On personal improvement
I’m my own worst critic. Lately, I’ve found myself in some situations where I realize that professional enhancement is less about “what you know” or “know how to do” and it’s more about the basics. It’s wonderful to have amassed a wide range of skills in your career, whether that’s an uncanny ability to develop great software, drive traffic to websites, design compelling interfaces or simply package and market products with the best of them. But in my case, I’m reminded that all of this is worthless knowledge when you stumble on the basics. It’s a humbling experience when it happens. It’s that misunderstanding due to poor listening habits. Or it’s a process of atrocious and lazy decision making technique. From personal experience (e.g. screwing this up), I’ll posit that bad decision making is less about the actual choice you make and more about the process you used to get there. I’ve reflected on big decisions lately. I’ve found myself thinking 5% about the actual paths I’d chosen and 95% about the absolute train-wreck-of-a-process I used to arrive at a conclusion. The process was the problem. The choice was just a choice. Only time will tell whether the choice was the best choice. But no time needs to go by at all to expose a bad process. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Time to go back to elementary school. I started thinking “what do I know about the basics of decision making”? I further began to consider what other “basics” might I presume to be proficient when in fact I could brush up.
I found some interesting resources online about decision making and listening - basic things we’re forced to do each and every day to get our jobs done.
Effective decision making can be much more involved that simply relying on intuition. You can use tools to help map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the importance of individual factors, and choose the best course of action to take. For example, there’s the Pareto Analysis, the Paired Comparison Analysis, Decision Trees, Force Field Analysis and more. Who knew there were so many considered methodologies for making choices? Want to know whether a change is worth making? There’s a better alternative to flipping a coin. Try a Cost/Benefit Analysis.
Continuing on this vein of self improvement I found this great brief on listening called: 10 Ways to Become a Better Listener and Change Your Life Forever
Listening is a combination of hearing and using your brain to promote the right outcome. It involves making a point of being extra vigilant about your reactions, and extra aware of your tendencies. Avoid most big misunderstandings by listening better.
Being a bad decision maker and a bad listener negatively impacts your career and relationships with other people. Being able to write a thorough and compelling PRD, marketing plan or even lines of great code is certainly valuable stuff but stumbling on the basics can be pretty humiliating. Believe me.
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One other suggestion that we’ve found useful are some simple techniques taught in Kevin O’Connor’s book, The Map of Innovation — you can find it on Amazon here. Nothing too complex, but great reminders about ways to make decision-making/idea-generation a little more democratic and allow some of the wisdom of crowds to generate consensus/momentum. Still allows for some orders from above, but we’ve found the process really helpful.
Can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/Map-Innovation-Creating-Something-Nothing/dp/1400048311
Thanks Dave I’ll check it out! Kelly