The Urgency of Importance

In Stephen Covey's book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” he talks about the difference between Important and Urgent matters, and how dividing our time in a balanced way between those two types of activities can make us more or less effective.

It’s amazing how something that urgently demands our attention almost always seems to appear important. But is it? Understanding how to recognize the two as separate has really been an eye-opener for me and has helped me prioritize how I spend my time.

Urgent matters require our immediate attention; we react to urgent needs. It could be something as simple as putting down a book we are studying to answer a question shouted from the next room.

Every one of us probably knows someone who’s permanently in crisis mode, constantly putting out fires, busy, busy, busy. But, have you noticed, that type of person is frequently stuck somewhere shy of their goals because they never seem to have the time to get to the things they say are important to them?

I am not saying that urgent matters are always not important. A true crisis must be tended to. But a problem—something like figuring out how to clear the cache on your computer so it runs smoother—must take a number and wait behind matters that actually are important.

Important activities are those that help you get closer to the goals you have set for yourself. Important tasks frequently are things we must do on our own initiative, without some outside circumstance creating a sense of urgency. Important things come in all sizes, but usually require planning and effort, sometimes simply to prevent situations from becoming urgent. For example, taking care of your own body now is important because it may help you to avoid a future consumed by illness and urgent visits to the doctor. (I have barely missed the gym since I had this epiphany!)

We ignore important tasks early in the day or early in life, they have a way of escalating into urgent situations.

It’s probably becoming apparent that one thing that’s extremely important is to separate important tasks from urgent ones and assign them time appropriately. Once you’ve clarified that something is important, it’s your responsibility to assign a sense of urgency and get it done. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about the aspects of your business that are urgent as opposed to important. Consider delegating urgent tasks by getting an assistant. Your effectiveness will dramatically increase if you start spending by far the greatest percentage of your time attending to the important things. If you take care of the important tasks you’ll keep them from becoming urgent and reduce the amount of time devoted to crisis management in your life.

As I said, time for mortals is finite. In fact, we never really know when we’ll run out of it. To make matters more complicated, there turns out to be truth in the old saying that you never have enough time to do everything you’d like to do. So you really do need to decide what is important, and take care of business!

Aliquot Films Launch Party Hangover

Aliquot Films Launch Party Hangover

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A Social Media Infatuation

According to Alexa.com, a staggering 17% of global Internet users now visit Facebook.com daily; up almost 25% in the last three months. The average user spends 25 minutes a day, and just last month, Facebook reached 200 million users.

Soon after I joined Friendster in 2002, I moved to a new city, where I knew practically no one. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I trolled Friendster for a few hours each day, examining the profiles of people in my area who seemed to share my personal interests. A little bit voyeuristic maybe, but helpful nonetheless. Since that initial foray into the social networking world, I’ve since joined Myspace and more recently Facebook. 200 million people don’t just sign up for something—and then stick with it for years—because it’s fashionable or cool – Facebook in particular is downright addictive, the newest sensation of the masses.

MySpace and Facebook aren’t necessarily ways for you to meet new people. They’re ways for you to meet people you already know. Even if you’re in regular contact with a person, it’s possible to re-meet them in the land of Facebook. For example, you learn for the first time from their meticulously detailed profile, that they spent a college semester abroad in Mumbai. You learn, from one of their high school friend’s postings, that their high school nickname was “T-Bone.” Turns out you’ve been friends with a total stranger.

Moreover, these networks are ways for you to meet yourself online. Facebook asks you things like “What’s on your mind?” which gets me thinking about what I’m actually doing right now. Typically, I don’t realize what I’m doing or thinking until I’m asked, at which point I’m compelled to think about it, even if the asker was in fact a social networking site. So, in a way, Facebook helps (forces?) me to come to grips with who I am, especially in those moments of caffeinated multi-tasking when I’m simultaneously checking email, reading news online, and visiting a number of my favorite websites.

