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Book Reviews

The Power of Habit. Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

2017-03-30 by Roberto Zoia 1 Comment

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for The New York Times. In The Power of Habit, the author proposes a framework for understanding the importance of habits and how habits work. Throughout the book, Duhigg uses stories —real stories— to exemplify his points, and he does a great job telling them. The stories are based, in part, on Duhigg’s interviews and journalistic research.

Perhaps the most important concept in the book is the Habit Loop, the loop that governs any habit. It is composed by three elements: cue, routine, and reward.

  • The cue is what triggers1 the habit. It tells our brains to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.
  • The routine is the action itself, which can be pyshical, mental, or emotional.
  • The reward helps our brain figure out if the loop is worth remembering for the future.

Over time, this loop —cue, routine, reward— becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become interwined until a powerful sense of anticiaption and craving emerges. Eventually (…), a habit is born.

In presence of the cue, says Duhigg, the habit emerges. Our brain stops making decisions, and the pattern folds automattically.

[Habits] can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. (…) They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize —they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

It is by learning to observe cues and rewards that we can change our habits or cultivate new ones.

Part One of the book is the best part of this book. Based on numerous researchs, the author explains how new habits are formed, and how old ones can be replaced for new behaviours.

Part Two of the book —habits of successful organizations— and Part Three —the habits of societies— are interesting, but in my opinion, the author relies too much in stories to sustain his points. Some of these stories are used to make unjustified generalizations in some cases, and oversimplifications in others.


  1. Other authors, like Marshall Goldsmith, refer to the cue as trigger. ↩

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: habit loop, habits

The Inevitable. Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly

2017-02-21 by Roberto Zoia 1 Comment

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly is the cofounder and Senior Maverick of Wired Magazine. Founding member of The Long Now Foundation (which focuses in fostering long-term thinking and long-term responsibility). Nomadic photojournalist, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, and author of several books like What Technology Wants (2010), and often-cited inspiring articles like 1,000 True Fans.

Kevin Kelly has an impressive ability to think out of the box and analyze the implications of technology from different angles. With “inevitable”, Kelly means that there is a bias in the nature of technology that tilts in certain directions and not others. “All things being equal, the physics and mathematics that rule the dynamics of technology tend to favor certain behaviors.”

In the past 30 years the social economy based on this technology has had its ups and downs and seen its heroes come and go, but it is very clear that there have been large-scale trends governing what has happened.

These broad historical trends are crucial because the underlying conditions that birthed them are still active and developing, which strongly suggests that these trends will continue to increase in the next few decades.

This book is about 12 of these patterns, inevitable technological forces —according to Kelly— that will shape the next 30 years. These tendencies do not dictate specifics or particular instances. For example, “the form of an internet —a network of networks spanning the globe— was inevitable, but the specific kind of internet we chose to have was not.”

Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs. It may be against our initial impulse, but we should embrace the perpetual remixing of these technologies. Only by working with these technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer.

“These forces are trajectories, not destinies. They offer no predictions of where we end up. They tell us simply that in the near future we are headed in these directions.”

This book reads like a conversation with the author. For each trend, Kelly points out what’s happening today, both mainstrean and at the edges of technology. Then he speculates about what the future could look like. Along the way he shares personal stories and experiences to help us better understand his point of view.

If you are interested in technology trends, this book will book will give you a glimpse of what the future can become, well beyond the typical, short-visioned, “Trends for next year” article.


Book Summary

Are you interested in technology trends? Check my 20-page book summary of The Inevitable on Amazon.

Filed Under: Book Reviews

Triggers. Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be. By Marshall Goldsmith

2017-01-04 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment


'Triggers, by Marshall Goldsmith'
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Marshall Goldsmith is a world-renowned business author, educator, and coach. He’s considered by Thinkers50 the most influential leadership thinker and coach. Forbes considers him one of the five most respected executive coaches.

Triggers is a superbly written book. Besides proposing the methods needed to achieve meaningful and lasting behavioral change, Goldsmith shares great, powerful stories from his professional practice to exemplify his points.

