I reflect back on my time at Reed College, where I first became acutely aware of my fear of being wrong and eventually (finally!) learned to get over it.  In my post Don’t Believe Everything you Read in a Book, I talk about the shock and horror I experienced when a Biology professor told us to cross out text on–and even tear out (my gosh!)–the pages from our book.  You mean everything you read in a book isn’t right?  No, it’s not.  My classes at Reed frequently pushed me to think outside of right and wrong answers.  We didn’t have definitive textbooks.  There were no multiple choice tests.  In fact, the way that most of my classes approached learning was to assign five or six conflicting articles or books and then ask us to “discuss.”  More often than not, there was no right answer.

It took me about two and a half years to realize that the way I’d been taught to learn (looking for the right answer) wasn’t working for me at Reed.  All the symptoms were there: I was afraid to speak in class; I had more questions than answers; I was confused by the students who quickly offered definitive statements.  But it wasn’t until a professor said to me, “You know, Erin, if you don’t speak in class, I assume you haven’t done your reading,” that I realized something really needed to change.  I had done my reading.  It was the speaking–and the possibility of being wrong about what I’d read–that I couldn’t get past.

My fear of being wrong was so deeply entrenched that I needed a year off from school in order to get over it.  I did a lot in that year, nannying in Lancaster, PA, Cooperstown, NY and Redwood City, CA; traveling for a month to Costa Rica and Nicaragua; coordinating an August wedding; and taking a mycology class at UVA’s Mountain Lake Biological Station. (Ironically, and as the only undergrad, I earned a grade of 100 in that class. Take that Reed’s weed-out freshman Biology course that gave me a C-!).  In all of my searching, traveling, and real-world living, I think I was digesting how to be wrong.  In order to succeed at Reed, I realized, I needed to be willing to look take risks, to speak up, to be right, wrong, and even–”stupid.”  When I returned to Reed I was resolved to attend every single class and speak at least once.  And I more or less did it.  And the more I did it, the less painful it became.  Through the process I learned that on the other side moment I said something that needed adjustment or correction was a learning opportunity (and not just for me, but for my whole class).

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” Sir Ken Robinson harangues.  Today, as I’m simultaneously working to find breakthrough marketing ideas in a saturated pipette calibration industry and coming to grips with my entrepreneurial spirit (oh, the failures! so many to look forward to), I realize that there has never been more value in being wrong than in today’s business world.  Be wrong often!  Be wrong quickly!  The sooner you figure out what doesn’t work, the closer you are to discovering what will.  What I’m describing is not revolutionary–unless you’re like the old me, paralyzed by fear of being wrong.  Thankfully, today there are whole camps of people dedicated to the practice of being wrong, to “failing forward.”  Design thinking is on the rise, software development is moving from the waterfall method to scrum or agile approaches; and in education, Montessori seems to be getting a little more attention.  We need more people who are willing to be wrong, to be creative, and to think out of the box if we’re going to solve the world’s problems.

Now that I’ve gotten this off my chest, I think I’ll go do a little math.  That’s definitely one area I could use to fail a little faster.  (If that seems like an inside joke, I’m referencing this post: Reality of the GMAT: I’m an Idiot When it Comes to Math.)

Related articles

• Lucky People by Choice: Open Minds, Strong Networks, and Spontaneity for the Win
• Don’t Believe Everything You Read in a Book, Or: Forks Over Knives gets it all Wrong
• You Are (Probably) Wrong About You
• Baby-stepping to Awesome: IterationA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) , Experimentation, and Validated…

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Quoting from Little Bets, “Learning a Little to Learn a Lot,” pp. 121-124:

To understand whether different behavioral patterns characterized lucky versus unlucky people, Wiseman performed a series of experiments on four hundred people, and summarized his findings in his book The Luck Factor.  His study sample included people from all walks of life, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-four, including secretaries, doctors, computer analysts, factory workers, and businesspeople.

Wiseman and company began by surveying people about whether they perceived themselves to be lucky or unlucky.  They found that 50 percent of the respondents considered themselves to be lucky, 36 percent felt they were neither lucky nor unlucky, while fourteen percent said they were consistently unlucky.  So, for example, a forty-two-year-old forensic scientist named Jessica exemplified someone in the “lucky” group.  “I have my dream job, two wonderful children, and a great guy whom I love very much.  It’s amazing; when I look back on my life, I realize I have been lucky in just about every area,” Jessica shared.

