Time Management By Andy Stanley

Here's a great section from Andy Stanley's book The Best Question Ever on time management:

Real Sports with Bryan Gumbel: Nebraska Women's Bowling

I randomly caught an episode of Real Sports with Bryan Gumbel featuring the Nebraska women's bowling team and their coach, Bill Straub. The program has won 10 NCAA National Championships since 1991. Here's a trailer for the episode:

I'm struck by how much consistency exists amongst successful athletic programs across all sports -- and even more broadly, successful organizations in any arena. Again and again: there's no secret sauce, just small things done well, over and over and over again. 

My Favorite Lines: Champions By Daniel Chambliss

Below are a few of my favorite lines from Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmer by Daniel Chambliss. You can find all my notes HERE.

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“They become champions by doing what needs to be done, by doing everything right, by concentrating on all the silly details that others overlook. What makes them champions is the knowledge -- and action following from that knowledge -- that champions are only real people, not gods, and that all it takes to be a champion is to do what champions do.” - p. 14

“The difference, what makes Schubert and a few others remarkable, is not their knowledge, not something that could be learned from a book, symposium, or clinic, but simply their willingness to do
what is necessary. All the ‘little’ things Schubert began in his first summer at Mission mattered.” - p. 32

“He attracted others who wanted to become great and were willing to pay the price.” - p. 37

“Going to the beach is fine, but if you want to be on this team, you have to come to practice. You see
these guys? They want to be national champions, and as a team we want to be national champions. If you want to be one, you can train with us. If you don’t, you can train somewhere else.” - p. 61

“I just came here to get more guts.” - p. 69

“This is an ‘heroic’ conceit -- a literary device, basically -- and it actually does a terrible injustice to the athletes, for the heroic conceit mystifies excellence, removing it from the routines of daily life where it must, each day, be lived; it looks back over years and years of small events and tries to explain them in a quick phrase: ‘a career of excellence,’ ‘incredible dedication,’ ‘the will to win.’ So it fails, finally to do justice to the drab routine of athletic training, and it presents dedication, too, as a gift -- as something that one day you just ‘have’ (like ‘talent’). In fact, world-class athletes get to the top level by making a thousand little decisions every morning and night. If you make the right choice on each of these -- decide to get up and go to practice, decide to work hard today, decide to volunteer to do an extra event to help you team -- then others will say you ‘have’ dedication. But it is only the doing of those little things, all taken together, that makes dedication. Great swimmers aren’t made in the long run; they are made every day.” - p. 94

“Hard training was the key to success; if the preparation was right, the performance would follow.” - p. 114

“There was no room for being ‘cool,’ for staying even a little bit detached.” - p. 172

“[Meagher] had become excellent, she believed, by doing fairly ordinary things consistently and with care. She was better than most swimmers, she thought, because she worked hard and enjoyed it … and because of a whole series of mundane habits she had developed over the years.” - p. 200

“Doing is the only thing that counts. The truth is simple: Most swimmers choose everyday not to do the little things. They choose, in effect, not to win. They say, ‘I could do this workout if I wanted to’ … In some sense, everyone ‘could’ win the Olympic Games, but ‘could’ doesn’t count. The gold medal is reserved for those who do.” - p. 215

High Standards By Jeff Bezos

Below is an excerpt from Jeff Bezos' annual letter to Amazon shareholders. It's very good.

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Intrinsic or Teachable?

First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though
exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter.

Universal or Domain Specific?
Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors).

Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or non-existent, and certainly not world class. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.

Recognition and Scope
What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.

Let me give you two examples. One is a sort of toy illustration but it makes the point clearly, and another is a real one that comes up at Amazon all the time.

Perfect Handstands
A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be – something this coach understood well.

Six-Page Narratives
We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Skill
Beyond recognizing the standard and having realistic expectations on scope, how about skill? Surely to write a world class memo, you have to be an extremely skilled writer? Is it another required element? In my view, not so much, at least not for the individual in the context of teams. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos – the memo is from the whole team.)

Benefits of High Standards
Building a culture of high standards is well worth the effort, and there are many benefits. Naturally and most obviously, you’re going to build better products and services for customers – this would be reason enough! Perhaps a little less obvious: people are drawn to high standards – they help with recruiting and retention. More subtle: a culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of what it means to be a professional.

And finally, high standards are fun! Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back.

