Greg's Right FIT #404

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on a Momentum Lens
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on a Momentum Lens

• "I'm working so hard," they say. Yes, you are. It's the price we pay to pay the game. Another part of the game is don't confuse effort and results. One doesn't guarantee the other. 
• Resilience, or as one of my bosses used to call it, "bouncebackability", is key to momentum. It's okay to mourn a result and wallow a bit, but get back to it. Take action.
• It's hard to restart after you've been on a roll. You know the effortless feeling you had, and it may never come back. It's why even high level athletes struggle to recover from injury. It's okay to pivot. Starting over lets you start something new.
• Looking up today's sunrise I learn twilight comes in different flavors: astronomical, nautical, civil. There's an analogy in there somewhere, but it's not coming to me. It's early.

Being Human - You ran a marathon?

". . .strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”  – Jack Welch

I have a friend with seemingly boundless energy. It's infectious. One holiday season I introduced him to another high energy friend and by the end of the evening it was decided we were going to run a marathon. 

At the time I could barely jog around the park without stopping (3 miles) but it seemed like a fun adventure. We trained, we chafed, and we all finished no worse for the wear. When I told people about my experience running a marathon the typical response was, you ran a marathon? 

I wasn't offended. I don't look like a marathoner. I wasn't known for running, and I may have been a little bored at the time. 

The lesson I took from running the marathon lied in the training. To go from relatively stagnant to maintaining 4 straight hours of activity takes planning. We started with the end date, marathon day, and worked back to where we were today. The first week required 30 minutes of run/walking three times. Three months later we were running 10 miles in 110 minutes. Three months after that we ran 18 miles, the longest training run before tapering down to marathon day. The day of, we joined 30,000 like-minded souls and ran through the streets of Chicago for four-plus hours. 

It started with the vision, we set the goal, we calibrated the goal to where we were at the moment, then we worked back from the goal to make a plan, like "the week before the marathon, we'll need to rest a bit, the week before that, we'll need to taper for the rest week, the week before that we'll need to run 18-20 miles. . ." and so on. All the way back to week one, starting the day after the holiday party. Trying to run/walk for thirty minutes, three times. 

I tell this story a lot this time of year. It helps orient clients for strategy and planning sessions. (strategy is its own session, planning is another) Agree on the vision, set a target, compare it to today, agree on the value of the difference, then step back from the target planning the next year/quarter/month/week. Finally, leave in copious wiggle room for when conditions change. 

It's a process, not an event. 

Random Stuff

"When life hands you lemons, make whisky sours.”
― W. C. Fields

We had a nice visit with a dear friend last weekend. We haven't seen one another in the flesh for the better part of a decade and a lot of catching up happened. 

One of the challenges with catching up is picking out the events to tell the story. There's not enough time to go through all the bits that make up a lived experience. The hardest part was describing the kids. In the last decade-ish the kids have gone from teens to young adults. They are full-fledged people in their own right and I got to wondering if how close my description of my child comes to their descriptions of themselves. I mean, how would you describe yourself to another?

The default is to resort to recent anecdotes. Recency bias. If you had some success in the prior week, things are going well. If you've struggled, things could be better. Neither snapshot is accurate, but who has time to watch the movie?

I mean, just because I'm about to harvest one nearly perfect lemon outside of growing zones 9-11 doesn't mean I'm a master gardener.