Proverbs and Quotations

Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience

March 7, 2011 by Rosa Say

The short post which follows, originally appeared on my Say “Alaka‘i” column for the Honolulu Advertiser in October of 2009. The context then was slightly different; as I recall, we were in battle with mediocrity at the time. However having an edge applies to our recent discussions as well. I thought about it when writing up The G in Goals stands for Greatness, which I ended this way:

If you think Goal Setting is boring,
do what you must to light your fire with it again.

But first… by way of intro, and in keeping another recent reminder within sharp focus…

Getting “all fired up” is a Clearing

One way to light your fire, and challenge your most brilliant self, is to “Burn Your Boats” ~

“I’ve never forgotten the story of the famed explorer Hernando CortÃ©s. He landed on the shores of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519. Wanted his army to conquer the land for Spain. Faced an uphill battle: an aggressive enemy, brutal disease and scarce resources. As they marched inland to do battle, CortÃ©s ordered one of his lieutenants back to the beach with a single instruction: ‘Burn our boats.’ My kind of guy.”

“Challenge serves beautifully to introduce you to your best — and most brilliant — self. How fully would you show up each day — at work and in life — if retreat just wasn’t an option?”

—Robin Sharma, The Greatness Guide
(which I highly recommend: One of the most dog-eared books I own)

Too extreme?

Well then, what does it take for you to choose action? Goals are actions of the Hernando CortÃ©s variety: They explore, but they also seek to conquer something.

You may have noticed that fire is a highly visible, hot emotion metaphor for me. Burning, not destructively, but as in having a “burning Yes!” as opposed to a wimpy, unemotional decision.

Where I live, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, brush fires are more common than we would like them to be, but the wonderful thing is that they don’t leave lasting scars behind. In fact, they clear: After a fire, the green shoots emerging from the ground are so life affirming. Fresh. New. Exuberant. Growth happens where it would never have began without that fire, and it happens quicker, for the fire didn’t take everything: It left behind both space and nutrition.

So how do we bring those lessons back to us, and understand what motivates us, freshens and renews us, particularly in setting challenging goals, and then, as managers, helping others do so?

Well, another way to light your fire is to make things inconvenient for you, just like our Big Island wildfires temporarily do, blocking the main highway. Consider with me, how…

Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience

I have noticed something about the workplaces I have visited recently. Managers are playing it safe, and that’s bad news for all of us. The inventive, edgy work borne from fresh ideas doesn’t happen where managers play it safe.

How often do you seek out those who aren’t on your radar, engaging them in conversation?

How often are you deliberately working on what is completely inconvenient and out of the norm for you?

How often do you push yourself to do the things you don’t like to do, arriving at those places which fall out of your comfort zone —and then staying there long enough to learn a new m.o.?

Make no mistake about it: Any edge you gain in today’s highly competitive world will come from your inconvenience.

I realize that this goes counter to what so much of management is all about. We managers work to make everything comfortable and predictable. We smooth ruffled feathers. We eliminate variance. We knock down barriers and obstacles. We spend considerable time and effort paving over the bumps in the road, and tending to the peace and order of the workplace landscape so that everyday work gets done with some kind of productive regularity our stakeholders can count on.

Well guess what. That’s what everybody else does too.

And remember, even A Copy of the Best is Still a Copy.

Hard as it may be to maintain peace and order, you can’t pat yourself on the back once it’s done and stop there. If you do, you’re the same as everyone else, and you won’t be anything special because you didn’t go the distance.

At first this sounds like a leadership concept (and it is), but it’s about Alaka‘i management too, for when we manage we channel available energies. If you are only working within your own comfort zone, you are missing the catalytic disruption which you can harness, and there is a LOT of energy available in disruption, waiting for you to channel it more productively.

Breakthrough-your-business Word for the Day: Disrupt (link to Ho‘ohana Aloha)

Let’s go back to the questions we started with:

How often do you seek out those who aren’t on your radar, engaging them in conversation?

