Hard work III

Maria Das Gracas Silva Foster
The current head of Brazilian Oil Giant Petrobras spent her childhood in a favela collecting cans to pay for school. She started as an intern in 1978, but quickly became the company's first female head of field engineering.

Bloomberg reports that her tireless work ethic has earned her the nickname Caveirao, for the armored vehicles police use to clean up crime ridden Brazilian neighborhoods.

Hard Work II

Mark Cuban
When asked what people should know before starting a business, he responded:

"It's not about the idea, it's about how prepared you are. Everyone has ideas, most don't do the work required to get the job done. The 2nd thing you need to know is that sales are the most important aspect of a small business. No sales, no company."

Cuban's advice is all about being pragmatic. People toss around terms like "disruption" and "innovation," then go and make products that nobody wants to buy, or don't actually do the work required to make their idea work as a business.

When it comes to his personal success, he takes a similar tack. When asked about passion versus hard work and how he motivated himself he wrote:

"I daydreamed for motivation. I didn't lie to myself and talk about my passions and how if I was passionate enough about something i could be successful at it.

I was lucky. I grew up knowing that hard work and smart work [has] a greater impact on results than being passionate about something."

So work hard, and be prepared.

Hard Work

Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi worked the graveyard shift as a receptionist while putting herself through Yale.

Wikimedia

Now of the most powerful and well known women in business, Pepsi chief Indra Nooyi worked midnight to 5 A.M. as a receptionist to earn money while getting her masters at Yale.
In an interview for a speakers series at Pepsi, she describes coming in to work every day at 7, rarely leaving before eight, taking home bags of mail to read overnight, and wishing there were 35 hours a day in order to do more work. She did all of this while raising two young daughters.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/16-people-who-worked-incredibly-hard-to-succeed-2012-9?op=1#ixzz2GZ7VBdSD

More Productivity Tips

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-science-of-productivity-video-2012-12?utm_source=alerts&nr_email_referer=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHfjvYzr-3g&feature=player_embedded

Not sure why I couldn't put the link on the image, but anyway.  There is a simple "accountability" log that appeals to me.  Instead of "planning" or having a "to do," you turn it around and keep a log of everything you do.  Of course, deadlines feature prominently.  Intense work followed by breaks. Breaking the project down into bite sized pieces.  Lots of standard advice, but useful and pithy.

The Progress Principle

The downfall of to do's is that even when you get a tremendous amount done, you need to take credit and incorporate the success of having completed the tasks so that you change your self image as a doer.  For those of us who are self critical, this important part of the "to do" to "done" gets swept under the rug, the the inner harangue continues.  I like the following idea, so posted it in its entirety.

Leverage the Progress Principle with iDoneThis

We’ve written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win. 

In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:

1. Capture progress that may have been lost in a busy workday and celebrate the small wins.

Professor Amabile notes that even on frustrating, seemingly unproductive days, you can almost always find one thing on which you made progress. Note it. Celebrate it. “This is the best way to leverage the progress principle,” Professor Amabile says. Next stop: more awesomeness.

iDoneThis helps you see your workday through the lens of accomplishment because it asks, “What’d you get done today?” In taking a moment to reflect on this question, you make a habit out of focusing on the progress you made and your wins, however small. Writing and recording wins in your iDoneThis calendar is a quiet affirmation and celebration.

2.  Plan next steps, think things through, and overcome setbacks.

Professor Amabile also suggests using a work diary to consider the causes of setbacks you experience and create a plan of action if a similar problem rears its head again. The Progress Principle encourages learning from negative experiences and counts those valuable lessons toward your overall progress, turning negatives into net positives.

iDoneThis contributes to such positive growth, because it keeps a record of all your daily doings. You can go back into your log and see what decisions, actions and efforts led to the setback. In short, you can pinpoint where things started to go wrong. This record gives you the information to form a plan of action to resolve similar setbacks. Down the road, your iDoneThis becomes a map to which you can refer back and see how you overcame obstacles.  

3. Nurture your own personal growth and work through difficult events.

In her talk, Professor Amabile provides an example of one engineer struggling through the experience of massive layoffs at her company. While grappling with the stress of watching her team members being laid off and her own uncertainty about the future, the engineer turned to her work diary to center her thoughts. She recognized that because she had no control over her position at the company, instead she would focus on the one thing that she did have control over — her work.

iDoneThis is about you, you the captain of your work. It’s not a task-specific or project-oriented tool in that it isn’t interested in micromanaging questions like: “How far did you get on Project X today?” or “What did you do for Team Y?”  No, it asks, “What’d you get done today?”

This is a question that matters when the going gets tough. Your progress is what matters, not that of a particular endeavor. If you need to center yourself and regain control of a situation by focusing on work, iDoneThis allows you to see evidence of your control and progress. If you need to focus on your emotional and cognitive processes, iDoneThis provides an outlet for that as well.  

