Aim to peak at 60

October 9, 2014October 9, 2014 Eric Johnson2 Comments

I was telling a group of college students last night they should aim to peak at age 60. They stared blankly at me. I’m not sure if they were processing the thought or erasing it as ludicrous. When you’re 19, 25 seems old. And 30+ is even hard to imagine.

“But hear me out”, I said. If the decisions you make today are guided by the long game, by the intent to improve consistently over a long period of time, imagine the perspective that will offer you. Instead of attempting to rule the world by age 30, you can slow down and focus on being the best you can be in this moment. No pressure. No need to compare yourself to others and measure your worth by the fleeting and fickle whims of our culture and what “success” means superficially.

Put some blinders on and just focus on getting a little better each week. Use your 20’s to just start figuring out what it means to be an adult, to start mastering something valuable in your work life and in your quest to be fully human in your intellectual and emotional growth.

Build a solid base in your 20’s and you’ll be in a good place for the opportunities bound to come in your 30’s and 40’s and 50’s. Imagine the kind of person you hope to be when you’re 60. Live your way into that vision slowly and surely.

Hero Quest

October 8, 2014 Eric Johnson

I’m tweaking the slides for a presentation I’m giving tonight to a group of business students. This is my “HeroQuest” talk.

If I had to tweet the purpose of this talk, it would be this:

I want these college students to walk away tonight with new possibilities for the future and knowing it is in their power to craft a remarkable and meaningful life, a life worth talking about.

I welcome these speaking invitations. Preparing a talk for a group compels me to think in ways I wouldn’t otherwise have to. And the best way to understand truth or beauty or what it means to live a good life is to try to express it. Even if my talk tonight connects with no one in the audience, it’s been worthwhile to think through these ideas and try to understand them myself.

No forcing and no holding back

ImageOctober 6, 2014October 6, 2014 Eric Johnson

The elevator pitch, the tweet, and clarity of purpose

October 1, 2014October 1, 2014 Eric Johnson1 Comment

Can you pitch your idea or make your point in the length of an elevator ride? That’s been a long-standing and effective thought experiment to help determine if you’ve thought clearly enough about your plan and can articulate it simply and quickly.

So, if you’re working on a speech or a business idea or a movie script or trying to start a movement to change the world, consider the elevator test.

Imagine you’re giving a talk at a conference. A fellow attendee gets on the elevator with you and sees the “Presenter” ribbon on your name badge. He lets you know he’s tempted to escape the conference during your session and go play golf or take a nap and asks what he would miss from your talk. What would be your response? What will your talk accomplish that would be of value to this wayward golfer? What will offer him enough value to make him delay his escape and stay for your presentation?

If you can’t come up with a short simple statement of your intended purpose and one that offers something of value to the prospective audience member, you need to go back to the beginning and rethink just why it is you’re doing this presentation. Or starting a business. Or writing a screenplay. Or starting a movement.

Or, instead of an elevator pitch, my 21st-century, connected friends, consider the challenge of tweeting, in 140 characters or less, your purpose, your mission, your goal. Can you say in just a few words, within the constraints of a tweet, what you hope to accomplish? If not, get busy asking “Why?” and hone and sharpen your thinking to come up with as clear and simple a statement as you can.

Here, for example, in tweet form (and exactly 140 characters thanks to the added hashtag and a stray space, because I’m just OCD enough), is my aim for a talk I’m giving this week to a couple of college classes:

So many companies and organizations have some committee created mission statement that is either unknown and ignored or is so unwieldy as to be meaningless. What if your mission statement was tweetable and so direct and clear that everyone in the organization knew it and connected with it?

Imagine tweeting your own life’s purpose or the values and goals of your family. Not that you need to actually get on Twitter and post these things, but the effort to zero in on a crystal clear statement on the key “Why’s” in your life potentially can lead you to unparalleled clarity and action.