Meanwhile, a thirty-four-year-old care assistant named Carolyn epitomized someone in the “unlucky” group.  As Wiseman wrote, “She is accident-prone.  In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall, and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson.  She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Over the next several years, Wiseman sought out differences between these self-described “lucky” and “unlucky” people.  He performed in-depth interviews, asked people to complete diaries, and administered a battery of tests, experiments, and questionnaires.  So, for instance, in one experiment, Wiseman gave both self-described lucky and unlucky people a newspaper and asked them to count the number of photographs is contained.  He found that it took people in the unlucky group roughly two minutes to complete the task, whereas it took people in the lucky group just seconds.  “Why?”  Wiseman recounts, “Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: Stop counting.  There are forty-three photographs in this newspaper.”  The message took up half a page and the typeface was more than two inches high, nearly impossible to miss.  According to Wiseman, “It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.”  Even more, as Wiseman describes it, “For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: ‘Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.’  Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.”

As the newspaper photo counting experiment illustrates, one obvious implication from Wiseman’s research is that lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people.  It’s more nuanced than that.  Here’s where being open to meeting, interacting with, and learning from different types of people comes in.  Wiseman found that lucky people tend to be open to opportunities (or insights) that come along spontaneously, whereas unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine, fixated on certain specific outcomes.

In analyzing behavior patterns at social parties, for example, unlucky people tended to talk with the same types of people, people who are like themselves.  It’s a common phenomenon.  On the other hand, lucky people tended to be curious and open to what can come along from chance interactions.  For example, Wiseman found that the lucky people had three times greater open body language in social situations than unlucky people.  Lucky people also smiled twice as much as unlucky people, thus drawing other people and chance encounters to them.  They didn’t cross their arms or legs and pointed their bodies to other people and increased the likelihood of chance encounters by introducing variety.  Chance opportunities favored people who were open to them.

Wiseman believed another type of behavior played an even greater role in success.  Wiseman found that lucky people build and maintain what he called a strong network or luck.  He wrote:

Lucky people are effective at building secure, and long-lasting, attachments with the people they meet.  They are easy to know and most people like them.  They tend to be trusting and form close relationships with others.  As a result, they often keep in touch with a much larger number of friends and colleagues than unlucky people.  And time and again, this network or friends helps promote opportunity in their lives.

This was Wiseman’s core finding: You can create your own luck.  “I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind,” he argued.  Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people.  Extroversion, Wiseman found, pays opportunity and insight rewards.  And that makes perfect sense: Chance opportunities are a numbers game.  The more people and perspectives in your sphere of reference, the more likely good insights and opportunities will combine.”

What do you think?  Are you a lucky one?  An unlucky one?  How do you start living your life differently to create more luck and opportunity?

Related articles

• “The Luck Factor”
• Make Your Own Luck: Break Your Routine And Embrace New Experiences
• Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?
• Networking is For Go-Getters
  

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START WITH YOURSELF

Like communication itself, knowing yourself takes work.  What do you value?  How do you relate to people?  What makes you tick?   What motivates you?  Are you an introvert or an extrovert?  What is your role within your organization?  How much influence do you have, and how do you wield it?  What are your strengths and weaknesses?  Self-study can be effective for people who are good at regular introspection, but anyone of us can benefit from using a tool or two.  Consider a test like The DiSC Profile, TAIS, or Myers Briggs–or picking up a book like The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas.  Any or all of these tools could be helpful in getting a better sense for your personality and preferred communication style(s).

NOW THINK OF THE OTHER(S)

Seek first to understand, then to be understood. -Stephen Covey

Who’s your audience?  Is it an individual?  A group of individuals?  Why are they going to give you their attention?  What’s their interest in your discussion, presentation, query, or supplication?  What do they value?  What are they motivated by?  Is it relationships?  Money?  Success?  Education?  How does this individual or group make decisions?  Study them.  And just like you’ll be helped by using a few tests or books to better understand yourself, these same tools can provide you with the broad (or specific) categories you’ll need to better understand your audience.

TAILOR YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE

The secret of effective persuasion comes in knowing the heart of the person you wish to persuade and ordering your words to fit. -Han Fei Tzu

Tailoring your message to your audience means speaking to their values, motivations, and interests.  For instance, if you’ve come to understand that your sales people are motivated by money, and only money, then you’ll tie the behavioral changes you’d like to see to their comp plan.  You won’t appeal to the authority that taking on a new territory will impart.  If your audience is motivated by relationships, then you’ll position your request that they take on more responsibility as an opportunity to keep, make, or improve relationships.  You won’t appeal to making money, gaining authority, or rising to the call of duty.

