The Power to Get Things Done
Two premises of getting things done
1. The better able you are to do things that help you achieve success, whether you feel like it or not, the more successful you will become.
2. By learning and applying follow-through concepts and strategies, you can improve your ability to turn good intentions into action.
Poor follow-through isn’t your fault
Our primitive mind seeks immediate pleasure and shuns delayed gratification. Our good intentions are not hardwired to our behavior.
Outliers who succeed may be wired differently than the rest of us. Alternatively they may have life experiences that rewired them.
How motivation really does work
The need to succeed will produce good intentions. Good intentions won’t have enough power to propel you to do something. You need a follow-through infrastructure.
I have intended to learn physics but find it really difficult to finish the thick undergraduate physics textbook, chapter by chapter. I have been putting it off for months until I realized I can just type some notes and problems from the textbook first. When I type and come across something new, I can draw and explain in my own words what it really meant.
After that I can post and sell the notes, drawings, problems and solutions on the internet. If I get really adept at this, I can also post solutions for different textbooks and reference books online. A lot of physics and mathematics textbooks provide partial solutions. Some had no solutions for physics problems. University and college students will find a textbook accompanying solution manual exactly what they need. All it takes, on my part, is just one hour of typing per day.
I have been learning French on a smartphone, using Duolingo. It is an interactive app that motivates you to play it like a game. The app allows you to repeat what the speaker has said. You can also freely translate french to english and vice versa.
It rewards you when you successfully maintain 5 days of continuous streak. It motivates you with praises and bonus marks when you do well. New levels will be unlocked once you progress good enough. Duolingo makes it addictive to learn French.
The independence you want can bring you follow-through challenges
Studies on both sides of the Atlantic indicate that more than half of new businesses will fail within their first four or five years. There is more than twenty five million small businesses in the United States and United Kingdom combined.
If you start a new business, you need to put a follow-through infrastructure in place that would provide motivations equivalent to expectations of your superior, deadlines, performance evaluations, competition, tangible and intangible rewards and punishments, so you would work on your own sustainably.
In organizations, employees are prompted, prodded, pressured and pushed to do things that they don’t feel like doing. Supportive boss who lavish praises, micromanaging supervisors, demanding boss who had exacting expectations and team pressure are in fact helping you to follow-through on work necessary to earn a living.
Having more autonomy means having less of a follow-through infrastructure. If you really want to reach success, you can’t depend on the wind. You have to learn how to row.
Walk, not wobble
Act immediately on your good intentions without waiting or procrastinating.
Just post content consistently every day or week without caring whether it would bring audience or grow subscribers. Give first, before asking people to buy your thing. Generating good content comes second to merely posting daily content.
Taking your intention seriously
Improve your follow-through ability by being more aware, conscious, deliberate, and formal about the way you produce and adopt your intentions. Be precise and explicit about your intentions.
A good intention should be a serious commitment to take a specific action.
Promising less can allow you to deliver more
Every time you prevent yourself from adopting a half-baked intention, you will strengthen your follow-through ability.
Eliminate wiggle room
Make your intentions as specific as possible. This make the intentions more effective. Instead of “learn math”, you could promise to “type problem sets for a topic and post solutions every week”. It makes you far more accountable and steps to reach your goals become much more actionable.
Use an alarm clock to prod you to do something. Use something that is capable of sending you frequent signals. Assign a motivating meaning to the signal. Every time you are prodded, you are urged to take the desired action.
Put a picture board of your Big Whys — your vision, dreams, children, clients or customers — on strategic locations in your home or office.
Cheetah catch only one out of ten gazelles they chase. But they get to dine on gazelle because they ignore the odds against them. Be like cheetah.
Ignore the odds against you. Doing more of it will tilt the odds in your favour.
How to give your intentions all the power they need
Make it feel like you had no choice but to do it.
You can write a check for $800 to a political party you dislike. Give the check to a trusted friend with instructions to mail the check unless you have successfully achieved a specific goal by a certain date. If you did not follow through, the money would be donated to a political party you find repulsive. To keep yourself from losing money and honor, you would pursue your goal for the right reason.
Take a lesson from the marketing industry
Mail-in rebates stimulate sales. A company encourages you to buy their product by promising to give you some of your money back after you make the purchase.
A company might offer a $100 rebate if you purchase a television that costs $500. To get your money back, you have to fill out a form and sent it to the company’s agent, and wait for weeks to get your check. As few as 10% of consumers would put in the effort to fill in the form to get the rebate.
We are more likely to do things that feel easy.
If you buy Genoa salami that is sliced at the store, you might think putting in the refrigerator is a good way to keep your salami addiction off your sight. But since it is sliced, you have a tendency to open the fridge and grab a slice or two. You don’t even need a knife or dish. The salami would be eaten up faster than you realized.
What can you do to curb this addiction?
Just make a point of not having the salami sliced at the store. Buy a whole chunk of salami and stock it in the fridge.
Every time when you think of eating the salami, you would need to get a knife and cutting board, and peel the sticky wrapping off the salami chunk. It is an awful lot of work. Maybe you don’t need to eat a piece of salami after all.
Make it harder to violate your intention and easier to do what you intend to do. You could easily just take an apple — which you cleverly placed next to the salami — instead.
Never rely unnecessarily on willpower
The less you feel like working on a task, the more willpower it will take for you to do it. Willpower is like physical strength. The heavier an object, the more physical strength you would need to lift it. The more dreaded you are doing a particular task, the more willpower you need to do that task.
You actually have a tool that can help you lift heavy objects with little physical strength. If you have a flat tire, you don’t have to rely on brute strength to lift your car.
