At first look, I thought the book is about how we can improve our performance at work so that we can be excellent at anything. For instance, we may be good at technical aspects of our work but may be poor in terms of motivating and providing leadership to the team which we lead. Well, it was certainly a lesson not to jump into conclusion too fast especially just by looking at the surface. As the title (".......to get more out of work and life") suggests, the book is about how we can have a meaningful life and to have the best adventure during our short stay here on earth. The book is good where it provides guidance and practical examples on how we can improve our work performance while at the same time, have a meaningful and happy life outside of work. For me, more importantly, it prompted me to ask myself some questions which are neglected in the chaos and hectic lifestyle of all of us modern animals. I certainly do not want to only realize that I have not "lived" when I am fifty or sixty and it may be too late by then. It also prompted me to ask myself what would give me the most satisfaction and contentment when it was time for me to check-out from this adventure on earth. Would I have any regrets? Have you asked yourself such questions lately?
Actually, the book is well written and there is also summary/action steps at the end of each chapter. Anyway, the original intention of this blog is to share some excerpts from the book which I find useful/motivating and as usual, the followings are excerpts which I am sharing with all of you (Words in blue are my own opinion):
1) The way we're working isn't working in our own lives, for the people we lead and manage, and for the organizations in which we work. We're guided by a fatal assumption that the best way to get more done is to work longer and more continuously. But the more hours we work and the longer we go without real renewal, the more we begin to default, reflexively, into behaviors that reduce our own effectiveness - impatience, frustration, distraction, and disengagement. They also take a pernicious toll on others.
We live in a gray zone, constantly juggling activities but rarely fully engaging in any of them, or fully disengaging from any of them. The consequence is that we settle for a pale version of the possible.
(Are you suffering from the above or you noticed that someone which you are leading is suffering some of the behaviors described above due to over-working or burnt out? Are you passionately engaged in your work or you are doing it half-heartedly and not to the full potential which you know you are capable of?)
2) Human beings, on the other hand, need to meet four energy needs to operate at their best: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
3) Perhaps no human need is more neglected in the workplace than to feel valued. (Employees need to feel valued! As leader, we need to let our employees know that they are valued)
4) The single most important factor in whether or not employees choose to stay in a job, Gallup has found, is the quality of their relationship with their direct superiors. (Different people may interpret this statement differently. For me, a good quality relationship is where we work for someone which continue to inspire us to reach higher and to grow as a person and not necessarily as your best friend at work)
5) Consciously cultivating a more realistically optimistic perspective refuels our emotional reservoir (Be positive. No one likes to be around a grouch)
6) Is the life you're leading worth the price you're paying to live it? (Powerful question isn't it? We have to constantly ask ourselves this question)
5) Consciously cultivating a more realistically optimistic perspective refuels our emotional reservoir (Be positive. No one likes to be around a grouch)
6) Is the life you're leading worth the price you're paying to live it? (Powerful question isn't it? We have to constantly ask ourselves this question)
7) "There is always an optimal value," explained the philosopher Gregory Bateson, "beyond which anything is toxic, no matter what: oxygen, sleep, psychotherapy, philosophy." The Stoic philosophers referred to this paradox as anacoluthia, the mutual entailment of virtues. No virtue, they argued, is a virtue by itself. Even the noblest virtues have their limits. (This is a philosophy which I strongly believe. Everything should be in moderation from money, work and even having fun. The same goes with management philosophy, there should be middle ground between compassion, making the hard decisions, etc.)
8) We create the highest value not by focusing solely on our strengths or by ignoring our weaknesses, but by being attentive to both.
9) Self-control, Baumeister hypothesized, operates the same way a muscle does during resistance training. Exposed to continuous stress, the muscle becomes progressively depleted of strength, until ultimately it can't exert any more energy and fails. If we have to rely on willpower to sustain a new behaviour, the overwhelming likelihood is that we'll eventually fail.