AN EXAMPLE OF TAILORED EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

I’ve always had trouble communicating with my CFO.  Why? Because we value different things, are motivated by different things, and have much different communication styles.  He’s a classic detail and data-driven person.  He speaks in numbers, percentages, and what the office lovingly refers to as “DOS speak.”  Everything he says seems to shorthand or written in some kind of code.  By contrast, I value vision, accomplishment, bench-marked progress, influence, eloquence, and getting things done.  I don’t like to be bothered by too many details.  When I wanted to ask for a marketing budget increase, my temptation was to lean on the things that I valued. While I’m sure that I could have given a very moving and heart-felt speech on the possibilities that an increased budget would unfold for the company (pointing, of course, to past successes), this approach would have fallen on deaf ears.  My CFO does not care about possibilities or the vision that I have for my department.  He cares about data.  Numbers.  And so I spent a week preparing a 14-page report of charts and graphs.  I detailed industry standards and demonstrated positive correlations between increases in marketing spend and annual revenue growth.  I backed my positive correlations with detailed reports on the ROI of past marketing campaigns; and I took it one step further and and prepared ROI predictions for future activities should my budget increase be approved.  And guess what?  It was approved.  That’s because I spoke to my CFO in a language he could understand.  I appealed to his values.  We understood each other.  And agreed.

SO SIMPLE.  AND YET SO HARD.

Breaking effective communication down into three steps–Know yourself, know your audience, and tailor your message–makes it seem simple.  In some ways it is.  In other ways, it’s not.  Like communication itself, any one of these steps can be challenging.  Like most things, I expect to be working on effective communication for the entirety of my life.  How do you practice effective communication?  Have there been tools along the way that have helped you to understand yourself, your audience, or the communication process that have improved your ability to reach either understanding or agreement?  What steps will you take to be a more effective communicator?

Related articles

• The art of communicating
• Wrestling with communication?
• Communication at the Expansion Stage: Tappers and Listeners

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I’ll never forget the moment that I was taught to think outside of the published word.  I was sitting in a freshman biology class at Reed College and the professor told us to open up our biology textbook and turn to a specific page.  “See that bottom right paragraph?” he asked us. “Cross it off. That’s no longer true.” Then: “Turn to page 187,” he said, “and I want you to tear out the next two pages. Tear it out,” he said, “it’s wrong.” I was shocked. Horrified. This is a book! I wanted to protest.  Tear it out!?  I had stupidly (oh, to be 19 years old) assumed that if it had been published in a book it was accurate and true.  Right?  WRONG.

My issue with Forks Over Knives?  They take a reductionist and outdated view on animal products.  This book prescribes to the same misguided logic that proclaims that you’re better off eating a KFC Double-Down than a single egg.   What?  They both assume that dietary cholesterol increases blood cholesterol levels and therefore eating cholesterol-containing foods causes heart disease.  The problem with this?  Dietary cholesterol only contributes a tiny amount to your blood cholesterol–about 70 percent of your cholesterol is actually made by your liver.  If your body isn’t busy producing too much of its own cholesterol, then eating cholesterol really isn’t a problem.  (If you’d like a great guide to cholesterol, check on Mark Sisson’s Definitive Guide to Cholesterol.)

The world used to be flat, people! Well, not really, but it might as well have been for all the people who believed that it was.

To bring this back to Forks Over Knives, what I do appreciate about this book is that it encourages us to think about the foods that we’re putting into our bodies.  It attributes most disease to diet.  I agree.  I absolutely agree.  But I’m not so sure that they’re right that a vegan diet is the best way to go.  Forks Over Knives vilifies processed foods (I agree) and then lumps in animal food products, too.  I’ve got a problem with this.  Why? Because, for instance, they relied upon studies that fed casein (a protein in dairy products) to rats to explore whether or not protein is bad.  This is a seriously flawed study.  Many people are allergic to dairy and have serious problems with casein, much like at least 1 in 133 of us have trouble with gluten.  Casein causing health problems is not the same thing as a steak causing health problems, or egg yolks causing problems, or clarified butter causing problems.  All their study showed is that feeding a diet of 70% casein to rats caused health problems in rats.  Forget protein in people in general.

