The 7 Habits Of Highly Ineffective People
danariely.com
danariely.com
On the other hand, you might have more in the place with higher average income. Remember that buying isn't the only way that you can get things.
Compare NYC with North Dakota. Things cost more in NYC than in ND, which is bad if you're buying, but there is a lot more free stuff in NYC than ND.
Plus, there's more opportunity to move up in NYC than in ND. In some cases, that opportunity is worth something.
Yup. Great museums are cheaper in NYC than ND but owning a horse is much cheaper in ND.
Plane tickets between two specific locations are world price, but you also have to take where you live into account.
For example, going to Singapore from Reno costs more than going from SF or San Jose.
Of course, this is counterbalanced by having more opportunities in terms of career, education, culture, and entertainment.
As to effectiveness -- that is dependent on your personal goals. Some people are very effective at chilling out and not doing much. Others are very effective at building business, or playing a sport, or programming, or whatever. Dependent on what you want emulate the ones succeeding in that and you will be "effective"
b) Some people get more enjoyment being more rich than their immediate community than just being rich. This is true for everything else apart from money. Some people want to have more knowledge than others etc...
Yes. I'll go a step further - I try to be the least educated, least skilled, most poorly compensated person in a room as often as possible. Holding to this habit means you keep looking for better and better rooms full of people as you improve. Serve in Heaven instead of Rule in Hell...
This is an interesting point. Everyone has their preference point. Some people (like startup founders) can live on ramen income of < $20k/year if there's hope that they'll one day strike it rich. Other more conservative people prefer their steady salary of $80-100k at Corporation XYZ since it offers them a sense of stability. In addition to the class risk/reward paradigm illustrated here, I think this also illustrates how some people place higher value on change (read positive growth) and in turn, discount the value of stability.
0. Lack Of Respect For Time- A person who does not respect time will be limited in what he can accomplish in this world, regardless of talent. Besides your own, if you don't respect other people's time, your integrity depletes by the second until there is none left. Almost everything else is a byproduct of this, positive or negative.
It's interesting that you hi-lighted this. I just had an extremely annoying experience the other day with a VP in my company. Long story short, he decided to question what I was spending my time on and why client engagements took more than a 45 minute meeting like he experiences when doing a sales pitch(I perform most of the execution end of business relationships in my company -- things that take dozens of hours).
I decided after a couple meetings of having my time questioned like that that I had lost quite a bit of respect for him and will probably not suffer that kind of thing again without there being serious repercussions inside the company -- like a reorg so that we're no longer in the same management chain.
He absolutely didn't respect the 80 hour weeks I put in to keep the company afloat. Since that's time out of my personal time, and I could be doing something at another company for the 40 I'm supposed to be doing, it's a lack of respect for me.
Ask him to do a client engagement and let you observe so you can do better in the future.
One of you will learn something.
I believe I respect him when he says part of his job was particularly challenging and time consuming (like getting contracts executed). I don't particularly feel respected when I say something took a lot of time and effort and get asked, "like what?".
I'm not sure that's a bridgeable gulf.
He thinks that it is. In telling you that you're taking too long, he's also saying that he has some constructive ideas about how to reduce that time.
He may need some help to "show you how it should be done", but you should insist that he do so because he has pointed out that this is an important issue.
You really don't want to argue about his competence.
I think that that is too abstract and too small and likely to be irrelevant to his concerns. (If he cared about whatever task you're thinking of, he'd have mentioned it.)
He's given you a specific case that he thinks is a big deal. Why won't you address it?
This isn't about you. It's about him.
BTW - If he thinks that something can be done better, it doesn't matter if said thing is technical and he's not. Again, stop questioning his competence.
I think the problem is that he is simply ignorant of what people actually have to do when creating complex technical things. I think he honestly thinks that he can go do a couple of client meetings, get some paperwork signed for some custom work and there's vending machine in the back that spits out custom software. The thousands of hours of mind numbing things like, looking at trace logs, or defining a controlled vocabulary so that your team and the customer's team can even communicate on the same level, are absolutely not within his sphere of understanding. In those matters he's as incompetent as I am in his arena. The difference is that I know that and don't disparage him when he says things like "executing this NDA really took a huge amount of effort." I have no idea if executing an NDA involves anymore than 5 minutes of actual work and lots of thumb twiddling or if it's an active, engaged process one can spend hundreds of hours on. I know that he thinks that when he does a 30 minute deal closing meeting, that he did all the work to make it happen and should get all the credit. Never mind the last 6 months by our engineering team working nights and weekends to fulfill a custom customer requirement.
