The Achievement Habit
Stop wishing, start doing, and take command of your life
By Bernard Roth
About Design Thinking
Design thinking is a set of general practices a group of us has developed over the years that are effective in solving design challenges. It is a concept named by David Kelley, to explain that successful designers have a different mind-set and approach from most people. The idea of the principles are:
1. Empathize. When you design, you're not primarily doing it for yourself, but with other people's needs and desires in mind.
2. Define the problem. Narrow down which problem you're going to solve or which question you're going to answer.
3. Ideate. Generate possible solutions using any means you like -- brainstorming, mind mapping, sketching on napkins...however you work best.
4. Prototype. Without going crazy to make anything perfect, build your project in physical form, or develop the plans for what you;re going to enact.
5. Test and get feedback.
Design thinking is very group-focused, focus on action -- doing rather than overthinking.
Nothing is what you think it is
You give everything its meaning. You can choose what meaning and importance to place on something, you can also understand that it is you, not external circumstances, who determines the quality of your life. In life, the only one keeping a scorecard of your successes and failures is you. While I cannot control what the outside world does, I can determine my own experience. Once you accept that you give everything in your life its meaning, you feel like the master of your life, not a powerless victim of circumstance and chance.
If you stop labeling the world, your job, and your life, you may find that an amazing trajectory is there for the taking. You can remove labels entirely; you can also relabel to great effect. Relabeling can change behavior. People are more concerned with reinforcing their self-image than with their actions; thus, to change behavior, you first change self-image. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.
In an ideal world, self-image would form the basis for much of what we do and do not do. In the real world, things are more complicated.
We generally like to think we are in charge of our actions. Nevertheless, we know that some of things we do are not controlled consciously, know as reflexive or autonomous behaviors. The initial knee-jerk reaction triggered by our brain is out of our conscious control. The second is our reasoned response, which can be brought under control. The first reaction is called a limbic-abduction reaction or amygdala hijacking because it is triggered by the amygdala, a small organ within the brain's limbic system. The amygdala's primary function is to immediately signal the adrenal glands when a fear stimulus is received. It has a secondary and slower connection to the cortex and the other reasoning centers of the brain. The secondary reasoned reaction is not a voluntary one. With a bit of effort you can easily change your secondary reaction. All you have to do is decide you want to change, and then work on it. If you are willing to ignore the initial limbic impulse, you can get your cortex to calm down, take charge, and calm your whole body down. Harvard professor Rudy Tanzi recommends a four-step process to handle situations in which we are in the thrall of a limbic abduction:
1. stop yourself from doing what your initial reaction.
2. take a deep breath.
3. become aware of how you are feeling.
4. recall a past event that gave you a feeling of happiness and peace.
In terms of design thinking, you're breaking down the fight response and looking at it as a problem to be solved, then using ideation to bring you to a better place. These steps bring you into a state of emotional well-being, in which you regain control over your behavior. It takes practice.
Various types of dysfunctional behavior are associated wit a lack of balance in the use of different parts of our brains. Narcissistic or overly dramatic behavior is associated with being stuck in the emotional (limbic) part of the brain. Overintellectualization is associated with being stuck in the part associated with higher intellectual functions (the neocortex). We can stop ourselves from getting stuck by practicing self-awareness. We can train our brains to give us greater sensory awareness, body awareness, and social awareness.
In life we often find ourselves playing the game of right and wrong. I win if I am right and you are wrong. Whenever you find yourself challenged to a game of right and wrong, stop playing. Remember, you give everything in your life its meaning, so you can choose to end the game. It doesn't matter how right you are or how wrong they are, you lose just by playing.
You can modify the way you react to experiences. One little trick is that by exaggerating your reaction, you can make the experience better. If you are boring, tell yourself that in fact, it is so boring that it is amazing. If you are depressed, do not get depressed at the idea of being depressed but get off on it. Admire the fact that you are having this amazing depression. It's allowing yourself to become amused by the terribleness of your situation. Think of the metaphors a comedian would use to describe just how bad is the situation. Write your troubles into a comedic country song, deliver your own stand-up routing about depression.