How often are you deliberately working on what is completely inconvenient and out of the norm for you?

How often do you push yourself to do the things you don’t like to do, arriving at those places which fall out of your comfort zone —and then staying there long enough to learn a new m.o.?

Go spend some time on the wild side: Any edge you gain in today’s highly competitive world will come from your inconvenience.

There’s a fringe benefit too: You’ll never be bored.

Find your Blue Flame Inspirations: There’s no refrigerator space for inspiration.

Dangerous? Risky? Perhaps, but as the saying goes, you go out on a limb because that’s where the sweetest fruit is!

The G in Goals stands for Greatness

March 3, 2011 by Rosa Say

And the M in Manager stands for Matter. Make a difference.

Our talk story this week started with a deadline many managers share, and our wayfinding to make the best of it brought us to goal setting.

That’s a happenstance I’m pleased with, for goals is the stuff of ‘Imi ola — creating our best possible life.

Love this passage from Robin Sharma in his book, The Greatness Guide:

I know what you’re thinking: “Robin, give me a topic that’s fresh and original and challenging. Why are you writing about goals? We know this stuff. It’s boring!” Few success practices are as important as articulating your most closely held goals and then reviewing them daily. Getting masterful at setting and then considering your goals on a consistent basis is essential to a life of greatness. And yet, guess what? Most people don’t spend more than an hour a year doing this. It’s true: People spend more time planning their summer vacations than they do designing their lives.”

I admit to you that I’ve had my ups and downs with it too. Goal setting is hard, especially the kind of goal setting that Jim Collins explains as BHAGs: Those Big Hairy Audacious Goals you know will cause your life to shift in a way that will change you at your core forever.

Managing with Aloha was the achievement of a BHAG for me, and now, 7 years later, I’m still seeking my next one.

I’ve had much more success in helping my employees and customers set their goals, guiding them and supporting them, than I’ve had with setting goals of my own.

However I keep trying, for the evidence is crystal clear to me:

I feel alive, attentive and accomplished when I’m focused on a goal, even a small one.

When I ‘take a break’ from goal setting I’m fully aware that I’m stalling. I feel directionless and unsatisfied about a lot of things, not just the lack of a new goal.

When I help others with their goals, I’m working on my own how-to-achieve-them mastery too: It all counts.

When I recognize my next BHAG cresting over the horizon, I’ll be ready for it.

So please. Don’t succumb to giving lip service to goal setting.

If you think it’s boring, do what you must to light your fire with it again. Get it to work its magic for you personally, and as an Alaka‘i Manager who matters in the lives of other people.

Here’s more help from Joshua Becker: How to Fulfill Dreams

“Setting your goals is a bold play for your best life. Setting your goals is an act of heroism because you are reaching for the potential that has been invested in you.”
— Robin Sharma

There’s no refrigerator space for inspiration

January 30, 2011 by Rosa Say

Here’s a new habit to groom for 2011, our year of better habits:

Make space for inspiration, and not in your refrigerator.

Add it to your language of intention.

It’s become my way to remember something I originally heard from Jason Fried of 37signals, when I heard him say in a podcast that “inspiration is perishable.”

You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh.
~ Jason Fried

So true!

Inspiration is fragile and fleeting, and so you have to capitalize on it, and optimize it when you can whenever you have that chance. To simply capture it, say in a written note on a scrap of paper, or in a voice memo on your phone, usually isn’t enough for it to survive as true, earth shaking inspiration. You’ve let the moment pass, missing that window of opportunity where there was something more. You edited something which should have been allowed to run rampant for a while longer. Rampant, wild and free.

You can’t refrigerate a blue flame without smothering it.

The best possible time for inspiration to hit you, is when you have space in your life — in the day to day living of your life — to stop everything if you have to, so you can focus on that inspiration and nothing else. If it’s an idea, you can milk it for all it’s worth while your inspired thinking about it is shiny and new, fresh and still untapped of its greatest potential — however you usually get that full blown release to happen.