10) By defining precisely when we're going to undertake a behavior, we reduce the amount of energy we have to expand to get it done. Often, when we make a commitment to a new behavior such as exercising, we fail to recognize that unless we set aside a specific time to do it, it's unlikely we will.
11) Maintenance and refueling are as critical to victory as racing itself. That's because the higher the demand, the greater and more frequent the need for renewal. (Don't burn out yourself!)
12) Taking care of yourself physically won't turn you into a great performer - it's just one piece of a more complex puzzle - but failing to do so assures that you can't ever perform at your best. (Do you neglect your health in the pursuit of career advancement?)
13) William Dement, the widely acknowledged dean of sleep researchers, argues that sleep may well be more critical to our well-being than diet, exercise, and even heredity. (It seems that modern workers are increasingly sacrificing sleep in the pursuit of career advancement and jeopardising their own long-term growth)
14) So how much sleep do we need? The National Sleep Foundation recommends between seven and nine hours.
15) Numerous studies of great performers suggest they sleep more than the rest of us, not less. (I should have used this book against my parents for complaining that I sleep too much during the day during my student days. Hehehe. Anyway, don't misinterpret the statement. It doesn't mean that the more you sleep, the better you are at whatever you are doing. It just means great performers knew the importance of sleep and pace themselves accordingly to ensure sustainable long-term performance)
16) Sleep is not simply cognitively restorative but also a time during which considerable learning occurs. Although the acquisition of knowledge occurs only during waking life, there is evidence that we process, consolidate, and stabilize memory during sleep.
17) Whether it's evenings and weekends truly off, longer and more regular vacations, brief breaks during the day at ninety-minute intervals, short afternoon naps, or a minimum of seven to eight hours of sleep a night, the overwhelming evidence is that our health and productivity are enhanced by a rhythmic movement between work and rest.
18) ....... three principles that we believe are fundamental to sustainable high performance. The first is that we cannot expect growth or improvement in any dimension of our lives without intentionally and regularly challenging our current capacity. The second is that intense effort for short periods, followed by intentional rest and recovery, is more efficient, more satisfying and ultimately more productive than moderate, continuous effort for longer periods of time. The third principle is that Aesop had it wrong in his classic fable about the tortoise and the hare. It isn't the tortoise, slow and steady, that wins the race. Rather, it's the hare, who balances intense burst of energy with intermittent periods of recovery.
19) Metabolism is the rate at which we burn calories, and eating breakfast stokes it and also gives us energy for the day ahead. (Breakfast is important!!!)
20) The third problem with negative emotions is their impact on others. The research is increasingly clear that all emotions are contagious, for better or for worse. (Be happy and positive and the world will be a better place)
21) We think of leaders as "chief energy officers." The core challenge for leaders, we believe, is to recruit, mobilize, inspire, focus and regularly refuel the energy of those they lead - to nudge them toward high positive. (For me, the greatest sense of satisfaction is when seeing the person which you lead grow together with you)
22) Our core emotional need is to feel secure - to be valued - and challenges to our self-worth do just the opposite. They make us feel devalued and insecure. Most of us find such feelings uncomfortable at best and intolerable at worst.
23) Whether inflated self-regard is a thin cover for inadequacy or an inflated and unwarranted confidence, it's at least as dysfunctional as insecurity.
24) When a trigger lands you in the "Survival Zone," the first key is to calm your physiology. That requires applying what we call the Golden Rule of Triggers: whatever you feel compelled to do, don't. Instead take a deep breath, and then feel your feet. Buy time until your body calms down, so that you can make an intentional choice about how to best respond to the trigger. (Helps prevent us from responding in a way which we regret later)
25) Expecting to succeed, in short, makes us more likely to succeed. "Each of us can be considered an active player in the quality of our experiences," writes Schneider, "with at least partial control of whether good things happen. Realistically, having a good attitude is likely to pay off." (Attitude, attitude and attitude determine our success)
26) ....... "the Stockdale Paradox."......."You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
27) In its 2007 study of 90,000 employees in eighteen countries, Towers Perrin found that the single highest driver of engagement was whether or not senior management was perceived to be sincerely interested in employees' well-being. An organization's reputation as a great place to work was the highest driver of retention; second was the satisfaction of employees with the organization's people decisions. The third was having a positive relationship with one's direct supervisor. The conclusion is inescapable: truly valuing people pays huge dividends.
