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Laziness Expands to the Maximum

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Are you lazy? How lazy? I think technology is giving us opportunities to take laziness to an entirely new level!

I remember life before the Internet took over. Many things have changed. Now we can buy stuff online. We can watch movies and TV shows on our computer instead of our TV, when we want them. And we have access to an incredible wealth of the world’s information by simply visiting a search engine like DuckDuckGo.com and typing a few keywords. We can store infinite photos in our iPhones. We can use templates to quickly create presentations and reports. All that automation should be freeing us up to get smarter than ever. But that isn’t my experience.

Our brains take shortcuts. For example, it’s hard to know if someone is competent. So research shows that we interpret confidence as competence. Our brain substitutes the easy decision for the hard decision. We aren’t even aware of this consciously, however. That’s why certain professions wear suits—to give clients the knee-jerk impression of competence, even if none exists.

In the last two days, I’ve had a few younger people demonstrate a remarkable laziness factor. Whereas someone in my generation wouldn’t look something up because it involved going to a library or calling a reference librarian on the phone, these younger people tell me they did a web search and couldn’t find the information they need. So they stopped trying. Without an answer delivered up instantly, even in the age of the Web, kids who have never known anything else get stopped in their tracks the instant their preferred method requires extra effort.

Of course, if it’s happening to them, it’s probably happening to me, too. Where once I wouldn’t have minded picking up the phone and calling someone to arrange a meeting, now it’s just easier—and lazier—to send them a million emails, even though objectively, it’s far less efficient. That’s because my new standard is twitching a finger and clicking a mouse button. By comparison, lifting a phone to my ear is a huge amount of work.

Be on the lookout! In the long run, our in-the-moment laziness may seriously hamper our ability to get big-stuff-done. Our brains are substituting the question “is this easy to do right this instant?” for the question “will this make reaching my overall goal any easier?” And it’s the latter question—the one our brain skimps on—that is most important. It’s the one that will help you reach you goals.

Brainpower boosters? Not so fast…

Happy BrainBeing in the self-help space to some degree, I see an awful lot of products designed to “boost your brainpower.” This is an interesting value proposition, but it’s incomplete. You need to ask: how will you use the boosted brainpower? What will you expect it to do that your current brainpower isn’t doing?

This is an extremely important question. In my experience, brainpower is NOT what holds people back. What holds people back is not brainpower, it’s how the brainpower they have is organized. Brainpower is secondary to the ability to take action, align actions in mutually reinforcing ways towards a goal, and use feedback from the world to make mid-course corrections.

For example, if your primary attitude towards life and the world is a “victim mindset,” do you really want to boots your brainpower? You’ll be that much more effective at finding ways to explain why you’re a victim and not in control of your own life.

Boosting brainpower without making sure you’re using it for something worthwhile is like putting in a high-horsepower engine without making sure your car is pointed in the direction you want to go. What determines where you end up is the direction of the car. The horsepower only affects how fast you’ll get there.

FIRST choose a worthwhile direction.
THEN boost your brainpower.

Social Media and “The Good Life”

I just spent a week camping at a festival. We were in a far away place, with no power outlets and only spotty cell phone coverage. It seemed best to put my iPhone away and spend the entire time disconnected.

Logging into Facebook, checking my email, and returning to the online world, it’s once again glaringly obvious how little it seems to add to my life. The quiet and serenity was lacking in reaction-driven seratonin hits, but it was wonderful for just enjoying being in the here-and-now.

Try disconnecting for a while. It’s really fun!

What makes a good driving question for life?

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If you were only allowed to ask one question of yourself to move you into action each morning, what one question would have the greatest chance of creating the best life for you?

In a recent Get-it-Done Guy episode, I explored the nature of using driving questions to shape your life. My episodes are often created from events in my own life. As many of you know, several years ago I did a three year experiment in Living an Extraordinary Life which later turned into a TEDx talk, a webinar, and a series of talks. You can even download an MP3 of the Living an Extraordinary Life webinar.

The driving questions episode came from my decision (largely made unconsciously and revealed to me by my unconscious mind in the late afternoon of June 17, 2014) to re-start the Experiment discussed in the presentation. In short, what driving questions drive an extraordinary life?

Here are some candidate questions so far:

  • What am I grateful for?
  • Who do I want to hang out with?
  • Who do I want to serve?
  • What do I want to do?
  • Who do I want to be?
  • What do I want to build?
  • What would I do if I were on vacation?
  • Who are the people I want to become?

These are all good questions to ask as part of a periodic life review. That’s very different from the way I’m proposing to use them, however. The proposal on the table is that one of these questions–or some other question entirely–can act as a daily launching pad for life. Which question is the one that will serve best as a daily launching pad? They propel you in a very different direction, depending on which is answered.

Want to change yourself? Change the system.

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While reading “The Lucifer Effect,” it’s becoming increasingly clear how much of behavior is a product of situations and systems. I think that coaches and psychological change agents are missing this piece, big-time.

I have many people tell me that “if a person just gets clear on their big passion, they’ll make the change they need to make.” Or if they “just have an inspiring vision,” that’s enough. And yet that simply hasn’t been my experience. People go to a change agent, come back all pumped up, and six weeks later are back where they started.

(Besides, do you want a surgeon who has passion, or a surgeon who has training? There really is more to life than just having passion. Indeed, there’s research that says passion often comes from doing something you don’t like and growing to like it.)