My takeaway?  Think for yourself.  Consider the number of conflicting studies you’ve seen in your lifetime and take each subsequent study you see with a (huge) grain of salt.  And where diet is concerned, consider a self study to see what really works for you.  And a note on that: You have to eliminate any given food for about 21-30 days until you’ll know if it adversely affects you.  You’ll also have to test each food individually so that you can be sure that you understand what food specifically is causing problems.  If you want a little structure to help you explore diet and its effect on your health, the Whole30 from Whole9 Life is a great place to start.

UPDATE: Turns out this post is timely.  Now, another study comes out: Egg Yolks Almost as Bad as Smoking.  See Mark Sisson’s smart response here; but to summarize, the study was conducted by three scientists, two of whom have ties to the statin industry (conflict of interest?); and the study failed to take confounders such as waist circumference, age, smoking, blood pressure, stress, etc.  into account. Correlation is not causation–and any study that uses observational data to “prove” something without isolating the factor being tested hasn’t proven anything at all.  In fact, along those lines, this study, this study, and this study all found that there was no correlation between consuming egg yolks and high cholesterol.  Now what?  (Another shout out to Reed College: My professors frequently gave us five to six conflicting articles, all citing “facts,” and then asked us to discuss.  After triggering a slight existential crisis, this method of teaching taught me to ask good questions and be critical of everything I read.)  Where egg yolks versus smoking are concerned, maybe we should be asking more questions than we should be accepting “answers,” and do a little more thinking for ourselves instead of turning to the news for diet advice.

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GIVE YOURSELF ENOUGH TIME

I’ve since learned to take setting and reaching goals a little more lightly. Last night I ran into a friend, Jim Jubelirer, who works as a business coach. He told me that he’s preparing a talk on how most people overestimate what they’re able to accomplish in one year–and underestimate what they can accomplish in five. Turns out that a long view is crucial to being able to make the most of each day, week, month, and year–and that of course we only set ourselves up for disappointment and failure if we expect that we can achieve longer term goals (or habits, like keeping a daily journal) in an inappropriately short time frame.  This is a great reminder for me as I work on applying to business school and marrying my two loves of business and food.

BE WILLING TO ADJUST COURSE AS NEEDED

Taking a deliberate and slower, more flexible approach has serious applications to business as well.  I used to want to design the perfect marketing campaign, execute it to according to plan, and call it a success because I had launched on-time and according to specs.  Metrics, I thought, could be measured later.  But let’s think about that.  So what if you design what you think is an AWESOME product and get it packaged and ready for distribution by your target date–and then it turns out that no stores want to carry it? FAIL. So what if your marketing campaign goes out on time to 10,000 people–and no one responds?  (Chalking your campaign up to “awareness building” only works for so long.) FAIL.

Embracing an iterativeA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) process in business means not only that you see your end goal and break it into little bitty bite size (accomplish-able) pieces, but that you measure your success along the way and adjust course as needed–and before you reach what you think is your ultimate goal.  In marketing, we talk about taking a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach. Seriously. The target is moving so fast these days that we’re stupid not to measure not only our progress along the way, but also the meaning and worth of that progress.  Targets change.  Eric Ries, in his (awesome book) The Lean Startup addresses the same problem and its solutions, describing the iterativeA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) process  as “Build-Measure-Learn.”

BABY-STEPPING TO AWESOME

And let’s be serious. An iterativeA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) , slow-moving, forgiving process works for smaller tasks, too. I’ve been working on “the perfect resume” for almost a year. I’m certain that it’s better now than it was a year ago; but the way that it has gotten better has only been through small changes over time.  And how did I know which changes to make?  Because I got feedback.  I learned along the way.  The best part of taking a slower approach and testing your results is not only that you usually end up with a better outcome, but that you get to enjoy the process along the way. So take it easy. Accomplish your goals in bite-sized chunks, and take the opportunity to review your progress and make sure that you’re getting where you really need to be.

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“The test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I recently had the opportunity to apply the genius of AND to a situation at work.