28) We recognized that we needed to pause to celebrate our successes along the way, or else people get burned out and feel taken for granted.
29) Because the impact of bad is stronger than good, the first rule for an effective leader is simply to avoid devaluing emotions: anger, intimidation, disparagement, and shame.
30) Treat employees well, make them feel more valued, and they will treat their customers well.
31) Herbert Simon, a polymath who wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and won the Nobel Prize in Economics, saw our current attentional crisis coming forty years ago. "What information consumes is rather obvious," he wrote in 1971. "It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." (I think many of us can relate to this. The quality of our attention seems to be deteriorating due to information overload. We are bombarded with constant information from TV, smartphone, etc. to the extent that it is also affecting our attention to our loved ones and our surroundings. This is the same with work that too much information can be paralysing and we are so busy replying e-mails, phone calls, etc. that we are rarely focused on the more important task)
32) If you want those in your charge to be effective at delaying gratification and focusing their attention effectively, it goes a long way to make them feel cared for and secure.
33) Obvious as that may seem, the act of prioritizing - focusing on what's likely to add the greatest value over the longest term - doesn't come to us naturally. It requires both awareness and intentionality. At a practical level, it means setting aside regular time to reflect on and define priorities, rather than simply plunging into the next task that comes into your mind or reacting to the next request that flashes up on your computer screen.
34) Control your attention, and you control your life. I truly believe that.
35) ..... many analytically gifted, left-hemisphere-driven leaders who lack the capacity to connect emotionally with those they lead. At the opposite end, extreme empathy may lead to an inability to create boundaries with others, while high creativity may be accompanied by a spacy inability to follow through and translate ideas into actions. (This explains why technical people like engineers are usually lousy businessman because technical people are dominated by left-hemisphere of our brain and engineers lack the ability to connect emotionally with others such as Clients. At the other end, highly creative people which is dominated by right-hemisphere brain lack the efficiency of getting things done systematically unlike engineers. So, the key here is to realise our inherent biological weaknesses and how to overcome it, e.g. perhaps engineers need to spend more time socialising to develop our social skills)
36) While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci regularly took off from painting for several hours at a time and seemed to be daydreaming aimlessly. Urged by his patron, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, to work more continuously, da Vinci reported to have replied, immodestly but accurately, "The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less."
37) Arie de Geus, a former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell, conducted a studies of companies that have lasted the longest. "The ability to learn faster than competitors," he argued, "may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." (The challenge for a company is then to instill a culture of learning within the organization and to treat every unique job as an opportunity to learn. The same applies to individuals)
38) Any organization that fails to build a robust learning program for its employees - not just to increase their skills but also to develop them as human beings - ought to expect that its people won't get better at their jobs over time and may well get worse.
39) "He who has a why to live for," said Nietzsche, "can bear almost any how." When something really matters to us, we bring vastly more energy to it in the form of focus, conviction, passion, and perseverance.
40) ...... that once our basic needs are met, money has little to no impact on our happiness. Nonetheless, the typical pattern in any addiction is to progressively do more of whatever the addictive behavior may be, in an increasingly futile effort to recapture the initial pleasure it provided.
41) We derive the most powerful sense of purpose when our values fuel behaviors that serve something beyond ourselves.
42) "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," Apple CEO Steven Jobs told Stanford's graduating class in 2005, just a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-nine.