4. Spot patterns in your reactions and behaviors. Identify your greatest strengths and weaknesses.

In The Progress Principle, Professor Amabile recommends asking yourself at the end of each month, “Do I notice trends over time in this journal?  What are the implications?” She also describes how research participants would change their behavior based on recognizing unwarranted and unconstructive behavior patterns.

Patterns of behavior and trends are easy to spot with tools like iDoneThis.  Because iDoneThis records all your entries in an easy-to-read monthly calendar, you can see at a glance the ebb and flow of your inner work life, day to day, week to week, month to month.

iDoneThis also provides a Word Cloud, a fun way to spot trends in your entries. The Word Cloud is populated with the most commonly used words in your entries. At the moment, my most commonly used words seem to be “worked”, “idonethis”, and “gym.”  Sounds about right. 

5. Find patience.

Professor Amabile adds a bonus benefit to her list of four, noting that keeping a work diary “can help to cultivate patience.“ Why? Because you can always look back and see how you persevered and survived much worse days.

It’s especially true if you’ve kept your work diary with iDoneThis. Every day that you make an entry, you’ll see a blue check mark appear over each calendar day.  Over time, you’ll see from the number of blue checkmarks in your iDoneThis calendar that there are no unproductive days.  Even on the worst days, you achieved accomplishments worthy of note. Don’t believe it? Click on that day and see for yourself. There’s always something in each of your past days to be proud of that contributed to the successes that came later on.

It’s an honor for us to have Professor Amabile’s recommendation. It’s always been our goal to create a tool that helps people find happiness, meaning, and motivation at work through celebrating their daily progress, however incremental. 

Defense, Avertive Powers

Defense, Avertive Powers:  Eihwaz from the Book of Runes, by Ralph Blum. A reminder that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing.

Patience is the counsel Eihwaz offers: nothing hectic, no acting needy, or lusting after a desired outcome... The ability to foresee consequences before you act is a mark of the profound person. Avert anticipated difficulties through right action, this Rune is saying.  And yet even more than we are doers, we are deciders. Once the decision is clear, the doing becomes effortless, for then the universe supports and empowers our action... You are put on notice that through inconvenience and discomfort, growth is promoted.  This may well be a trying time; certainly it is a meaningful one. So set your house in order, tend to business, be clear, and wait on the Will of Heaven.

More On Risk from "brainstorm"

Risk:
To productively obsess, you must be easy with taking the risks that accompany difficult projects.  What are those risks? That choosing this obsession was a mistake. That you won't succeed. That you'll disappoint yourself (again) or that the world will disappoint you (again). Unless you're in the habit of taking such rusks automatically, so that risk-taking is not even an issue for you, you will have to train yourself to conscouly announce that you are about to risk.  You must put the idea of risk on the table and then fiercely embrace it.
...
The state of avoidance. We are not really obsessing about our idea, only about our doubts and worries.  We aren't thinking, "How does gravity work?" We;re thinking, "How can somebody with an IQ of only 135 solve such a problem?" We aren't thinking, "HHow can I use that folk melody in the third movement of my symphony?" We're thinking, "Who in her right mind would compose a symphony nowadays?" We haven't embraced the risk inherent in interesting projects, and we're secretly hoping for guarantees...

Mastery: Do the Needful

From Mastery

"By nature, we humans shrink from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult.  We bring this natural tendency to our practice of any skill. Once we grow adept at some aspect of this skill, generally one that come more easily to us, we prefer to practice this element over and over.  Our skill becomes lopsided as we avoid our weaknesses.  Knowing that in our practice we can let know our guard, since we are not being watched or under pressure to perform, we bring to this a kind of dispersed attention. We tend to also be quite conventional in our practice routines. We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for these skills.
 This is the path of amateurs.  To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice.  The principle is simple--you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice.  First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself.... Your recognize your weaknesses, precisely the elements you are not good at.  These are the aspects you give precedence to in your practice.  You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring. Second, your resist the lure of easing up on your focus.  You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two.  In devising your own routines, you become as creative as possible.  Your invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses.  Your give yourself arbitrary deadlines to meet certain standards, constantly pushing yourself past perceived limits.  In this way you develop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others..
In the end, your five hours of intense, focused work are the equivalent of ten for most people.  Soon enough you will see the results of such practice and others will marvel at the apparent ease in which you accomplish your deeds."

Pure gold.

Develop Yourself

More from Mastery:
"Eventually, you will hit upon a particular field, nich, or opportunity that suits you perfectly...This emphasis on your uniqueness and a Life's Task might seem a poetic conceit without any bearing on practial realities, but in fact it is extremely relevant to the time that we live in.  We are entering a world in which we can rely less and less upon the state, the corporation, or family or friends to help and protectus.  It is a globalized, harshly competitive environment. We must learn to develop ourselves.  At the same time, it is a world teeming with critical problems and opportunities, best solved and seized by entrepreneurs-- indivicuals or small troups who think independently, adapt quickly, and possess unique perspectives.  Your individualized, creative skills will be at a premium.

Mastery: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Making my way through "Mastery" by Greene. He, in turn quotes Emerson:

A (wo)man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to use with a certain alienated majesty.

Stoicism

Feeling the need for some philosophy after delving into the sociopathic world of "high finance" in the book "The Big Short."
So some philosophy light.

"As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught: “Where is the good? In the will. Where is the evil? In the will.”"

The Resistance

Love this photo

"The Work

Your work is to create art that changes things, ro expose your insight and humanity in such a way you’re truly indispensable.

Using resistance as a weather vane

Whenever you feel the resistance, the stall, the fear and the pull, you know you’re onto something. Wherever the resistance is coming from, that’s where you head.  The closer you get to achieving the breakthrough your genius has in mind, the stronger the wind will blow.

The resistance will help you find the things you most need to do.

The Paradox of the Safety Zone

Resistance wants you to curl up in a corner, avoid all threats, take no risks and hide

The more you hide the riskier it is. Need to make a commotion.

Lizard brain wants to keep you safe, invisible, unchanged"

Thing is, in Vipassana meditation, the teaching is to tune in to your body to determine your course of action.  So this is sort of the opposite.  Tune in to the feeling, and if it feels difficult, do it.  Hmmmm. Paradox.

Just try

Mother Theresa
"God doesn't require you succeed, he only requires that you try."

The Process of Genius

From Scientific American Mind,
Creativity as described by psychilogist Donald Campbell, emerges through a process or procedure he termed blind variation and selective retention (BSVR).  A creator must try out ideas that might fail before hitting on a breakthrough... The blindness of BVSR merely means that ideas are produced withough foresight into their eventual utility. Two common phenomnea characterize BVSR thinking:superfluity and backtracking.  Creating a variety of ideas, and returning to previous approaches after blindly goin ooff in the wrong direction.  BVSR can help us make sense of crtain quirks of the creative geniuses. Although they devote considerable time to achieving expertise, they also pursue other hobbies.  Their openess to new ideas and their breadth of interests infuse them with seemingly irrelevant stumulation that can enrich blind variations.

"As 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no on else can see."

My "Standing Desk"

Much has been written lately about the importance of standing as much as you can, or at least minimize sitting.  This prompted a visit to Ikea, but I couldn't find anything suitable for home.  So I improvized with an ironing board on blocks.  It has the advantage of being collapsible for when company is over. This barely qualifies as a home project, but posted under this label anyway...

The Power of Less: Starting Small

Like the stripes. Not my total favorite, but getting there.

Leo Babauta
Start new habits in small increments. Why?
Narrows your focus
It keeps your energy and enthusiasm going for longer
It's easier to handle
You ensure success
Gradual change is longer-lasting

Some suggestions
Waking early: start by waking fifteen inutes earlier instead of an hour or two
Productivity: start by trying to focus on the task at hand for five to ten minutes at a time
A major project: Start with just one small task from the the project, instead of trying to tackle everything at one, then go to the next small task and so on
Decluttering: STart with just one drawer instead of trying to declutter your entire office or home.

The Power of Less: Possible Goals

LOVE this study. Want.

Here are some of Leo Babauta's suggestions for goals to try to accomplish one at a time (30 days each)
1. Set your 3 Most Important Tasks each morning
2. Single task. When you work on a task, don't switch to other tasks.
3. Process your in-box to empty
4. Check e-mail just twice a day
5. Exercise five to ten minutes a day (for me an hour would be a better goal.)
6. Work while disconnected, with no distractions.
7. Follow a morning routine
8. Eat more fruits and veggies evry day.
9. Keep your desk decluttered (ha..)
10. Declutter your house 15 minutes a day (love that idea.)
11.Stick to 5 sentence limit for email. (Doesn't apply to me too much.)
(

Tips for Making Data Memorable

We offered 6 principles for making your data memorable.
1. Simplicity. Become a master at exclusion. Find the essential core of what you are presenting.
2. Unexpectedness. Keep your audience’s attention by presenting the data in a striking way.
3. Concreteness. Cut the vague corporate-speak. Use concrete language and data, examples and images.
4. Credibility. Back up your arguments with carefully-chosen numbers.
5. Emotions. Your community is a group of real people with real experiences and feelings.
6. Stories. We never forget stories. Don’t just measure relationships; describe them.
From radian6  www.radian6.com

Winners are good at losing

From Seth Godin's "linchpin"
Make your own map.  If you're following the manual instead of writing the manual, you're facing resistance.
You become a winner because you're good at losing. The hard part about losing is that you might give up. Don't.

Notebooks

Seems "writing it down" has a lot of traction among idea experts.  From Vera John-Steiner author of "Notebooks of the Mind"
Notebooks are a crucial link between inner world of mind and outer world.
You can express yourself freely in a non-linear fashion
  1 Find the best time for you, a.m. or p.m. to make notebook entries or at any time
  2. Generate first, then organize, avoid the critic!
  3. Use your notebook to record ideas at any time

3 ways of generating ideas
  Word association
   Analogical thinking  
   Fantastical storytelling 
 

Idea generation from Edward De Bono

From "6 Thinking Hats."
The process of dfining and solving problems from diverse angles
1. Maintain a notebook. (In my case, that's the easy part, it's finding it againg that's tough...)
2. Practice ideaphoria
3. Discern patterns
4. Express ideas visually
5. Explore roads not taken

Einstein

from Einstein

Curiosity
Concentration
Perseverance
Self Criticism

Reread

from Schopenhauer
"Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately."

Eat That Frog

Summary Learn to Work on the Most Important Task first
1. Set the table.  Figure out exactly what you want. Write out goals and objectives before you begin.
2. Plan in advance.  Think on paper.
3. Apply 80/20 rule.  Concentrate on top 20%
4. Consider the consequences.
5. Practice ABCDE.  Organize by value and priority so you are sure to focus on most valuable priorities.
6. Focus on key results areas.  Focus on results that you HAVE to get to do job well.
7. Practice the law of forces efficiency.  Never enough time to do everything, but always enough time to do the important things.  What are they?
8. Prepare thoroughly before you begin.  Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.
9. Improve your skills.
10. Leverage your special talents and throw whole heart into doing those.
11. Determine your key constraints.  Determine the bottle necks and choke points and focus on alleviating them.
12. Take "one oil barrel at a time."  Complete one step at atime.
13. Put pressure on yourself. Imagine you had to leave town for a month and had to get everything done.
14. Maximize your personal power.  Identify when you are most efficient and structure your day around that.
15. Motivate yourself into action.  Be your own cheerleader.  Focus on the solution, not the problem. Always be optimistic.
16.  Practice creative procrastination. Deliberately put off low value tasks so you can do the tasks that really count.
17. Do the most difficult task first. The one task that could make the most difference to your life and work and focus on it until it's complete.
18. Slice and dice the task.  Take large tasks and divide them into small components and work from there
and do one small task to get started.
19. Create large blocks of time
20. Create a sense of urgency.
21.  Single hand every task.  Work without stopping until task complete.
Practice these everyday until a habit.

Write it down

advice comes from Jane Wurwand, CEO of Dermologica via Entrepreneur:
"I try and stay curious all the time so when I’m driving around LA or whatever city I’m in I’m always trying to pay attention to everything that’s happening — the way a menu is written, the way a plate is served, the way a booking is taken or customer interaction."
Wurwand recommends carrying a notebook everywhere you go and writing literally everything down.
She says she keeps a running commentary of her stream of consciousness and then uses it when she is looking for ideas or product names. She recalls one instance when she went to a bar and it took her seven minutes to be seated because a girl working at the bar was on her phone. She wrote that down and it later reminded her to pay more attention to customer service at her own front desk operations.
“Gather thoughts a bit like a magpie, put them together in a written book, keep it on you at all times and then all the time your subconscious is working on it and chewing it. Then when you spit it out, you’re like 'Oh I like that idea!' ”

The Beauty of Lists

This is from Adam Savage, at adamsavage.com, who looks to be an uberproductive individual and has some advice on lists.  This is excerpted from WIRED.

"Lists are how I parse and amange the world.  I make lists for fun (I have more than 17,000 palindromes) and to relax (I can eliminate distractions and focus on what's important.)  But mostly I make lists for projects.  This can be daunting.  Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of your task. 

That's OK.  The project maybe the lion, but the list is your whip.

The first think I write down is whatever I hope to end up with... 

Eventually, I'll create a folder called Adam's Progress. As I chug along, I take photos with my phone and drop them into this folder for a quick reference of how far I've come.  These images provide inspiration and momentum. A list of what I've already done make the list of what's left to do a bit more manageable.  And when I'm finished, this older will be my diary of the entire project. It's something I'll keep forever.

Biz Advice

From Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce

"Be an Industry Disruptor

" My four rules are: Build a great product, build demand in any way you can, make sure you have a distribution organization to fulfill the deman, and make sure your customers are happy-and that is the first rule, bu the way. those are the four elements. Is your product better than anyone else's-is it easier, more efficinet, simpler? Can you explain to people how it's better?  Can you position it correctly in thier minds? Tha's what you're talking about-consciousness.  When you talk about disruption, a market is just a group of people.  Can you sell it, distribute it, get people to try it?  Can you get it adopted? Then if you get tha customer satisfaction, it starts all over again.

Website Tweaks

The references for webcopy are many, and not sure where this one came from.  Again from random notes on my desk that I'm plowing through.