Yes, not having an internal change will often keep you stuck. If you sabotage yourself at every turn, you’ll be stuck wherever you are. But my new opinion is internal change only works if it gets you into action. But not just any action; action needs to help create a new situation or new system that will support the new identity or new vision, or the change will eventually die out.

You don’t hear that side of the story, though. When a change agent fails with a client, they don’t trumpet the failure from the mountaintops and examine what happened in detail, to find out if their (the change agents’) models of change are insufficient. And the clients who don’t change don’t trumpet the story for obvious reasons.

My new formula:
change = change in mindset (identity, role) + change in actions + change in systems

In my NLP training and my coach training, identity has been considered a powerful shaper of behavior change. And it is, it just turns out that Situation and System can be even more powerful than identity. It also turns out that identity is shaped by behavior, even if the behavior is undertaken for neutral reasons1.

The Power to Change

 

 

  • Changing a system or a situation is the most powerful creator of change, because it forces behavior to change.
  • Changing behavior is the next most powerful, when done in a way that reshapes identity.
  • Changing identity is the least most powerful of the three, but still very powerful, because it can provide intrinsic motivation which can lead someone to change their action and their systems.
  1. see the Social Psychology literature on “commitment and consistency,” in which small behavioral changes produce identity changes. ↩

Please work for free. Not.

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I’m sure you have never asked someone to work for free. But just in case you know someone who has—or if you’ve ever been asked—here’s the kind of thing you really should say.

Today I received this letter:

Hello Mr. Stever,

 

I am writing to you on behalf of XYZ, a non-profit, CSR project of ABC (a $4 billion conglomerate operating in 16 countries). … We bring together advisors and speakers from some of the top business schools in the world… we are committed to building local intellectual capital and leveraging a business model that ensures sustainability and relevant development opportunities to our present and future business leaders.

 

To begin a relationship, we would be interested in having you as one of the subject experts for our Webinars to conduct a live complimentary webinar on a topic of your choice, and also offer you to write exclusively on our blog<.

My response:

I find your request confusing. I am a professional, who has spent several hundred thousand dollars and several decades developing my expertise.

 

While I believe I might have valuable content to offer, the key word is “valuable.” You say that you are a project of a $4 billion conglomerate, yet your business procedure seems to be asking people such as myself to work for free. That doesn’t sound like partnership; that sounds like crass exploitation. You have the money to pay your vendors, you would just rather have them work for free.

 

That is not the kind of business practice I stand for or am interested in. If you are training entrepreneurs, it is a business practice you should object to as well—any entrepreneur who does not make sure they are well-paid for their product will quickly go out of business. I strongly suspect that neither you nor the CEO of your organization work for free. I can only follow your lead and decline your offer, in favor of clients and partners who believe in paying for the value I provide.

Income inequality is simple math

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Simple math is a great way to understand a system’s behavior. I picked up this trick from Warren Buffett’s writing and speaking. Warren often figures out which mathematical elements drive behavior of a stock or industry, and then uses that to set a boundary on his investment decisions. He gave a great analysis in February 2000 of why the first internet bubble had to pop. Three weeks later, it did.

His analysis depended entirely on noting that valuations in the internet companies were assuming profit growth of 15%, while the economy as a whole was growing at 2.5%, and profits were remaining a constant share of the economy. As he put it, “mathematically, that relationship can not continue to hold. I don’t know what will collapse, I don’t know who the survivors will be—and there will be many of them—but I do know that eventually the house of cards will tumble. It has to.”

The Simple Math of Wealth Inequality

Thomas Pitteky’s new book about income inequality is apparently making a big splash. I haven’t read it, yet, but I’ve been told he is very sympathetic to my point of view. Here’s my analysis, before reading the book.

I’ve long held that the driver of wealth inequality is much simpler than policy, philosophy, or ideology. It’s simple mathematical fact, given our tax rates.

I finally ran some numbers.

Starting position: rich own 25%, everyone else, 75%
Overall tax rate on everyone else, 39% (25% federal + 14% FICA)
Overall tax rate on the Rich, 17% (mainly capital gains)
Assuming the Rich can get an average ROI of 15%, while everyone else 10%
(a reasonable assumption, given that the entire class of high risk/high return investments requires one to be an accredited investor. I.e., rich.)

With these assumptions, in 50 years (say, 1960 to 2010), the income distribution goes from rich 25%, everyone else 75% to rich 85%, everyone else 14%.

If we assume that both groups get equal returns on their money, rather than the rich getting higher returns, we still go from 25/75 to 48/51 in just 50 years

The Rich Get Richer, Purely By Virtue of Ownership

As long as the overall tax rate on the rich is lower than the overall tax rate on the poor, even independent of the range of investment opportunities available (and the rich also have enough money to have a portfolio of large-enough bets that a single winner will ultra-increase their net worth), the rich will eventually own everything.

This is independent of whether they work harder, whether they are more committed, whether they “create jobs,” or anything else. It’s purely based on their after-tax rates of return. (And as for them being job creators, note that to the extent that they can lay people off, their rates of return will increase. Hiring decreases it.)

I don’t understand why this simple mathematical fact never comes up in these discussions.

Even If The Rich Allocate Capital Poorly, They Still Win

If you run the numbers, it doesn’t matter if the rich get below-market returns. Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, has only gotten market-level returns in recent years. But he’s still owning more of the economy than you are, every year.

The tax rate differential is high enough that Warren Buffett’s interest income still has a better after-tax return than you have on your entire income.