For very good reasons, my company has priced its services according to regional market differences.  What you buy in NJ will have a difference price than what you buy in Kansas even though they’re essentially the same service.  A valuable and long-time distribution partner has now asked us for list pricing.  Can you imagine the flurry of internal objections?  Appointed to the role of “moderator,” and tasked with participating in the tough conversations at my company in order to come up with nationwide list pricing to present to the partner, I found myself thinking: Why can’t we have standardized list pricing AND regional pricing?  We give the partner a list price that comes with a nice bulleted list of reasons that they may want to stray from list pricing, and we invite them to pick up the phone to call us if they think that any of those reasons apply to their customer in the sales situation.  We all win.

I may be oversimplifying this situation (it will still be hard to agree upon that list price), but by thinking more broadly and by assuming that two concepts can be equally possible or equally true at any given time, we can create a scenario in which we all win.  My company’s business model doesn’t have to change.  Our distribution partner can have their list price.  AND we can create new opportunities for dialogue around any given opportunity, which will most likely increase the likelihood of closing the sale AND strengthening our partnership with the distributor.  What do you think?  How can you start using AND more in your life in order to go for the win-win?

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We’ve all been brought up hearing “no.”  Don’t touch that; don’t do that; no, you can’t have that.  Likewise, we’ve been taught that wanting things is bad.  Plato writes about the tripartite soul, which consists in three “levels”: the appetitive, the rational, and the spirited.  The appetitive wants.  It desires.  The rational, guided by the spirited, must keep the appetitive in check.  Likewise, Freud writes about the id, ego, and super-ego.  The id is our most primitive self, guided by the pleasure principle; the ego (rational) and super-ego (critical) likewise keep the id in check.  Standing on the shoulders of these giants, society organizes itself around the idea that rational thought should always override desire and want.  Or should it?  What if the two ideas, in a civilized person, could actually be compatible?  What if we could reasonably and responsibly want something and state it out loud without feeling badly about it?

Let’s be clear: the rational should override the appetitive in certain instances–like wanting to punch your brother in the face when he steals your candy, or desiring a leather coat but not wanting to pay for it.  There are great social and moral reasons to keep our wants and desires in check.  We all know the difference between right and wrong–and when the line isn’t clear, rational thought should step in to help us decide whether or not to pursue a particular course of (questionable?) action.  But here’s the thing: We have also–at least in my American culture–been socialized to suppress what we want because we think wanting is bad as a basic pricinple, and that we should first and foremost take a stance of selflessness.  I postulate that when you don’t say what you want, there’s always at least one loser and usually two.  Only in saying what you want can there be a win-win.

There are a number of reasons that we don’t say what we want:

We Think Someone Else Wants Something Different

You’ve been there.  Maybe you didn’t tell your friend that you really wanted to go to the Italian restaurant because you know she loves Chinese.  So you said you wanted Chinese food to make it easier on her.

We Think That What we Want Will Disappoint

You’ve been there.  A friend of mine recently found himself in an uncomfortable position because he’d agreed to go on a golfing trip to Vegas–and then decided that given all of his recent work travel, what he really wanted was a weekend at home.  He was afraid to call to cancel his trip because he knew it would disappoint his friends.

We’re Afraid That Others Will Judge us for what we Want

You’ve been there.  To use myself as an example, I was recently at my family’s festival in Missouri (see my post on working the ticket booth).  My family has a tiny little cabin without running water and electricity.  I wanted to use some of my Hilton points to stay at a nearby hotel–but thought that my family and friends make fun of my for it and call me a princess.  I was keenly aware of how I would be judged and didn’t like it.

What You Want Isn’t in Line with Your Upbringing

This is the hardest one.  Examples are wanting a divorce when you’ve been brought up to believe that marriage is forever; being a career-seeking woman when you’ve been taught that women should maintain the house and raise the children; or taking a year off between high school and college when you’ve been taught that education is everything and that if you don’t go now you’ll never make it.  I’m sure you can think of examples from your own life where what your heart wanted was in contrast with your upbringing, or with the values you’ve been taught to embrace.

We are the Cause of our own Unhappiness

We often don’t say–or go after–what it is that we really want because we’re afraid of how others might perceive our actions.  And so we carry on in life, not really getting or going after what we want, and not really happy because we’ve constructed a reality of constraints and limitations, suppressed desires, and curbed enthusiasms.  You know what I’m talking about.  I once dated a guy who wanted to spend his weekends playing video games with me sitting by his side while he did it.  I wanted to socialize; to be out in the world doing and creating.  Thank goodness I broke that one off (and didn’t have to pursue a divorce) to start creating the life I wanted.

