The Sage Advice Thread

[tangerine]

^ yes, butternut squash ravioli is often served with sage brown butter sauce, delicious!

[cheapmuthafukr]

child support is like paying for an abortion every month for 18 years

[wizard4life]

build a man a fire and he'll be warm for an hour, set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

[boy better know]

life is trying things to see if they work

[equilibrium]

"never give anybody your advice, they won't follow it." - Jack Nicholson

[Wesley Pipes]

A Macks place, is in a hoz face... Church!!

[Vampyrvargfesten]

http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2009/05/two-lists-you-should-look-at-e.html

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning

by Peter Bregman | 11:00 AM May 27, 2009

I was late for my meeting with the CEO of a technology company and I was emailing him from my iPhone as I walked onto the elevator in his company's office building. I stayed focused on the screen as I rode to the sixth floor. I was still typing with my thumbs when the elevator doors opened and I walked out without looking up. Then I heard a voice behind me, "Wrong floor." I looked back at the man who was holding the door open for me to get back in; it was the CEO, a big smile on his face. He had been in the elevator with me the whole time. "Busted," he said.

The world is moving fast and it's only getting faster. So much technology. So much information. So much to understand, to think about, to react to. A friend of mine recently took a new job as the head of learning and development at a mid-sized investment bank. When she came to work her first day on the job she turned on her computer, logged in with the password they had given her, and found 385 messages already waiting for her.

So we try to speed up to match the pace of the action around us. We stay up until 3 am trying to answer all our emails. We twitter, we facebook, and we link-in. We scan news websites wanting to make sure we stay up to date on the latest updates. And we salivate each time we hear the beep or vibration of a new text message.

But that's a mistake. The speed with which information hurtles towards us is unavoidable (and it's getting worse). But trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate. Otherwise we'll get tossed around like so many particles of sand, scattered to oblivion. Never before has it been so important to be grounded and intentional and to know what's important.

Never before has it been so important to say "No." No, I'm not going to read that article. No, I'm not going to read that email. No, I'm not going to take that phone call. No, I'm not going to sit through that meeting.

It's hard to do because maybe, just maybe, that next piece of information will be the key to our success. But our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We'll exhaust ourselves. We'll get confused, nervous, and irritable. And we'll miss the CEO standing next to us in the elevator.

A study of car accidents by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute put cameras in cars to see what happens right before an accident. They found that in 80% of crashes the driver was distracted during the three seconds preceding the incident. In other words, they lost focus — dialed their cell phones, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of a sandwich, maybe checked a text — and didn't notice that something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.

The world is changing fast and if we don't stay focused on the road ahead, resisting the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting, then we increase the chances of a crash.

Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. Make two lists:

List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What's important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can't work 25/8.

List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn't make you happy? What's not important to you? What gets in the way?

Some people already have the first list. Very few have the second. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever. The leaders who will continue to thrive in the future know the answers to these questions and each time there's a demand on their attention they ask whether it will further their focus or dilute it.

Which means you shouldn't create these lists once and then put them in a drawer. These two lists are your map for each day. Review them each morning, along with your calendar, and ask: what's the plan for today? Where will I spend my time? How will it further my focus? How might I get distracted? Then find the courage to follow through, make choices, and maybe disappoint a few people.

After the CEO busted me in the elevator, he told me about the meeting he had just come from. It was a gathering of all the finalists, of which he was one, for the title of Entrepreneur of the Year. This was an important meeting for him — as it was for everyone who aspired to the title (the judges were all in attendance) — and before he entered he had made two explicit decisions: 1. To focus on the meeting itself and 2. Not to check his BlackBerry.

What amazed him was that he was the only one not glued to a mobile device. Were all the other CEOs not interested in the title? Were their businesses so dependent on them that they couldn't be away for one hour? Is either of those a smart thing to communicate to the judges?

There was only one thing that was most important in that hour and there was only one CEO whose behavior reflected that importance, who knew where to focus and what to ignore. Whether or not he eventually wins the title, he's already winning the game.

