Give criticism without hurting people's feelings while opening the relationship for constructive collaboration.

He was taught criticism had to tick two simple boxes. It had to be constructive, and it had to be criticism of an action or thing instead of a person.

But no one ever bothered to teach us how to criticize constructively— without making humans miserable. At least nobody ever taught me the secret.

What I didn’t get at the time was that my advice was not nearly as valuable to the receivers as I estimated in my mind.

My advice was totally unsolicited.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott — a book every “boss” should read.

After reading The Coaching Habit, I realized that the best criticism is criticism that doesn’t have to come out of your mouth, but ideally from the receiver of the criticism’s mouth.

• “What” questions drive exploration.
• “How” questions drive action.
• “Why” questions drive justification.
• “When” questions drive accountability.

Step 1: Set the stage, tone, and rules

While we dive deeper into ____, I may also say some stupid things that might make you feel like this bizarre person doesn’t know what the heck they’re talking about. I’d like to openly invite you to poke holes in my ideas whenever you can.
I’d love for this to be a space where we can collaboratively challenge each other’s thinking so that we can both leave this conversation with sharper thoughts.

Step 2: Ask curious “what” questions

Step 3: Ask “what else” questions

Step 4: Ask “how” questions

That’s excellent! How would you go about improving ____?

Step 5: Ask the first step question

That’s excellent! What would be the first tiny step to improve on ____?

6. Ask the “when”

The most well-known passage Marianne Williamson wrote has some disconcerting implications.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Williamson writes in A Return to Love. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”

Besides being super hydrating, coconut oil has the ability to act as a protective layer that sits on top of the skin and locks in moisture, while also preventing transepidermal water loss (where water passes through the skin and evaporates into the air).

Sílvia Bastos

What could I write about today that my future self would benefit from reading?”

Second: 5 (or so) bullets

The truth is, it doesn’t have to be five — it could work as well with a bit less or a few more. Personally, I find seven to be the number that works best for me, but I recommend starting with five to make it easier—then adapt it to your own preferences.

• An inverted solid triangle for creative ideas
• An upright triangle for big wins
• An eye for cues and signs
• A spiral for big lessons and questions to ponder
• A square (that I can use as a checkbox later) for actions and experiments I want to do

The Formula

This is the formula making real money in almost any profession, doing almost anything, for almost anyone. Here it is:

Your income is directly dependent on your ability to produce value at scale with ownership.

• “Value is the gap between what clients can do for themselves and what we can do for them.”

Scale

1. Eliminate any and all superfluous action on your part.
2. Automate anything and everything that can be automated.
3. Delegate anything that cannot be automated.
4. Do anything that cannot be delegated.

Ownership

If you have no equity, no real ownership, the first two pieces of this formula DO NOT MATTER. YOU MUST HAVE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR VALUE!

A lot of people think of creativity and discipline as opposites. But nothing could further from the truth… Many of the most creative people the world has ever known were surprisingly disciplined in…

1. Outline your creative work the day before
2. Create a warm-up ritual
3. Stop fighting your procrastination and validate it instead
4. Quarantine your busywork

Reading and listening are two fundamentally different modes of learning. Reading is a standalone activity, but it tends to create stronger memories because your brain needs to fill in many gaps that listening pre-populates. What does the setting look like? What do the voices sound like? Reading uses back-tracking eye movements to maximize retention. Turning pages is a built-in break, giving you time to process what you’ve read. Reading also provides structural cues from punctuation, and physical books give you a spatial sense of where you are in the story at all times, both of which help improve your memory.

Listening, on the other hand, is a more social experience. You can glean information from one’s intonation, volume, and speed. Because you can’t rewind a conversation, you tend to focus on extracting the most important points. Listeners thrive on interaction and spontaneity. They love hearing multiple angles until one clicks, and that’s when the words magically roll off their tongue in response.

The biggest difference between the two is that listening still works when you do it passively — you can let the information run over you like a waterfall, and your subconscious will save the most relevant bits as they pass by — while reading requires constant attention. It is entirely active, like a treasure hunt.