Basic Principles of Asking for and Pursuing What you Want

I know that the idea of asking for what you (really, truly!) want is controversial.  In trying to explain this concept, I’ve come up with some basic guiding principles:

• Your wants should pertain to yourself.  Wanting your child to be an Olympic swimmer isn’t the same thing as wanting to be an Olympic swimmer yourself.  We should only seek to control our own destiny.
• What you want shouldn’t harm someone else–in the sense that “your rights end where another’s begin.”  It is okay to disappoint someone or cause them to have to adjust or change their plans.
• The best relationships are built around the idea that both people can be happy at the same time.  People who really love each other don’t want something when they know it’s at the other’s expense.
• Be a clear communicator.  Say what you want as soon as you know you want it to avoid confusion and miscommunication.
• Saying what you want makes room for others to say and get what they want, too.  Maybe your friend didn’t want Chinese food that night afterall–but only said it sounded great because you’d lied and said you wanted Chinese food.  Oops.  Didn’t mean to create that one, did you?
• You’ll get what you want–or something even better.  Life is full of surprises.  Surely you can think of a time that you didn’t get what you wanted and it worked out for the best.  Lead with this.  Be open to being surprised and getting something even better than what you thought you wanted.
• Other people want to help you get what you want; they want you to be happy.  If they don’t, do you really want to be friends with them?
• We are all responsible for our own happiness (or unhappiness).  No one can make you happy or unhappy but yourself.  Conversely–you can’t make anyone else happy or unhappy.  We can only support–but not cause–each other’s (un)happiness.

There’s nothing more frustrating than when someone won’t tell me what they want.  I want them to be happy.  To have what they want.  If they won’t tell me what they want, I can’t help them get it.  And if they don’t want what I want, that’s okay–but I need to know so that we can start working on a win-win.  Everything is negotiable; and there’s always another way.  When I don’t get what I want, I get something even better.  I believe that, and see it play out in my life all the time.

By clearly communicating our intentions and desires with each other, we make space for each other to create a world in which each of us has our healthy wants and desires fulfilled–where we live happier, more meaningful lives.  What do you think?  Do you ask for what you want?  Why not?  Are there other reasons besides those I’ve cited above that you find yourself silent on what you want?  What’s holding you back?

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Coming back from a business trip to Boston, I noticed that my brother had been in my apartment while I was away. He usually asks permission to spend time at my place. This time he didn’t ask, but there were the telltale signs: my bed was made differently than how I’d left it; my beer was gone; there were wine glasses in my dish drying rack; and there was evidence of fast food in my trash can. I didn’t mind–he left my place in good order–but it seemed he’d had some people over. Malcolm Gladwell writes in Blink about how a stranger can more accurately describe an individual’s personality from fifteen minutes in their living space than close friends can from hundreds of interactions. (This phenomenon is called thin slicing.) It made me wonder: What had these strangers gathered about me during their visit to my apartment?

Something that stood out to me as I surveyed the kitchen trying to see myself from a stranger’s perspective was the list of goals that I have hanging on my fridge. Even though I think a degree of public accountability and a certain shout-it-from-the-roof-tops attitude is necessary to actually reaching your goals, I felt a little embarrassed. My goals are broken down into daily, weekly, monthly, annual, five-year, and 10-year goals, and include little silly things like “rise early,” “take Mo on a walk,” “socialize,” “start a family,” “get published,” and even my two-year salary and savings targets. Most people don’t want others knowing what they make or have stashed away in the bank. That’s a little personal. Am I silly to have such explicit, structured goals?

My self-consciousness around my publicly visible, written, specific goals was perfectly timed. As I stared at my list of goals on the fridge, I was in the middle of getting ready for a sales seminar and networking event in Raleigh. The topic, I would soon discover, was “the formula for success.” It was presented by Tim McGuiness–so if this is his idea, he’ll get proper credit. Success, Tim told us, is the combination of Attitude, Ability, Skills, and Knowledge + GOALS. “How many of you have written down your goals?” he asked.  About a third of us raised our hands.

Why You Should Write Down Your Goals

I’m sure you’ve heard of SMART goals. Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Suddenly I started to feel a little better about the specific, time-bound (i.e., weekly or yearly) goals I’d set for myself. They’re measurable. I know if I’ve reached them or not. Most of them are specific–and just last week I’d rewritten a few to be more specific as I’m getting clearer on my direction. This was all good news for a goal setter who has them pasted to her refrigerator.

