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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, you can find me guest hosting on the TV Times Three Podcast this week, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons I’m learning about winning at past failures.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
You’ve heard the phrase, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” How about these:
If at first you don’t succeed, sky diving’s not for you.
If at first you don’t succeed, you’re running about average.
If at first you don’t succeed, order pizza.
If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
If at first you don’t succeed, keep flushing.
If at first you don’t succeed, get a bigger hammer.
If at first you don’t succeed, cry, cry again.
It’s also been said that experience is what you get when don’t get what you expected.
We’ve been talking a lot about goals over the last month, and I think that it’s been a great benefit to a lot of us. Yesterday over our the Stuff I Learned Yesterday Facebook page, Faith shared an update on a new script that she’s working on and Mark shared an update to his weight loss goal. Over the weekend, Davia and Geoff both shared updates on their goals.
I also posted an update to one of my goals yesterday. You may recall that one of my goals this year is to read 10 books. I started the year by reading [[[Thou Shall Prosper]]] by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. This was a really great book about finance that looks at finance from a different perspective. I really found it valuable. I started reading it because Daniel became a client of mine and I wanted to be familiar with his work, but the book ended up being much more than that. It’s probably a book I will try to read once a year for the foreseeable future. And just in case you’re interested, Rabbi Daniel’s new podcast will be launching in the next week or so.
The second book I read is called [[[Six Ways to Keep the Good in Your Boy]]] by Dannah Gresh. This book gives tips on how to talk to your son about sex, help you and him understand the changes he’ll go through in his teen and tween years, and guide him through the minefield ahead as he is bombarded with differing opinions about what makes a man, how a man should treat women, and how to maintain honor and integrity.
It’s a tough part of life. My parents never had any type of sex talk with me and just left me to try and figure things out by what I saw on TV or heard from friends. And I don’t mean figuring out how to have sex, it’s much more than that. The book does a pretty good job and gave me a lot to think about.
Now I’m on my third book, [[[80/20 Sales and Marketing]]] by Perry Marshall. In this book, Perry talks about (wait for it) the 80/20 rule. It’s a simple concept to understand, but it’s showing me that the 80/20 rule is much more ubiquitous than I thought. A simple example is that 80% of the traffic in your town, travels on only 20% of the roads. However, Perry points out that if you take 80% of the 80%, you’ll find that they comprise only 20% of the 20%. This principle can be observed in just about any situation.
A more practical example might be that 20% of the workers at a business make up 80% of the work being done or the revenue being earned. I’m just a few chapters into the book, and I’m already learning principles that I can apply to my business model and efforts.
Last year I had a similar reading goal. My goal last year was to read 12 books. However, I didn’t really see it as a goal to read 12 books, I saw it as a goal to read 1 book each month. That may sound like the same thing, but it’s not.
If I say that my goal is to read 12 books in a calendar year, I could read no books from January 1 through December 30 and be okay as long as I read 12 books on the last day of the year. However, if I say that my goal is to read 1 book per month, I’ve failed to reach my goal if I haven’t read 1 book by January 31st.
The end result may be the same, but the way it’s worded makes all the difference. However, I just said that I DID word it that I wanted to read 12 books by the end of the year. BUT in my mind I did not see it that way. So in January I read a book. In fact, I read it with over a week left in the month. Since I had met my January goal, I then skipped the rest of the days in January. When February came around, I had to try to rework my schedule again to find time to read. At that point I failed to make the change, and I failed to read a book for February. I then felt defeated. I tried a few other times to get back into the reading groove, but it didn’t stick. I ended the year having read 2 books.
Since I failed to reach my goal last year, I decided to lower my expectation this year and try to read 10 books. When I did this, it had an unexpected benefit. Since the number of desired books did not equally match the number of months in the year, I no longer felt like I had to read exactly one book per month. My approach to achieving the goal was completely different.
To achieve the goal, I’ve set aside the first 30 minutes of studio time to reading. I sit down with a cup of coffee, set my timer for 30 minutes, and I begin reading. If I come to the end of a chapter and there’s two minutes left, I stop reading. If the timer goes off and I’m a few pages away from the end of a chapter, I keep reading. It’s totally flexible.
It’s so flexible that on the day I woke up and had fires to put out, I didn’t read. The next day, I added a few minutes to my reading time. The day after that I did the same. The day after that I was not able to extend my reading time and that was just fine. It took me two days longer to finish the second book than I’d planned, but I didn’t feel like a failure. After all, I did finish the book and that was all that mattered.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Sometimes we fail and we think that we’re failures. That’s just not true. Sometimes we fail because we just need to tweak the smallest thing. For years my wife has tried having a daily Bible study and it’s always been a struggle. Last year she tried to do it in the space between when our oldest and youngest kids go to school, but it didn’t work. Starting this calendar year she has changed her routine. She now retires to our bedroom when the kids go to bed, and she spends the next hour studying. It’s working out great for her. Why? She’s not a morning person, she’s a night person. She’s doing the same things she did before, but she just tweaked the time of day to a time when her brain is more alert.
I think another reason that I’m succeeding this year is that I’ve put my goal out there to all of you. In turn, you’ve shared your goals with me. You’re updating me on your goals, and it’s driving me to keep on top of my goals. That, my friends, is called accountability, and that’s how it’s supposed to work. We encourage each other to keep pushing to reach higher heights and achieve what we couldn’t do alone.
So, thanks! Thanks to all of you who have shared your goals. If you’ve been thinking about jumping in on the goal sharing action, do it! It’s not too late. If you’ve tried goal setting before and failed, try again please. Think of what you could do differently to achieve success, and take action.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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