You have the power to change your attitude toward anything, find enjoyment in it. Once you learn that it is possible to change your habits and develop new attitudes about things, you have a new tool to use in both your professional and your personal life.
Self-image by design
What you can achieve in life has a lot to do with your self-image. If you see yourself as a risk taker and a doer, you're more likely to take risks and do. If you see yourself as cautious and scared, it may make the road to achieving your goals a lot more difficult and protracted. Our intepretations of our self-image, that of our bodies, emotions, actions, and thoughts -- ultimately define for us who we are. We may have an accurate self-image, or it may be way off the mark.
You may not know how you define yourself, let's figure out where your self-image comes from. Some people's self-image totally identifies them with their origins. Naturally, our parents and siblings have a strong influence on who we become, but on the way to maturity, we go through several stages. The first big break from the nuclear family typically occurs when we enter school and learn to deal with strangers. In this environment we first get to look at ourselves and start to form a self-image that reflects who we are rather than who our parents think we are. The closest friend usually becomes a way to know ourselves better because we are free to share things that we withhold from our parents. In teenage years, this need form intimacy in friendship becomes more diffuse, and more friends enter the circle. It provides an opportunity for developing and testing our self-image in a new and uncertain environment. It may involve exploration and experimentation into new realms and certainly involves a strong redefination of self and very strong peer pressure to take on group characteristics. If as adolescents we find a kindred group, our sense of belonging to this world is solidified. If not, it is possible that we might suffer a life of alienation and isolation.
As we leave our teenage years, the next big event in forming self-image occurs when we make a special bond with a love interest. The end result of this pairing is often marriage or some equivalent cohabitation with a partner, and a de facto moving away from the larger group of friends. This is usually a period of personal growth, in which we learn and enhance our marketable skills. We now develop a newer version of our self-image, integrating the influences from our intimate pairing and our skills training into our pictures of ourselves as autonomous adults.
We are influenced by our teachers and parents to the extent that we spend our lives trying as best we can to mimic them, and all too often we end up being second-rate replicas. If we are with someone we admire, we often start to take on some of her traits. It is also possible to learn from them how not to be, generally it takes some conscious efforts. One of the social functions of families and the other communities to which we belong is to constrain our behaviour. Normally these social constraints serve a valid societal function. Yet they can also have a big downside unless we are willing to confront and discard them in a productive manner.
Story writers are concerned with different points of view. They classify them as an objective point of view, a third-person point of view, a first-person point of view, an omniscient point of view, and a limited omniscient point of view. In the objective point of view the writer takes the position of a detached observer, never telling more than can be directly inferred from the dialogue and action. In the third-person point of view the narrator does not participate in the action of the story; we find out about the characters through the narrator's outside voice. In the first-person point of view the narrator is a participant in the story, and now the trustworthiness of the account is in question because it might lack objectivity. In omniscient accounts the writer knows everything about all the characters and actions, or, in a more limited version, knows everything about a limited number of characters or actions. In real life, we get to write our own stories. Some people may be arrogant enough to think they can take on an objectivity or omniscient point of view, and some rare people might be disassociated enough from their lives to take on a third-person point of view. Some people have the delusion they can take on any point of view. Perhaps they can for brief moments, but most of us are all limited to a first-person point of view, and just as in fiction, the question of reliability arises. Because we are writing our own life stories in the first person, we need to realize that we give ourselves and all the other characters their meaning.
There are many factors at play in determining your self-image, and you can shape and redesign that image at will whenever it doesn't suit you. It's important to know that your self-image doesn't have to stay stagnant. Whether that includes physical things like getting a haircut or losing weight, personality-based things such as correcting bad habits or improving skills, or changing pieces of your identity outright (like changing a name). You can make a decision right now to see yourself differently, and then to become different.
Reasons are bullshit
Reasons are simply excuses to hide our shortcomings from ourselves, to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives. Letting go of the need for reasons to justify your behavior is useful in every part of the design thinking process. It can get you unstuck from dead ends, and lead to new approaches and insights.