Some people need to talk it out, which is great, for it becomes this twofer where another person can get inspired too. Me? I have to be able to write it out, writing through a complete mindsweep until I feel mentally exhausted, but never spent, for those are the times I’m most energized and feeling like I’m on fire, and burning as hot and bright as I’ll ever burn — it’s the blue flame stuff: In most fire (because it can depend on the fuel too), the blue flame is the hottest, with the potential to tip into dazzling white fire, and it burns most efficiently.

So ask yourself this: When inspiration strikes, what do you do? Can you always do it? What must you change, from however your work atmosphere now exists, to make space in your day for your inspiration to run rampant, and for however long you need it to?

The part about making space in your day is important: KÄ“ia lā — it’s “about today, the here and now.” You can’t instruct your inspiration to only come around on weekends, or be satisfied with it only showing up once a month or so. Daily inspiration is what’s ‘Imi ola, and living your best possible life.

And have you tried to track it somehow, so you know when you’re likely to be inspired? It’s habit learning you have to incorporate into your trusted system or Strong Week Plan; you simply must. Books for example, always do it for me, somewhere within their once, twice, or third time coming.

It feels so delicious, to indulge in your inspiration!
I genuinely wish you blue flames, run rampant space, and no refrigerators.

The most unexpected triggers can inspire you.

It was this Beverly Hills.ish looking car for me a few days ago.

Sweet, sweet ride.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

Accomplishments when Lifestyle is Sweet

January 25, 2011 by Rosa Say

A short follow-up post. Within this conversation about useful skills, Shannon asked me another question:

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment up to now?

Unlike her other questions, this one was easy to respond to quickly, for I’ve often marveled at it with immense pleasure and gratitude. I answered her without hesitation:

“That my two children grew up to be such good people, and optimistic adults. They’re not perfect, but neither am I or their dad, and neither was ‘the village’ it took to raise them, but it still happened, and wow, they’re amazing.”

It’s an answer that is easily duplicated into what I consider my second greatest accomplishment: Choosing to be a manager, and treating it as a calling, so that I could be honored with serving employees too, and not just my children.

I like holding onto the thought of management as a profound responsibility, and I like feeling that managers raise employees within their OIB [‘Ohana in Business] for they do: Whether they realize it or not, bosses take over where parents and teachers have released their children into the world. Released them with great expectations, entrusting them with the rest of us, and with as much faith as they can muster.

And then the magic: Your profound responsibility turns into an extraordinary gift, because employees become your teachers.

This has long been a favorite quote, for I agree with him completely. Emerson is talking about ALL of us, kākou:
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’d count Managing with Aloha as my third amazingly sweet accomplishment (for all accomplishments worth listing should be crazy amazing), and I’m still working on the accomplishments I’ll one day say are my fourth, and fifth… I consider myself still learning within the ebooks I’ve begun to publish.

Thankfully, none of us need stop at just one accomplishment or two. We can satisfy our Ho‘ohana urges and callings comprehensively: I don’t think we ever reach ‘completely.’

And then there’s that concept of ‘it takes a village.’ So true, and a good thing it is, because villages encourage both sustenance and synergy. Accomplishments needn’t be solitary ones, and you can share the credit in your admiration and gratitude for the others who are involved, whether deeply, or in fleeting yet important distinctions.

Life is pretty sweet that way. I think it’s a very good way to describe one’s lifestyle, to be able to say, I’m a maker of accomplishments in concert because that is what you intend.

Villagers with their children at Cooper Center’s
Sunday Farmers Market, Volcano Village

Where these thoughts have possible roots in the archives:

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Getting “all fired up” is a Clearing

Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience

Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

Where these thoughts have possible roots in the archives:

Getting “all fired up” is a Clearing