The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, ironically spends the majority of the time discussing the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s principle. Essentially it states that 80% of the best results come from 20% of the work.
If you want to become indispensable, you don’t have to necessarily leave your cubicle. First let’s look at the three types of cubicle workers.
There are the cogs that know what they need to do, their orders and instructions, and make sure to extend the tasks to take up the entire day. They do the same thing every day and are always working, but not getting anywhere.
Then there are the LOL cogs that know what they need to do, and get it done quickly. They then resume surfing the web and entertaining themselves with hundreds of pictures of LOL cats and chain emails.
Lastly, there are the linchpins in a cog position, that know what they need to do and do it quickly and efficiently. Then they proceed to do more than is asked and because they used the Pareto’s principle, have 80% of their time left over to work on maximizing their art, their creativeness. They use the extra time to be more of a linchpin.
Tim Ferriss shared a way to do all the work necessary for a factory job with minimal time in the office and other time to work on starting up a business. I’m suggesting that the same time can be used at home or in a cubicle.
Everyone has the same 24 hours, but only linchpins risk using their cubicle hours to create something remarkable.
Stay Positive & Of Course You Don’t Look Busy, You Did It Right The First Time
Sometimes guilty myself, I always hear people say “I need more time”.
Those who mutter these words are likely the ones doing, acting, creating and following through. When you feel that you need more time it ignites a sense of urgency, hectic-ness, and haste. It is what needs to happen before you accomplish and ship anything valuable.
There is a way to just let time flow and “enjoy” yourself. Only through mediocre, dull and banal achievements can you do this. It’s easy. You do less and you get more time to do even less. No need to worry about haste making waste.
However, there is a way to have both and that is through Early Urgency. It’s a talent that can be attained by anyone willing to take control of their efforts, initiative and mind-set and who want more time to enjoy themselves and their accomplishments.
Early Urgency is making yourself flail (sometimes confused with fail), early. It is expediting your efforts before your deadline to ship. By doing so, you have all that time, from when you finished early to the deadline, where you can relax and enjoy yourself.
Warning: For some reason, the side effect to Early Urgency is that there are more phenomenal products being shipped early, never a peep about needing more time, and rarely ever, does someone want to just let time flow to enjoy themselves. They get all the enjoyment they need out of the frequent act of shipping their creations.
Stay Positive & Quicken Your Pace To Win The Race (To The Top)
Previous generations had it easy didn’t they? Much easier than us anyway.
They didn’t have electronics to take them to a new world. They didn’t have the ability to Google all the things they love, the items they didn’t have or even focus on working hard to get them. They had a simple life. Hard, yes. But simple.
Our generation and any hereafter can Google more and further than our imaginations could previously take us. We Google surreal images, pictures representative of predictive futuristic consumerism. We now Google thinking it will help, yet we do very little or nothing that blogs suggest, that articles advise, that pictures inspire, that the world needs. We waste our time Googling for two reasons.
1. We seek safety, security and the knowledge that “everything is alright”. The same reason, in fact, as why you check Twitter and Facebook 20 times a day to see that everything is okay, nothing serious has happened. We never think that maybe, if something serious were to happen, if our security was breached, if we felt unsafe, that we may just feel it and know? Do we really think Googling, checking News, Twitter feed and Facebook will really be the primary acknowledgment that we are in trouble? No.
(It does good to take a moment to realize that this process is what has put us in trouble)
2. Our imaginations have been released, but not far enough. We search and stretch our minds as far as the web will let us extend them and then we feel like we got there ourselves, accomplished. We feel that since we imagined it, that it is real, attainable and easily reached. The ability to see and understand that which would not be attainable without the web is creating a surge of jobs not filled, inventions not made, and ideas not created. It is as though whatever is on the web is as far as the mind can reach, but this is false.
What you can Google, discover on Twitter, view and share on Facebook can well be used as a bridge to a further discovery. They are not your destinations, they are someone else’s and this means that there is a calling upon you to take what you view and learn to improve it, make it better, and most importantly add your imagination to it.
