Mixed Thoughts

On my recent trip to the USA, I caught up on some reading – 14 hours on a plane gives you plenty of time – and I thought I would share with you just three of my favourite thoughts/ideas that I came across.

1. 103 Bits of advice I wish I had known
Kevin Kelly turned 70 last week and for the past few years, he’s jotted down bits of unsolicited advice.  He shared these recently and some that appealed to me are:

• Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.
• Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.
• If you repeated what you did today 365 more times will you be where you want to be next year?
• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
• To keep young kids behaving on a car road trip, have a bag of their favourite candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave.
• Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.😅

Want to read more?

2. The Most Eye Opening 10 Minutes Of Your Life by Brené Brown
Love, love, love the wisdom in this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7DbxtMbpQ

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston. Brown has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy.

As a coach, I love working with my clients’ gremlins.  What is your gremlin saying to you?

3. Data, information and decisions
“Data is everywhere, but turning it into information isn’t free.

It takes focus, effort, consultation and time.

More information is only useful if it helps you make a decision. Knowing the temperature on Saturn isn’t useful. Knowing it to even more accuracy is less useful. That’s because we’re not making any decisions that involve the temperature on another planet.

We’re surrounded by data that our spreadsheets or networks or cohorts seem to want us to be aware of. How many people clicked yesterday, or what someone wrote in a comment, what a backlist book sold or the foot traffic in that store vs. this store.

But if you’re not going to use the data to make a decision, don’t spend the time exposing yourself to it. It’s resistance at work.

If you can’t do anything with the data, it’s never going to be information”.

Source: Seth Godin – May 14, 2022 Data, information and decisions 

As a specialist in competitive intelligence, I have seen this so often. Many business executives worry about data when in fact it is the insights (what does this mean for the business) they really need to understand in order to make better business decisions. And if you are unclear about your decision, then any data will do, right?

Are you focused on the data or are you after insights?