With a tire jack, you can use very small physical strength to get a large result.
Rely as little as possible on willpower. Look out for ways that create levers that make you easier to do things without using willpower.
If you want to curb your addiction to smartphone — you like fiddling with it during work — you can create a lever to reduce using your smartphone for important work. Swap a smartphone with a dumb phone and a tablet. Tablet is heavier and bulkier, so you will want to leave it at home.
You can also create a lever to reduce the willpower you need to follow through on your intention to get physical exercise.
Rear a dog which likes to go out in the park running. Your dog will give you one of those looks pestering you to go out for a walk. Rain or shine, you can count on the dog to go out and get physical exercise, without relying on your willpower.
Outsmart temptation
Imagine that you are a buyer for a large variety store chain. You have the daily temptation to shop for personal items while working. You cannot quit shopping since shopping for company goods is part of your job as well.
You can make a deal with yourself to do the wrong thing as long as you do a little bit of right thing first.
You can allow yourself to shop, only after spending at least a few minutes working on a project on your to-do list.
In a similar case, you are tempted to surf the internet and browse social media for hours, forgetting that you needed to do internet research for your science assignment.
You can promise yourself to spend ten minutes first on searching for results on your assignment. When you honor your commitment to briefly work on your project, you would tend to keep working on, and the temptation now becomes tamer.
Let situations do the heavy lifting
Suppose you want to discourage people from entering a particular room. Would you:
A: Put a sign on the door saying “Do not enter.”
B: Skip the sign, but keep the door locked.
The best way to get people to conform to a rule is to make it impossible for them to break the rule.
Speed bumps on streets work better than road signs to get cars to slow down. Railfoad crossing gates work better than flashing lights to get motorists to stop.
If you want a student to stop playing basketball in class, you can just confiscate his basketball, instead of insisting again and again and again that he stops.
Situations that force people to do the right thing work better than efforts to persuade them to do the right thing.
Instead of snacking on chocolates and cookie bars, eat fruits like apples or pears that have been washed, pre-cut and kept in the fridge. Every time you open the fridge door, you could just reach out to the fruits, instead of chocolates.
Pull the “I commit” lever
If you decide to produce a weekly radio show, you have to put in commitment like signing a contract, putting some deposit and generating expectations on the part of family and friends.
When you pull the “I commit” lever, you have leveraged your willpower to the max. You place yourself in a situation that made you feel like you had no choice but to do things that lead to success even though you might fret doing it.
Gary Vee previously posted videos everyday — DailyVee ended last week on the 600th episode — and committed to it by hiring a videographer to follow him wherever he goes.
Declare to the world you are going to do it
Make a point of announcing your goals to colleagues, friends and family that you would do something by a certain date. You can make a promise that makes you feel you must keep.
You can promise your students that you are going to give them treats as soon as you get married. The very thought of having to inform your students that they won’t be getting their promised treats because you are a slacker makes you feel like you must somehow get married.
It does not sound logical. But it works anyway.
Burn your bridges behind you
Sometimes the best way to get yourself to go forward is by removing the opportunity to go backward.
Imagine you are a typical office worker. You want to make good on your intention to perform as a TED keynote speaker.
Instead of just waiting for the day you would muster up enough courage to venture way outside your comfort zone, you can book a thousand-seater conference hall for your first performance as a speaker. Booking the hall way in advance makes it easier for you to burn the bridges. Once you have paid the hall rental fee of thousand bucks, you would somehow had to go on stage to speak.
Make the consequences feel real
You want to go swimming every day before school. Instead of keeping your hair dryer at home, you put it in the swimming pool locker. If you don’t go swimming and use the hair dryer, you will go to class with a head full of messy hair.
By making it a big fuss to violate your intention, you would have to pull yourself up to go swimming every day.
Create a sense of urgency
Make a timeline for all your intentions, new year resolutions and goals. Send it to your friend every New Year. Your friend will check on you whether you have achieved your resolutions by Christmas of that year. If you do not achieve a certain goal by the end of the year, you have to give them $100.
Commit only to doing the easy part
If you are a writer, you might face writer’s block on some days. It can be frustrating to wait for inspiration since it is unreliable and sporadically appears. You can just show up in front of the writing desk every morning.
Scribble anything that comes into your mind, without editing or processing your raw ideas. Don’t throw away ideas you think is petty or trivial. Keep them in a file. When assimilated those ideas will become prompts for the next essay.
Type a few sentences on your half-formed ideas, rather than just contemplating about it. Write anything. A word is better than none.
Once you start putting your thoughts into words, and make it a habit to show up on your writing desk everyday 7am, it will turn into a self-sustaining routine that becomes easier to execute and maintain consistently.
If your creative muse does not emerge, do not force yourself to write. Just leave and come back a while later.
Buy follow-through help
Outsource everything you are no good at. You do not need to be good at everything to get things done. Get someone else to do it for you. Delegate your task to someone else who will follow through.
Join a group
Choose a group that will make you feel obligated to do the things you say you’re going to do. I always wanted to study physics since I didn’t have the chance to take physics course after my first year in university.
Last year I volunteered to teach physics to Senior 1 students, and had to learn my A-level Physics all over again. I taught my students physics in class.
My students are a community that kept prodding me to continue producing physics notes and solutions every week. They watched me grow — I watched them as well — as I learnt to explain the concepts to be more easily comprehensible. They often asked me questions after class and suggested alternative methods to solve a particular problem. We could find the fastest method to solve a problem through class discussion.
They are smart, creative, curious and hardworking students. Teaching is really a good motivation to build momentum for continuing learning.