Learning Agile

by | Oct 10, 2022 | Tech

Customers don’t always know what they want – or need. As Henry Ford once put it, if he’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” 

Of course, Ford gave them cars. But imagine if he hadn’t. Years would have been wasted trying to satisfy that demand. Chances are, by the time Ford’s product hit the market, someone else would have already started selling cheap, reliable cars. His product would have been dead on arrival. 

We all have the same problem. That problem can be summed up in a single question: How do you deliver a valuable product to your customer, even if they can’t tell you what they really want or need? 

One answer is the bundle of practices and principles known as agile. If you’ve heard that word before, you’ve probably also come across some related concepts – like scrum, kanban, XP, and lean. Oftentimes, there’s a temptation to rush into discussing these methodologies right alongside agile. 

For Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, the authors of Learning Agile, that risks putting the cart before the horse. There’s no point in getting into the nitty-gritty, after all, if we haven’t shown why you and your organization should even consider agile in the first place.

To do that, we’ll follow a project from start to finish. Along the way, we’ll see how agile principles can help a team of software developers work more efficiently and effectively – and deliver a better product. 

You can’t design good software in a vacuum

Take e-readers for instance, like Kindle, It’s easy to see why they’re so popular. The object itself is about the size of a regular paperback, but it holds thousands of books. Even better, every text is responsive to you, the reader. You can enlarge the words, change the font, or skip back and forth between the main text and references. With a single click, you can access libraries and catalogs; with another click, you can borrow or download new books onto your device. 

In short, this is great software. It’s well designed. Convenient. Intuitive. It satisfies every stakeholder. Readers find it easy to use, and it displays texts accurately, which is important to authors. It also helps booksellers and publishers sell and distribute books.

The first e-book readers didn’t do all these things, though. In fact, it took over a decade of development before the software got to where it is today. Back in the early 2000s, it wasn’t clear what would make an e-book reader valuable. We only know that today because hindsight is 20/20 – which brings us to our little thought experiment. 

Let’s go back in time. Imagine we’ve been tasked with developing the software to display electronic books on brand-new handheld devices. How will we approach our task? 

Well, we’re actually going to do it in the worst possible way because this isn’t the kind of company that’s exploring new ways of building software. This is an old-school operation, with leaders who lead and followers – that’s us, the developers – who follow. In short, this isn’t the kind of office where you’ll hear the word “agile.” So let’s see how things play out. 

The hardware team has already made a prototype. Picture a chunky black tablet with a USB port for loading books and a fiddly little keyboard for interacting with the reader. It’s up to us to build the software that will display e-books on this gadget. 

Our company applies what’s known as a waterfall process to its projects. What that means is that projects are front-loaded. All the product requirements are defined at the outset. As we said, leaders lead and followers follow. All the stakeholders – the senior managers, publishing representatives, online retailers, and so on – sit down and and hash out a plan. They outline requirements and come up with a specification that ticks all their respective boxes. Every other stage of the process, from design to development and testing, flows downstream from these decisions just as a body of water flows downstream from a waterfall. 

So what’s in the specification? In a word, everything. This e-book reader is going to be revolutionary. It’s going to have tons of features. It’ll capture market statistics for publishers. It’ll have an internet storefront for readers to buy books. Authors will be able to preview and edit their books as they write them. And it’s all going to be ready in 18 months.

Fast-forward a year and a half. Since this is a thought experiment, we don’t have to be realistic, so we’ll say the project is completed on time. And it’s all there – every requirement in the specification has been implemented, tested, and verified. Everyone’s happy. 

Can you guess what happens next? The reader hits the market . . . and it flops. Hard. No one buys it. 

What went wrong?

The thing is, people’s needs aren’t static – they change with the times. If your only choice is a horse, you want a faster horse. But a horse, no matter how fast, isn’t much use if everyone else is already driving cars. Similarly, the software that people needed 18 months ago isn’t the software they need today. Since our project began, a new industry standard for e-books has emerged. No retailer wants to publish our unstandardized format – it’s too much bother. And so none of our revolutionary features are supported, which means they’re no use to anybody. 

This also means we’ve wasted lots of time and money creating software that’s not very valuable. So what should we have done differently? 

Release imperfect software today, & you’ll end up with a better final product tomorrow

Here’s where we went wrong: we were unresponsive. We spent 18 months working in a bubble to implement a plan that was out-of-date before it even reached the market. There were no adjustments. We weren’t flexible. Our project, in short, wasn’t iterative. 

An iterative design process doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Instead, it rolls out products quickly, getting them to customers as soon as possible and gathering feedback. That feedback is the basis for improvements, which are then sent back to customers – again, as quickly as possible – so they can provide new feedback. At that point, the cycle restarts. To iterate, after all, means “to perform repeatedly.” 