One casualty I have observed on sites like Facebook and MySpace is the prevalence of self-indulgence and misinformation. It becomes easy for members of these sites to basically invent things about themselves which simply serve to make them appear “cool”, “hip”; by referencing certain bands, books, whatever. It’s Web narcissism, essentially, a phenomenon that happens to be addressed very cleverly by the website Hedonism Chronicles (hedonismchronicles.blogspot.com). It goes deeper; too, analyzing why humans feel compelled to present themselves in an ideal way online. I mean, there’s obviously an evolutionary element here. Naturally we all want to make ourselves appear as attractive as possible. But it seems a different thing completely to go about present an idealized image of yourself on the Internet. You might call it cyber narcissism. As opposed to the regular narcissist, the cyber narcissist seems to be only pretending to adore himself. Their actual bodies aren’t involved in the presentation. In other words, it’s all pretend.

And yet, even if it’s all pretend, I admit it’s kind of nice to hear what other people are pretending to do and think about. But for people who are surrounded by swarms of humanity, social media sites seem to provide a kind of comfort as well, just in the opposite way. Take the recent AT&T circuit board meltdown that occurred in Austin during South By Southwest, due to the ridiculous amount of Twittering and Facebooking going on. In a large group like that, everyone wants to separate themselves from the masses by Twittering themselves into a little bubble of elite knowledge and exclusivity. It’s human nature, which these sites seem to understand pretty well.

I don’t hate Facebook. I’m also a willing participant who actually enjoys spending an hour or two once in a while poking around other people’s (pretend) lives. What’s next? Second Life becomes the real real-world? Only time will tell. Off to tweet something cool I just thought of…

Jay Kubassek

www.jaykubassek.com

Ideas and Action

Anyone can have a great idea, lots of them: million dollar ideas; ideas that will change their life; ideas that will change other people’s lives; ideas that will change the world. But any idea that stays on the chalkboard is worth only the chalk it's written with.

What's missing for most people is decisive action and disciplined follow-through to take their ideas from concept to reality. Here is how I have turned a lot of my “million dollar ideas” into millions of dollars.

Take some form of productive action daily.
It could be something as simple as googling a phone number or doing some basic research--something that takes you closer to your goal. Be careful though, being “busy” does not necessarily mean you are taking action; action takes you measurably closer to your goal. When a task, idea, or goal is so big or challenging that you can’t move on it, break it down into small steps that you can take action on daily. Ideas don't count as building blocks, only actions do. Considering this, how is the construction on your house of dreams coming?

Be scrappy, resourceful and do it yourself.
No one is going to have the same passion that you have for your idea and no one will be willing to invest as much time, energy and passion in making it happen as you. If you have to, make your action steps smaller, but do not quit or allow yourself to stall when tough circumstances appear. Persistence and patience are key to solving your entrepreneurial puzzles. I have no formal education on business or marketing yet almost very major accomplishment and entrepreneurial success I have had in the last five years came by figuring it out and doing it myself. All you do-it-yourselfers know there is no substitute for the school of hard knocks.

Don’t wait to take action until you have the perfect conditions.
Circumstances, conditions and timing are seldom perfect. That’s why all of the successful entrepreneurs that I know create their own circumstances as they need them. Just like with travel, the quickest way to get to your destination is the most direct route. If that means figuring it out and doing it yourself sometimes, so be it.

Seek guidance from people who already have the results you want.
I personally have about a dozen people I look up to in all different areas of life and business. People that have the results that I want to achieve whom I look to emulate as closely as possible. These people don’t even know that are on my imaginary board of directors. Leveraging other people’s knowledge and experience will help you cut down on mistakes and accelerate the process.

Put productivity over procedure.
People can take months batting ideas around, preparing a business plan, consulting accountants and attorneys, getting a business entity set up, etc. I see people stuck in the “getting-ready-to-get-ready” mode all the time. (I made my first million before I actually had an accountant or business entity set up. Not recommended.) But hey, I made my first million, and my last million by taking action on my ideas. You should try it.

Putting Savvy Before Necessity by Jay Kubassek

When put to the test, people are endlessly adaptive, inventive, cunning and resilient. These are some of the qualities that have helped us survive eons of changing, challenging conditions to emerge as the dominant species on the planet.