Turns out that the Harvard (or Yale, as it is sometimes referenced) study on goal-setting is a fake. Dominican University decided to follow the fake with a real study on the matter.  What they found is that individuals who wrote their goals down, assessed the difficulty of achieving them (i.e., how realistic they were), had an accountability partner, and reported their progress on a weekly basis were the most successful in reaching their goals.  Simply having written your goals down, however, even without making a commitment to a friend, had a significant impact on the participants’ ability to reach their goals.  Thinking about your goals alone usually isn’t enough to get you across the finish line–and not having any at all goals will probably get you no where.

Do you write down your goals?  Do you know where you’re headed?  Do you know when you want to get there?  And–if you’re really serious about getting there–have you shared your goals with someone?  Even though it still feels a little like having been seen in my underwear, maybe it’s not so weird that I have my SMART goals posted on my fridge.  If nothing else, the experience has me thinking about and reassessing my commitment to them.  And what do you know?  It’s 9:47 and I’ve already crossed off three of them: rise early (6:30 on a Saturday), take Mo on a walk, and write a weekly blog post.  Today’s going to be a great day.

Related articles

• The SMART Way to Set Goals
• SMART Dreams
• Need Clarity with Your Life Goals, Create a List!
• S.M.A.R.T. Goals; Listing out your goals

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Bon Vivant picked me up and immediately started talking wine.  My driver, who is also an owner of the company, effused wine.  He wanted to know what I liked.  Reds, whites, which varietals, which regions, etc. etc. etc.  He was a wine encyclopedia.  After a stop at Chateau St. Michelle (crappy wine, cool manufacturing facility!), we stopped for a quick lunch before heading to the boutique wineries.  He promised me, based on what I’d told him about the wines I liked–and which wines I had and had not preferred at Chateau St. Michelle–that we’d go to wineries that he thought I would like, and that he’d structure our tour on a simple-to-to-more-complicated hierarchy so that I’d have time to warm up to the complexities of the wines I was tasting.  It was at lunch (The Purple Cafe) that we started talking about his business.

I expected that I would taste some wines.  That he would drive me from winery to winery and drop me off at my hotel.  I expected, based on Bon Vivant’s quick response to my inquiry, that my driver would be prompt and on-time and would deliver what he’d promised.  But in reality, I didn’t even know what his brand promiseYour brand promise is what your customers expect when they buy from you. Consistently delivered, it creates customer loyalty. A brand promise should serve to differentiate you. Also called a positioning statement or USP (unique selling proposition). was.  What would make Bon Vivant different from Evergreen Escapes outside of their quick response time?  I never expected that what I was actually going to experience was half a day with a wine expert who would help me experience a personalized wine tour at wineries that I would like.  We talked a little about what he was doing in the way of marketing and he told me that he thought they needed a better website and video.  Their website, I told him, was fine.  What they needed, I said, was a clearly visible unique selling propositionReal or perceived benefit of a good or service that serves to differentiate it from competing brands and gives the buyer a logical reason to prefer it over their other options., a brand promiseYour brand promise is what your customers expect when they buy from you. Consistently delivered, it creates customer loyalty. A brand promise should serve to differentiate you. Also called a positioning statement or USP (unique selling proposition)., a differentiatorUnique features and/or benefits of a product, or aspects of a brand, that set it apart from competing products or brands. in the marketplace.  “You offer personalized, educational wine tours!”  I told him.  “You need to say that.”  He wasn’t as good of a listener as he was a wine talker.  He still thought he needed to make a video.  Why would anyone watch your video if they don’t know what you stand for?  Doing more marketing will do very little if people don’t know why they should buy.  (For more on how your WHY is even more important than WHAT you sell, check out this great Ted Talk by Simon Sinek.)

Look at the bus in the picture above.  You see “Wine Tours” advertised, but no where does it say what makes Bon Vivant different.  One of those little bullet points on the right says “customized wine tours;” but you can’t see it, and a customized tour doesn’t mean the same thing that a personalized, educational tour does.  Customized tours pick you up a little early and drop you off late at a place of your specification, but they don’t necessarily meet you where you are on your wine experience and help you grow into a more sophisticated wine drinker like a personalized, educational tour will do for you.