This feedback loop is at the heart of agile processes. Think about the word “agility” as we use it in everyday language. It describes a way of moving quickly and nimbly – of being responsive to the environment and engaging with what’s in front of you. An agile climber, for example, responds to every hand- and foothold they encounter. They make rapid adjustments to prevent slips and fumbled grips. It’s the same with agile in software design. Agile teams use iterative processes to respond quickly and nimbly to bugs and mix-ups as they encounter them. They might not build the software they set out to build, but that’s a whole lot better than building something useless. 

So there’s the first principle of agile. We can phrase it like this: The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. 

Now, let’s break that principle down even further. 

Software can only be built in the real world – the world of imperfect humans. Even the hardest working teams miss important details. The most talented developers fail to anticipate vital requirements. The only way we can correct mistakes is to put the software we’re building into the hands of customers – the people who’ll actually be using it. As developers, we’re entirely dependent on their feedback. That’s why we need to release software early. 

Releasing software early isn’t just an antidote to perfectionism – it delivers value for customers. If they have a single feature today, however buggy, they can do something they couldn’t yesterday. By actually using a product, they can clarify their needs. That means they’ll be able to give us a clearer idea of what they want a product to do. And once we’re locked into this feedback loop, we’re on the road to creating a final product that actually satisfies those needs.

Embracing change is all about adopting the right mindset

So there’s the answer to the question we asked earlier – what we should have done is put our software into the customers’ hands, so they could actually use it and give us feedback. If we’d done that, we would have realized there was a problem and changed course. That would have saved us the time, effort, and money we put into building an expensive dud.

Of course, changing course midway through a project is easier said than done. In practice, it’s usually a painful and unpleasant experience. You’ve made the difficult decisions. You know what you’re building. You know what your customers expect. Your workflow is established. It’s not plain sailing, exactly, but you’re making progress. And then someone from outside the project comes along and says that you’ve been on the wrong path the whole time. That all that planning and work was for nothing. That you have to circle back and start again. Worse, the person telling you to change course is the same person who put you on that path in the first place! They told you to build one thing, and now that you’ve built half of it, they’re telling you to do something else. It’s demoralizing – disrespectful, even. No wonder you get defensive and resist making changes. 

Understandable? Sure. Helpful? Not at all. The important question is though, how can you get past this feeling? 

Well, it’s a question of mindset, and it has two parts. The first is accepting that it’s really hard to build valuable software if you’re not constantly checking – and revising – your priors. Yes, changing course halfway through a project is frustrating, but it’s nowhere near as deflating as reaching the end of a project and realizing you’ve built a piece of junk.

The second part is about perspective, and it takes the form of an exercise. 

This isn’t always an easy exercise – it requires a cool head and more empathy than you might want to extend to the person who’s just ruined your day. But it can be illuminating. Start by asking yourself these two questions: First, did your customer deliberately send you down the wrong path? Probably not, right? And second, how did they feel when they realized they screwed up and cost you months of work? Chances are, they were pretty embarrassed. They probably didn’t want to come to you and admit their mistake. It’s a good thing that they did, though – they’ve just saved you even more wasted time! And it’s not just your deadline that’s been blown. Your client’s timeline is delayed now, too. Their company is spending good money to build software that meets its needs, and this mistake means the project isn’t delivering. In other words, this is frustrating for everyone. 

When you get down to it, you’re both in a difficult position. The only way you could theoretically avoid screwups would be to read your customer’s mind. Your customer, in turn, would have to be able to predict the future. In an ideal world, you’d both be able to do those things. But software isn’t built in an ideal world; you won’t be working with telepathic clairvoyants. Accept that, and mistakes – along with the changes they bring – will be much easier to deal with. 

Iterative processes keep you in touch with your customers

OK, let’s go back to where we started. How can the agile principles we’ve explored help our troubled e-book reader project? Let’s find out by running the project again. 

First, let’s remind ourselves why that reader flopped. It lacked some important features used by competing e-book readers, like supporting an industry standard format. Note, however, that this problem couldn’t have been predicted – or avoided. When our team went to work, there was no industry standard. Our emphasis, then, has to be on the team’s responsiveness to what it finds out once its work has already started. 

This time, the project is going to be agile. We’ll start with a big meeting where we’ll hash out the requirements and specifications, but we’re not going to stick to that plan for 18 months straight. Instead, we’ll divide that year and a half into one-month sprints – a single cycle of the feedback loop we discussed earlier. Put differently, we’re going to update our design in response to feedback every month.