SpeechCraft: Showing my work

September 29, 2014 Eric Johnson

I’m speaking in a couple of college classes this week about presentation excellence. It’s a favorite topic, but it’s also especially challenging when the audience is expecting excellence by virtue of the topic alone. If you’re giving a talk about how to give talks, you better be good.

I’ve tweaked my slides on this over time. The screenshot above is of my final “light table” view when I shipped off the presentation to the grad student who will load my slides tomorrow.

I was asked to send a Powerpoint version for use in the class. I haven’t used Powerpoint actively in years. When I converted my Keynote to Powerpoint today, I had to go back and clean up format and animation errors due to the conversion. And I was reminded how poor an app Powerpoint is compared to Keynote. Powerpoint just seems like a mess. The design looks amateurish and cluttered. It certainly made me appreciate just how much I enjoy working in Keynote which is simple and clean yet filled with thoughtful, smart touches like its grid system and gorgeous animations.

I rarely say “No” to an invitation to speak. Having a speaking gig out there forces me to engage my creative mind on the search for what to say and how to say it. Few things lead me to regular flow states like getting immersed in preparation to stand in front of an audience. Even if the audience gets nothing from me, I certainly have grown a little from my attempt to engage with them.

Intense obsessions

September 12, 2014September 12, 2014 Eric Johnson

Follow what delights you, not for applause or money or validation or any external reward. You may not be able to make a living off your obsessions, but you can make your life richer and more meaningful by intensely following those pursuits that most make you come alive.

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself. Think of something that you love to do for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out. Cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”

–Anthony De Mello

ht: Emily

Image credit: invaderxan

Five C’s of leadership

September 3, 2014April 7, 2016 Eric Johnson

Kevin and Melissa, two of the university students I work with, are taking a leadership class and were assigned to ask questions about leadership. They both had this question for me: “What are the characteristics of an effective leader?”

“Effective” is subject to interpretation. Gengis Khan was effective… in conquering, destroying, and subjugating, but he was a heck of a leader, as were many violent tyrants throughout history.

For this purpose, however, let’s assume effective has a threshold of moral propiety that makes no room for obvious bad behavior or world domination.

Leadership is not a topic I’ve explored with much intention. I’ve always felt like I’ve known it when I’ve seen it, and, more commonly, been very aware where it’s lacking. As I pondered this question from my students, though, some key attributes came to mind. (And after I thought of the first couple, I couldn’t resist continuing with alliteration. Hence, five “C’s”.)

Here’s what I see or hope to see in the most honorable and effective leaders:

Clarity – Effective leaders have a clear vision of the big picture and can communicate with clarity the “why” of an organization or business or movement. “Why?” comes first, and if a leader hasn’t asked and can’t answer that question about the endeavor they’re hoping to lead, they still may be leading effectively but in a completely wrong direction.

Caring – A good leader cares deeply about the mission and the people involved and all the “how’s” and “what’s” necessary for excellence. The leader cares about even small details, about the process as much as (if not more than) the outcome. The intrinsic rewards of a job well done, of creating something of value and quality, outweigh any extrinsic rewards.

Competence – Mastery inspires confidence. We will follow someone who is clearly competent in their abilities, who knows their stuff. Teammates will rally around someone who is committed to excellence and demonstrates extraordinary competence, even if that person has not been entrusted with any official leadership role.

Character – The authentic person of integrity, who treats everyone with fairness and is impeccable with their actions, that person is a leader I want to follow. A leader of character will be wholly themselves regardless of the circumstances or the people around them. And trust is the most valuable asset an effective leader has to offer.

Compassion – A leader I admire is one who is kind and compassionate and who treats everyone with respect regardless of position or title. She is quick to forgive, eager to reconcile, and open to listening to and understanding even, or especially, divergent viewpoints.

My favorite description of a master leader comes from the Tao te Ching, one of the most profound books of wisdom:

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

You don’t need to be offered a promotion or run for office to be a leader. Be the CEO of your cubicle or your desk. Lead yourself. Act like you are who you want to be and embody the attributes that lead to an excellent life well lived.