I’m no expert, but every business faces the risk that they’ve become commoditizedAlmost total lack of meaningful differentiation in the marketplace. Commoditized products or services have thin margins and are sold on the basis of price and not brand. in the consumer’s mind.  If you don’t want to compete on price, make sure that your prospective customers know what makes you different.  People don’t buy features (“eight hour tour! six winery visits! air conditioned bus!”)–they buy benefits.  The benefit of my particular wine tour was that I left more knowledgeable and curious about wines than I had ever expected.  I thought I’d bought a limo driver.  Instead I got an education.

Know what makes you different.  Call it a value propositionAn analysis or statement of the combination of goods and services offered by a company to its customers in exchange for payment., a unique selling propositionReal or perceived benefit of a good or service that serves to differentiate it from competing brands and gives the buyer a logical reason to prefer it over their other options., or a differentiatorUnique features and/or benefits of a product, or aspects of a brand, that set it apart from competing products or brands.–but know it.  What’s the value you offer?  What makes you different from your competitors?  Why should your ideal customer do business with you, and you alone?  If you’re reading this post and thinking something like, “but I don’t have a business to market,” think a little more broadly.  You, as an individual, have a brand, too.  No matter how you make your money (or your friends), people experience you in a unique way and base their expectations regarding their future interactions with you based on current and past ones.  What’s your brand?  What do people expect from you?  Does it line up with how you’d like to be perceived?

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Dan Ariely, a former professor of behavioral economics at MIT and current James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, set up a study to understand people’s attitudes towards “keeping their options open.”  He put together a computer game where participants had the opportunity to click on one of three doors.  Each subsequent click inside a room corresponded with a certain payout (of real money).  The best strategy was to explore all three doors and then settle on the room with the highest payout; but iterationA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) after iterationA process for arriving at a decision or a desired result by repeating rounds of analysis or a cycle of operations, the objective of which is to bring the desired decision or result successively closer to discovery with each repetition (iteration) of the study found that the participants were so averse to “closing doors” (i.e., losing options) that they’d do anything it took to keep them all open, even at the cost of cold hard cash.  You can read more about his study here.

I think we all know what it’s like to want to keep our options open.  Students are brought up to be well-rounded.  Heck, I was.  I’ve had my own short-term debuts as an all-state soccer player, a flutist, an award-winning poet, a member of my high school student council, editor-in-chief of a student body publication, skydiver-in-search-of-certification, national honor society webmaster, astronomy club whatever–and then later in life, orchidologist, marketer, short-story writer, runner, weight-lifter, blogger, guitar-player-wannabe–and yada, yada, yada.  My experiences are so diverse that I’ve been the barn manager at a llama farm, a wedding planner, a festival ticket booth coordinator, a personal chef’s assistant, and one of the only people in the nation to get a Fredclarkeara afterdark orchid to bloom.  I think that the confusing part is that I was pretty good at a lot of it–but what Ariely’s book taught me is that if I want to be really good at anything at all (and if I want to make some money at it), it’s time to FOCUS.  I’ve got to close some of these doors.

What I care about more than anything is family, health, food, and business (and maybe in that order).  I now see writing as a tool to help me in my other endeavors rather than an endeavor upon itself.  And I’ve decided that given my goal (to make a real difference in the world by combining food and business), all the other crap really needs to fall to the wayside.  I can read Russian literature later.  Watch “The Bachelor” because I think it will help me understand young ladies my age later.  Read Vogue magazine because at one point in time I really wanted to be a fashion designer later.  Or maybe I can do those things never at all.  Understanding my true passions and goals in life has imbued me with a certain single mindedness that has allowed me to say “yes” or “no” to each potential task–and opportunity–in front of me with a decisiveness previously unexperienced.

I used to be the kind of girl who would force myself to read my magazine from front to back.  Every.  Single.  Word.  As I writer, I wanted to acquire every experience in the book so that I could understand, and therefore, write about them.  I’ve seen the world’s second largest boiling lake.  I was a waitress.  I’ve road-tripped across the nation–twice.  I’ve tasted Chinese chili peppers to know what they taste like–and cried.  I’ve been the kind of girl who said yes to everything and no to almost nothing.

What do you really care about!?  Who do you aspire to be?  How much time do you really have in this life, and how are you going to accomplish what it is that you care about more than anything if you’re a version of my old me, someone who wanted to do and experience everything because you didn’t know how to say no, how to FOCUS?  Figure out what you’re passionate about, and then close every single door that doesn’t help you get there.

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