The QLog

50/5 Challenge

I have encouraged friends, family, and clients (and some strangers) to consider crafting the following:

A. A Life List of 101 Goals that includes goals for 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, (and maybe 50) year time horizons.

B. A Purpose Statement to explain the reason one has for waking up everyday (a good starting point is to consider what you would like people to say about you...both now and 100 years after you have died).

However, a few people have told me that they have have a hard time with both of these activities. Here is an exercise that can help.

Today, you are given both "the good news" and "the bad news".

1. While having breakfast with your accountant, you discover that your net worth has suddenly increased, due to all your efforts, to $50 million dollars!

2. However, after lunch, during a routine doctor visit, you discover that you only have 5 years to live. These will be healthy years until the very last day; however, there is no cure or treatment.

This is the 50/5 Challenge. Map out how you would spend your time for the next five years. Go into detail. Do not just say "travel the world". Where would you go? Why? With who? What would you do there? What else?

If you have a problem with goal setting, this may help you gain some insight into what you really would like to try, see, experience, be, or have before you really do enter into your last five years of your life.   

100 Goals in 1000 Days

Yesterday, I started a new blog to track one hundred goals I plan to complete over the next 2.75 years. Please visit 100goalsin1000days.com to learn more about this new meme. Although this neoblog has a minimalist look currently, as it matures, the style will certainly change and I have plans to add both audio and video entries. 

My new 100 Goals in 1000 Days blog will NOT replace Qlog as it has a very different purpose. Instead, I will be maintaining both digital journals simultaneously.

What Have You Forgotten?

On March 19th, the world lost writer and visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke. You can see the farewell video that he recorded for his 90th birthday where he outlines his world-changing "three wishes" for humanity I hope they all are granted in the near future.   

Although Clarke is best well known for his science fiction novels such as Childhood’s End (which has been in print for 50-plus years and has generated over $25 million in revenue) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (plus the 1969 movie of the same name that he co-created with director Stanley Kubrick), he also wrote a technical paper that outlined the feasibility of a true global communication system in 1945 via satellites in geosynchronous orbit, a brilliant insight, some years before Sputnik. Twenty years later, Clarke wrote an interesting essay entitled "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time" about this idea as he did not patent the the concept (yet, he points out, the patent itself would have expired by the time it would become economically viable anyhow).

I decided to re-read his classic novel Rendezvous with Rama and while I was immersed within his fictional universe, I discovered a great question, a motto of one of the characters, Karl Mercer: What Have You Forgotten?

Consider your current goals, projects, and tasks. What is missing? What is hiding? What have you overlooked? Is there an assumption you need to re-think, a variable you need to re-calculate? In other words, what have you forgotten?

Behavior as a Mirror of Self

"Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I posted the above quote last week and today I'd like to explore the idea with more depth.

Behaviors, unlike thoughts, are observable to other people. Although a witness will often not understand the reasons why someone acted a certain way, they will know how someone conducted their affairs. Your behavior is measurable and can be compared and contrasted in the following ways:

1. What you said you would do (consider the saying "actions speak louder than words").
2. What your peers or competitors are doing.
3. What others have done in similar situations in the past.

Bottom Line: External acts are the main way others judge our qualities as a human being. The summation of what we do, both small and grand, becomes the public record of our life.

Fifty Year Plan

If you have completed your five year plan, I encourage to craft a 50-Year Plan! Expand your time horizon for half a century and plan out all you would like to be, do, have, learn, see, and experience.

What if you are already 80 years old? Then consider what legacies you would like to leave behind and how could you help\influence\impact your family, friends, community, or the world-at-large in fifty years from beyond the grave.

Of course, this plan is subject to change as the world changes; nevertheless, course corrections are easiest when you are already have your bearings and are heading in a single direction.

A rough outline can be completed within a few hours. A superior Fifty Year Plan will take several weeks to assemble as it will involve personal brainstorming, quite reflection, critical thinking, and strategic planning.

