Be Your Best

Michael Masterson With Todd Gifford

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity recently to finally meet and talk with someone that I have admired for many years — Michael Masterson.  Michael is a business guru and a massively successful business person, as well author of several Best Seller books on business and life success.  Michael Masterson is someone that has demonstrated the ability to get a massive amount accomplished and create success from scratch multiple times over.  In short, he is someone I listen to.

Michael Masterson believes that taking action and speed of action have a lot more to do with success than skill and ability.  The principles apply to everything, regardless of the field or endeavor, work or personal life.  He talks a lot about the things affect our ability to take action, like procrastination.  He dives into these concepts deeply to unpack them to allow us the ability to develop means to conquer the problem.  Procrastination is a huge issue in terms of productivity, and bigger than most of us realize.

An Easy Way to Measure Procrastination’s Impact

If you want to get a taste of how procrastination is affecting you directly, just maintain a written To-Do list of just the most important critical things you want to get done each and every day.  Keep the list short such that you believe it is possible to get 80-100% of those things accomplished during the day.  The next day, you have to write down all the key/critical things you want to get done again during that day.  And again the next day, etc…  This is a very old fashioned approach, on a notepad with a pen, and certainly is not as ‘efficient’ as maintaining your To-Do Critical list on a computer.  BUT, it is very telling of how procrastination dramatically affects your results.  Watch how many times you have to repeat key or critical tasks and projects on that To-Do List that you did not even start.  If you measure this for a while, it is an eye opener.

 The 2-Headed Monster

Everyone, including the most successful, deals with what Michael Masterson calls the ‘2-Headed Monster’ on a daily basis with respect to procrastination.  One of the monsters is “perfectionism” and the other is “those little chores”.  We all like things to be as good as they can be, which creates a feeling for the need to be perfect to begin.  Unfortunately, the pursuit of perfection (aka—paralysis of analysis) kills just about every good idea that comes along.  In seeking what your mind feels is “perfect” is not really perfect, and perfect simply does not exist.  The amount of effort required to get to the ‘perfect’ level from ‘good enough’ is overwhelming and draining — not to mention the time involved to get there.  The irony of seeking perfection vs. good enough is that  even after all the effort/time invested beyond ‘good enough’, it usually made no difference or it may actually harm the result.

 Those Little Chores

The 2nd Head of the 2-Headed Monster, ‘those little chores’ are a major roadblock and instigator of procrastination.  They are sneaky and deceptively harmful to productivity.  They create the illusion of productivity while killing your productivity.  We convince ourselves ‘need to do this asap’ and ‘got to do that first’, when none of these items make it to the Most Critical Items that Must Get Done Today List.

 One of Michael Masterson’s Best Seller books is “Ready, Fire, Aim”.  Obviously with that title, you can get the feel for how Masterson believes things should be done.  But don’t misinterpret “Ready, Fire, Aim” for “Fire randomly at will”.  The key is in the firing when ready, and doing your “aiming” AFTER you fire.  Essentially, Michael is contends that spending time aiming after being ready, and before firing is harmful to success.  In other words, if you do not get going when ready, you may never get going, or going too late and waste a tremendous amount of time.

Proprioception

In skeet shooting, they now teach people to ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ not ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’.  The pros teach the hobbyist to ready the rifle against your shoulder, bring it up to your eye and shoot — they don’t want you to aim.  They have found that aiming actually decreases accuracy because the brain is already programmed to make the adjustment for movement of the object you are shooting at.  By ‘trying’ to aim, you are trying to manually replicate what the brain does automatically.  The same principle applies in many other daily mundane activities, like throwing paper into a waste basket, pouring pop into a glass, or catching a ball.  This natural ’aiming’ sense that humans have is called proprioception.

Masterson recommends to ‘fire’ when ‘ready’, and then ‘aim’ (or improve on what you are doing) after you get going.  The getting going IS the toughest part.  It’s a great lesson and principle to apply and get much more accomplished faster.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford