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...

Possibility Never Disappoints

Kierkegaard

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.  Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.

Making Ideas Happen

From the book, Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, in his chapter on "Self Leadership," (maybe a better name for this blog?) he quotes Weinreich (entrepreneur) and says

"he believes that entrepreneurs should just try "to stay in the fifth inning forever"--meaning they should focus more on incremental progress than on the need to win.  The big win is likely far off in the distance, many iterations and ideas away from the current state of the project.  This practice of perseverance is consistent with the notion of short-circuiting your reward system.  Weinreich calls it the "process of willful delusion."  You must somehow stay engaged with incremental progress and maintain momentum even if you find your self staying in the same inning--making repeated attempts at the same idea."

I can really relate to that quote since I've been working on the same idea for a decade now and just can't seem to give up on it.