Month: January 2023

Is My Idea Brilliant or Dull?

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“Is my idea brilliant or dull” isn’t a useful question most of the time.

A more useful question is:

“What problem am I trying to solve?”

When you have a clear answer to that question, you can then start the process of testing your idea to see how good it is. All you need to do is:

  • Join or create a team who are passionate about solving the problem.
  • Create minimal liberating rituals and systems to test multiple solutions quickly.
  • Convince someone to finance the idea.
  • Find evangelists to sell the idea.

The next time you have a potentially brilliant idea, a useful question could be, “How much effort and time am I willing to spend to solve this problem?”

Resetting for a New Year

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Hand turns dice and changes the expression “old habits” to “new habits”.

Instead of creating new year’s resolutions, I use many of the tools that I have written about to imagine the best possible outcome for the coming year and to examine my habits to see if I need to adjust them to live my imagined story.   

The first step in creating a new story for myself is reflecting on the last year. I do this by journaling and allowing myself as much time as I need to process and record what I have learned over the previous year. 

The second step is to write a Positive Intention where I describe in past tense the most positive and successful year I could imagine. 

The final step is to identify any habit changes I want to make. For this year, I want to: 

  • Enhance is my ability to Focus and Finish.  For me, this means being fully present and attentive to whatever task I am doing.  As I imagined what this would look like if I was successful, it would mean that every person I interacted with would feel seen, I would limit my Work in Progress (WIP) to 1, and I would only do activities that couldn’t be effectively delegated to someone else. As I get better at Focusing and Finishing, both my professional and personal life will be transformed. 
  • Read something spiritual each night before I go to sleep. I will use a checklist that I leave on my nightstand to track my progress. My husband teases me that I get endorphins from checking things off a list, so this method of tracking should help me add this step to my nighttime routine. 
  • Re-establish my weekly blog. I stopped writing my blog when I took a medical leave last September and gave myself the time I needed to recover. Over the break, I thought long and hard about a process that would help me and my amazing communication team do this more effectively.  I hope it works! 

This process is based on what I have found to be effective and works for me.  

How do you reset for a new year?