Five Year Plan

"We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year.  But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.”  - Peter Drucker

Successful people usually have a time horizon that spans several years. So, if you do not have a 5-year plan, I highly suggest you take an evening an map out the next few years, consider everything you would like to do, have, be, and experience. Some things are just not possible to complete within 365 days. Increase your goals list to span long-term targets that may take a few winters to accomplish.

Intensity With Direction

A layman's definition for the term velocity might be "speed with direction." What is the velocity of your life? Which way are you going and how fast?

Consider a car. If it is going in the right direction, but only traveling at 1 mile an hour, it has a low velocity. If the same auto has a high speed, like 75 miles per hour, but going in the wrong direction, it will never reach the correct destination. Both factors are important.

For human goals, the velocity of success is probably better defined as "intensity with direction" as projects require many types of effort which may or may not be 'fast'. Goals require work. This is the Law of Action.

Have you determined your direction?
Have you maximized your intensity?

Three Magic Words are...

...Write It Down!

1) Do you want increase your productivity? Write It Down. Think on paper and consider your top concerns, assumptions, questions, goals, projects, and tasks.

2) Do you want to increase your creativity? Write It Down. Record your observations, conversations, ideas, insights, answers, solutions, crazy thoughts, and wild memes.

Simple advise? Yes. Easy? No! Think of all the times you had a million dollar idea for a great book, movie, business, or project but could not recall the details later.

I do suggest keeping a daily journal as a life enhancing habit. Why? It is an excellent way to insure that you capture your thoughts on a regular and semi-systematic basis.

Stop List for 2008

Take a moment to think about habits, activities, and past times that are extremely low value. Are you watching too much TV? Would you like to stop eating fast food? Perhaps you take coffee breaks at work that are longer and more frequent than they should be, and thereby impacting your overall productivity?

I suggest you set aside 30 minutes tomorrow to consider all of the bad behaviors that waste your time or which are undesirable. Write them down and then create a Stop List. This is a 'NOT to do' list. Review the list and rank each item (no ties). Then pick the top three entries as these are the most pressing time waster which you would like to eliminate from your life.

For the next 28 days, focus on removing the first item on your list and ONLY the first item on your list. If you relapse into the activity, start over. Experts agree that the learning process to remove a habit takes at minimum 21 days. I suggest a full four weeks as that will insure you are ready.

Once you have eliminated the first item from your life, it is time to move to the second item on the list. After a full 28 days of successfully removing that second habit, you can move on the third item on the list.

After all three have been vanquished, you may begin at step one to re-create a new Stop List.

Fear vs. F.E.A.R.

Fear is a legitimate emotion and it seems to be part of the human condition as a survival mechanism. Most importantly, it help protect children as it constrains many behaviors that could prove hazardous or fatal at a young age.

Nevertheless, many fears are really F.E.A.R or False Evidence Appearing Real. F.E.A.R holds people from achieving their absolute best. Often, it helps maintain 'the good' instead of promoting 'the great'. F.E.A.R. keeps many people doing average things in a mediocre way for years without growing beyond their status quo.

Five common examples are:

• Fear of failing
• Fear of looking foolish
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of success
• Fear of loss

Instead, embrace the mantra of the late productivity expert Dr. W. Edwards Deming: Drive Out Fear!

How? Below is a simple 7-step techniques to focus on the real problem and determine the best next action instead of being controlled by fear.

1. State the problem, situation, or opportunity as clearly as possible. Clarity is key. Write it down and include who, where, when, why, what, and how.

2. Review the data as you presented them for possible biases. Be as objective as possible. Determine which facts are really assumptions and personal interruptions.

3. Play Devil's Advocate. Is everyone in agreement on the above facts? What would an opponent claim? What is the opposite hypothesis and how might this point of view be correct? Be honest with this exercise.

4. Restate the REAL problem, situation, or opportunity as a question.

5. Create a list of potential solutions with a mindstorm, including both outrageous answers and conventional methods. Be creative and open to new ideas. Do not stop until you have at least 20 items on your list.

6. Review the list critically, considering variables such as cost, time, effort, and complexity. Pick the best two option on the list. One will be your primary course of action. The other will be your plan B.

7. Act today. Begin working on the solution to your fear now.