"Perfectionism is poison." 8 insights on personal effectiveness and strategies for success

Perhaps only cats and selfies. Only cats and selfies can compete in popularity with posts about personal effectiveness methods on social networks. Willy-nilly, and I sin with this genre. In this post, I have collected some of my most popular posts from recent years on personal productivity. All of them elicited some nonzero response - which means they may not be entirely hopeless.

1. The secret to success is not hard work

Recently, for some reason I have been thinking about various banal topics. Well, for example: what distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful ones.

Successful people like to say it's hard work. Not true. There is a natural limit to the amount of work a person can do in a day. You can't jump higher.

There are many people who plow from morning to night and to no avail. The cashier at Auchan in Biryulyovo is no less tired than the CEO of a California startup. And what do you think is his personal effectiveness?

As a result of the analysis of various cases - fortunately, for fifteen years in business journalism, enough material has accumulated - I got such a list.

Luck … There is always an element of luck in a major breakthrough.
Gift … If everyone spends the same amount of energy, then the one who is better adapted to this activity by nature goes ahead.
Focus … Many people start, quit, start something else. Of two equally talented people, more success comes to the one who hits the same spot.
Ambition … Again: managing one store is as hard as managing a thousand. But often people do not have enough ambition to swing a thousand.
Courage … If you have ambition, but no courage, you will remain a dreamer. Many successful people are successful primarily because they are not afraid of shit and go ahead.

Total. Luck does not depend on us. Once we have chosen our path, we follow it - and there is nothing we can do about it.

It turns out that we can work for success only in three ways: constantly raise the bar for ourselves, not be afraid of anything and not allow ourselves to doubt the main thing, hammer at one point.

2. The key resource is energy, not time

The longer you live, the more acutely you feel that the key resource for personal effectiveness is not even time, but energy. You can have a lot of good ideas, but if you don't have enough gunpowder, little will come of it.

It was not immediately possible to realize that for any tasks - mental, creative, volitional, even everyday - a person draws energy from one source.

Shopping for good pants is just as energy-depleting as working hard on a manuscript.

If everything depends on energy, then what to do to increase your personal efficiency? What methods can be used?

At first, reduce costs.

Create habits (everything done automatically burns less fuel).
Don't do something that consumes energy, but doesn't matter (see Obama's jackets, Zuckerberg's T-shirts).
Change focus (the longer you concentrate on one thing, the more energy you burn in the end).
Avoid stress, quarrels - they burn energy.
Saving - you don't have to emotionally invest in any action. Learn to be relaxed where the situation allows, to act in certain situations on autopilot.
Mentally transfer tasks from the category "must" (coercion) to the category "I want" (fulfillment of desires).

Secondly, it is necessary replenish stocks.

Catching a wave, inspiration, courage - all this greatly fills with energy. As a rule, for this you need to set yourself some interesting tasks, for this people and throw themselves all sorts of challenges.
Form the right circle of friends (there are people who inspire heroic deeds, and there are those who kill the last will to live).
To a certain extent - go in for sports (but if you overdo it, the effect may be the opposite).
The Jews were not fools that they came up with Shabbat - you need to specially allocate time for yourself to recharge, forbidding you to work.

Something like this.

3. No need to buy anything

It is worth buying something only if absolutely necessary. Because any acquisition entails a chain of encumbrances and reduces personal effectiveness. Let's say you bought a cool computer mouse made by Apple. And she also needs a rug. And also batteries. Well, in order not to spend money on batteries - batteries. And to the batteries - a charger.

Or I bought a watch, mechanical, rare. So start every day. And once every six months or a year, if you please, buy a new strap to replace the worn one. And then you knock again - you have to trudge to the workshop. And finding a workshop nowadays is not so easy, because wherever it says "Watch repair", usually only straps and batteries are changed.

Or wireless headphones. There is a wire to them. Charge every day. But sometimes - at the most inopportune moment - they still sit down. It means that there are still need for backup, wired ones in the bag. That is, taking, for example, a backpack instead of a bag, do not forget to shift both. And then back. Phew, phew … But you can also do without. In the end, I think this: it is better not to take risks and not buy anything at all.

4. Plan two steps ahead

He invented a method of increasing personal efficiency, ingenious in its simplicity, and, in general, getting everything you want from life.

At every moment in time, you need to have a plan two steps ahead. Like "now I will do this, and then I will do that." Well, when you do “that”, “that” becomes “this”, and something else comes in the place of “that”.

I call this walking with low beam. I came to the conclusion that for me this is the most effective system of self-management. Why?

The situation is changing all the time, planning the whole day is simply pointless. But it is also impossible not to have any plan.

If you know what you will do next, you do not fall into a stupor. The risks of wrong decisions are reduced.

The mood is also changeable. The task must match the energy level. At 9 am you cannot predict your mood at 6 pm, but you can predict your energy level two steps ahead and choose the right task quite accurately.

At the same time, planning the second step at once gives sufficient distance not to succumb to the mood entirely, helps to see the perspective, to correctly prioritize.

And often you have to do something, but you don't want to do it. Then you plan something simpler for the first step, heavier for the second. Performing the easy gives confidence and inspires the difficult.