There’s not going to be much to test at the beginning, of course, so we’ll fast-forward to the fourth sprint. When the project manager, team, and stakeholders meet, one of the developers reports that there’s a new industry standard for e-book formats. The team incorporates this new information into its next sprint and builds a library that supports the new format. By the sixth sprint, it’s ready to incorporate that format into the reader’s user interface.

As you can see, each sprint roughly maps onto each iteration or version of the software the team is building. So let’s skip to month eleven – the eleventh sprint and the eleventh iteration. We now have a working build, which can be loaded onto the prototypes the hardware team came up with. It’s buggy, but it’s good enough for real-world testing, which is exactly what the team wants. When the project manager talks to the software’s early users, she learns that they’d like to be able to email newspaper articles and PDFs to their devices. That’s the focus for the team’s next sprint. 

This approach isn’t just about testing and incorporating new features, however – some features can also be discarded. For example, maybe that internet storefront doesn’t make sense. There’s a standardized e-book format, after all, so we don’t have to create a unique platform of our own. That’s handy because it frees up time to work on other, more important features. 

This version of the project is much more likely to end well. We’ve been continuously releasing software for real-world testing and making timely changes in response to those tests. The big difference here is that we’re in touch with customers and users. When we used the waterfall process, we were completely sealed off from these groups once the project’s requirements had been approved. This time, though, we haven’t lost sight of our ultimate aim: building valuable, working software that satisfies real needs. And that’s the why of agile.

There are lots of ways of working agile, but every approach rests on the same core principals. The first is responsiveness. Agile processes are all about feedback. You don’t wait until the end of a project to test the software you’ve built – you get it out there as soon as possible. Real-world testing identifies problems early and helps your customer clarify what they need that software to do. The second principle? There’s no such thing as the perfect plan. Every project will require ad-hoc fixes, changes, and redesigns. But that’s a good thing – it’s how the best software gets built. 

I Quit – Quitting made me Achieve Goals

by | Sep 30, 2022 | Productivity

“You must not only have competitiveness, but ability, regardless of the circumstance you face, to never quit.” 

That’s from soccer star Abby Wambach, a woman whose determination to succeed has taken her to the top of the athletic world. Our culture reveres the idea of grit – of persevering no matter what. Often, it also sees quitting as a sign of weakness. 

It’s true that optimism and perseverance can help keep us going in hard times. But they can also motivate us to stick to a losing effort longer than we should. While we usually have to persevere to find success, that doesn’t mean perseverance guarantees we’ll reach our goals. And sometimes, we keep going long after we should quit – with serious consequences. 

The Book “Quit”, by Annie Duke, will help you see the value in quitting and make better decisions about how and when to do it. It shows that success isn’t about blind persistence; it’s about finding the right avenue to pursue. If we don’t, we may end up wasting piles of money on a doomed business or years on a dead-end relationship. 

By learning to quit at the right time, we can avoid grinding through unnecessary misery or wasting time and money we don’t have. This frees us to work toward what we actually value.

Quitting can be a virtue.

There’s something that epitomizes the value of quitting – and it’s called poker. Knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, as Kenny Rogers famously sang, is the essence of the game. 

Do poker pros rely on grit, persevering through tough times, to win hands? Hardly. In fact, pros fold more than half the time – far more often than amateurs. Poker rookies, in contrast, typically play out their hands. They’re driven by the need to see if they can pull out a miraculous straight – and fearful of losing the money they’ve already bet. How are they rewarded? By losing their shirts. 

In the narrative we spin about success, we have a bias toward “winners.” We fixate on the inspiration of success stories – like that magical, last-minute straight flush. What we don’t highlight are the people who stopped short of their goal – the thing we might call “failure” – and benefited from it. 

But quitting is a wise reaction to changing circumstances, and this makes it a vital skill. 

Take mountain climbing, for example. Each year, many people try to make the ultimate climb to the summit of Mount Everest. A number of them make it. And quite a few die, falling victim to the mountain’s famously hostile environment. People in both categories persevered; some reached their dream, and others succumbed to their fate.

Other climbers, though, make it almost all the way to the top of the world’s tallest mountain – only to turn around and give up because conditions become unsafe or they run out of time. These people make a choice that often saves their lives. 

If there’s one thing to learn from these sensible climbers and poker pros, it’s this: quitting can be a virtue. And it’s definitely not something to be ashamed of. In the next sections, we’ll look deeper into the benefits of quitting – and when and how to bow out.

We often keep going for way too long.

Stewart Butterfield’s big goal was to create a successful online computer game. What he ended up building was an enormously profitable communications tool. But he was only able to do this because he had the wisdom to quit. 