43) The limitations we set on ourselves are mostly our own. The willingness to delay immediate gratification in the pursuit of excellence is the surest way to achieve rich, deep, and enduring satisfaction.
44) "A person with ubuntu," explains Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished."
45) A review of more than 150 leadership studies found that integrity is the value employees care most about in their leaders. Honesty is second, and humility is third. The other qualities employees most value include care and appreciation, respect for others, fairness, listening responsively, and reflectiveness.
46) If you lead or manage others, here are the sorts of questions you might ask yourself and request others to answer about you:
a) Do you actively support people in taking care of themselves physically? Do you model these behaviors yourself?
b) Do you truly value, regularly recognize, and express appreciation to those who work for you?
c) Do you respect and trust your employees and treat them as adults capable of making their own decisions about how best to get their work done?
d) Do you believe passionately in what you're doing, and do you give people who work for you a compelling reason beyond a paycheck to come to work every day?
47) "Before my illness, I had considered commitment king among virtues. After I was diagnosed, I came to consider consciousness king among virtues. I began to feel that everyone's first responsibility was to be as conscious as possible all the time....Looking at how some of the people around me had managed their lives, I lamented that they had not been blessed with this jolt to life. They had no real motivation or clear timeline to stop what they were so busy at, to step back, to ask what exactly they were doing with their life. Many of of them had money; many of them had more money than they needed. Why was it so scary to ask themselves one simple question: Why am I doing what I'm doing?" (written by Eugene O'Kelly, the former CEO of accounting firm KPMG in the last months of his life, before he succumbed to brain cancer at the age of fifty-three)
I think the last point best sums up the lessons from the book. Do we know our priorities? If we say that we needed more money for our loved ones but we are now sacrificing our time with them, is this the correct path? Do we know why we are doing what we are doing?
Good luck and have a good and happy life ahead!
9) Self-control, Baumeister hypothesized, operates the same way a muscle does during resistance training. Exposed to continuous stress, the muscle becomes progressively depleted of strength, until ultimately it can't exert any more energy and fails. If we have to rely on willpower to sustain a new behaviour, the overwhelming likelihood is that we'll eventually fail.
10) By defining precisely when we're going to undertake a behavior, we reduce the amount of energy we have to expand to get it done. Often, when we make a commitment to a new behavior such as exercising, we fail to recognize that unless we set aside a specific time to do it, it's unlikely we will.
11) Maintenance and refueling are as critical to victory as racing itself. That's because the higher the demand, the greater and more frequent the need for renewal. (Don't burn out yourself!)
12) Taking care of yourself physically won't turn you into a great performer - it's just one piece of a more complex puzzle - but failing to do so assures that you can't ever perform at your best. (Do you neglect your health in the pursuit of career advancement?)
13) William Dement, the widely acknowledged dean of sleep researchers, argues that sleep may well be more critical to our well-being than diet, exercise, and even heredity. (It seems that modern workers are increasingly sacrificing sleep in the pursuit of career advancement and jeopardising their own long-term growth)
14) So how much sleep do we need? The National Sleep Foundation recommends between seven and nine hours.
15) Numerous studies of great performers suggest they sleep more than the rest of us, not less. (I should have used this book against my parents for complaining that I sleep too much during the day during my student days. Hehehe. Anyway, don't misinterpret the statement. It doesn't mean that the more you sleep, the better you are at whatever you are doing. It just means great performers knew the importance of sleep and pace themselves accordingly to ensure sustainable long-term performance)
16) Sleep is not simply cognitively restorative but also a time during which considerable learning occurs. Although the acquisition of knowledge occurs only during waking life, there is evidence that we process, consolidate, and stabilize memory during sleep.
17) Whether it's evenings and weekends truly off, longer and more regular vacations, brief breaks during the day at ninety-minute intervals, short afternoon naps, or a minimum of seven to eight hours of sleep a night, the overwhelming evidence is that our health and productivity are enhanced by a rhythmic movement between work and rest.