Everything is fine, only periodically you need to remember to turn on the high beam to check if you are going there at all.

5. Why put off important things for later

Each life hack has its own counter-life hack.

Here are many smart people write that in order to achieve maximum personal efficiency, you need to devote the beginning of your working day not to urgent matters, but to important ones. Like, every normal person has some cherished ideas that all the time have to be postponed until later under the pressure of circumstances. Many great people achieve extraordinary results because they always do what they need first, and not what others need.

It seems reasonable to me. With books, this is often the only way it works. (Because a book is such a thing that you always want to postpone for later. There is always something much more urgent. But the book will wait. Hand over the manuscript in a year, not earlier.)

However, I also noticed the opposite thing. Sometimes it's helpful to put off something cherished until the very end of the day.

At the end of the day, strength is running out - and it is simply unthinkable to force yourself to do some obligatory, but not inspiring routine. When you try to squeeze out another hour of productivity, the body simply turns off.

But he, the infection, magically cheers up if you invite him to do something pleasant for him. For the sake of the cherished cause, the scoundrel turns out to be capable of one more small leap.

6. Why evening news is better than morning news

Life, forgive the sinner, hack.

I am an experienced news junkie. And I am constantly looking for ways, if not to get rid of the addiction completely, then at least to keep it under control. Otherwise, it is simply impossible to increase personal efficiency.

Started an experiment last week. I forbade myself to read the news until 19:00. That is, I switched from the model of consumption of the "morning newspaper" to the "evening" one.

This means that I am reporting the results.

During the day, so much free time was freed up that sometimes you don't even know what to do. Increased energy.

Previously, the day began with plunging into some kind of another horror (as you know, they have no other news for us). It took a lot of time and energy to emerge. That is, it turned out to be some kind of nonsense: it is stupid to waste time on something that does not depend on you, and not do because of this what you can change (or make it worse because of wasted energy).

But you cannot completely disconnect from the news. This is not an option. Exit - "evening newspaper".

In the evening there is not much time left to worry. Things are done. It somehow gives strength. You still worry a couple of hours - and sleep. And overnight you completely reboot. It's not so scary in the morning.

Plus, by skipping a day of news, you're missing out on a lot of unnecessary crap at the same time. Someone declares something, then refutes, then adds, then clarifies, and then it turns out that nothing happened at all. Instead of wasting your life on this fuss, in the evening you get acquainted with the resume - and that's it.

In short, I intend to continue.

7. Perfectionism is a poison

Here I realized that the main thing for achieving personal effectiveness is to burn out the desire for perfection in myself with a red-hot iron. Especially if you want to do something worthwhile in life.

This is only at first glance, perfectionism - a good alternative to indifference. In fact, he is no better.

Having worked with a number of extremely confused perfectionists, I can say for sure that their results are always worse than what could be achieved under the given circumstances.

Actually, perfectionism gets in the way: it forces you to improve what is already good (and thereby spoil everything or just waste time), work on details that don't really change anything, and, most importantly, constantly doubt yourself.

Perfectionism is poison.

It is worth admitting the thought that perfection is permissible, and perhaps even approaching it in some way, like - bam! - some dastardly imperfection will immediately come out. And it will itch. And torment. And to reduce this very efficiency.

I did a kind of decent job - but somewhere something is not as it was imagined, and now the joy, it seems, is not the same. I wanted everything to be perfect! So that the mosquito does not undermine the nose.

I bought a kind of cool thing, chose for a long time, consulted, overpaid - and it is good for everyone, but if it were not for one trifle, it would be generally superb. But for some reason, it soon begins to seem that it's all about the little things. Already the rest is not happy, and you only think about this nonsense.

In general, all this is the path to eternal torment.

So now my main motto is good enough. I try to reject perfectionism and embrace a new faith. After all, in order to be happy, everything - work, things, circumstances - should not be ideal, but simply good enough.

No more.

8. The same method may or may not work

One very cool businessman - one of those whose fortunes are calculated by a certain American magazine - once told me this thing: most people do not understand business history at all.

When they read about some well-known entrepreneurs, they think they should repeat after them. If Jobs, Walton, or Schultz did this or that, then this is the path to success.

But there are no rules in business. The situation never repeats itself. What worked for Jobs would not have worked for Schultz. What was relevant in 1991, in 1992 it would have been stupid.

Moreover, even the same company can use the same tool - and get completely different results. This is what makes the business interesting: you cannot write a manual for achieving success for all time. It is more art than science.

I remember that. And I think that all this applies not only to the company, but also to the person.

We all often try to come up with some universal rules and methods of personal effectiveness that should help us become more productive, more successful, and happier. But the ambush is that they simply cannot exist.

Each person is not like the other. Each has its own head and its own alignment. Moreover, each of us is constantly changing, evolving, rethinking something. Likewise, the situation is constantly changing.

Therefore, perhaps the most important thing is flexibility. The ability to constantly analyze - yourself, others, the situation. Adapt to constantly changing variables. Sample. Analyze. Try again. Do not lose heart. And move on.