So, the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope. For us, these work at all levels of detail. Everything from writing memos to whole new, clean-sheet business initiatives. We hope they help you too.

The Transformative Power Of Accumulation (UNCOMMEN)

I wrote this post for a friend who helps with UNCOMMEN.org.

UNCOMMEN exists to encourage men to be better leaders, husbands and dads by equipping individuals and organizations with inspiring and educational resources. Our vision is to help men succeed at being the man they were always meant to be.

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I'm not free thinker. I prefer reading what others have to say, organizing ideas and making connections. So this post isn't as much original writing as it is highlights from a few books (and one video) that have inspired me.

I particularly like reading about people who are good at what they do. One of the most fascinating things about high performers is how much consistency exists across disciplines. High performers in sports, business, the military and every other field are all the same. Their big secret is there is no big secret; they are regular people who choose to do small things well, day after day, year after year, all pointed in the same direction.

Below are sections from three books that have contributed to the way I understand excellence (or greatness or success):

Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers by Daniel Chambliss
Daniel Chambliss wrote Champions after observing the practice habits of Olympic swimmers ahead of the 1988 Olympic Games. A year later, he wrote a follow-up article called "The Mundanity of Excellence." Both are awesome.

They become champions by doing what needs to be done, by doing everything right, by concentrating on all the silly details that others overlook. What makes them champions is the knowledge—and the action following from that knowledge—that champions are only real people, not gods, and that all it takes to be a champion is to do what champions do.

The ‘big secret’ that all the visitors around the world came looking for was—that there is no ‘big secret.’ There is only the will to swim for miles and miles, all the turns done correctly, all the strokes done legally, all the practices attended, all the weights lifted, and all the sprints pushed to the point of exhaustion, day after day for years and years.

This is a ‘heroic’ conceit—a literary device, basically—and it actually does a terrible injustice to the athletes, for the heroic conceit mystifies excellence, removing it from the routines of daily life where it must, each day, be lived; it looks back over years and years of small events and tries to explain them in a quick phrase: ‘a career of excellence,’ ‘incredible dedication,’ ‘the will to win.’ So it fails, finally, to do justice to the drab routine of athletic training, and it presents dedication, too, as a gift—as something that one day you just ‘have’ (like ‘talent’). In fact, world-class athletes get to the top level by making a thousand little decisions every morning and night. If you make the right choice on each of these—decide to get up and go to practice, decide to work hard today, decide to volunteer to do an extra event to help your team—then others will say you ‘have’ dedication. But it is only the doing of those little things, all taken together, that makes dedication. Great swimmers aren’t made in the long run; they are made every day. 

Doing is the only thing that counts. The truth is simple: most swimmers choose everyday not to do the little things. They choose, in effect, not to win. They say, ‘I could do this workout if I wanted to.' In some sense, everyone ‘could’ win the Olympic Games, but ‘could’ doesn’t count. The gold medal is reserved for those who do.

Good to Great by Jim Collins
Good to Great examines key differences between great and mediocre companies. Defining the Flywheel Effect, author Jim Collins looks at the incredible effort required to rotate a 5,000 pound flywheel. He writes:

Now suppose someone came along and asked, 'What was the one big push that caused this thing to go so fast?' You wouldn't be able to answer; it’s just a nonsensical question. Was it the first push? The second? The fifth? The hundredth? No! It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction. Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel. The flywheel image captures the overall feel of what it was like inside the companies as they went from good to great. No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.

Resilience by Eric Greitens
Resilience is a collection of letters written by former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens to another former SEAL plagued by depression, alcoholism and debilitating lack of purpose. The quotes below are from a chapter called "Habits":

The direction of a person’s life is shaped not by a single turning point, but by thousands of days, each filled with small, unspectacular decisions and small, unremarkable acts that make us who we are.

For most people engaged in pursuits of excellence, we are not dealing with a single important day of decision. We are instead dealing with days and weeks and months and years of accumulated effort, consistent practice, and wise habit formation.

Steph Curry: A Case Study
Steph Curry is a great model of what these authors are describing. Once overlooked by every major college basketball program in the country, Curry is now the best shooter in the NBA and winner of back-to-back MVP awards. Trainer Alan Stein offers great insight into Curry's transformation:

In the video, Stein describes Curry as the least recognized player at Kobe Bryant's Nike Skills Camp. But because of Curry's work habits, Stein labels him the most impressive. Here's what Stein observed:

Thirty minutes before every single workout, most players were still in their flip-flops and had on their headphones, and Stephen Curry had already started doing some form shooting. He had already started taking game shots from games spots at game speed. By the time the workout officially started, he had probably already made 100, 150 shots and was in a full sweat. When the workout actually started, he was meticulous with everything that he did. He made sure that he had perfect footwork. He made sure that he had perfect shooting form. If he did anything and it wasn’t perfect, he did it over again.

