had done, he would have failed.

On the final day, unsure exactly how he would receive the money, he held a great meeting. There, he described exactly what he would do with one million dollars if he had it. The audience was greatly moved, and in particular, one man at the back. This man was a multi-millionaire, and was so impressed by what the preacher said he was going to do, that he provided the money right then and there.

The key point that everybody misses is that the preacher laid out exactly how he was going to use the money for good. He had a plan, and he was going to add value to many people lives.

Adding value is the key. If you visualize selfishly, thinking only of attracting things to yourself so your life becomes easier, you will get nothing.

If, on the other hand, you come up with a plan to make other people’s lives easier, to solve a problem or to create something that people will appreciate, that is when the law of attraction actually starts working for you.

Set goal for yourself. Visualize having that goal. Now, figure out how to either use that goal to help people, or how to help people so you can reach that goal. If you do that, you have a much better shot of reaching it.

This is the book I started my entrepreneurial crash course with. As soon as I started reading it, I could see why my mentor wanted me to start with it.

Grant Cardone is a man of huge ambition, and this book is his thoughts on how to achieve all of our ambitions. His energy is contagious and inspires you to think about possibilities and how to achieve them.

The main focus of the book is very simple. Do ten times more than you think you should in just about everything if you want to be successful.

Ten X-ing Our Lives

Grant advises us to “ten x” parts of our life, starting with our efforts.

When we set a goal for ourselves, we try to guess how much effort it’s going to take to accomplish the goal. However, we almost always misjudge how much effort it’s actually going to take. We get disappointed that we haven’t reached our goal yet, and stop trying out of frustration.

The Ten X rule says that you have to take how much effort you expect your goal to take, and then multiply that by ten. That’s how much effort it’ll actually take. If you think it’ll take 10 calls to get a meeting and sell a product, make 100 calls.

By doing this, you’ll expect that reaching your goal is going to be hard, so you’ll be mentally ready for the obstacles and roadblocks you find in your way.

The next thing Cardone talks about is motivation. He says small goals make for small effort, so we have to 10x our goals in order to have the motivation to work through everything to reach them.

What goal do you want to reach? How much money do you want to earn in your life? How good at sports? What matters to you? Now take that goal, and multiply it by ten. Now multiply it by ten again. Now you have a goal worth straining for.

My Takeaways

This book has been fantastic for getting me in the right mindset to set goals and be mentally ready to achieve them. It impressed on me how hard reaching high goals can be, and just how rewarding striving for those goals can be. Why fight to reach a goal to simply be content when you can fight to achieve something amazing? I know I would much rather do that.