18) ....... three principles that we believe are fundamental to sustainable high performance. The first is that we cannot expect growth or improvement in any dimension of our lives without intentionally and regularly challenging our current capacity. The second is that intense effort for short periods, followed by intentional rest and recovery, is more efficient, more satisfying and ultimately more productive than moderate, continuous effort for longer periods of time. The third principle is that Aesop had it wrong in his classic fable about the tortoise and the hare. It isn't the tortoise, slow and steady, that wins the race. Rather, it's the hare, who balances intense burst of energy with intermittent periods of recovery.
19) Metabolism is the rate at which we burn calories, and eating breakfast stokes it and also gives us energy for the day ahead. (Breakfast is important!!!)
20) The third problem with negative emotions is their impact on others. The research is increasingly clear that all emotions are contagious, for better or for worse. (Be happy and positive and the world will be a better place)
21) We think of leaders as "chief energy officers." The core challenge for leaders, we believe, is to recruit, mobilize, inspire, focus and regularly refuel the energy of those they lead - to nudge them toward high positive. (For me, the greatest sense of satisfaction is when seeing the person which you lead grow together with you)
22) Our core emotional need is to feel secure - to be valued - and challenges to our self-worth do just the opposite. They make us feel devalued and insecure. Most of us find such feelings uncomfortable at best and intolerable at worst.
23) Whether inflated self-regard is a thin cover for inadequacy or an inflated and unwarranted confidence, it's at least as dysfunctional as insecurity.
24) When a trigger lands you in the "Survival Zone," the first key is to calm your physiology. That requires applying what we call the Golden Rule of Triggers: whatever you feel compelled to do, don't. Instead take a deep breath, and then feel your feet. Buy time until your body calms down, so that you can make an intentional choice about how to best respond to the trigger. (Helps prevent us from responding in a way which we regret later)
25) Expecting to succeed, in short, makes us more likely to succeed. "Each of us can be considered an active player in the quality of our experiences," writes Schneider, "with at least partial control of whether good things happen. Realistically, having a good attitude is likely to pay off." (Attitude, attitude and attitude determine our success)
26) ....... "the Stockdale Paradox."......."You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
27) In its 2007 study of 90,000 employees in eighteen countries, Towers Perrin found that the single highest driver of engagement was whether or not senior management was perceived to be sincerely interested in employees' well-being. An organization's reputation as a great place to work was the highest driver of retention; second was the satisfaction of employees with the organization's people decisions. The third was having a positive relationship with one's direct supervisor. The conclusion is inescapable: truly valuing people pays huge dividends.
28) We recognized that we needed to pause to celebrate our successes along the way, or else people get burned out and feel taken for granted.
29) Because the impact of bad is stronger than good, the first rule for an effective leader is simply to avoid devaluing emotions: anger, intimidation, disparagement, and shame.
30) Treat employees well, make them feel more valued, and they will treat their customers well.
31) Herbert Simon, a polymath who wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and won the Nobel Prize in Economics, saw our current attentional crisis coming forty years ago. "What information consumes is rather obvious," he wrote in 1971. "It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." (I think many of us can relate to this. The quality of our attention seems to be deteriorating due to information overload. We are bombarded with constant information from TV, smartphone, etc. to the extent that it is also affecting our attention to our loved ones and our surroundings. This is the same with work that too much information can be paralysing and we are so busy replying e-mails, phone calls, etc. that we are rarely focused on the more important task)
32) If you want those in your charge to be effective at delaying gratification and focusing their attention effectively, it goes a long way to make them feel cared for and secure.
33) Obvious as that may seem, the act of prioritizing - focusing on what's likely to add the greatest value over the longest term - doesn't come to us naturally. It requires both awareness and intentionality. At a practical level, it means setting aside regular time to reflect on and define priorities, rather than simply plunging into the next task that comes into your mind or reacting to the next request that flashes up on your computer screen.