Butterfield’s company, Tiny Speck, was armed with millions in investment capital. It had created a game called “Glitch” that attracted rave reviews and a small but passionate fan base. 

But his business model depended on building up subscribers. Unfortunately, even as a marketing blitz grew his subscriber base, he realized the math didn’t work. The company wasn’t going to make it with the current strategy. So Butterfield made a startling decision – with investors still confident and subscriber numbers rising, he decided to call it quits. 

Many of us hang on far too long, fighting for our goals to the bitter end. We do this because we feel we’re losing an opportunity by quitting – and that we’re giving up on something we’ve put a lot of effort into. But by not quitting, we’re actually costing ourselves other opportunities we could have been pursuing. 

Butterfield quit, but he was a long way from being done. He rolled the investment money into an internal communications tool his team had been using. It was a little something called “Slack.” Butterfield soon sold Slack for $27.7 billion – and helped change the way teams communicate. 

So, how can you harness the power of quitting in your own life?

One way to think about whether it’s time to quit is by considering expected value. This involves some mental time travel. Start by looking ahead. Calculate the possible outcomes of decisions – both potential gains and potential losses. These outcomes might not necessarily be money. They could be about time or fulfillment or stress level. When you’re done, look over the results, and consider alternate options for how you could be using your time – just remember to calculate the expected value for those as well. 

Considering when to quit like this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take risks. Sometimes, big risks have enormous potential payoffs. But you need to calculate your risks and be realistic about them. That’s what Butterfield did, and it’s how top poker players win millions. It may set you on a more rewarding course. 

Sunk cost fallacy (and other barriers to quitting)

Imagine you’re offered a ticket to an outdoor concert, but the weather is going to be terrible. Even if you love the band, a free ticket probably won’t be enough to entice you to suffer through it. But what if you’ve already bought the ticket? You’ll be tempted to go so you don’t waste the money. 

Of course, it shouldn’t matter if the ticket was free or cost money. You’ll be miserable either way. But still, you think of the two situations differently.

This is the fallacy known as sunk cost. The more resources we invest, the more likely we are to try to continue, even if it’s a bad idea. We convince ourselves that we’re avoiding waste.

Another example is finishing a college degree in a field you don’t enjoy just because you’ve already spent a lot of money. What happens if you don’t quit? You’ll spend even more money and time just to end up in a career you hate. 

This is like an optical illusion. And it’s very powerful. Even if you understand what’s going on, you still see the illusion. 

Another barrier to smart quitting is what’s called an escalation of commitment.

Once people decide on a certain course, they often become more committed, even if it’s not working out. Rather than admit their mistake, they refuse to quit – sometimes in the face of enormous cost. 

In the Vietnam War, it soon became apparent that the fighting was costly and unwinnable. So what did leaders do? They doubled down, leaving a trail of napalm and bitterness behind them. The war ended up costing tens of thousands of American lives and $1 trillion in today’s money. It also had profound consequences for political leaders and created backlash against the US government. 

Then there’s the endowment effect, which was identified by Richard Thaler – the researcher who coined sunk cost. The endowment effect is when we overvalue something we have in comparison to something we don’t.

This ownership extends to our ideas and decisions. When we meet milestones toward a goal or take part in decision-making, we increase our ownership, which magnifies the effect. We also tend to stick with the status quo, preferring to keep things as they’ve always been. 

For example, if team management signs a star player to a big contract, it may be harder for the team to bench or trade that athlete if she performs poorly. Management “owns” that decision and values the player more highly than a similar player who wasn’t part of a significant investment decision. 

All these traits work together to make quitting extremely difficult. But if we’re aware of them, we can take steps to come out on top.

Your identity can get in the way of you quitting.

Sears was a colossal retail powerhouse. It built an extremely successful mail order business in the 1800s, delivering goods to rural residents. Later, with the rise of retail stores, Sears continued building its empire by switching to that model. But with stiffer competition and a changing market, Sears began a long, inexorable decline. 

The company had a potential way out. Along with retail, it had built up a lucrative financial services branch, which included Allstate Insurance, Discover Card, and Coldwell Banker real estate brokers. But it didn’t choose that path. Instead of shifting out of a losing market, Sears sold these successful businesses to finance its retail operation and keep the core of its identity. You can probably guess how this all ended: bankruptcy. 

Our identities are especially powerful in our decision-making. And when they’re wrapped up in our careers or ventures, it can make quitting particularly difficult. 

The idea of cognitive dissonance plays into this. When confronted with information or facts that challenge our beliefs, we’re uncomfortable – we experience dissonance. To deal with this, we can either change our beliefs, which may be core to our identities, or we can explain away the information. Usually, we do the latter rather than admit we were wrong. 

