Lessons & Ideas

I've been thinking about this quote a lot...

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

When you encounter a thought that doesn't ring true (meaning that it doesn't reconcile with what you believe or how you view the world) you have two choices:

1. Dismiss the idea

2. Examine the idea

If you choose to dismiss it, that's ok. In that case, withstand the urge to disparage or form a straw man.

WARNING: Only disparage ideas that you fully understand.

You'll know if you fully understand the idea if you can recall it to someone that holds the view and they agree that it is an accurate representation of their view.

WARNING: Even then, disparaging idea is probably a bad idea.

If you choose to examine the idea, don't adopt the idea (yet) or dismiss your current view. Instead, hold the new idea in your hand and examine it.

A few potential outcomes of this examination:

1. Slight recalibration to your world view

2. Major recalibration to your world view

3. Wholesale dismissal of the new idea

If you are forced into discussing an idea you haven't fully examined, say so. And leave room for being off target in your view.

"Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” — Jeff Bezos

I’m keeping two tabs open in my browser at all times durring this crazy Corona event.

1. Stress reducing protocol

2. Worst case scenario list

These 2 docs give me instructions for handling any anxiety or stress that creeps in and a place to put the anxiety and stress once it rears it’’s head.

Hope this helps you!

Recently the Growth Tools leadership team had a meeting to talk about how to encourage and incentivize everyone at the company to identify small tests with high upside and problems with simple fixes and then to empower them to go execute on them. 

We even setup a large reward for the person with the simplest and most impactful project of this nature in Q1.

In this meeting we talk about the pros and cons of this. How to encourage it. And how to think about it.

This is a recording of a private internal meeting.

Enjoy!

I came across a fun chapter from Austin Klein’s boom, Show Your Work, today. The chapter Is entitled, Share something small everyday. It resonated with me. So in this episode I’ll read you the chapter and share why I liked it. Enjoy my beautiful reading ability! :)

This week has been the most bizarre and crazy week I can remember in multiple decades.

I just sent a video and update to our team sharing how I’m thinking through it on a personal and business level.

Two key points:

1. Take precautions

2. Take advantage (aka: turn it into a positive)

This was originally a video, but I stripped out the audio to post here.

I hope this is helpful for you!

One of the best uses of my time right now is working with our leadership team 1:1. I love it. But one of the down falls is my calendar can turn into a hot mess of random meetings.

So, today I wrote a quick memo to everyone with a few guidelines on how to schedule with me. This will help them get what they need quicker and make me more efficient.

Listen to the episode for the details:

Here is the memo I sent: https://public.3.basecamp.com/p/64SVDti9TkZdmoQvv97kgHmM

Each day starts the same for me. I sit down at my desk and do my Morning 10. These are 10 shot tasks that take 1 minute or less to do. These 10 things set my tday up well, prime me to be productive and ensure that the most important stuff in my life is being attended to.

Hear more about it in this episode.

This is my current Morning 10:

1. Pray

2. Pre-log my food

3. Pull notes our of my phone

4. Write down tasks for the day

5. Text wife

6. Check Bank

7. Log Q1 goal progress

8. Journal core emotion wheel

9. Clean out Basecamp notifications

10. Look at weekly goals

In this episode I read an article by Michael Hyatt entitles “Why Vision Is More Important Than Strategy”.

https://michaelhyatt.com/why-vision-is-more-important-than-strategy/

Highly encourage you to read the article. Linked above.

Every quarter we do a challenge on our team focused on encouraging and empowering each person to find problems and opportunities for the company (and fix them).

This quarter the person with the best project wins a $2k trip.

Listen to the episode for details.

I just finished reading my favorite book on naming things (products, companies etc.) and I loved it!

I recorded a short video summary and wrote up detailed notes on the book so that years from now I can come back to it and remember the key parts and the method taught in it.

In this episode I share the audio from the my book summary video.

For the full video, notes and a few custom worksheet I made - go to my Twitter account @harris_bryan, everything is linked up there.

The notes: https://vidfru.it/2RZFgLc

Enjoy!