A joke
A quote
A statistic
A headline
A name
Solutions to real problems.  Benefits not features
Happiness
An easier life
Security
Entertainment
Paint a living portrait
Get testimonials, add a P.S.
Be visually atractive, short paragraphs, dialogue when appropriate, bullet, wide margins, staggered Right margin
"Most writers slough off the most important part of their trade, editing their stuff, honing it and honing it until it gets an edge like a bullfighters killing sword."
"Cut off their heads, cut off their feet, delete every 6th word.  Readers want concise, simple writing." Elmore Leonard "I try to leave out the part people skip."
Read aloud. Read aloud yourself. Hypnotic writing has to be easy, simple and clear.
Take a break.  Cut and past and change the order.  Use bullets.  Use quotes.  Write stories, create mental images that lead to a waking trance.

The Resistance

Notes found while cleaning up my desk. Inserting this photo of Diana Vreeland, having just seen "The Eye Has to Travel" yesterday.  She was an utter force and extremely inspiring, a tonic.
 I'm pretty sure these are from Seth Godin, about the "resistance."  This is extremely pertinent to anyone who is self-employed who faces no external deadlines.  These are all paraphrased.

-You don't need more genius, you need less resistance.

-Freedom(meaning free time, no boss) feeds the resistance.  Your tasks are vague and hard to measure.  Freedom makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses.

-There is stalling, a waste, an insidious plot to keep you from doing your real work

-Get around resistance with multiple paths, and different ways to win.  No one proposal is do or die.

-The work is feeding, amplifying, and glorifying the daemon.

-Which ever way the wind of resistance is, that's the way to head in your work. (So powerful a concept...)

-The closer you get to surfacing and defeating resistance, the harder it fights.

-Dream bigger

-Strip away anything that looks productive but doesn't involve shipping

Do nothing between projects-alone with your thoughts with the resistance.

Loving What is

From "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie.

When you become a lover of what is, there are no more decisions to make.  In my life, I just wait and watch.  I know that the decision will be make in it's own time, so I let of when, where and how.  I like to say I'm a woman with no future.  When there are no decisions to make, there's no planned future.  All my decisions are made for me just as they're all made for you.  When you mentally tell yourself the story that you have something to do with it, you're attaching to an underlying belief.

I think this ties into the tension between urging and prodding yourself to act, but, also, going with the flow so that you don't get a backlash from your inner "brat" or inner "sage."  It also reflects the phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me that when I sit to meditate, tasks bubble up from somewhere, as if I were just a vessel being run by the tasks.  Fascinating.

The Positives of Pessimism

This article outlines some of the positives of being a pessimist in our society where positive thinking is thought to have almost mystical powers.  But the point that I thought was most interesting was this (the point is emboldened.)  I have found that it's a fine line between cheering yourself on and having a backlash.  Likewise, it's possible to arouse your inner brat by having a "to do" list that's too long or involved.  So I found this article to be validating in that regard.  Please click through if you want to read the whole thing.

. You undermine yourself.

A study from the University of Waterloo divided participants into two groups, those with high self-esteem and those with low self-esteem, using a scale from 0 to 35. After repeating positive affirmations like the ones above, participants with high self-esteem saw their self-esteem score rise seven points. On the flip side, the participants with low self-esteem who repeated affirmations saw their score drop seven points.

The researchers found that when people with low self-esteem repeated the affirmations, it actually sparked “resistance,” or a snarky inner voice that debated the truthfulness of those affirmations, which effectively lowered self-esteem

Read more: http://www.learnvest.com/2012/09/the-power-of-pessimism-how-negative-thinking-can-improve-your-finances/#ixzz25jPu0Yte

Follow up

So, no, not too much progress on the clean up.  And abstract still needs to be reworded to have 300 words and am at 520.  Yikes. Plus the projects are not cut out either.  So. Fail.

abstract research done

Though I woke in the middle of the night and realized that I need to completely rework the actual text of the abstract.  But it feels much more "right."  Will link when done...
And no, the desk is still a mess, and projects not cut out. Soon, soon.

still laboring

half way

more Labor

one more before photo. Yikes!! How embarrassing is that. And then my game plan to finish the abstract today.  Onward.

Labor Day Labor

So this is the chaos I have to tame this labor day.  LABOR!

Need to fully tweak the attitude to make it orderly, and in addition finish my Abstract for submission to SARS.  Next post will be a perfect work space, a complete list for my business, and abstract link.  Think I can do it??  Sure you do!!  You'll see...

Oh, and two projects cut out too.

Divergent Thinking

Or also called Brainstorming.

"Brainstorming programs are ways to stimulate people to increase the fluency, flexibility, and originality of their ideas and responses.

Produce as many ideas as possible.

Identify a key word and then try to generate as many synonyms as possible.

Have as many different ideas as possible.

Quantity is importatnt, but try to avoid redundancy.  Variety in conversation, in the selection of music, in a menu, is generally appreciated.  It pays off to learn how to alternate topics of conversation, types of restaurants, kinds of shows, ways of dressing.