Contrast Sears with Philips, which began life as a light bulb company. Philips later added electronics, and both components were a big part of its business as late as 2012. But Philips, too, faced a changing market – and had options. Philips had long been involved in health care. Rather than sticking with its core identity, the company relinquished its less profitable light bulbs and electronics sectors. And after the switch, the new company was able to bring in almost €20 billion in annual sales. 

This just goes to show that the powerful grip of identity can be broken. 

Countering our tendencies

We’ve talked a lot about how hard it is to quit when we should. Research has shown it’s almost impossible to avoid these mental hangups. But we haven’t discussed the incredible juggling monkey yet. Wait . . . what?! Let’s explain.

Eric “Astro” Teller, an entrepreneur and academic who helped lead Alphabet’s X branch, is a quitting specialist. His company focuses on big ideas – ones that can change the world – and clearly doesn’t waste much time on creative company names. Because they invest so much money, they have to be willing to ditch ideas that aren’t working and use that money on better ones. If they can’t bring an idea to market and make it profitable in five to ten years, they aren’t interested. 

One way the X team analyzes projects is with a colorful metaphor. If you want to launch a traveling show featuring a monkey juggling flaming torches on a pedestal, you’ll likely draw a big crowd – but you have to figure out how to do it first. The pedestal part is easy, and you can fool yourself into thinking you’re making progress by taking care of that. But you still have to train a monkey to juggle objects that are on fire. If you can’t tackle that, you don’t have a show. 

X identifies the monkeys and pedestals in each project. The team refuses to go forward if they haven’t figured out how to overcome the main challenge. 

Once you embark on a project, it really helps to set so-called kill criteria. This involves setting measurable benchmarks. If you don’t meet them, you quit. Criteria could include a spending level, a deadline, or buy-in from a client.

One way to develop kill criteria is by doing a premortem – imagine your project’s future death. What “were” the warning signs?

Your kill criteria will help you counter harmful thinking, like the sunk cost fallacy. 

The problem with goals

Believe it or not, more than one marathon runner has broken a bone and finished the race – in excruciating pain – anyway. 

Goals can be incredibly helpful in motivating us to accomplish difficult things. But they also come with a big downside – they can blind us to circumstances, make us inflexible, and actually keep us in negative situations. Like worsening an injury by running with a broken bone. 

Part of the reason for this is the finish line mentality. The finish line mentality means you don’t see any accomplishment in completing just part of your goal. It’s a pass/fail situation. 

Goals create a false choice: finish, or don’t bother starting. These goals, though, are often arbitrary and ignore all of our accomplishments along the way.

Look at it this way. Runners who fail to run a marathon might go the same distance as a successful 5K run. Mountain climbers who get almost to the top of Everest have still done something that few other humans – or even mountain climbers – have managed.

When we decide on mountain climbs or other goals, our information is incomplete –  circumstances change, and we change. But our goals are fixed. And they often stay that way.

You can keep goals flexible and realistic by coming up with “unless” options. This means you’re going to strive for the goal unless A, B, or C happens. For instance, unless the person you’re dating isn’t interested in commitment. Unless you’re not making a profit by year three.

Think about this the next time you’re tempted to run with a fractured fibula.

We fear quitting because we fear failure

We’re afraid of wasting all the valuable resources we’ve poured into an effort. We have to recognize, though, that our definitions of failure and waste may simply be wrong. Being able to quit a situation that’s not benefiting you is a vital skill. And even if you’re satisfied where you are, keep your eyes out for other options – circumstances may change. You may just find that quitting leads you to success. 

Get a quitting coach!Has anyone ever told you, after you finally quit a terrible job, that they knew you’d been miserable for months? They didn’t mention it because they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. 

Quitting is difficult, so an outside perspective can help you confront your biases and rationalizations. This is where a “quitting coach” comes in – someone who’s willing to tell you the hard truth and work with you to find the right path. The truth might be hard to hear, but it’ll save you trouble down the road. 

Unlocking Potential within 5 Seconds

by | Aug 31, 2022 | Productivity

The 5 Second Rule (2017) Book by Mel Robbins explains through concrete examples why so many people procrastinate and put off pursuing their dreams. It is a transformative guidebook to taking actions, changing behaviour, living life with less fear and more courage. The advices are memorable, easy to implement and instantly effective. These are practical for anyone to implement to take control of their lives and move confidently towards a better tomorrow.

In these post –

•  5 Second rule is Simple Decision Making Tool

•  What percentage of employees are waiting to talk to their bosses about needed change.

•  How the five-second rule can help you stop worrying.