He continues:

The moral of that story is that success is not an accident. Success is actually a choice. And Steph Curry is one of the best shooters on the planet today because he has made the choice to create great habits. And my question to you is: are the habits that you have today on par with the dreams that you have for tomorrow? That’s something that you need to ask yourself every single day. Because whatever you do on a regular basis today will determine where you will be tomorrow.

The Challenge
If Chambliss, Collins, Greitens and Stein (and countless others) are to be believed, excellence is simple. But if excellence is simple, why is excellence so UNCOMMEN? The answer: excellence costs. Legendary West Point football coach Red Blaik, a mentor of Vince Lombardi's, preached to his teams: "anything is ours provided we are willing to pay the price." If you want to achieve excellence—at work, at home, in your faith, in your relationships—you can. But don’t be fooled, you must pay the price. The price of excellence is the price of building good habits. The habits that transformed Steph Curry into the superstar he is today were not bought cheaply. They came at the expense of physical comfort, time with friends, sleeping in and looking cool (it's not cool to workout when your teammates are still in their flip flops). Whatever that means for you, excellence will always cost.

A Word To The Wise
It’s true excellence builds through accumulation. But so does mediocrity. We've witnessed the cumulative effect of small things done well. But the cumulative effect small things done poorly is equally powerful—as is the cumulative effect of neglect. Be sure the small things you do on a daily basis are taking you where you want to go; good or bad, they are in the driver's seat.

Letter To My Younger Self By David Robinson

I had the opportunity to coach at the US Naval Academy for a year and half. It was a fascinating experience and I now see references to the Academy all over the place -- references that went clear over my head a few years ago. This morning, I read a great article on The Player's Tribune featuring USNA alum David Robinson. Here are a couple of my favorite parts:

How do you build a solid vocabulary? The same way you build a house. Brick by brick. Word by word. Night after night. The same rule applies to learning to swim, or developing a post move, or building a business. Preparation is everything. This is a simple but undeniable truth that is completely lost on you at 18 years old.

When you fail the swim test, don’t get too bent out of shape. Just remember how your father built up your vocabulary with that thick dictionary. Practice, son.

Kobe Bryant's Practice Habits

Here's a good article written for The Players' Tribune on Kobe Bryant's practice habits: The Secret I Learned From Kobe Bryant by Buddy Hield. Kobe's greatness (winning + impact + endurance) is a direct result of his individual excellence ("deliberate actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, compounded together, added up over time" - Daniel Chambliss).

More About Habits

There's a great book by Eric Greitens called Resilience. The chapter on habits is one of my favorites. Here are a few lines from that chapter:

“The direction of a person’s life is shaped not by a single turning point, but by thousands of days, each filled with small, unspectacular decisions and small, unremarkable acts that make us who we are.”

“Your life builds not by dramatic acts, but by accumulation.”

“How many people have put off the necessary, glamorous work of building habits because they spend their lives waiting for an epiphany that never comes? Don’t wait. Don’t wait a single day.”

“For most people engaged in pursuits of excellence, we are not dealing with a single important day of decision. We are instead dealing with days and weeks and months and years of accumulated effort, consistent practice, and wise habit formation.”

Steph Curry's Practice Habits

I love this video. It’s about Steph Curry’s practice habits at 16 years old:

My favorite line from the video: “Are the habits that you have today on par with the dreams you have for tomorrow? That’s something you need to ask yourself every single day. Because whatever you do on a regular basis today will determine where you will be tomorrow.” If you ask yourself that question and the answer is no (there is a disconnect between your habits and your dreams), you have two choices:

1. Change your habits
2. Change your dreams

"If your habits don't line up with your dream, then you need to either change your habits or change your dream." - John Maxwell 

You don’t get to have bad habits and big dreams. Of course, the good news is you’re in control and success is a choice. The good news is “anything is ours ... providing we are willing to pay the price” (Red Blaik).

Are the habits that I have today on par with the dreams I have for tomorrow?