Mesmerized by routine

September 2, 2014 Eric Johnson

Mason Currey’s fascinating book, Daily Rituals, is filled with details of how prolifically creative people structure their days. Here’s the opening paragraph on novelist Haruki Murakami’s daily rituals:

When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

A repetitive daily routine seems monotonous, but consistently flipping the switch on a work mode will eventually let the muse know you are in it for the long haul. And the muse will be expected to show up, too. The sameness can lull your inner critic, that voice of caution that kills your creative fight. Mesmerized by routine, you can summon more consistently the creative force that may never otherwise appear randomly.

Style + substance

September 1, 2014 Eric Johnson

Form AND function. Both should be remarkable. Quality content can get lost in poor delivery. Details matter. Presentation matters.

I love how Apple cares as much about the package design as they do about the hardware and software engineering of their products.

Tweaking the details of a design often leads to new insights in the content for me. And if I care enough about the content, I want to present it as beautifully as I can.

Herschel: Train hard, be hard to beat

August 30, 2014August 30, 2014 Eric Johnson

Herschel Walker won the Heisman Trophy during my freshman year at UGA. He had already been a phenom and was the talk of the college football world from his very first game. I was in awe of him at the time and still am. He remains a freak of an athlete even in his 50s.

In the early 1980s Herschel was the this soft-spoken, humble kid from rural Georgia who was an athletic outlier among athletic outliers. So fast and so strong. He seemed so much better than any other player on the field, and I can attest to the thrill of watching him take over games and put a charge into 80,000 spectators.

He says that he was an overweight kid who got bullied by others and was just an afterthought on his school team. When he asked his coach how to get better, the coach said, “Do pushups and sit-ups and sprints.” So, Herschel did just that. And then some.

He loved watching TV, and every time a commercial came on he would do pushups until the show came back on. The next commercials would have him switch to sit-ups. He would do thousands of reps every night, and he would go in his yard and race his sister, who went on to be a track star at UGA.

And that’s all he did. He didn’t lift weights and work with a trainer. Just pushups, sit-ups, and sprints. Over and over and over. And he became the athlete we now know.

Clearly he’s got good genes, but they wouldn’t have been realized without his relentless, obsessive work ethic.

How strong would you be if you did a thousand pushups a day? What price are we willing to pay in effort and discomfort, even pain, to get really good at something?

Herschel is still doing a crazy number of pushups every day. He’s still working on being awesome.

What routines do I need to pursue with Herschel’s level of obsessiveness? What hard things should I take on so that I might be hard to beat?

Choose your tyrant

August 29, 2014August 29, 2014 Eric Johnson

Be tough on yourself. Enforce self-discipline and sacrifice and embrace adversity and rule over your actions so you can be more likely to avoid having anyone else rule your life. Choose your tyrant.

Not quite enough time

August 28, 2014August 28, 2014 Eric Johnson

Few things focus the mind like a short deadline on a big plan. If there’s no external pressure, make up a deadline to keep from dragging your feet on a dream.

Make excellence a habit

August 26, 2014August 26, 2014 Eric Johnson1 Comment

What do you do repeatedly, consistently, every day? Is that who you want to be?

Make excellence a habit. Determine the actions that are most meaningful to you. Writing? Speaking? Reading? Art? Service? Work skills? Giving quality attention to your family and friends? Taking care of your health?

Whatever you want to master, make a habit out of the skills required. In the short term, repeated action may have little to show for the effort. But it’s the long game that matters. Patience and consistency will eventually sneak up on excellence.

Do the thing you want to do with intention. Build routines around it. Craft your habits and inch your way to a remarkable life.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. –Anthony Trollope

Get out of bed and go to work

August 25, 2014August 25, 2014 Eric Johnson

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
—But it’s nicer here.…
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
—But we have to sleep sometime.…
Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.

