Thomas Edison on Personal Strength:

CREATIVITY - “If there’s a way to do it better … find it.”

EFFORT - “I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.”

INITIATIVE -  “A little twist to the usual, ‘Everything comes to he who waits.’ Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”

OPTIMISM - “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

PERSEVERANCE - “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

SELF-CONFIDENCE - “If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”

SELF-DEVELOPMENT - “I’ve never made a mistake. I’ve only learned from experience.”

Source: buildingpersonalstrength.com

One thing at a time.

As a Certified Scrum Master, we are taught how vital it is to work on one thing at a time.  In our world today, we are constantly expected to multitask but our brains work much better when we focus on ONE thing at a time.  Taking something, completing it,and moving on allows us to make progress.  If you stop mid-stream for something else, there is serious recovery time needed for you to get back into the groove.

Analogy: Imagine your task is to fill water cups for a group of 10 people.  You could put a small drop of water in each cup, go round and round, and eventually fill all 10.  Or, you could fill each cup individually.  The latter allows those first people to gain the benefit of the water and also allows you to completely move on to the next cup.

Wedding Countdown with Wolfram

Jo and I are nearing the 200 day mark!

Wolfram Alpha is one of my favorite websites.  It is a computation engine that can calculate pretty much anything you can think of. 

One of my favorites is “How many days until August 11th 2012?”

The engine spits out a detailed breakdown by month, # days, # week days, # years.  You may have noticed that a big portion of the iPhone’s Siri is based on Wolfram.

Official Wedding countdown

Source: wolframalpha.com

Break complex goals into tasks.

The GTD methodology works well here. 

  1. Write down your project’s purpose and desired outcome. 
  2. Then list out the very next actions that will get you there.
    • Next actions are not high level (like put up Christmas lights), they are specific and highlight the next physical action (drive to Menards, buy new LED lights, grab ladder from garage, install lights). 

This distinction in task building is crucial and avoids the trap of nebulous, unattainable tasks.

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