Try to produce unlikely ideas

It is more difficult to learn how to think in original ways than to learn how to be fluent and flexible.  It requires cultivating a taste for quality that is not necessary in the other two.

Changing Internal Traits: Shift from openness to closure

"Perhaps them most important duality that creative persons are able to integrate is being open and receptive on the one hand, and focused and hard-driving on the other.  Good scientists, like good artists, must let their minds roam playfully or they will not discover new facts, new patterns new relationships."

To keep enjoying something you need to increase its complexity

I think I get this, but not quite sure.  In the previous paragraph, he talks about trying to get more enjoyment out of mundane activities like brushing your teeth.  I have found if I try to be more precise in mundane activities, it helps to resent them less.  But in the next segment he goes on to say that that

Generally it is more satisfying to become involved in activities that are inexhaustible--music, poetry, carpentry, computers, gardening, philosophy, or deep personal relationships.
Most domains are so complex that they cannot be exhausted in a lifetime, not even the lifetime of the human race...

Have a specific goal to look forward to

Creative individuals... believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can't wait to get started on it... Before falling asleep (you) review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting... Eventually most of the day should consist of taks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.

Again, the key to his post and the last is having that system of goals and plans so that you don't get distracted, discouraged or derailed when you have your own work to do instead of external pressures.  I've tried the card system, the calendar, lists.  I still don't have it down, but feel that I learn a bit from each system.  Just need to implement relentlessly!

Focus, don't get distracted

From the section on enhancing personal creativity,

Entropy, the force behind the famous Secon Law of Thermodynamics, applies not only to physical systems, but to the functioning of the mind as well  When there is nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state, which is randomness or confusion.... When there is not external force demaning that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus.  It falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of effort is required. When this happens, a sort of mental chaos takes over.  Unpleasant thoughts flash into awareness, forgotten regrets resurface, and we become depressed.  Then we turn on the TV...Taking refuge in passive entertainment keeps chaos temporarily at bay, but the attention it absorbs gets wasted.  On the other hand, when we learn to enjoy using our latent creative energy so that it generates its own internal force to keep concentration focused, we not only avoid dpression but also increase the complexity of our capacities to relate to the world.

Follow "sparks" of interest

From Creativity, the fourth suggestion is to explore things that cross our path that interest us, an idea, song, or (in my own case), the origin of a word.  

"We are too busy to explore the idea, song, or flower further.  Or we feel that it is non of our business.  After all, we are not thinkers, singers, or botanists, so these things lie outside our grasp.  Of course, that's nonsense.  The world is our business and we can't know which part of it is best suited to our selves, to our potentialities, unless we make a serious effort to learn about as many aspects of it as possible.

  If your take time to reflect on how best to implement these four suggestions, and then actually start putting them into effect, you should feel a stirring of possibilities under the accustomed surface of daily experiences.  It is the gathering of creative energy, the rebirth of curiosity that has been atrophied since childhood.

Acquiring Creative Energy

The last segment of "Creativity" talks about enhancing personal creativity.  There are many suggestions.  The first is to overcome obstacles to have  incommitted attention to deal with novelty.  People who are too taxed and overworked can not be expected to learn a domain.  But often the obstacles are internal.  Too much energy defending the ego, too much energy centered on selfish goals. So the sick, hungry and cold need to spend all their energy on survival, the very rick and famous devote much of their time to getting more money and fame.  So one needs to divert some attention to the world around us on its own terms.

1.  Cultivate Curiosity and Interest

   a. Try to be surprised by something every day.  Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. " Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences--the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be."

2. Try to surprise at least one person every day.  Break a routine, express an opinion, experiment with your appearance.

3. Write down each day what suprised you and how you surprised others.  Keep a diary or notes. (Darwin and other intellectuals of his time kept journals of scientific thought.)  Keep it simple and it's fun to do. (I always lose my journal or notebook. Always. Sounds so easy, "keep a notebook and jot things down." Lost.)

Then try to look for patterns.

Avoiding Distractions

Many of these categories I realize have in inherent handicap for women.  Avoiding distractions suits a "mans world" much easier than a woman's.  But no excuses.  Just do the work.

Many of the peculiarieies attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process.  Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work.  The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it,  and the easier it is to get distracted...
Many of our respondents were thankful to their spouses for providing a buffer from exactly these kinds of distractions.  This was especially true of men; the women sometimes mentioned pointedly that they also would have liked to have had a wife to spare them from worries that interfered with their concentration on work.

Word.

Idling and simmering

from Creativity

Many artists interviewed in this book agree that it is important to let problems simmer below the threshold of consciousness for a time.  From the physicist Freeman Dyson

I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don't know until afterward.  I think that it is very important to b e idle.  I mean they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative.  So I am not ashamed of being idle.

Love what you do

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

(what schools need to do) is make us learn how to learn, to whet our appetite for knowledge, to teach us the delight of doing a job well and the excitement of creativity, to teach us to love what we do, and to help us to find what we love to do.

