Tuesday was another one of those days that wasn't revolutionary but made gradual progress. Sathvik had sent me a post from James Clear about how Pat Riley introduced to his players after they had 'the most talented team ever' and lost in the Western Conference Finals a statistical measure, whose goal was to motivate players to become 1% better every day. It wasn't the players' best day or the worst days, their average. So even though they had the most talent, they can't rely on their best days only to lift them to a championship. In a basketball world, you're directly asking yourself in this frame of mind "Is my average better than the other player's and team's average?" Not "Is my best better than the other player's and team's best?" In the context of my life, I've gotta be asking "Is my average this week / month / quarter / year better than my previous week / month / quarter / year?" With the daily habit tracking, 6 Time book, and daily overall scores, there is a direct way to see that progression.
August Bradley is currently starting his Mindset and Identity Sculpting section of his YouTube series so he talks about the same thing. One question he asked / asks himself that I liked was "Would the person I want to become do this?" So again it's coming back to current self vs future self. The person I want to become is the ideal me. So if that ideal me would do it, then let's go ahead and do it now. Of course, long way to go to get that ingrained in my mind but it's a start. Noticing more content that I'm consuming lately has been about the mind and mentality. So looking forward to continue that and continue leaning into that.
We did our Feb Retro at work yesterday. We spent like 20-30 min talking about one thing it seemed like on the Franchising team. It's a good case study internally to learn from. But my hope is that we actually do learn from it and not make the probabilistically same decisions that will lead to potentially the same results. I'd want to see this OKR retro go for longer than 1.5 hours - or at least have a minimum of 1 hour to be able to discuss the points that people made. I know everyone had some great ideas and input that we didn't really get to b/c we spent the majority of the time just reading through the OKR updates. Then there's the point of we're doing and will have done more and more retros and gained more and more wisdom in how to best operate as a company. But are we retaining the ideas and improvements from previous months and quarters or is it a revolving door of "improvements" but no actual compounding interest? I think what could help actually is, if we did Strengthsfinder or something like that like Myers-Briggs, enneagram, etc. We will understand each other better. There will be more clarity in how our strengths mesh better with other people's strengths and weaknesses. While some people's strengths are Activation and Organization, some people's are Process and Ideation and all the others. By not spending enough time it seems like really assessing and reflecting on the past, we're jumping into planning and doing. It's a ship that's moving fast but to where exactly is the question. Idt we're doing badly. We're light years ahead of where we were before. AND we have lots of room for improvement. Both can be true.
Related to this, I was meditating yesterday evening and was pondering on why it's phrased sometimes as bringing spirituality into business. And not bringing business into spirituality. We are not business beings naturally, we are spiritual beings naturally. So how can you bring something to something that already exists? Spirituality is the default setting, the largest concentric circle. We need to think of it as business as a realm of this spirituality, not injecting spirituality in places where convenient. Like I said, I'd like to see us spend a larger portion of the planning process on the past and learning from the accomplishments and disappointments. I want to see the ideas that everyone has implemented better. I think I could see myself facilitating / helping to facilitate some of the future retros / planning sessions b/c I know we have the potential to achieve all our goals. Something I'd want to do even during this next Q2 planning would be to lead a short meditation 'icebreaker' at the beginning. I do viz med almost every day and I've seen the power it has. It's the main topic around so many books. How do we manifest our ideal reality? I want to share some version of the practice with people here. I want us to picture, feel, immersively experience what it feels like to have accomplished our goals. If we can see, hear, taste, touch, smell our success in the subconscious, no doubt that the actions we take, external factors that are "not in our control", how we perceive and react to those external factors in the conscious state will lead to that success. This sounds like a crazy idea, but idt (m)any people are doing this as a business. I really think this could be a key to unlock our full potential.
I'm also not sure if there are organizations / groups / consulting firms that provide spiritual insight in the business world. So I'll add that to my list of bold ideas to perhaps start something like that - or at least do some more research into it.
Ready to continue this Biweekly circle today and continue my focused execution!
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