We share many of these qualities with other creatures. I recently read about a chimp in an outdoor zoo that doesn’t like being gawked at, so overnight he gathers piles of rocks and places them, strategically, around his pen to hurl at visitors when they arrive. Luckily, chimps only know how to throw underhand.

There’s an extra quality that humans have. Call it savvy. If the chimp had it, he might build a pile of rocks big enough to climb out of his predicament. Which brings me to the predicament we all find ourselves in, one way or another: the recession.

According to a New York Times article, economists who have tracked trends in previous recessions found that when the economy turns down and jobs disappear, more entrepreneurial businesses spring up. In other words, when people are forced to stop working for someone else, they figure out how to make money for themselves.

The ability to reinvent ourselves is in each of us. It’s part of human nature. But why wait until you are forced to dig deep before you find the motivation to become an entrepreneur? Why not be proactive? Why not gather some rocks ahead of time and work toward building a castle where you can live happily ever after?

You are probably familiar with the expression “The best time to look for a job is when you already have one.” Well, that’s also a good time to launch your own business. When there’s no pressure. But if you are out of a job, don’t despair. It’s always a good time to become an entrepreneur.

The Internet has created countless opportunities for “virtual” businesses, particularly over the last five years with so many people shopping, meeting and communicating online – the mass embrace of Web 2.0 social media. There are literally millions of business opportunities online if you know where to look and how to develop them…or if you simply connect with someone who can show you the ropes.

The Internet has become a multi-purpose business tool that brings individual entrepreneurs together with entire common-interest communities to provide vast resources for business leads and clients, connections to partners, suppliers, product delivery systems, support networks and on-demand, quality training from successful professionals. Why go through the pains of starting a brick-and-mortar business, complete with overhead costs, employee headaches, etc.? You can find a way to turn your passion into a business – without searching for a job that ultimately may or may not do it for you – by using the power of the Internet and social media.

Don’t worry if you can’t identify a passion as the basis for your business. There are so many options out there. And you can let your entrepreneurial drive be your passion.

I’ve talked with so many people who have lost a job (unfortunately), and one of the most frequent comments I hear from them is that when you lose a job you also lose a ready-made social network. To prevent isolation from setting in, one of the ways people stay connected with the world and with each other is through the Internet. What I have discovered (and helped to create) is a network of committed entrepreneurs. Each of them knows that by helping him or herself they help each other.

Before the recession affects us any more than it already has, let savvy, rather than necessity, be the mother of invention. Let’s see how many small businesses that we, as entrepreneurs, can build, and how quickly we can climb out of this predicament.

Inertia, It’s Not a River in Egypt

I just looked up inertia on Wikipedia: "... the resistance of an object to a change in its state of motion [...] inertia means that an object will always continue moving at its current speed and in its current direction until some force causes its speed or direction to change."

Inertia is everywhere, in all physical objects and in every one of us. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For a long time I relied on inertia to get me going in the morning so I could get to the job where I earned enough to get through the day so I could get up the next day and do the same thing, again and again, day after day.
Even though in my daydreams of wealth and generosity that wasn't exactly what I pictured my life to be, I accepted it. Routine can become comfortable. It's common to develop a kind of psychological inertia, to know what to expect, to go along doing your thing, surviving.

Whatever path you are on, you can become driven by inertia...right up until you get that gnawing feeling that you're going nowhere fast. In that case, guess what? You are. That's inertia for you. But, if you have ambitions, things you want to learn about, places you want to go, people to meet, a sense that you want to be part of a greater good, a desire to earn more money, well, then inertia becomes a force you have to overcome.
Going back to our definition of inertia, changing a body's direction or speed (or both) requires an outside force. When it comes to people and inertia, however, that force can also emerge from within. It starts with a desire but also requires making a decision and following it with action.

It sounds simple, and it is. But simple doesn’t equal easy. You may have the desire to change but not the will. That's no longer inertia at work. That's something called laziness: perhaps the single greatest obstacle to achieving your goals. That's when coasting is no longer passive and has become an active form of resistance to change.

To put it bluntly, you can't be lazy and successful. Lazy entrepreneurs are the 90% who fail.

