Productive Habits Stack 1 of 101
Here are three recommended readings on productive work habits — from Gary Vaynerchuk, Daniel Pink and James Altucher.
Gary Vaynerchuk writes in his 2009 book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion,
Here’s the deal: if you want it badly enough, the money is there, the success is there, and the fulfillment is there. All you have to do is take it. So quit whining, quit crying, quit with the excuses. If you already have a full-time job, you can get a lot done between 7: 00 P.M. and 2: 00 A.M. (9: 00 P.M. to 3: 00 A.M. if you’ve got kids), so learn to love working during those predawn hours. I promise it won’t be hard if you’re doing what you love more than anything else. I don’t care if your passion is rehabilitating abandoned ferrets; if you learn to tap into everything the digital world has to offer, you can turn water into wine — you can transform what you love into a legacy-building business that makes a crapload of money, and still be true to yourself.
How Daniel Pink generates ideas for books;
I have a Dropbox folder of ideas with folders for different kinds of ideas: book ideas, article ideas, other media ideas. When I have an idea or see something that might be the germ of an idea, I’ll throw it in there, or I might throw it into Evernote. Periodically, maybe every six months, I’ll go through these folders just out of curiosity. What I’ll notice is that more than half the article ideas will absolutely suck. They’re terrible. They’re ridiculous. I wouldn’t want anyone to ever see them. So I’ll go through and prune them — take away the ones that suck and keep the ones that endure. I’ve noticed that if you do this every six months over the course of a few years, certain ideas end up being very persistent. They stick around longer than the other ones — and that suggests to me that there’s a book there. So when I’m at a juncture where I’m thinking about writing a new book, I’ll take those ideas and start going deeper: reading more deeply into those files, making notes, trying to write stuff.
What happened with this last book was this: I like to write book proposals. Even though I’ve been with Riverhead for a long time, and you and I might not need to write a huge book proposal, I like writing proposals. So, I’ll write a 30- or 40-page book proposal. The reason I do that is really for myself; it’s a test of concept, and it’s a test of whether I’m actually interested in the idea. For this last project, I started writing a book proposal for an idea that had persisted for a long time, and I got about two-thirds of the way and said, “This is not a book.” So I put it aside, and then I did another one for an idea I thought was fantastic, got most of the way through, and said, “This is not a book either.”
Finally James Altucher on the importance of learning the micro mastery of skills;
Every skill worth learning has dozens of micro-skills:
For instance, when I started my first successful business I had some natural skills at sales and technology (it was a technology business) but I had to learn so many micro-skills in order to succeed that it felt like I was going to die and fail almost every single day.
Here are some business micro-skills:
Sales, Management of employees, Negotiating, Selling to investors, Selling to acquirers, Product development, Product consistency and execution, Motivation, Emotional stability, and on and on.
All of the skills are exclusive of each other. Negotiating is not the same as Sales. Product development is not the same as management. But each skill needs to be developed to be successful.
Chess micro-skills: openings, middle game, endgame, tactics, positional play (which can be divided up into about 50 micro-skills, as well as all the different types of endgames), attack, defense, psychology, etc….
For whatever you are interested in: list the micro-skills. Figure out what you are good at, what you are bad at, and how you can learn to be better at each.
We highly recommend the recent books of the three author entrepreneurs.
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