> He's given you a specific case that he thinks is a big deal. Why won't you address it?
I'm not quite sure I follow. The way I see it, I have relatively few ways to address it:
1) Tell him to go F off, which I'm not sure does anybody any good.
2) Do the "let's trade jobs for a day" thing. But the only things that he would be able to do, because mine is a job that requires lots of domain knowledge in nearly every task, are the most meanial and time consuming ones. I'm not sure it'll provide the right kind of impression if I give him a task like "here's a list of 20,000 numbers, find all the ones with a non-numeric character in it".
3) Reorg this part of the company so interactions are limited. This might be the only direction that prevents undue internal conflict and keeps us in our respective lanes.
4) Ignore him and hope he learns to respect other people's work. In my experience this doesn't happen since this kind of behavior is largely ego driven.
5) Openly confront him (different from #1). This is the direction I'm presently going, but it's annoying and time consuming. I don't particularly feel the need to justify or explain the details of my job to him (especially when he won't understand the details anyway), senior mgmt already holds my work in high regard and that's who I have to answer to ultimately. The other departments in the company also work well with me and respect me. However, I'm rapidly moving towards #1 or #6.
6) Quit. But as a senior manager in my company, and the only person with domain experience with our customer base plus the technical training to be able to handle several different roles at once, I know that it would sink the company (which as a shareholder does me no personal good, and would put a number of people out of work who I'm responsible for). I think that would be irresponsible unless I knew there was a reasonable replacement to fill in for me.
> This isn't about you. It's about him.
It sure is, a small company like ours doesn't have the time or resources to ego stroke an employee.
> BTW - If he thinks that something can be done better, it doesn't matter if said thing is technical and he's not. Again, stop questioning his competence.
I'm not sure I follow. People are competent in their own areas and incompetent outside of that. I think he's quite competent in his as far as I can tell. He's not competent in mine. He's not offering suggestions for improvement -- which I'm always open to, from anybody regardless of field. He's openly questioning why a complex 6 week project he handled the contracting for takes 6 weeks of active, hands-on work, and not 45 minutes, a hand shake and a signature so I can then move on to help him with another sales pitch. It's stupid and unreasonable. For goodness sakes, he's been with the company for a few years now and to my knowledge has never even installed the software!
"I have less patience with someone who doesn't wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."
1. Reddit/HN/Digg/etc.
2. Facebook (move to #1 if you play Farmville or are female)
3. Steam/xbox/playstation/WOW/Dwarf Fortress
4. Checking Email
5. Watching videos/movies/tv
6. Doing something pointless on your phone
7. Etc. Choose your own time-waster
Of course I only get around 5-10 a day...
=(
#2 and #6 are pretty much saying the same thing. Both speak to how people tend to be over-optimistic with work they're planning to take-on and are unable to take into account of the possible delays to doing that work. Also with #2, It's not clear if he's saying that planning itself is a ineffective habit or if its just the inability to take into account future events.
I'd lump #3 and #4 together as both of these are symptoms of the same problem as well, seeking constant distraction.
#5 is poorly described as it does not describe a habit. He should call this the "keeping up with the Jones's." Either way, I don't really agree that this make people ineffective. Misguided? Maybe.
Edit: fixed some spelling errors.
Why is everyone so concerned with efficiency? One might say "that machine is efficient" or "this machine is not efficient". Why is that? Well, machines are created and owned by humans for a specific purpose -- a coffee-maker makes coffee; a CPU processes logical operations; a carriage horse drags around a cart full of spoiled rich humans :)
We can talk about efficiency of things we own but we can no longer own humans. In a civil society, humans are owners of services that they exchange under conditions of a free and fair market.
There, I said it. Now stop talking about efficiency of humans. Start creating efficient things that efficiently do all the things we hate so we can all be a bunch of lazy fucks :)