Spend some quality time with yourself. Listen to your heart. Figure out the top five things that you know you can change to take your income to the next level. (You will know what they are because you know yourself better than anyone else.) No matter how difficult or challenging they may seem, put them on the list. The more resistant you are to completing a task, the higher up on your list it should go. Work on each of the five every day until they are completed. And, if working on these things means getting help, seek it out. Talk to an expert. Get an education. The responsibility is yours. Just remember, inertia is at your side whether you like it or not.

I Can't Wait To Be Old by Jay Kubassek

When I was twenty-two, I dated a girl (let’s call her Rebecca) who used to say, “I can’t wait till I’m old!” She was 23, beautiful, witty, extremely well read. She had what seemed like two-dozen close friends who adored her, compared to my two or three who frequently questioned my morals. She wasn’t running away from anything, wasn’t an alcoholic, had a bunch of bright career prospects. And yet the girl wanted to be 60.

At first I thought she was kidding, or simply romanticizing old age as a place of relative calm and invincibility. (People are much less likely to break your heart at 60 than at 23, for instance.) But lately I’ve realized that, even at 23, she must have felt her youth slipping away, pummeled as women (and men) are by images of the teenage ideal in magazines, TV commercials, and ads. She foresaw losing her looks through her late twenties and thirties. And she just wanted to be spared the agony.

Now that ten years have passed, her desire to be suddenly old makes sense, in a way. I find myself frowning at gray hairs in the mirror, and lie to myself by attributing them to stress instead of age. Maybe it would be nicer to just zip to 60, and spare myself the slow decline?

When I was 22, though, I didn’t share this sentiment. I didn’t want to be 60! I wanted to be 22! At that age no one judges you on your accomplishments, since you haven’t had much opportunity to live. They only see your “promise.” Everything is ahead of you. Moreover, you are not yet to blame for how your life has turned out. Other people are guilty for that (parents, teachers, etc). You’re innocent.

But the fact that America worships such innocent young people—aimless kids who have yet to be tested or to prove themselves in life—seems to me a fairly dismal state of affairs. Obviously it’s about looks. Young people look better on stage than old people. They look better on camera than old people. But when looks become a reason for us to read a book or listen to an album, for example, society is in trouble.

Recently, I read an article explaining how fed up established authors are with the comparatively huge advances first time novelists receive. Just because they’re young! And their book jacket photo is cute, or sexy. Americans are buying these books, the older novelists say, simply in order to live vicariously through a young, sexy novelist. In truth, the book may have no substance at all, no wisdom, only the residue of a cute young person’s experience in the world. But Americans are becoming so youth-obsessed that getting a glimpse of what it’s like to be young today is enough, and more valuable than living through the mind of someone who has seen and experienced hardship, and navigated his or her way through it.

Maybe it was John Updike’s death that got me thinking in this slightly morbid vein. Which then got me thinking about Philip Roth’s inevitable demise, and how strange it is that such a vigorous man as Roth, so full of life and sexual potency, could possibly die. I’m sure he’s as amazed as anyone. As he himself once wrote: “Old age isn’t a battle; it’s a massacre.”

Yet old age doesn’t frighten me the way it seems to frighten Roth. Lately, I’ve come to look forward to it in a sense. Aging can be a graceful process, for both women and men, as long as they don’t succumb to the youth-media and cosmetics blitz that threatens to empty everyone’s psyche and bank account. Yeah, it’s sad to get wrinkles, to lose your mental and physical agility. But look at guys like Tom Jones, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery, for instance. Connery looks almost as good today as he did at 30, just in a different, more refined and dignified way. He seems to be no longer in the grips of his own libido, which can make even the most graceful of dudes seem sleazy and indecent.

Chances are I will look nothing like Connery when I’m his age. Still, I’ll know more than I do now. And at this point in my life, however cheesy it sounds, knowing more about the world, and understanding my place in it, seems more worthy of worship and respect than unlined skin and innocence.

As for my old sweetheart—who must be now, what, 33?—I hope she’s not still wishing for a sexagenarian’s existence. People are going to start living till 110 pretty soon, which makes 30 the new 20, or even the new 10. By the time we’re 60, 60 might even be considered young.