Quit! To be more effective

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• Five reasons why urgency beats lying on a beanbag

• Be crisp and stop the waffle

• Quit! To be more effective

• Forest bathing for less stress

• Emperor Marcus Aurelius as a career counsellor

ON YOUR CAREER

Five reasons why urgency beats lying on a beanbag

Thinking hard helps focus our action. But we must act. Here are five reasons why acting with urgency is needed in our careers:

1. Most people have a planning fallacy, or optimism bias, where they underestimate how long projects take.

2. Positive, urgent action gives us momentum, confidence, and a sense of mission.

3. Our positive, urgent action galvanizes the confidence and support of others.

4. We can be faster to test, fail, and pivot when we work with urgency.

5. Competitors can beat us if they are more urgent than us.

COMMUNICATION

Be crisp and stop the waffle

Last night I attended a four-hour-long industry event. The meal was good and the company at my table excellent. Several speakers addressed us in-turn from the stage. The best speaker was succinct and landed each of his points. He was crisp. The worst speaker was self-indulgent, under-prepared, and failed to connect with the audience. He waffled.

We show respect to our audience when we are efficient with their time. We show them empathy when we spare them long-winded, boring presentations. Less is usually more. Powerpoint or Canva slides are often crammed with too many points. Emails too wordy. Speeches too long. Communication is more powerful when we prepare and edit.

PRODUCTIVITY

Quit! To be more effective

Tenacity is usually an admirable trait. Sometimes, our tenacity can be counter-productive when the rational act is to quit.

Dr Annie Duke is a venture capitalist, cognitive scientist, and former poker champion. She identified that professional poker players are more willing to quit their losing hand of cards than amateurs. In Duke’s book Quit, she explains quitting is integral to success. This applies to fund managers exiting a losing investment, salespeople abandoning non-buyers, and coders quitting a failing app.

The Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, found that people are biased against locking in a loss. This can lead to us escalating our commitment of time or money to a losing project. Duke also found that most of us are terrible at quitting.

A growth mindset includes accepting our failures. When we quit an unproductive project, we free our energy to pursue better projects.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Forest bathing for less stress

Shinrin-yoku is a Japanese expression that means forest bathing. Spending time in nature has been shown to decrease our blood pressure, lower cortisol, and increase our immune system. Nature elevates our mood.

Weekends are ideal time to spend several hours ‘bathing’ in nature. But even in a busy work week, in a built-up city, there are opportunities to walk in the nearest park. It provides a quick reset and energizes us. More nature, less stress.

GET SMARTER

Emperor Marcus Aurelius as a career counsellor

Plato in The Republic wrote the ideal leader was a philosopher-king. Five hundred years later, the Roman Empire was led by Marcus Aurelius, who was acclaimed by many as a warrior-philosopher-king. Marcus captured his thoughts in Meditations. This book has influenced many current leaders in government, the military, and business. Three quotes from Meditations that are relevant to our careers:

If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.

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