From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Digital AND analog

August 20, 2014 Eric Johnson

This talk by master penman Jake Weidmann about the dying art of penmanship is fascinating:

Weidmann’s talk makes me care about penmanship. He’s got a great stage presence and makes a somewhat obscure topic something worth talking about.

I have terrible penmanship. I’m left-handed and struggled as a kid trying to use a fountain pen. My gnarled death grip on the pen would have me smudging the wet ink with my hand. I remember being frustrated and a bit embarrassed about my sloppy writing. The only average grades I ever got were in 5th grade for handwriting. (Most schools today don’t even teach, much less grade, handwriting.)

So, I later took to a keyboard with enthusiasm and became a decent typist. To get in to the journalism school in college I actually had to either pass a typing test or take a typing class. I passed the test and can write pretty fast with a computer keyboard. (I think the journalism school not only dropped the typing test a year or two after I graduated in 1986, but probably even shipped out all the typewriters soon after as they made room for computers.)

Now, I find myself resistant to writing anything more than a few sentences by hand. I’ll use my phone or iPad or computer keyboard when possible. They’re convenient and fast and guarantee a neat, legible, electronic copy of what I write.

However, I do switch to thinking through some ideas by sketching out mind maps on my whiteboard and on the big notepad on my desk. I’ve got a clear separation between the digital and analog work spaces in my office. It’s nice to change gears and brainstorm with a marker in hand then turn back to the computer to input and polish and tweak.

The analog side of my work space (My family came in this afternoon and added their own touches to my work. My daughters cannot resist writing and drawing on the whiteboard.)

This talk about penmanship is a good challenge to care more about how well and how often I write by hand. Maybe I’ve been holding a pen all wrong all my life. My wife has lovely handwriting and is meticulous and careful about making her writing just right. She should have a font named after her.

I don’t think you need to ditch your handy digital tools. We don’t have to choose sides. You can use both. And if you’re lost in the distractions of your electronic life, try grabbing a pencil or some colorful markers and a big sheet of paper or massive whiteboard. They’re all just tools. Use them to bring out your best.

Hustle

August 19, 2014August 19, 2014 Eric Johnson

I was clicking through interesting links last night and tunneled my way through the internet to this great Art of Manliness post: The World Belongs to Those Who Hustle. It’s worth reading if you need a kick in the pants to get going or feel you are lacking in talent. Talent is overrated.

Excellence is yours if you’re willing to put in the effort. In fact, the odds of doing something extraordinary are in your favor because most people are content with ordinary, with safe and secure but not remarkable.

There’s actually more competition for average than there is for awesome, because awesome takes effort and persistence and courage. And only the few will choose that path.

No excuse will suffice if the only thing keeping you from being the person you dream to be is your commitment to hustle.

*The quotation above could very well be misattributed to Lincoln. Not sure if the word “hustle” had this connotation in the mid-19th century. But the sentiment of this thought certainly seems to fit what we know of Lincoln’s character and his rise to prominence from a poor, illiterate family.

Slow down and do it right

August 18, 2014August 18, 2014 Eric Johnson

Daring Fireball linked to this article by a former Apple design leader, Mark Kawano. Deadlines are a big deal inside Apple. They never publicize far in advance when they are releasing a product, but internally they are driven by deadlines.

BUT, if their product is not satisfactory by the deadline, they don’t just ship it anyway. They are not opposed to moving deadlines to better serve the creation of a product that meets their high standards.

Many tech start-ups especially seem to prefer the opposite approach. Just ship something and then iterate to make it better later. But as a customer or user, I don’t want a half-baked product. I don’t want to be a beta tester providing useful feedback for the next iteration.

Kawano refers to Facebook beginning to change their approach to product development:

Take Facebook, which recently killed its famous internal mantra: “Move fast and break things.”

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told a crowd of developers earlier this year that he had made a decision to kill the motto after learning that speed does not equal success. “What we realized over time is that it wasn’t helping us to move faster, because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn’t improving our speed,” Zuckerberg said.

