Create an Enemy

I'm currently starting a business. At times it's tough to find the motivation to work nights, weekends, midnights, etc. for no pay to create something nobody thinks will be successful (except for you, of course).

One thing that really helps me, however, is to have an enemy. It sparks the sharp, aggressive mindset needed to destroy your opposition - and to start companies.

So create an enemy. Then do all you can to kill him. :)

Emotional Inertia

A seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that I discovered while on my mission in Veracruz, Mexico, is that of emotional inertia. Usually I experienced this when dealing with contacts, where we would talk to people in the streets, on buses, or anywhere else we happened to be. Sometimes I just didn't want to make any contacts. It took effort. It slowed us down. My resistance to making the mental change in direction needed to start making contacts was strong.

What I learned, however, is that I could use that inertia to my benefit. Once I got moving in any direction - whether that was making contacts, or, in my current situation, doing homework - it was easy to maintain emotional commitment to those actions. Once I convinced myself to do that first contact, the rest came very easily. That's because I had forced a mental change of direction and was now cruising along in contact mode. The real challenge, then, lies in acceleration. A change in direction, whether that be from stationary to movement, or changing the direction of actions already in motion.

I've found that some actions take an ENORMOUS amount of effort to get moving. Once I'm moving on them, though, maintaining the movement is easy. Inertia!

So, the takeaway is this: if you need to do something that you don't want to do, just get it moving, and as soon as you do, you'll likely want to keep moving on it. Accelerate.

-Tw3nty

Interesting Findings

• Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker published a study in Psychological Science in which they presented some research subjects with evidence that undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were forced to confront the counterevidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.

• Physical contact improves team performance. For the journal Emotion, Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang and Dacher Keltner measured how frequently members of N.B.A. teams touched each other. Teams that touched each other frequently early in the 2008-2009 season did better than teams that touched less frequently, even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations and early season performance.

• Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

• We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees’ initiatives.

• Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance.

• People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.

• Would you rather date someone who dumped his or her last partner or someone who was the dumpee? For an article in Evolutionary Psychology, Christine Stanik, Robert Kurzban and Phoebe Ellsworth found that men will give a woman a lower rating when they learn that she dumped her last boyfriend, perhaps fearing they will be next. But women rated men more highly when they learned that they had done the dumping, perhaps seeing it as a sign of desirability.

Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others

In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning -- and the most important gift we can give others.

Mushrooms = Plastic?!

The 1st Follower Makes a Leader

Purpose! Why?!

Punch through the board

Punch through the board - focus on a point past it - and you'll smash right through your target.

Laws of Domination

1. Identify single objective of each action
2. Feedback - what did we do well, and what can we improve?

Sales Qualifying Questions

1. Timeframe: When do you have to have a solution on board?
2. Requirements: What does your ideal solution look like?
3. Business/Consequences: Tell me a little about your business, how the solution will positively affect your bottom line, and describe the consequences of not moving forward with it.
4. Scope: How many people/departments/lines of business will need this solution?
5. Decision Tree: How does the decision process work for getting the solution on board?
6. Budget: Is the solution budgeted? If not, what is the process for establishing a budget?

Source: http://www.alextrain.com/inside-sales-telesales-tips-blog/bid/7969/Increase-sales-through-improved-Daily-Call-Metrics

Persuasion

Successful Persuasion and Leadership
Dr. John Daly

Successful leaders are great persuaders. Now there’s been thousands of years of research on persuasion. One strand of that research gives us a model of successful persuasion. What do we do if we need to persuade somebody to adopt our proposal?

Step number one, always create a need. The secret of good persuasion is a need. You know, the truth is when things are doing fine, no one wants to change, but if there’s enough pain, there will be change. So good persuaders always create initially a sense of pain in decision makers. You want people on the edge of their seat saying, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?” That’s creating the need.

Then you offer your plan or your proposal. Now one of the biggest mistakes most of us make is we present a plan, a proposal before we create the need and surprisingly, we get rejected. You see this every day. In a meeting somebody says, “Well, I want us to do this.” And people respond back, “We don’t have the time. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the people for it.” What you should do is, as I said before, get everyone on the edge of their seats saying, “We are so screwed.” And then you offer your proposal. People will listen more when they perceive a need. First step, create a need, second, offer a proposal.

Thirdly, show people there are benefits to what you’re proposing. People want benefits. They want to see they're getting something out of what you’re proposing for themselves. Now two things to remember about benefits. Number one, people want short term benefits more than they want long term benefits. I’ll give you fifty dollars today or a hundred dollars six months from now. “Give me the fifty,” you say. People always want short term benefits. So when you’re presenting anything, give people some immediate reward.