Sometimes people hide behind heart-wrenching reasons. It is important to understand that this doesn't make them any more useful. People are selective when it comes to recording what really happens to and around them. No matter how strongly you feel you have the true picture, you are probably wrong. Sometimes we are actively dishonest about the reasons for our behavior.
Projection is a common response when someone attributes a feeling or traint to another person, when it's she herself who owns that particular trait or feeling. A truthful person will think all people he encounters are truthful. A person with a background of duplicity and dishonesty tends to be wary of others because he projects his own manipulative behavior onto them.
Who's really stopping you? You are responsible for deciding what you do or don't do. Don't blame others, and don't use reasons to justify or rationalize your behaviors. One of the biggest excuses we have for not getting things done is a lack of time. We all have the same 24-hours in a day, yet, many people accomplished in their days is a lot more than what you have. The difference comes back to intention and attention. It's not that they had extra time, it's that they made time. When something is a priority in your life, you have to be willing to walk away from anything that's standing in its way.It may be helpful to write in a journal for a few days, noting what you're doing all day long and how long you spend on each task.
Getting Unstuck
When you can't find the answer, it is often because you are not asking the correct question. Reframing problems can lead to much better solutions. The idea of reframing is to introduce a change of perspective in to your thinking.
Q: how many design thinkers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Why use light bulbs?
Reframing a problem is essentially a change of point of view.
When thinking about how to achieve your dream, pause and think about what the problem really is. Go to a higher level and consider what else might be at the heart of the problem. Reframe it. Change your point of view. Then change it again and see where you are. The real problem will reveal itself to you.
If you get stuck while working on a problem, try putting it aside for a while. The second is to take the time to explain exactly why you can't solve the problem.
Use Meta Summary: a tool called sometimes as visual thinking. Approach a problem using our visual abilities to see, draw, and imagine. We can generate new ideas by drawing things that we see and things that we imagine. We seek solutions by bringing together results from these different aspects of visual thinking.
Use mind-mapping: relationship maps diagram the connections between pieces of information in a nonlinear manner. Start at the center of your space and write a word or short phrase that will be the main topic. Then see what other world this evokes and write it a short distance away. Connect the two words with a line. Go back to the first word and see what else it evokes. Write this new word in another direction and connect a line to it from the first word. Keep repeating this process until you run out of ideas.
Use How-Why Diagram: to generate a diagram showing a string of causes and effects. For a given problem the diagram lists a way of doing something - the how- and then why it is done. The top level are more abstract concepts, the second level consists of broader groups of topics, the third level are groups of concrete things, the bottom level consists of concrete things.
Power--> women--> cars -- a telephone
Use storyboards; a diagaram showing a linear sequence of events, a very pictorial version of the journey map, these aids for sequential planning are well known in the movie industry.
The big picture
Life on every level is full of complexity and uncertainty. The world around us is even more unpredictable. It's a good idea to have a general sense of your goals in life, and an equally good idea not to get too rigid about your path. Stay open to possibility, let other people in, and listen when new opportunities present themselves.
Some people almost never need to make agonizing decisions, life for them just seems to flow along, and when the big transitions happen, they notice they were big only in hindsight. There are two extreme types of people in the world --- those who say yes to every opportunity, and those who say no. There is no way to know in advance where these opportunities will lead, some may lead nowhere, and some to disaster. Yet when opportunity presents itself, we have no choice but to respond. Ignoring opportunity is itself a response.
The constraints on our career paths tend to be self-imposed. It is said that we all rise to our level of incompetence. What we find more to be the case is we tend to rise without thinking. there is a ladder that exists in many career paths, and society brainwashes people to think they are supposed to climb it. Not every new award, degree, or promotion is a good thing for the individual. There are a great many ex-somethings floating around who would have led much more satisfying and productive lives if they had stayed in the trenches, doing what they really enjoyed, rather than moving in what looked like an upward direction.
Keep asking over and over "what do I really want?", until you feel you have gained insight into your own desires so you're no longer at the mercy of society's idea of what is good for you.
Doing is everything
Notice the difference between intention and attention, between trying to do something and actually doing it. A bias toward action: it is better to start to do something and fail than it is to do nothing and wait for the correct path of action to appear. The most liberating way to acknowledge failure is to celebrate it.