The five-second rule is a simple decision-making tool that can change your behavior.

It was six in the morning on a dark winter’s day in Boston when the author was rudely awakened by the sound of her alarm clock.

There were days when Mel Robbins greeted the morning with a smile, but this was not one of them. She was unemployed, burdened with money troubles and had a drinking problem. She’d also developed the habit of hitting the snooze button and delaying the day ahead for as long as possible.

But this particular morning was different; instead of the snooze button, Robbins began her day by counting down from five.

This is called the five-second rule, and it’s used to prevent acting on detrimental urges.

So instead of rolling over and sleeping on, Robbins counted silently to herself, “five, four, three, two, one.” This simple act distracts you from your anxieties and redirects your attention to what you should be doing, instead of submitting to instantly gratifying urges. By continually doing this, you can break a negative cycle and create new and better habits.

Robbins also used the five-second rule to stop avoiding exercise and to push herself outdoors for regular jogs. And when she felt like procrastinating on updating her résumé, it was, “five, four, three, two, one” …and she got to work.

This tool is especially useful if you’re the kind of person who sits around waiting for inspiration to strike.

In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter coined a concept known as the locus of control. It explains the feeling people perceive of outside forces controlling their lives, and that those who feel more in control tend to be more productive.

We’re often told to keep an eye out for opportunities and to take them when they appear. But the better advice is to assert control over your own destiny and create opportunities yourself.

Robbins calls this the power of the push and the five-second rule might just be the push you need.

The five-second rule can unlock your inner courageous side.

On a cold December night, in 1955, Rosa Parks was sitting on a city bus and refused to stand up and give her seat to a white man. This relatively small act of defiance was nevertheless a historic moment of great courage in the fight for civil rights; and it shows us that it doesn’t necessarily take grand gestures to spark significant change.

This is the same kind of philosophy that makes the five-second rule effective. Counting backward from five isn’t a dramatic lifestyle change, but it can push you toward being a more courageous person.

The actions of Rosa Parks led to another small decision that would change the course of history.

Four days after Parks was arrested, people began to organize a boycott of segregated buses, and they wanted a 26-year-old preacher to be the voice of their protest. This preacher would later write: “It happened so quickly that I did not have time to think it through. It is probable that if I had, I would have declined the nomination.” That preacher’s name was Martin Luther King, Jr.

Parks and King didn’t consider themselves courageous people in their everyday lives, so their instincts weren’t to fight against injustice. Yet that’s what they did. They both encountered a moment when their instincts collided with their beliefs and goals and they felt the power of the push.

Most of us have instincts that tell us to play it safe and not be courageous. But the five-second rule can give us just enough time to move in the direction that can open us up to life’s opportunities.

Each day presents a chance to move toward greatness or stick with a safe and mundane routine. If you want to live an exceptional life, you’ll have to make the choice of taking five seconds to push yourself out of your comfort zone.

There’s no reason to see the great people throughout history as any different than yourself. Rosa Parks was a shy and introverted woman and Dr. King struggled with self-doubt. They just pushed past these fears, and you can, too.

Stop waiting for the right time and start pursuing your dreams now.

If you want to change the perception your coworkers have of you, all you need to do is raise your hand during a meeting and speak your mind. If you want to add some joy to someone’s day, all you have to do is take a moment to compliment them.

All these acts require is for you to make a decision, which is something you can always put off by telling yourself that today isn’t the right day. Eventually, this can be your life’s story, forever waiting for the right moment to arrive.

So why not let this very moment be the one you’re waiting for? Let the five-second rule be the tool that allows you to make the choices you’ve always wanted to make.

No one dreams of being a person who didn’t do anything. But we tend to wait “for the right time” even though our perfect scenario may never arrive. According to a recent survey, 85 percent of professional service employees are keeping feedback from their managers because it isn’t the “right time.”

Even the most talented among us need a push to get on the right track.

Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, was plagued with uncertainty after he and Steve Jobs were offered funding to start their own business in 1977. Wozniak wanted to hold off for a while and worried about quitting his day job until his friends convinced him to take the leap.

Wozniak certainly reaped the rewards the world has to offer to those who stop playing the waiting game.

The author E.L. James didn’t wait for a lucrative publishing deal before writing the overwhelmingly popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. She was a working mother with a passion, and she created her own opportunity by self-publishing the book that she’d managed to write in her free time.

Fifty Shades of Grey went on to sell a million copies in just four days, but it never would’ve happened if she hadn’t taken the initiative.

You can’t control your feelings, but you can always control your actions

To many people, professional athletes are extremely inspirational. As they should be; athletes show us what’s possible when you put your mind and body through rigorous training and practice.

