Pushing The Right Motivational Levers

Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School hypothesized that intrinsic motivation - that which comes naturally from within - is still the best, and extrinsic motivation that's controlling is still detrimental to creativity, but extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic drives can be highly effective.

What motivates our companion to do a job? The satisfaction of a job well done? The personal reward? The fear of failure? The good it serves others? The success of the team? Speak in terms of that for fastest results.

Going For The Flow

"[A psychologist's] famous work on 'flow' describes a state in which a person is so totally involved in a task that time slows down, enjoyment is heightened, and the task seems almost effortless. This 'high' is achieved when the challenge just matches the person's skills; if it's too easy the experience is boring, too hard and it's frustrating. As people master tasks, they must seek greater challenges and match them with higher-level skills in order to keep experiencing flow." - Geoff Colvin

In That Case, I'm A Great Skater

"Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from." - Geoff Colvin

Aging Slowly

"Studies in a very broad range of domains - management, aircraft piloting, music, bridge, and others - show consistently that excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else - except in their field of expertise." - Geoff Colvin

I'd imagine that this stems from the fact that people continue to throw themselves into their passions. What do we achieve in life by embracing a vague set of principles and dreams? Focus brings brilliance to photos and lives alike.

Stable, Boy

"Great art is usually created amid stability; you won't get many great statues or symphonies from a city under siege." - Geoff Colvin

Is your mind like a city under siege? Built a moat, find some peace! Today work kept me in the office till nearly 7 p.m. It was time to come home, do some quiet stretching in the living room while watching a good show on T.V., and grab something tasty to eat. Then I was relaxed, and ready to be productive again. Sometimes it just helps to detach the brain from "things that matter," and just revel in some easy mental and physical stress relievers.

Why Only 1% Of Grown Kids Live With Their Parents?

"The command and control model of leadership just won't work 99 percent of the time." - A.G. Lafely, Procter & Gamble

Saying Know

"Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment's consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not what, but knowing. Because the demands of achieving exceptional performance are so great over so many years, no one has a prayer of meeting them without utter commitment." - Geoff Colvin

There are some things we just know match our skills and passions. Why not go for it? Excellence is a long road away and it's time to start running.

Artificial Heart (Sort Of)

"Endurance runners, for instance, have larger than average hearts, an attribute that most of us see as one of the natural advantages with with they were blessed. But no, research has shown that their hearts grow after years of intensive training; when they stop training, their hearts revert toward normal size." - Geoff Colvin

We hear talk of reshaping our futures, and it's good to hear that we can even reshape our bodies to get there! Some might say that we're lucky, and that may be true. But as Hall of Fame golfer Arnold Palmer once said, "the more I practice, the luckier I get."

50 Years of Leadership

"The most successful parts of GE are places where leaders have stayed in place a long time. Think of Brian Rowe's long tenure in aircraft engines. Four or five big decisions he made - relying on his deep knowledge of that business - won us maybe as many as 50 years of industry leadership. The same point applies to GE Capital. The places where we've churned people, like reinsurance, are where you will find we've failed." - Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric

Good leadership needs consistency.

My Type Of Thinking

"The very fastest typists achieve their advantage by looking farther ahead in the text, which enables them to keep moving their fingers into place for the next keystroke just a little bit ahead of time (and, in particular, to hit successive letter types with opposite hands especially fast, which is their most effective way of outrunning average typists). When researchers prevented top typists from looking farther ahead in the text, they performed scarcely better than novices." - Geoff Colvin

(For the record, I made about ten mistakes when typing that.)

What an accidental parable! How often do we lock our attention into the letter of the moment, failing to look a few words ahead? Those words hold promise, lie beyond the petty worries of today's possible failures, and bring greater success through preparation.

Getting Pushy

"Practice is all about pushing ourselves just beyond what we currently do." - Geoff Colvin

I've never had a longer stretch of continuous weight lifting than this year. The first few months were about settling into a routine, building a mental picture of successfully completed workouts. More recently, it's about detaching my mind from the exercise, as if I'm watching a machine in action. Separating fatigue from failure has helped me to push until the muscle's entirely spent, without slipping into the kind of bad form that comes with self-induced pressure or panic.

Chess Natch

"My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work. I agree with him." - Susan Polgar

Susan was home schooled by her parents. The parents quit their jobs to devote themselves to teaching Susan chess. They accumulated a library of ten thousand chess books, and a giant filing system of index cards that catalogues previous games and potential opponents. At age 17, she became the first woman to qualify for what was then called the Men's World Championship. At 21, she was a grand master, the highest rank in world chess. She reached it faster than anyone in history, besting legend Bobby Fischer by a few months.

Oh, and her two sisters rose as high as sixth in the world.

Practicing Spurts

"A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes." - Geoff Colvin

And if you have trouble tearing yourself away from the thing it is that you're doing in order to become masterful at it, try drinking lots of water and let nature provide her own breaks for you!

Lonely Practice Makes Perfect

Three groups of violinists of varying success were studied.

"Perhaps most striking, all three groups were spending the same total amount of time on music-related activities - lessons, practice, classes, and so on - about fifty-one hours a week... though the violinists understood the importance of practice alone, the amount of time the various groups actually spent practicing alone differed dramatically. The two top groups, the best and better violinists, practiced by themselves about twenty-four hours a week on average. The third group, the good violinists, practiced by themselves only nine hours a week." - Geoff Colvin

Tanks For The Memories

A test subject who invested 250 hours of practice could eventually remember long streams of digits, read to him at a rate of one per second, after which he had twenty seconds to pause before reading them back.

His longest string approached 82 numbers!

"There is apparently no limit to improvement in memory skill with practice." - Chase and Ericsson

Mozart The Late Bloomer

"Mozart's first work regarded to day as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That's certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training." - Geoff Colvin

It's easy to confuse experience as giftedness. Don't! Genius for most is the fruit of hard work.

Choosing Wisely

"Bill Gates has said that if you took the twenty smartest people out of the Microsoft it would be an insignificant company, and if you ask around the company what its core competency is, they don't say anything about software. They say it's hiring. They know what the scarce resource is." - Geoff Colvin

In business, hiring decisions are far-reaching. And in personal life, what could be as important as choosing good friends? The kind who endure our faults, who strive to improve, who always find ways to be happy, who resist complaint, and who make us better through their example. Friends who get their fun out of commiserating will run a person into the ground, as surely as a river will cut stone. We have the choice to take the high ground by the friends we choose.