By Bernard Roth
About Design Thinking
Design thinking is a set of general practices a group of us has developed over the years that are effective in solving design challenges. It is a concept named by David Kelley, to explain that successful designers have a different mind-set and approach from most people. The idea of the principles are:
1. Empathize. When you design, you're not primarily doing it for yourself, but with other people's needs and desires in mind.
2. Define the problem. Narrow down which problem you're going to solve or which question you're going to answer.
3. Ideate. Generate possible solutions using any means you like -- brainstorming, mind mapping, sketching on napkins...however you work best.
4. Prototype. Without going crazy to make anything perfect, build your project in physical form, or develop the plans for what you;re going to enact.
5. Test and get feedback.
Design thinking is very group-focused, focus on action -- doing rather than overthinking.
Nothing is what you think it is
You give everything its meaning. You can choose what meaning and importance to place on something, you can also understand that it is you, not external circumstances, who determines the quality of your life. In life, the only one keeping a scorecard of your successes and failures is you. While I cannot control what the outside world does, I can determine my own experience. Once you accept that you give everything in your life its meaning, you feel like the master of your life, not a powerless victim of circumstance and chance.
If you stop labeling the world, your job, and your life, you may find that an amazing trajectory is there for the taking. You can remove labels entirely; you can also relabel to great effect. Relabeling can change behavior. People are more concerned with reinforcing their self-image than with their actions; thus, to change behavior, you first change self-image. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.
In an ideal world, self-image would form the basis for much of what we do and do not do. In the real world, things are more complicated.
We generally like to think we are in charge of our actions. Nevertheless, we know that some of things we do are not controlled consciously, know as reflexive or autonomous behaviors. The initial knee-jerk reaction triggered by our brain is out of our conscious control. The second is our reasoned response, which can be brought under control. The first reaction is called a limbic-abduction reaction or amygdala hijacking because it is triggered by the amygdala, a small organ within the brain's limbic system. The amygdala's primary function is to immediately signal the adrenal glands when a fear stimulus is received. It has a secondary and slower connection to the cortex and the other reasoning centers of the brain. The secondary reasoned reaction is not a voluntary one. With a bit of effort you can easily change your secondary reaction. All you have to do is decide you want to change, and then work on it. If you are willing to ignore the initial limbic impulse, you can get your cortex to calm down, take charge, and calm your whole body down. Harvard professor Rudy Tanzi recommends a four-step process to handle situations in which we are in the thrall of a limbic abduction:
1. stop yourself from doing what your initial reaction.
2. take a deep breath.
3. become aware of how you are feeling.
4. recall a past event that gave you a feeling of happiness and peace.
In terms of design thinking, you're breaking down the fight response and looking at it as a problem to be solved, then using ideation to bring you to a better place. These steps bring you into a state of emotional well-being, in which you regain control over your behavior. It takes practice.
Various types of dysfunctional behavior are associated wit a lack of balance in the use of different parts of our brains. Narcissistic or overly dramatic behavior is associated with being stuck in the emotional (limbic) part of the brain. Overintellectualization is associated with being stuck in the part associated with higher intellectual functions (the neocortex). We can stop ourselves from getting stuck by practicing self-awareness. We can train our brains to give us greater sensory awareness, body awareness, and social awareness.
In life we often find ourselves playing the game of right and wrong. I win if I am right and you are wrong. Whenever you find yourself challenged to a game of right and wrong, stop playing. Remember, you give everything in your life its meaning, so you can choose to end the game. It doesn't matter how right you are or how wrong they are, you lose just by playing.
You can modify the way you react to experiences. One little trick is that by exaggerating your reaction, you can make the experience better. If you are boring, tell yourself that in fact, it is so boring that it is amazing. If you are depressed, do not get depressed at the idea of being depressed but get off on it. Admire the fact that you are having this amazing depression. It's allowing yourself to become amused by the terribleness of your situation. Think of the metaphors a comedian would use to describe just how bad is the situation. Write your troubles into a comedic country song, deliver your own stand-up routing about depression.