Some pro athletes seem practically inhuman, but their ability to push past most people’s physical limits is determined by one simple trait. Despite feeling too exhausted to continue, an athlete has the ability to separate from this feeling and continue to run or swim or cycle.

Athletes know that feelings are only suggestions and sometimes it’s best to ignore those suggestions, especially when you’re trying to reach a goal.

This is a good lesson to take to heart, since most of us base our decisions on feelings rather than goal-oriented logic.

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio our emotions are the deciding factor for 95 percent of our decisions. So rather than “thinking and acting,” we generally “feel and act.”

Part of Damasio’s research involved brain-damaged people who were unable to experience emotions. Even though they could list the pros and cons of any given choice, they were unable to make decisions.

Damasio’s work led him to believe that human beings aren’t “thinking machines that feel,” but rather “feeling machines that think.”

Armed with this understanding of how much dominion your emotions have over your choices, you can put the five-second rule to work.

Instead of letting fears and worries stop you from fulfilling your dreams in life, catch yourself and take five seconds to make the decision that brings you closer to your goal.

This is what’s known as psychological intervention, which dates back to Aristotle, who summed it up as: “Do good, be good.” In other words, you have to change your behavior before you can change how you feel about yourself. The five-second rule is such a useful tool because it’s focused on doing just that. It changes your behavior and provides you with the courage to overcome the psychological obstacles that stand in your way.

The five-second rule is a useful weapon in the battle against procrastination

There’s an irony to modern technology like smartphones and tablets. They were designed to make us more productive, yet they often end up distracting us, and they’ve exponentially increased our ability to procrastinate.

But there’s a difference between innocent procrastination and destructive procrastination.

When we avoid getting things done, even when we know that serious trouble will follow, it’s destructive procrastination.

Experts used to think of all procrastination as being the result of bad time management and a lack of willpower or proper self-discipline. But it’s now understood that procrastination isn’t just laziness, but also a side effect of how we deal with stress.

According to Timothy Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University, procrastination is a result of our powerful subconscious desire for instant gratification. Since procrastination offers an immediate, albeit temporary, relief from the stress of life, we’re constantly drawn to it.

The stress we long to escape from isn’t limited to meeting a deadline, either. Most of us face money or relationship issues that hover over us – it’s just a fact of life. So putting life on pause to shop for a new pair of shoes is just a way of easing the pressure, just for a little bit.

To overcome the temptation of procrastination, use the five-second rule. Let it be your new, healthier habit.

Since the best way to complete a task is to “just get started,” as Dr. Pychyl puts it, you’ll want to start the five-second rule the moment you start to sense the urge to procrastinate or do something else.

Once you begin to use it for this purpose, you’ll immediately begin improving your locus of control. After all, procrastination is just another way of giving up control. So, instead, start the countdown and reassert control over your life.

Don’t regret all that time spent worrying. Redirect those emotions & start feeling grateful

There’s no big mystery to why we’re all so prone to worrying. As children, most of us were constantly being taught to worry by over-concerned parents telling us to “be careful” and “put a coat on or you’ll catch a cold.”

As a result, we’ve become adults who spend far too much time worrying about things that are beyond our control. And the fact is, we’ll likely come to regret all this time spent sweating the small stuff.

Dr. Karl Pillemer is a Cornell University professor who has spent over ten years discussing the meaning of life with more than 1,200 senior citizens. Through these conversations, one thing has become clear: most senior citizens believe they’ve wasted too much time worrying.

Life is far too precious a thing to spend living in fear and anxiety, so before you regret another minute, use the five-second rule to take control and live life to its fullest.

Pay attention to your mood, and when you feel your mind begin to give itself over to worry, take five seconds to peacefully count down from five so you can reassert control.

As soon as you reach “one,” ask yourself these two questions: “What am I grateful for in this moment?” and “What do I want to remember?”

Answering these questions will help you shift your focus away from the worry and onto the more uplifting and positive aspects of life. Remember, there are truly important and precious parts of life, such as your relationships and the things you are working on, so use the five-second rule to remind yourself of the big picture.

In any given moment, there are bound to be more things to be grateful for than to be anxious about.

In the end…

Nothing is set in stone. Your habits, mind-set and personality traits are flexible and subject to change. Once you realize this, your life can start changing for the better. To help facilitate this change, use the five-second rule, a simple tool that can help you adjust your “default” reactions by counting down from five. By changing the way we make decisions, this relatively small act can add up to redefine who you are, how you feel and what you do with your life. 

Reframe your anxiety as excitement.

