Success: A Road Map … It’s Not What You Think, or Maybe it is.

Disclaimer: None of these are my ideas and the full document can be found here: Quick MBA, I just wanted to capture a summary of these for future use. It’s based on the #1 bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey. My summary is actually a summary of a summary, I goal is to distill this information to it’s core. Call it laziness, call it efficiency… call it karma Ray.

The Seven Habits move us through the following stages:

1. Dependence: the paradigm under which we are born, relying upon others to take care of us.
2. Independence: the paradigm under which we can make our own decisions and take care of ourselves.
3. Interdependence: the paradigm under which we cooperate to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People are:

Habit 1:  Be Proactive

Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.

Habit 2:  Begin with the End in Mind

Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long-term goals based on personal principles.

Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.

Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a “win/win” deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make “no deal” may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertently rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5:  Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one’s own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening emphatically for both feeling and meaning.

Habit 6:  Synergize

Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person’s own solution.

Habit 7:  Sharpen the Saw

Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

What If You Received $86,400 Everyday

Imagine that your bank credited your account with $86,400 every day, and every night they canceled whatever funds were left over that you failed to use during the day, from the account.

What would you do? Surely you would strive to spend every cent, every day! Or go find another bank that would do the same thing but let you keep the balance

Here’s the thing, everybody has this account. It’s the “TIME” bank, and every morning it deposits 86,400 seconds in your account. Every night it withdraws and writes-off whatever you failed to invest. Your balance is never carried over, no matter what the excuse and you have no overdraft. Each day a new account is opened, and each night the bank’s records are destroyed. You are the bookkeeper of your equity, experiences and knowledge. If you fail to use the funds, the loss is your responsibility.

Live in the ‘now’ and seek to obtain the highest return on investment possible. By facing your pains, the injustices you’ve been dealt, your mortality and the challenges of your past, you’ll realize the true value of your “TIME” bank and look for ways to improve your ROI on future time investments.

Time Perception:

• 1 millisecond = the difference between who won silver and gold at the Olympics.
• 1 second = the difference between someone who just survived an accident and some one who didn’t.
• 1 minute = the difference between missing or catching your plane.
• 1 hour = the difference between some one spending time with their family or missing it.
• 1 day = the difference between a working or calling in sick if you’re on minimum wage, and have 5 kids to feed.
• 1 week = the difference between a prisoner being released from their sentence.
• 1 month = the difference between  giving birth to a premature baby or a healthy baby.
• 1 year = the difference between passing or failing the exam.
• 1 lifetime = the difference between realizing that you could have done better if you invested your time wisely.

Can you hear the clock ticking?

There’s always time to ask yourself can I start using my time better.

Conquer Doubt and Fear. Conquer Failure.

My Grandfather once said the longer we live the more we realize that the greatest diseases of mankind are doubt and fear.  He wasn’t trying to take away from the seriousness of some of our other afflictions, however doubt and fear rob more people of more life than all the other diseases of the world according to him.  He said that they’re diseases because they’re acquired,  we aren’t born with fear and doubt we learn fear and doubt.  They’re communicable and most of the time they’re passed from one person to the next like a virus or bad cold.

But the dictionary definition states a disease as: “a condition of the living animal that impairs normal functioning.”

Doubt keeps us from making positive and long lasting changes in our lives because they’ll “rock the boat” of the status quo. Fear causes us to make weak and often irrational decisions that can hinder our future potential for the sake of today’s comfort. It takes away our happiness, our sleep, and our very lives.

However, for the person who identifies the symptoms of these diseases, there are cures available. There are five techniques that Grandpa passed on that you can use to beat these diseases:

1. Fear is an opportunity that has been given to you as a way to bring you closer to your full potential.
2. When you run from your fear you miss the opportunity to grow.
3. Your beliefs are the basis behind your behaviors dictating your results.
4. Your everyday habits reflect your beliefs and fears.
5. Change your beliefs to change your behaviors. Change your behaviors to change your results. Change your results to change your life.

Use these five techniques to help change the way you think and feel to fully enjoy your life.

Entrepreneurs can change the world

I recently had a friend tell me that in a recession war or entrepreneurship will turn things around. Here’s hoping that we choose entrepreneurship over destruction and dispair. Here’s a great short video that another friend forwarded to me this morning, it’s a great message, not to mention the motivation that you’ll suddenly have after watching it. Enjoy!

In the words of one of my old hockey coaches, “Don’t wait for the good bounces. Make the good bounces happen.”

Earth Day Should be Every Day of the Year

Go Green everyday of the year, save green every day of the year.

That’s my goal. To be economical and environmental about how I spend my money. I think that should also be a businesses goal as well, and not just because of the current global economic state.

The state of the economy today demands that people be smarter about how they spend their money, but why are we so reactive versus proactive? It seems we always wait until the last quarter to make the big play. Here’s a list of “Green Savers” that would positively impact the environment, as well as the bottom line if companies started implementing the Virtual Office on a larger scale:

• Reducing turnover and training costs;
• Decreasing office space construction and maintenance;
• Lowering energy bills due to non-industrial office equipment;
• Shortening project turnaround time – People in different time zones can work around the clock.

The ACI estimates that over the next decade,
greenhouse gas emissions created by full-time commuters could be
reduced by more than five million tons by professionals freelancing
from their homes.

The following would be the benefits we’d all start to experience:

1. Reduced gasoline consumption;
2. Decreased energy used in building roads;
3. Cutting down on energy to build, heat, cool and operate large office buildings;
4. Minimizing run-off and disturbance in natural habitats; and
5. Diminishing pollutants and greenhouse emissions.

There’s definately more spin off benefits to this idea than listed here, if you’ve got any let me know.

Purpose

Since my life’s odometer has just rolled past 30 years and I am obsessed with things like Schedule, Cost & Performance. I decided to start this website, title it Nelson v3.0 and dedicate it to everything Project Management. Look for future release versions as the years continue to roll on by.

I know, Project Management doesn’t sound like a very exciting topic at first. However, I’ve been working as a Project Manager for close to seven years now spanning from Engineering, to Mining & Metallurgy, to Information Technology. I believe that Project Management is one of those key elements that, if practiced and executed well, will improve efficiency, as well as effectiveness, within any organization.

The more I reflect on it, the more I realize that I tend to apply Project Management tools to just about every aspect of my life. I’ve led the development of a MMOG, provided a Metallurgical Site with an Equipment Strategy and even applied 5S to my own house in attempt to eliminate unnecessary weekend chores (to the the mild agitation of my wife).

This site will be full of the methods & tools that I run into along my journey in the Project Management field, as well as some of the projects that I’m involved with.