Navigate Life: Practical Tips for Everyday Success: Part 1
Life is one big Change. Everything changes. Our bodies change — I was under 2kg at birth. Today I clock in at 111kg. In a month’s time I will be a svelte 110kg — I’m going to train a bit harder — try and work in a salad between ice-cream courses.
The world around us changes. The lines on maps change. The biggest change is in technology. In my lifetime we went from analog to digital. Now they’re talking about quantum. 2 years ago generative AI was still experimental — now it’s everywhere. Next up Artificial General Intelligence. Then there is noise about Superintelligence. I suppose the next thing will be Quantum Super Duper Hyper Intelligence.
Change has always been a factor in human lives — the thing now is that it seems we are switching gears again and about to experience even greater and greater acceleration.
I was thinking about some things that we can use to stay sane amidst all this change, and not just survive — but also thrive. I came up with a list of 17 tips. I do not think they are revolutionary or new, but I do think they are timeless. Some work well together. Some you probably use already. Others you can just add on.
17 is a lot — so I grouped them — into Tip families. There are 6 Tip families. These are tips that work together and operate as a group. You might be working with some of the family members and just need to get an intro to the older brother. Or you might not have met a whole family — in that case you are in for a treat.
The first Tip Family is the Up Family. These are some tips that will help to go up in life. To rise above the things that challenge you and enable progress.
The Up Family
Tip 1: Embrace a Growth Mindset
Tip 2: Set Fuzzy Goals
Tip 3: Be Adaptable
Tip 4: Reflect and Adjust
Tip 1: Embrace a Growth Mindset
The ordinary focus on what they’re getting. The extraordinary think about who they’re becoming. — Robin Sharma
This is the anchor in this family. The Matriarch — or depending on your idea of family — the family cat that actually runs the whole show.
If you habitually practise this tip, the other tips will automatically flow.
A growth mindset is an attitude, not a set of rules. It’s an orientation, a principle. A decision.
A growth mindset is not dependent on circumstances or resources. It’s about looking for opportunities to learn and grow, whoever you are and wherever you are. This is not the same as positive thinking. You can be positive or negative — it’s not really relevant (ask the cat). If you feel pressure to always be positive — you can drop that now.
Having a growth mindset is about finding the learning in any situation — whether positive or negative. A growth mindset is about trying to grow in every situation with whatever mental or physical tools you have.
You can also start small — in fact — that’s recommended. It’s not a volume thing. It tends to be qualitative. As such — it ends up compounding.
It’s more than learning from your mistakes — although those are good to start with. My son had a tendency to awfulise negative experiences and would want to give up whenever an endeavour did not go smoothly. I would ask him to list 10 positive things or learnings he could get from the bad experience or unaccomplished goal. You can imagine the attitude that evoked from a teen. I then told him I would up the required list to100 instead of 10 if the sulk continued. He chose 10.
The odd thing was that instead of letting the issue crush him, he went into an intellectual battle to mine the experience for 10 positive things or learnings. Did that immediately make the failure better? Did it remove the disappointment of the struggle? No. None of those.
That was never the intent though. It was to teach him to mine every experience and setback for growth. Eventually he got into the habit of asking himself the question whenever he hit a setback.
My next step was to ask him to do the same with positive experiences and victories. Which he found surprising. Oddly enough this was just as hard. We tend to think that when we have great success or a very positive experience that we are at the peak, the pinnacle. Often we are not. The work of Marcus Buckingham at Gallup proved beyond any doubt that if we build on and expand our strengths, that we will grow massively.
A simple example. I am not much of a sprinter. I have no particular natural talent. Now if I was put on a training protocol with an olympic coach and trained, ate and engaged in dedicated effort to become a sprinter, without a doubt I would improve. Will I win the Olympics? No. Probably not even a race against all the men in my suburb.
Do the same thing with a guy called Usain Bolt — and you end up with World records. It’s a natural strength. A strength that he then focused on and dedicated to growing and honing.
The key is to try and learn from our strengths and see if we can grow these. The potential could be quite astounding.
The wonderful thing about a growth mindset is that you can start where you are, as you are. The more you practise it, the more it becomes a habit. The more it becomes a habit, the more you will grow. Growth then equips you with greater insight and experience to mine further growth out of your experiences.
If you fail to do this and make it into a habit — well then you have a negative experience you can mine for growth. Start there. Restart there. Even if you restart embracing a growth mindset 100 times in 100 days — you will grow. It will have an impact on you.
The most ill-equipped and meagre human being who grabs hold of a growth mindset with the little strength they have, will eventually surpass the most gifted uber human who does not.
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Tip 2: Set Fuzzy Goals.
That probably contradicts everything you’ve ever read and heard. Are we not supposed to have clear, achievable goals? And write them down.
If you’re like me, you probably hate being told to do this. I do. It’s not that I don’t have goals. It’s that I don’t want to be tied down. What if I discover something tomorrow that makes me want to change my goal? Then I’m stuck. Afterall — I wrote them down — it feels kind of binding.
That’s why I like fuzzy goals. It also takes the pressure off. I don’t have a 5-year plan. Way too much work.