You have the power to change your attitude toward anything, find enjoyment in it. Once you learn that it is possible to change your habits and develop new attitudes about things, you have a new tool to use in both your professional and your personal life.
Self-image by design
What you can achieve in life has a lot to do with your self-image. If you see yourself as a risk taker and a doer, you're more likely to take risks and do. If you see yourself as cautious and scared, it may make the road to achieving your goals a lot more difficult and protracted. Our intepretations of our self-image, that of our bodies, emotions, actions, and thoughts -- ultimately define for us who we are. We may have an accurate self-image, or it may be way off the mark.
You may not know how you define yourself, let's figure out where your self-image comes from. Some people's self-image totally identifies them with their origins. Naturally, our parents and siblings have a strong influence on who we become, but on the way to maturity, we go through several stages. The first big break from the nuclear family typically occurs when we enter school and learn to deal with strangers. In this environment we first get to look at ourselves and start to form a self-image that reflects who we are rather than who our parents think we are. The closest friend usually becomes a way to know ourselves better because we are free to share things that we withhold from our parents. In teenage years, this need form intimacy in friendship becomes more diffuse, and more friends enter the circle. It provides an opportunity for developing and testing our self-image in a new and uncertain environment. It may involve exploration and experimentation into new realms and certainly involves a strong redefination of self and very strong peer pressure to take on group characteristics. If as adolescents we find a kindred group, our sense of belonging to this world is solidified. If not, it is possible that we might suffer a life of alienation and isolation.
As we leave our teenage years, the next big event in forming self-image occurs when we make a special bond with a love interest. The end result of this pairing is often marriage or some equivalent cohabitation with a partner, and a de facto moving away from the larger group of friends. This is usually a period of personal growth, in which we learn and enhance our marketable skills. We now develop a newer version of our self-image, integrating the influences from our intimate pairing and our skills training into our pictures of ourselves as autonomous adults.
We are influenced by our teachers and parents to the extent that we spend our lives trying as best we can to mimic them, and all too often we end up being second-rate replicas. If we are with someone we admire, we often start to take on some of her traits. It is also possible to learn from them how not to be, generally it takes some conscious efforts. One of the social functions of families and the other communities to which we belong is to constrain our behaviour. Normally these social constraints serve a valid societal function. Yet they can also have a big downside unless we are willing to confront and discard them in a productive manner.
Story writers are concerned with different points of view. They classify them as an objective point of view, a third-person point of view, a first-person point of view, an omniscient point of view, and a limited omniscient point of view. In the objective point of view the writer takes the position of a detached observer, never telling more than can be directly inferred from the dialogue and action. In the third-person point of view the narrator does not participate in the action of the story; we find out about the characters through the narrator's outside voice. In the first-person point of view the narrator is a participant in the story, and now the trustworthiness of the account is in question because it might lack objectivity. In omniscient accounts the writer knows everything about all the characters and actions, or, in a more limited version, knows everything about a limited number of characters or actions. In real life, we get to write our own stories. Some people may be arrogant enough to think they can take on an objectivity or omniscient point of view, and some rare people might be disassociated enough from their lives to take on a third-person point of view. Some people have the delusion they can take on any point of view. Perhaps they can for brief moments, but most of us are all limited to a first-person point of view, and just as in fiction, the question of reliability arises. Because we are writing our own life stories in the first person, we need to realize that we give ourselves and all the other characters their meaning.
There are many factors at play in determining your self-image, and you can shape and redesign that image at will whenever it doesn't suit you. It's important to know that your self-image doesn't have to stay stagnant. Whether that includes physical things like getting a haircut or losing weight, personality-based things such as correcting bad habits or improving skills, or changing pieces of your identity outright (like changing a name). You can make a decision right now to see yourself differently, and then to become different.
Reasons are bullshit
Reasons are simply excuses to hide our shortcomings from ourselves, to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives. Letting go of the need for reasons to justify your behavior is useful in every part of the design thinking process. It can get you unstuck from dead ends, and lead to new approaches and insights.
Sometimes people hide behind heart-wrenching reasons. It is important to understand that this doesn't make them any more useful. People are selective when it comes to recording what really happens to and around them. No matter how strongly you feel you have the true picture, you are probably wrong. Sometimes we are actively dishonest about the reasons for our behavior.