Instead, Zuckerberg said, Facebook was going to slow down and do it right.

Having a due date will force action. Circle a date on the calendar you plan to have something done. Make an appointment with your team or friend or spouse to show them your creation on that date. Then, if it’s not good enough, set another deadline to perfect it.

Set a deadline. Take action. But slow down and do it right.

“Details matter. It’s worth waiting to get it right.”
-Steve Jobs

How to put on socks

August 14, 2014 Eric Johnson2 Comments

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden began the first practice of every preseason with a lesson in how to put on socks.

He carefully demonstrated the proper technique while the new freshmen on the team were watching and likely thinking, “Why is coach doing this? I’ve been putting on socks all my life…”

Wooden went on to explain that if the players aren’t mindful in smoothing out the creases and wrinkles in the socks before they put their shoes on, they will be more prone to blisters as they begin training. And blisters will prevent them from practicing at their best.

Small things matter. Details determine outcomes. Wooden was a master of details, charting each practice session meticulously and knowing each player’s practice stats as well as their game stats. His leadership and his tightly organized system, of course, led to an unprecedented ten national championships.

One of Coach Wooden’s mantras was “Be quick, but never hurry.” Be efficient, but don’t be sloppy. If you hurry or are sloppy putting on your socks or doing other small things, you will be less likely to be awesome in the big things.

If you’re leading others, don’t assume they’ve got the basics down. Revisit them regularly. Be relentless in emphasizing the whys, but don’t skimp on the hows.

Strive to be impeccable in all that you do. Care enough to be awesome in the tiny, routine habits that will affect the quality of each day.

AP Photo

Chris Hadfield: “Don’t let life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.”

August 12, 2014 Eric Johnson

Everyone’s favorite Canadian Astronaut, Chris Hadfield, has written a really good book, The Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. He tells the improbable story of how a kid from Canada grew up dreaming of going to space and ended up as the most well known astronaut of his era. The book is filled with lessons he learned on his quest but that are relevant to those of us who will only be astronauts in our imagination. Hadfield has been a prominent and relatable voice for space exploration and science education. And he just seems like such a good guy.

ZenPencils created a great illustration of this response from Hadfield in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything”, which he did while orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station:

Decide in your heart of hearts what really excites and challenges you, and start moving your life in that direction. Every decision you make, from what you eat to what you do with your time tonight, turns you into who you are tomorrow, and the day after that. Look at who you want to be, and start sculpting yourself into that person. You may not get exactly where you thought you’d be, but you will be doing things that suit you in a profession you believe in. Don’t let life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become. –Chris Hadfield

Act like you are who you want to be. Do the things that the ideal version of you would do. Live the life you have imagined.

The best things

August 11, 2014 Eric Johnson

Steve Jobs once was asked which product he was most proud of. He said it was not the Mac or the iPhone, it was Apple, the company. He hoped to leave a legacy with the company and its culture that outlived him and any single product. So far, so good.

How did he plan to keep that going, even after he was gone? There’s an article in the New York Times about Apple’s secretive training program for employees that is designed to perpetuate Apple’s philosophy and culture and continue their run of success.

Culture is everything for an organization. A great company or non-profit or family, even, has to be intentional about connecting its people with what it considers its essential values and principles, and doing it continually and effectively. Don’t take anything for granted about what your people know about your whys and hows. Be relentless in telling the story of what made your organization what it is, but also in searching for opportunities to grow and rethink and shed what no longer resonates. Keep skating to where the puck is going, not where it is.

And consider this quote from Jobs in the article:

“Expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.” –Steve Jobs

That’s good advice for all of us. Seek out the best of what’s around (DMB reference for the win). Read the best writing and see the best movies. The classics are classics because their quality stands the test of time. Follow those at the top of your field. Be a connoisseur of quality in the things you surround yourself with. Appreciate the grace of great things and use those things to bring out the best in you.

Excellent Journey

Category: work