From Betrayal of the Self by Arno Gruen

Take your time

Not sure where this idea came from.  In something I was reading, if I find it I will give credit where it is due.  But the gist of it was that one artist/artisan said that when he was working on something challenging and complex, he would pretend he was in jail.  This sounds stark, but the point was that he would pretend that he had nothing else to do, and to take his time and not feel the pressure of a "due date."  I think this echoes a concept of savoring the process instead of the outcome.  The Bhagavad Gita says the same, not to be attached to the fruits of your labors.  But the idea of disengaging the time element of a project, and "pretending you're in jail" with nothing else to do,  could be quite powerful.

Update: Found the citation.  It is from a book called "Creativity" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (famous for his work on "flow.")

Jacob Rabinow uses an interesting mental techinique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition. 

 Yeah, there a trick I pull for this.  When I have a job to do like that, where you have to do something that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail.  Don't laugh.  And if I'm in jail, time is of no consequence.  In other works, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week.  What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years.  See? This is a kind of mental trick...

Number of Failures is Irrelevant

"It doesn't matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success."

from Mark Cuban, entrepreneur

Rewards Overhaul Part II

2. Stay Engaged by setting up a system of incremental rewards.

To achieve the sustained effort required to pursue spectacular achievements, you must trick yourself into staying engaged.  To achieve the sustained effort required to pursue spectacular achievements, you must trick yourself into staying engaged.  If you cannot completely overcome your obsession with short-term rewards, you must use it to your advantage by establishing a series of near-term rewards-- they psychological equivalent of grades, paychecks, and affirmations. .. You must be crearive in developing a set of incremental rewards that represent progress in long-term pursuits.

Be Your Own Ad Agency for Motivation

When it comes to staying focused, you must be your own personal Madison Avenue advertising agency.  The same techniques that draw your attention to billboards on the highway or commercial on television can help you become more (or less) engaged by a project.  When you have a project that is tracked with a beautiful chart or an elegant sketchbook, you are more likely to focus on it.  Use your work space to induce your attention where you need it most.  You ultimately want to make yourself feel compelled to take action on the tasks pending, just a a marketer makes you feel compelled to buy something.

Trying to figure out a visual system for working with data and research results is my challenge.  Will post it when I come up with something that works. 

The Rewards Overhaul Part I

1. Unplug from the traditional rewards system.  As you shift your focus away from short-term rewards, you must be willing to go without "success" in the eyes of others.... Some entrepreneurs I've met claim to gain confidence when traditional investors doubt their ideas. Such doubt boost their confidence that they are, in  fact, innovating rather than simply replicating something commonplace.

While it can by psychologically and financially difficult to depart from the race toward conventional rewards... doing so is imperative to succeeding in the long term.  Otherwise you will struggle to sustain your long-term projects amidst the desire to be validated.

2.

Chair Finally Done

Lame, I know, but struggled with this "found" chair for way too long.  Had to memorialize it's final completion. Originally, it was an ugly duckling dark brown, with worn maroon upholstery that looked like it had been used as a theater prop.  Found it on the sidewalk.

 Why are some projects so much harder to complete?  (Like this one.) Where others seem to get done much easier than anticipated? (Recent "drapes" projects.)  A mystery.  Maybe I'll add a bonus photo of drapes.
Now I just need a way to visually capture data entry and organization to post on my research project.

Structure and Creativity

"As you glimpse these well-known writers' routines(Grisham, eg), you get a sense of the important role structure plays in creative pursuits.  While each person's schedule is different, the purpose of keeping a schedule is the same for everyone.  Living by your own creative tendencies, rationalizations and emotional whims will not suffice. Sheer perspiration will come only from organizing your energy and holding yourself accountable with some sort of routine."

Spatial Approach to Organization and Motivation

"You live in a world of choices. At any moment in time, you mustdecide what to focus on and how to use your time.  While prioritization helps you focus, your mind may still have the tendency to wander.  When it comes to productivity, this tendency often works against you.  Maeda, the teams at IDEO, and many others use visual design to organize and understand information--and to stimulate action.  As with the old adage "out of sight, out of mind", so we learn that right before our eyes actions thrive."

I struggle with this aspect of all projects.  How to keep them in the forefront and, well, real, when the projects are self propelled and long term.  If I come up with a solution I like, I'll take photos and post.  But don't hold your breath...

How to Consistently Execute

"While many of us spend too much energy searching for the next great idea, my research shows that we would be better served by developing the capacity to make ideas happen-- a capacity that endures over time."

Again, showing the emphasis on action and doing, rather than your innate gifts, or even results...

Perfection

After a paragraph illustrating the fact that a quantity of work often will lead to quality work, as well, using an example of a pottery class,  the authors say

"If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble.  Art is human, error is human; ergo, art is error."

They also stress, as in Outliers, that talent is not necessarily the key to success.  That perseverance and quantity and work can be just as key.