But seriously — If I asked you to list 5 fuzzy goals — how does that feel?
Yup — pretty easy. There — that took a few seconds — instead of days or weeks of nail-biting effort and stress.
Now for the fun part — create some plans. Fuzzy plans. Imagine that. If you’re like me — creating fuzzy plans is easy, but it also has another effect. For the first time — planning becomes easy — after all — these are fuzzy — not cast in concrete. There is room to manoeuvre.
You might even find that by giving yourself some fuzzy freedom, you actually planned things that you would never have previously dared to. Fuzzy equals freedom. Normal, old-fashioned goals, with rigid plans — pretty much have 2 outcomes: Success or Failure. Fuzzy plans not so much. With fuzzy goals and plans you can adjust as you go along.
One of the characteristics of living in our world is change — constant and mind-blowing change. We live in a fuzzy world. Fuzzy goals and fuzzy plans fit this world.
If this fuzziness makes you uncomfortable — ask yourself this. Do you have clear goals and plans — or has the uncertainty, fear and stress of trying to create those left you without any goals or plans? Are you just fumbling along feeling like you’re stuck on an out of control roller coaster ride?
If you don’t have GOALS and PLANS — well — now you can have some fuzzy ones. The weird side effect of this is that just by creating these no pressure goals and plans, you will have taken the pressure and stress out of the process and your natural creativity and curiosity will get kindled.
Maybe you have this goal to skydive. I don’t — but I’m not judging you. Now you could set a goal to get your first jump next month. Then 100 jumps in 2 years, and do some base-jumping by year 5 (5 year plans again — sigh!). Or — you could set a fuzzy goal to do something that gets your adrenaline rushing, and involves heights. And you’d like to do it in the next month or ten-ish. Fuzzy.
Five months later, out of the blue, a friend tells you that they got tickets to a restaurant that has been built on top of the highest tower in the city and has a glass floor. Sounds freaky. You go along — you end up sitting high in the sky drinking multi-coloured cocktails with a glass floor under you that makes you feel like you are floating with the birds.
You just hit your fuzzy goal. Feels great. Now you might decide you still want to jump out of a plane. That’s great. You might also decide that you hit your goal, and set some other fuzzies.
Fuzzy goals and plans work really well with having a growth mindset. One of the things about a growth mindset is that you want to set some goals and make some plans. Fuzzy goals and planning take the trauma out of goal-setting and help you to play with goals and plans — playing is practice — you’re growing your goal and planning skills at the same time.
Tip 3: Be Adaptable
If you took to the concept of fuzzy goals like a duck to water — then you can just check this one off. It’s built into fuzzy goals.
If the thought of fuzzy goals caused heart palpitations, then you need to consider this. Even the best laid plans don’t always work out.
In 1871 a Prussian strategist and military planner Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder made the following observation: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. (paraphrased)
Our plans might not be battle plans, and we might not be in a combat situation, but life tends to be its own form of battle. Von Moltke was saying that things do not necessarily go according to plan. We can either get upset and miserable whenever things do not work out, or we can make contingency plans and be adaptable.
Of course — there is no guarantee that we will have thought of the circumstances or obstacles that actually occur. Don’t despair — when your stringent (or hopefully fuzzy) plans go up in flames — this is a perfect opportunity to employ your growth mindset and mine some gold.
Tip 4: Reflect and Adjust
This might seem like it’s the same as the previous tip — Be Adaptable. They are definitely siblings — but like even the most similar siblings — there are some differences.
The convenient thing about fuzzy goals is that adapting or adjusting them is pretty seamless. Unlike stringent 5-year plans that need a quorum of the planning committee to modify — fuzzy goals being fuzzy are pretty much self adjusting.
The key here is the other bit — the reflecting bit. Reflecting is where you examine things closely. Where you scrutinise and poke at them. See if they still make sense. This is where you take a long hard look at your growth and your fuzzy goals and sense check this.
When you look at a reflection of yourself in the mirror, just before you dash out the door to meet your friends for dinner, you do a quick sense check. Do I have pants on? Check. Spinach in teeth? Nope — Check. Hair looks like it’s been brushed? Check. Clean shirt? Check. Good to go.
Reflecting on your growth and goals is a similar exercise. Instead of a mirror — you look back over a period and reflect on what this reflects to you. Do this with a Growth Mindset. Learn from this. What insights do you get? Any fascinating learnings.
Did you mess up? Make mistakes? Probably. Forgive yourself — mine those failures, get some learnings and move forward. Set some new fuzzy goals. Adapt some existing fuzzy goals.
Using the Up Family of Tips will help you to handle the constant onslaught of change that life throws at you. We cannot determine what happens in life, but we can have a strategy for responding to what happens. We also cannot predict the future with any certainty and therefore need to set goals and make plans with some built in compensation mechanisms.
Cars have shock absorbers, and inflatable rubber tyres to protect us from the impact of all the variations on the road surface. This means that when you drive down a road your kidneys don’t get liquified. Fuzzy goals are goals with shock absorbers built in.
In Navigate Life: Practical Tips for Everyday Success: Part 2 I’ll introduce you to the Heal Family