[bfan]

[jackg]

[ojsimpson]

might as well call it the "just another quote thread"

hardly any advice up in here, just shit off old snapple caps

[shinobi2000]

repped you back up oj, I think that's true -- life's too complicated for these cutesy one liners.

OK I'll bite. I think it helps to also write a bit about where you're coming from so here's advice from a 33 year old guy with a relatively settled and comfortable position in life but not one without any regrets:

When young and in school:

Try to be genuinely curious about everything and try your best to achieve some basic level of mastery in every field. Don't be one of those kids who only want to do one thing. If you're a math whiz, don't think reading about Piggy getting abused in Lord of the Flies is corny or doesn't pertain to you. Years later when you're out in the woods at the company retreat of your new firm you're going to see how learning to maneuver the power plays of group can be a real bitch. If you're into writing poems in the style of Frost, don't think it's too geeky to learn about balls bouncing with Newtonian physics. One of these days you're going to teach your son or daughter how to ride a bike based on those laws. If anything this advice will help you do well on Jeopardy. Those contestants aren't smart in anyway. They're just well read. Set a goal for yourself that by the end of your senior year in college you should be able to answer 25% of those questions and by your mid thirties you should be able to answer 40-50% of those questions.

Learn at least one foreign language.

Learn to play at least one instrument or learn how to sing. I really wish I had done that in my younger days.

If you're American, try to take trips outside of the US if possible. Or at the very least try to pay attention to the international news. The whole world knows a heck of a lot more about you than you do about them. And that's not a fact to be proud of, we should be ashamed of that.

Consolidating all of the above together -- it's good to set a path for yourself early in life, complete with goals, milestones and endpoints.

That said, the most important thing to remember when significant distractions come along to slow your or divert you from this path is this: Ask yourself, will this totally derange my path? Will this opportunity come again? If the answer to both is "no" go for it! I'm not talking about little distractions like your friends want to start up a multiplayer game and you need to study for an exam that will get you a good grade that you will need to get into a good grad school that you will need for whatever etc etc... I'm talking about something like you're almost finished with med school but a chance comes up to work in a Bangkok AIDS clinic for a year essentially delaying your degree for year adding another year of interest to your already astronomical loans...What are you going to do? Or even more cloudy of a choice: you got your first awesome job in the field for which you studied all your life with awesome pay but now you just met the girl of your dreams and you are sure you want to have babies with her but she's moving across the country...What do you do?

Oy...if I could count the number of those lost chances I let slip away...

[julzkind]

when pointing your finger at someone consider this, there will alway be 3 fingers pointing back at you.

[Dropt]

^ Am I still on the sex thread ?

[cheapmuthafukr]

the way to a womans heart is understanding and tenderness. and the clitoris. mainly the last one.

[bfan]

the most valuable resource is almost always time

[cheapmuthafukr]

cop jawns, dont let jawns cop you

[grimm tones]

That buck that bought the bottle, could've struck the lotto.

life's all about opportunities

[wurm]

That buck that bought the bottle, could've struck the lotto.

life's all about opportunities

Though I'm not a heavy drinker I'd rather have booze than a worthless piece of paper.

[grimm tones]

Though I'm not a heavy drinker I'd rather have booze than a worthless piece of paper.

say word? didn't realize winning the lottery is worthless

[mis]

[wurm]

if you're in college, try to plan your schedule out so you're not taking a lot of hard courses your last semester and instead have mostly easy, light workload ones. you will be so glad you did when the time comes. due to time constraints i couldn't do that without taking extra time, but i really wish i had a lighter workload right now. if you're like me you'll end up procrastinating more than ever, even though you have harder courses and more work to do. i actually like my majors, but i imagine it's worse for people studying something that doesn't interest them.

[sawyer]

the way to a womans heart is understanding and tenderness. and the clitoris. mainly the last one.

So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.†ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain†(i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.†Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

melville - moby dick ch. 96 - "the try-works"

http://en.wikisource...Dick/Chapter_96

Edited February 16, 2013 by sawyer