"They why doesn't it come ealily for me?", the answer is probably, "Because making art is hard!"  What you end up caring about is what you do, not whether the doing came hard or easy."

(I'm using these constructs as applying to science, in my own case, not just artwork.)

Work on What's in Front of You

From "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland,

"Designer Charles Eames... used to complain good-naturedly that he evoted only about 1% of his energy to conceiving a design--and the remaining 99% to holding on to it as the project ran its course...After all, your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute--but not today, not in the piece at hand.  All you can work on today is directly in front of you.  Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible."

Resiliency and Risk

 Another excerpt from the same blog post:

Today's world is full of change and unpredictable disruption. Unless you take frequent, contained risks, you are setting yourself up for a major dislocation at some point in the future. Inoculating yourself to big risks requires taking small, regular risks—it’s like doing controlled burns in a forest. By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survivable. You gain “the ability to absorb shocks gracefully.” You become resilient as you take risks and pursue opportunities.

In my profession as an MD acupuncturist, I frame the intervention of acupuncture as a series of micro shocks or micro perturbations to the body.  In giving these micro shocks, it seems to make the body studier and more resilient, better to withstand allergens or migraine triggers.  It is, of course, much more complicated than that, but the concept of resiliency is pivotal.

Risk and the Modern Brain

This is from the Tim Ferriss 4 hour work week blog.

Overestimating risks and avoiding losses is a fine strategy for surviving dangerous environments, but not for thriving in a modern career. When risks aren’t life-threatening, you have to overcome your brain’s disposition to avoid survivable risks. In fact, if you are not actively seeking and creating opportunities—which always contain an element of risk—you are actually exposing yourself to more serious risks in the long term.

It is counterintuitive, but I've read the same thing from other sources too.  We don't see the risk in standing still, or NOT innovating.  In reality, in our new modern reality, the risk/benefit calculation is not the same as it was when our brain was being wired.  So we have to counteract our "natural" inclinations.  Not an impossible task, we do it all the time, just a matter of being convinced of the benefit of it. Godin often speaks of the "lizard brain."  The part of the brain that wants you to stay where you are, safe and comfortable.  He also says that as you closer to completion of a project, the lizard brain comes out in force and tried to derail your efforts.  I have found that to be incredibly true.

Work the System

From Sam Carpenter's book, "Work the System,"  

Focus on the mechanical systems that produce the results, not the other way around, and never doubt that a superb collection of subsystems will produce a superb primary system.

What I like about this is that it leaves your outcomes somewhat in your control.  Work your systems, tighten them enough and some modicum of success will be yours.  A solace somewhat like Malcolm Gladwell's concept (maybe not his) of the "10,000 hours."  Put in your time, do your work, tighten your systems, delight your customers/clients/patients, make a product they want to buy, and let the rest take care of itself.  As Carpenter says,

Forget about making mighty home-run swings that will win the game... Instead hunder down, preserve what you have, and fo for the surefire, incremental sytsm-improvement advances: the singles and doubles... Relish the small yet permanent improvements that will add up to something big down the line.  It's the little things that add up.  

As one modern band musician said, "a fan a day."

Little Bets

From Peter Sim's book "Little Bets,"

Seasoned entrepreneurs... all do things to discover what to do... Little bets are their vehicle for discovery...

Along these lines, identifying problems before solving them is also how seasoned entrepreurs develop their ideas...

Invention and discovery emanate from being able to try seemingly wild possibilities and work in the unknown to be comfortable being wrong before being right...to play with ideas without censoring oneself or others...to have a willingess to be misunderstood, sometimes for long periods of time, despite conventional wisdom.

Take Your Ideas Seriously

More from Belsky

"Please take yourself and your creative ideas seriously.  Your ideas must be treated with respect because their importance truly does extend beyond your own interests. Every living person benefits from a world this is enriched with ideas made whole--ideas that are made to happen through your passion, commitment, self-awareness, and informed pursuit."

Creativity as a Deviant Activity

This quote is also from "Making Ideas Happen" by Belsky.  I like the mind jujitsu of seeing doubts from others as a sign that you're on the right track.

"Whether it was dropping out of college to pursue a passion, quitting a well-paying job to start a company, or declining certain opportunities that appeared golden to others-, their paths were unconventional.  As these budding creative leaders hacked their ow paths, they lost support from others.  But amidst a cacophony of discouragement from teachers and even their own families and friends, they persevered and learned to gain confidence from being questioned.  They became deviants of a sort.
Deviants are maverick-like, willing to be unpopular, misunderstood and even shunned during creative pursuits.  The vision of extraordinary achievement is, by definition, a few steps beyond consensus and conventional logic.  As such, we should become emboldened by society's doubts rather than deterred...
You must learn to gain confidence when doubted by others.  The uncharted path is the only road to something new.  As pressures mount, you need to stay the course and consider the doubts of others as an indication of your progress... Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means...