Next time you’re feeling nervous about something, such as a job interview or speaking publicly, don’t tell yourself to “calm down.” Instead, say, “I’m excited!” Anxiety is a state of physiological arousal and you can flip it around to make it positive instead of letting the fear pull you in. When you tell yourself that you’re excited, it provides a valid positive alternative that allows you to stay in control.

Human Psychology Hacks You Must Learn About

by | Jul 5, 2022 | Mind

Anytime human psychology topic comes up, you’d find it interesting, but complicated to understand and go deep into it. On the contrary, the amazing part is that you’d find it easy to practice those and make it part of your day to day life.

Read through some of the points mentioned below and you’d find them easy to implement, to understand how you can apply and understand the most simple complicated language out there i.e. body language.

P.S. Once you start practicing all of these, 2 things may happen – First, you’ll be changed person, not in terms of your nature, but how you see the people around you. Second, Your circle might get small or big depending on what you want and who you want to be there around you.

Let’ start –

1. Stay Quiet, Hold Eye Contact till You get an Answer you are Satisfied with

Many a times you’d notice that you are in a conversation with someone and as time goes, it’s definite that there will be some questions thrown, some answers given. You might agree to most of the answers the other person might give but you’d still not be convinced and move ahead to talk about something else. The conversation goes on without your heart or head convinced fully about what other person said.

Well, the simple trick to get the true answers you are seeking would be to keep holding the eye contact with the other person, till they start opening up and tell you what is actual or what exactly happened or how really they feel about the thing you are talking about.

It definitely can create a vibe of awkward tension, may be something that could take them on back seat, or anything else. But that’s the moment they start talking the truth and open up what they really feel or think about it. They do will get the feel that you want to know what’s actual, real and accurate information.

This applies to other side too, if you want to know if someone really wants to understand you, they’ll look into your eye and want to know more about your thoughts and feelings.

2. Yawn! And Get to Know Who’s Watching You.

Have you ever observed that often when we aren’t doing any work and are not focusing on anything, our mind starts noticing nearby environment and in that moment, we tend to think that someone else is watching us or keeping an eye on us? But when we look around, we fail to find it. Even when you pinpoint someone, they might be looking somewhere else and you are still left with the same question… who is watching me?

Well, the simple trick to find answer to your question is to YAWN. Yes, science has proved that yawning is a Contagious Action. Whenever someone watches you yawn, they also start yawning. You definitely would have observed this behaviour but now since you know this trick, you can try it out to find who is watching you.

3. Have Less Options When You Can’t Decide.

Life puts us in several situations when you don’t know what to do. You are filled with choices to make, actions to do, responsibilities to handle, and many such activities wherein you have got to make a decision and get the work done. And with several options around, deciding what to do and which choice to make, it becomes hell of a task.

As human, we always feel the more, the merrier. This makes us feel that we have all resources in hand and can tackle any situation. But this concept of having all options has been proved futile by Psychologists by several studies. The study was done in following manner.

24 Jars of different varieties of Jams were being sold for $1 each. Next day they only kept 6 of those and sold for $1 each.

Can you guess which day their sales were higher? The answer is – Day 2. Why? Well imagine you went into that sale and saw 24 options, you’d get confuse which one to buy, and 90% of the time you’ll end up buying nothing. On the contrary with 6 variants to choose from, there will be 60%-70% of chance that you’ll end up buying 1 or 2 variants.

This proves that the more you have choices, the more your energies are spent and the more your time is wasted. And that also makes you prone to choose wrong option. That’s why keep it a habit to have less options and quality ones, so you have less to think and more to work.

4. Check Eye Colour for Instant Charisma.

Eye contact plays a crucial role while have any in-person conversation.

5. In-Person Requests Helps.

6. Trick Stopping Brain into Procrastination.

7. Chewing Helps in Calming Nerves.

8. No More Haters. Ask Them for Small Favours.

9. Play Tricks in Brain to Feel Good Vibe.

10. Write Down Your Worries.

11. Count 5, Get Things Done.

12. Learn Things by Explaining.

13. Colours Make You More Productive

Why I moved from Android to iPhone?

by | Jun 1, 2022 | Tech

Do I Think it was a Mistake ?

It was an immediate love affair when I started using android smartphones. I used Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus and many smartphones, and all of them provided good experiences, be it usability, camera, sound, notifications and whichever parameters you can think of while using your phone. All of them were my go to devices for all occasions and I have fond memories with all of them 🙂

This love affair came to an end somewhere in August 2020, where my heart said to move on from android and give Apple a chance. So, I switched to iPhone. Being a gadget lover and low on budget, I opted for Apple iPhone SE (2nd Generation) which seemed most value for money at that time, and safe also so that I don’t spend too much and regret later. 😐