Secondly, you’ve got to figure out what their reward is, not what your reward is. In the persuasion research, we call it the WIIFT question. What’s in it for them? People always want to know what they’re going to be getting out of it. But the mistake a lot of persuaders make is they assume that what excites them will certainly excite everyone else. Not true. Successful persuaders systematically figure out each person, each decision maker’s WIIFT. What is it they really want out of that proposal?

By the way, another mistake is we assume every decision maker in the room has the same WIIFT. If you have more than one child, you are sometimes amazed they came from the same genetic pool. If you have a brother or a sister, you may wonder sometimes how can you be related. Everyone has different WIIFTs. They all want different things out of an idea. The root word of customer is not cus, it’s custom. So what you’ve got to do is show benefits for each decision maker in the room.

Final thing, and this is relatively recent research, people fear regret more than they get excited by opportunity. We’re more hesitant about losing out on things than we’re excited about gaining things. Losing a hundred dollars feels more painful than the joy of gaining a hundred dollars. If you have children, you know what I’m talking about. Suppose you have a five or six year old daughter. You and your spouse are talking. “What should we do for a holiday?” You say, “Well, I think we ought to go to Newfoundland, Gander. It’s really cool up there, even in the summer time.” Your spouse says, “What about Disney?” You say, “I don’t want to go to Disney. It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s the summer time.” But then your spouse says, “Yeah, but if our daughter doesn’t go this year, she’ll be too old to enjoy it next year.” Disney parking lots are filled with hundreds of thousands of people who really don’t want to be there. But they understand if they miss out, they’ll miss out on a memory that they won’t be able to get it again. There is with any proposal, not only a benefit, but there’s a cost for not investing. So a wise persuader always alludes to what happens if we don’t adopt my proposal.

Little Guys

Steppin on leprechauns.

...

Don't chase competitors, chase customers.

What do you like to do?

People don't like doing things. People like being good at doing things.

And what do you do? I save the world.

I once spent two years saving the world. That time was the most rewarding and enjoyable time of my life to this point, despite the fact that it was also the most difficult. I put forth more mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional effort during that time than I ever had before or have since, and as a result grew and achieved more than I thought possible. It felt like I was living life 20 times faster than I had before, and I probably did learn and grow more in those two years than I would have in 40 years of "normal" life.

It's now been two years since the end of that journey, and I've had a bit of time to reflect on the differences between my life as a superhero saving the world and my life as a normal civilian going to school, dating girls, and working.

My big problem upon retiring as a superhero is that no cause seemed worthy enough to dedicate the same kind of effort to it that I did to my job of saving the world. A thought that often crossed my mind when working is, "does this really matter?" Let's be honest - making spreadsheets in Excel or performing internal audits to ensure that your office actually has as many printers as they think they do isn't inherently inspiring. In fact, I'd say it's inherently mind-numbing to the point that you start wondering if monkeys could be trained to do your job.

However, contrasting my work saving the world and my work making spreadsheets has helped me dissect the drivers behind high-powered motivation. How do you get people, including yourself, to be superheros in their respective jobs? How do you muster the kind of internal motivation that will inspire us to work harder and smarter than anyone knew we could?

No one likes to be lazy, or disengaged, or inefficient. People want to push themselves. We want to create change. We want to save the world.

Apply it!

The real work, then, lies in understanding how a job saves the world. What need does it fill? Why does it really matter?

For example, I started a small business selling niche daily planners about two years ago. They're made of paper, are spiral bound, and provide a place for you to write stuff down. I was and am extremely dedicated to the product and have given the business more of my time and effort than it's worth in monetary terms. In fact, I was probably working at less than $2.00 an hour while building it. But I believe in it. I can see how it saves the world, so I continue to put time and effort into it (and continue to make almost nothing for it).

How do my planners save the world? The mission of the company is to help returning missionaries keep up the good habits they learn during their service, namely goal setting and planning. Those skills are necessary to living a life of high engagement, and a life of high engagement is a very rewarding one. I want to prevent these returning missionaries from slipping out of the habits that make them so potent as they serve. I see it as a literal matter of life and death. The high level of engagement they achieve on missions cannot survive when they return home without continued goal setting and planning. If they stop doing those things, their potent lifestyle dies. Simple as that. And that's how my work in the planner business saves the world.

Whatever the job is, if people are paying you for it, you're saving someone's world. Figure out how your work saves the world, why it really matters, and become a superhero. You'll love the lifestyle.

Here are some questions to ask yourself or others to help figure out why what you do matters:

• What do people use my product/service for?
• Why do they do that?
• Why do they do that?
• Why do they do that?

Keep going until you find something that means something to you, then get out and save the world.

Purpose