What a guy who wouldn’t help his kid open a can says about the Culture War

This is the chasm between between those who have decided that joking about “funny rape” or ironically calling someone a “fag” actually isn’t very original or creative (and honestly never was), and those who feel alienated by the prospect of living in a world where their jokes about Jews (delivered with or without affecting a Cartman voice) are no longer met with unconditional approval.

What we all get wrong about anger

My habit of judgmentalness was especially strong because it was also positively reinforced: In addition to the alleviation of boredom and disappointment, I also felt a swell of positive feeling while I was arguing and being judgmental. This was partly excitement—the thrill of the intellectual hunt!—but by far the largest positive emotion I experienced in these situations was good old-fashioned self-righteous anger.

Anger is typically the result of the following assessment about the world: Something is wrong. Now, if that were the end of the assessment, you’d expect to feel negative. But hidden between the lines of most assessments of injustice is an implied assessment of justice: Something is wrong… and I’m right!

Anger is a crutch that makes us passive

My argumentative judgmentalness and all the ego-boosting anger that resulted distracted me from a very real solution to my problem.

However, when he inserted the words — “You will probably refuse” — before continuing on to ask for a donation, the compliance rate jumped to 39 percent.

That’s why the words, “You will probably refuse,” are so effective: they give people an out. The words make people feel like they are acting out of their own free will and that they’re the ones who are in control of their decision.

You do not demand the bud blossoms at a certain hour. You plant a seed deeply, you water it and give it light, and then you let it do what it was created to do. You are the exact same way. If you show up each day and do the work, the desired results will come on their own, in due time.

Trying too hard makes you instantly ineffective.

When someone tries too hard to get you to like them, you are more disinclined to give them a chance. When someone tries too hard to make you think they’re attractive, you usually don’t. When someone tries too hard to convince people that you are intelligent, they start to seem unintelligent. When you try too hard to sell your business, it tends to push people away. When you try too hard to seem cool, you do not seem cool.

In every single thing that brings us success in life, there is an element of effortlessness at work.

It’s something I learned from Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country:

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

The Only Real “Life-Hack”

So if I had one hack to offer it’d be this — fall in love with doing instead of the idea of doing.

Delegate problems, not tasks

The simplest and most relevant one is the GROW framework, created by Sir John Whitmore. Here’s how to use the GROW model when delegating problems:

• Goal: Establish the goal
• Reality: Examine the current reality
• Options: Explore the options
• Will: Establish the will

A few weeks later Zig saw the woman again. He was delighted to see that she had successfully made the transition from a “fault-finder” to a “good-finder” — putting an end to her advanced case of what Zig calls “Stinking Thinking.”

What do you love about your life?

Are you serious Mike? You want me to make a list of the things I love about my life and read it out loud in front of a mirror like a freaking lunatic?

“What is my experience of this, and what would would I like this experience to be?”

Once you have the end goal in mind, you can start to bridge the gap between those two places. I recommend actually drawing this out on a piece of paper, where you can actually outline the steps manually.

Step C: Why am I attached to this being impossible?
Step B: What do I need to do to make this possible?
Step A: What do I need to think to believe this is possible?

When you’re addicted to something, your brain is functioning in a three part cycle: trigger, routine, reward. That’s exactly what’s happening when you keep deciding to be less than you are.

1. Set absurdly ambitious goals

“When 10x is your measuring stick, you immediately see how you can bypass what everyone else is doing.” — Dan Sullivan

9. Learn to apply, not to procrastinate “the work”

Learning is best done while you’re doing the activity. Public education has taught people they must first master theory, then attempt to transfer that theory into the real world. In a similar way, people’s love for information via the internet has led them to use “learning” as a form of procrastination.

10. Focus on quantity in the beginning

Quantity is the most likely path to quality. The more you produce, the more ideas you will have — some of which will be innovative and original. And you never know which ones will click. You just keep creating.

Defining your personal KPIs
Design is all about making decisions that prioritize one metric over another.
What metrics are important to you?

• Less time spent
• Less forgetting:
• Less decision-making
• Less cognitive load