Or you can simply avoid this roadblock and let your imagination run as wild as possible. Of course, by doing this you will only find out that you can actually go further than what is proposed on the web, what can be dreamt of, created and achieved by another.
You can give any person a red dipping bird and have them place it in a position for all to see and begin telling about it. Not only will they show and tell about the red dipping bird, but they will do it perfectly.
“It is a red plastic bird that for some reason dips forward and puts its beak into a glass of water “emulates the movement” and dips back and continuous going back and forth. You can purchase them in all different sizes, colors and with goofy extras like flamboyantly colored feathers or an old Abe Lincoln hat.”
Done. They showed and told.
But there’s a flaw.
It’s boring.
Everyone who’s seen one knows this. Everyone who owns one, probably laughed at the flamboyant feather color comment but still thought the presentation was dull. Everyone else who were shown and told to, they could get up and do the same exact thing.
Show and tell, which is ultimately done in k-5 grade levels, can set incredible examples and offer intelligent insight into creativity – if done right. There’s a often an overlooked variable to show and tell that can make the experiences result artistic, unique and altogether attention-informative (Information people actually want to pay attention to). Simply showing and telling doesn’t do this. Doing it the old school way is bland and banal.
The correct format is to figure out THEN show and tell.
Figure Out THEN Show & Tell
Having to figure something out taps potential on the shoulder and tells it to get to work. In the case of the red dipping bird and according to How Stuff Works, The Dipping Bird (also called the Drinking Bird or the Dunking Bird) is a popular novelty item or toy in the United States and other countries.
A Dippy Bird has the following parts:
Two equal-sized, hollow glass bulbs
A long glass tube that connects the bulbs
Fuzzy, water-absorbent material covering the head
Two plastic legs with a pivot connection
Methylene chloride in the abdomen. Methylene chloride is an industrial paint stripper and solvent (one thing that dissolves easily in methylene chloride is caffeine, so you can use methylene chloride to decaffeinate things). Methylene chloride helps makes a Dippy Bird work because it evaporates very easily — it boils at just 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
To operate the Dippy Bird, you get its head wet. As the water evaporates, fluid moves up into the head, causing the bird to become top-heavy and dip forward. Once the bird dips forward, fluid moves back into the abdomen, causing the bird to become bottom-heavy and tip up.
Here is how a Dippy Bird works:
When water evaporates from the fuzz on the Dippy Bird’s head, the head is cooled.
The temperature decrease in the head condenses the methylene chloride vapor, decreasing the vapor pressure in the head relative to the vapor pressure in the abdomen.
The greater vapor pressure in the abdomen forces fluid up through the neck and into the head.
As fluid enters the head, it makes the Dippy Bird top-heavy.
The bird tips. Liquid travels to the head. The bottom of the tube is no longer submerged in liquid.
Vapor bubbles travel through the tube and into the head. Liquid drains from the head, displaced by the bubbles.
Fluid drains back into the abdomen, making the bird bottom-heavy.
The bird tips back up.
Show And Tell No More
Rhetorical questions :
Which show and tell of the red dipping bird did you like more?
Which one did you learn more from?
Which one was presented in an interesting way?
Which description do you think there was plenty of effort behind?
Figuring It Out
We are doing the world a great injustice when we don’t incorporate this critical variable to the Show and Tell process we teach our youngest students. What makes matters worse is that more than three quarters of adults still follow the same routine system of show and tell that they were taught as kids.
The variable of “figuring out” how something works, what something is, or why it does a particular thing is essential to producing real results. Results that are human, that are original, and that are backed with experience. These are the results that create profit.
The market used to be in the pocket of those who could show and tell well, even more so to those who mastered it. Now it goes to those who figure it out, who provide content and experience it, who make sure that what they are showing and telling is their art, their invention and their creation.