Projection is a common response when someone attributes a feeling or traint to another person, when it's she herself who owns that particular trait or feeling. A truthful person will think all people he encounters are truthful. A person with a background of duplicity and dishonesty tends to be wary of others because he projects his own manipulative behavior onto them.
Who's really stopping you? You are responsible for deciding what you do or don't do. Don't blame others, and don't use reasons to justify or rationalize your behaviors. One of the biggest excuses we have for not getting things done is a lack of time. We all have the same 24-hours in a day, yet, many people accomplished in their days is a lot more than what you have. The difference comes back to intention and attention. It's not that they had extra time, it's that they made time. When something is a priority in your life, you have to be willing to walk away from anything that's standing in its way.It may be helpful to write in a journal for a few days, noting what you're doing all day long and how long you spend on each task.
Getting Unstuck
When you can't find the answer, it is often because you are not asking the correct question. Reframing problems can lead to much better solutions. The idea of reframing is to introduce a change of perspective in to your thinking.
Q: how many design thinkers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Why use light bulbs?
Reframing a problem is essentially a change of point of view.
When thinking about how to achieve your dream, pause and think about what the problem really is. Go to a higher level and consider what else might be at the heart of the problem. Reframe it. Change your point of view. Then change it again and see where you are. The real problem will reveal itself to you.
If you get stuck while working on a problem, try putting it aside for a while. The second is to take the time to explain exactly why you can't solve the problem.
Use Meta Summary: a tool called sometimes as visual thinking. Approach a problem using our visual abilities to see, draw, and imagine. We can generate new ideas by drawing things that we see and things that we imagine. We seek solutions by bringing together results from these different aspects of visual thinking.
Use mind-mapping: relationship maps diagram the connections between pieces of information in a nonlinear manner. Start at the center of your space and write a word or short phrase that will be the main topic. Then see what other world this evokes and write it a short distance away. Connect the two words with a line. Go back to the first word and see what else it evokes. Write this new word in another direction and connect a line to it from the first word. Keep repeating this process until you run out of ideas.
Use How-Why Diagram: to generate a diagram showing a string of causes and effects. For a given problem the diagram lists a way of doing something - the how- and then why it is done. The top level are more abstract concepts, the second level consists of broader groups of topics, the third level are groups of concrete things, the bottom level consists of concrete things.
Power--> women--> cars -- a telephone
Use storyboards; a diagaram showing a linear sequence of events, a very pictorial version of the journey map, these aids for sequential planning are well known in the movie industry.
The big picture
Life on every level is full of complexity and uncertainty. The world around us is even more unpredictable. It's a good idea to have a general sense of your goals in life, and an equally good idea not to get too rigid about your path. Stay open to possibility, let other people in, and listen when new opportunities present themselves.
Some people almost never need to make agonizing decisions, life for them just seems to flow along, and when the big transitions happen, they notice they were big only in hindsight. There are two extreme types of people in the world --- those who say yes to every opportunity, and those who say no. There is no way to know in advance where these opportunities will lead, some may lead nowhere, and some to disaster. Yet when opportunity presents itself, we have no choice but to respond. Ignoring opportunity is itself a response.
The constraints on our career paths tend to be self-imposed. It is said that we all rise to our level of incompetence. What we find more to be the case is we tend to rise without thinking. there is a ladder that exists in many career paths, and society brainwashes people to think they are supposed to climb it. Not every new award, degree, or promotion is a good thing for the individual. There are a great many ex-somethings floating around who would have led much more satisfying and productive lives if they had stayed in the trenches, doing what they really enjoyed, rather than moving in what looked like an upward direction.
Keep asking over and over "what do I really want?", until you feel you have gained insight into your own desires so you're no longer at the mercy of society's idea of what is good for you.
Doing is everything
Notice the difference between intention and attention, between trying to do something and actually doing it. A bias toward action: it is better to start to do something and fail than it is to do nothing and wait for the correct path of action to appear. The most liberating way to acknowledge failure is to celebrate it.
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