34) Control your attention, and you control your life. I truly believe that.
35) ..... many analytically gifted, left-hemisphere-driven leaders who lack the capacity to connect emotionally with those they lead. At the opposite end, extreme empathy may lead to an inability to create boundaries with others, while high creativity may be accompanied by a spacy inability to follow through and translate ideas into actions. (This explains why technical people like engineers are usually lousy businessman because technical people are dominated by left-hemisphere of our brain and engineers lack the ability to connect emotionally with others such as Clients. At the other end, highly creative people which is dominated by right-hemisphere brain lack the efficiency of getting things done systematically unlike engineers. So, the key here is to realise our inherent biological weaknesses and how to overcome it, e.g. perhaps engineers need to spend more time socialising to develop our social skills)
36) While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci regularly took off from painting for several hours at a time and seemed to be daydreaming aimlessly. Urged by his patron, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, to work more continuously, da Vinci reported to have replied, immodestly but accurately, "The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less."
37) Arie de Geus, a former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell, conducted a studies of companies that have lasted the longest. "The ability to learn faster than competitors," he argued, "may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." (The challenge for a company is then to instill a culture of learning within the organization and to treat every unique job as an opportunity to learn. The same applies to individuals)
38) Any organization that fails to build a robust learning program for its employees - not just to increase their skills but also to develop them as human beings - ought to expect that its people won't get better at their jobs over time and may well get worse.
39) "He who has a why to live for," said Nietzsche, "can bear almost any how." When something really matters to us, we bring vastly more energy to it in the form of focus, conviction, passion, and perseverance.
40) ...... that once our basic needs are met, money has little to no impact on our happiness. Nonetheless, the typical pattern in any addiction is to progressively do more of whatever the addictive behavior may be, in an increasingly futile effort to recapture the initial pleasure it provided.
41) We derive the most powerful sense of purpose when our values fuel behaviors that serve something beyond ourselves.
42) "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," Apple CEO Steven Jobs told Stanford's graduating class in 2005, just a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-nine.
43) The limitations we set on ourselves are mostly our own. The willingness to delay immediate gratification in the pursuit of excellence is the surest way to achieve rich, deep, and enduring satisfaction.
44) "A person with ubuntu," explains Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished."
45) A review of more than 150 leadership studies found that integrity is the value employees care most about in their leaders. Honesty is second, and humility is third. The other qualities employees most value include care and appreciation, respect for others, fairness, listening responsively, and reflectiveness.
46) If you lead or manage others, here are the sorts of questions you might ask yourself and request others to answer about you:
a) Do you actively support people in taking care of themselves physically? Do you model these behaviors yourself?
b) Do you truly value, regularly recognize, and express appreciation to those who work for you?
c) Do you respect and trust your employees and treat them as adults capable of making their own decisions about how best to get their work done?
d) Do you believe passionately in what you're doing, and do you give people who work for you a compelling reason beyond a paycheck to come to work every day?
47) "Before my illness, I had considered commitment king among virtues. After I was diagnosed, I came to consider consciousness king among virtues. I began to feel that everyone's first responsibility was to be as conscious as possible all the time....Looking at how some of the people around me had managed their lives, I lamented that they had not been blessed with this jolt to life. They had no real motivation or clear timeline to stop what they were so busy at, to step back, to ask what exactly they were doing with their life. Many of of them had money; many of them had more money than they needed. Why was it so scary to ask themselves one simple question: Why am I doing what I'm doing?" (written by Eugene O'Kelly, the former CEO of accounting firm KPMG in the last months of his life, before he succumbed to brain cancer at the age of fifty-three)
I think the last point best sums up the lessons from the book. Do we know our priorities? If we say that we needed more money for our loved ones but we are now sacrificing our time with them, is this the correct path? Do we know why we are doing what we are doing?
Good luck and have a good and happy life ahead!