I enjoyed reading this book for the first time, and then a second time to write this review. Both times I’ve benefited greatly and came out with concrete advice and discovering areas of personal improvement. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to be improve his or her leadership, or simply as a book that will help you become the best person you can be.

Why Don’t We Become the Person We Want to Be?

Goldsmith centers the explanation of why we don’t become the person we want to be around two ‘truths’: First, meaningful behavioral change is very hard to do. Hard to initiate, harder to stay on course, and even harder to make change stick. And second, no one can make us change unless we want to change. Some people say they want to change, but they don’t really mean it.

We are reluctant to admit we need to change. Even when we recognize the need for change, given the choice we tend to do nothing -–that’s inertia’s power over us. And when we decide to change, motivation by itself is not enough. We need to know how to change, and have the ability to execute the change.

Even when the benefits of changing a specific behavior are indisputable, we are geniuses inventing reasons to avoid change. We fall back in a set of beliefs that trigger denial, resistance, and self-delusion. Goldsmith call these triggers belief triggers.

An excuse is the explanation we offer when we disappoint other people. It explains why we fell short of expectations after the fact. We are late for work because of ‘traffic’, and other variations of ‘the dog ate my homework’. Belief triggers, however, trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage change by negating, deeply inside us, the possibility of change.

Some examples of believe triggers (Goldsmith lists a total of fifteen triggers, every one worth reading):

  • Forgetting the difference between understanding and doing triggers confusion. Understanding what to do doesn’t ensure that you’ll actually do it.
  • Giving too much credit to willpower and self-control leads to overconfidence. We choose to ignore the will-reducing power of the environment, disregarding the need for help or structure.
  • The faith in time’s infinite patience triggers procrastination. There is no urgency to begin today… We simultaneously underestimate the time it takes to get anything done, and belief that we have enough time to get everything done.
  • Forgetting that we need to change not only our behavior but how we define ourselves leads to stubbornness. We refuse to adapt our behavior to new situations because it isn’t me.
  • While other people consistently overrate themselves, we think think that our own self-assessment is fair and accurate. We have an impaired sense of objectivity.

The Environment

Above listed rationalizations still don’t still completely the larger question of why don’t we become the person we want to be.

Our environment, Goldsmith argues, has a strong influence on our behaviour. Because we don’t appreciate how our environment influences our choice, we fail to make the right choice. “If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.”

Driving in a crowded freeway, surrounded by rude impatient drivers, can lead us to become rude and impatient ourselves, even if that’s not our usual behavior. Placing ourselves in a work environment of impatience, competitiveness, and hostility, can probably alter our usual behavior. Excessive pressure on our sales force to reach exceed their goals, no matter what, can trigger non-ethical behavior, even if that was not our intention.

If there is one “disease” that I’m trying to cure in this book, it revolves around our total misapprehension of our environment. We think we are in sync with our environment, but actually it’s at war with us. We think we can control our environment but in fact it controls us. We think our external environment is conspiring in our favor —that is, helping us— when actually it is taxing and draining us. It is not interested in what it can give us. It’s only interested in what it can take from us. (…) Our environment is a nonstop triggering mechanism whose impact on our behaviour is too significant to be ignored.

Identifying our Triggers

Goldsmith proposes feedback as a way to see our environment as a triggering mechanism. “ Feedback —both the act of giving and taking it— is our first step in becoming smarter, more mindful about the connection between our environment and our behavior. Feedback teaches us to see our environment as a triggering mechanism.”

A feedback loop comprises four stages: evidence, relevance, consequence, and action. “Once we deconstruct feedback into its four stages of evidence, relevance, consequence, and action, the world never looks the same again.”

An example. After trying unsuccessfully several approaches to decrease speeding in residential zones in Goldsmith town, town officials installed radar speed displays (RDS). Also called driver feedback systems, this speed limit signs with a digital readout of your actual speed work effectively to decrease speeding.

The RDS measures the drivers speed and relays it to the driver (evidence). The speed limit sign lets drivers know if they are breaking the law (relevance). Awareness of their actions and possible consequences kicks in (consequence), so they slow down (action).

Our environment produces no feedback loops by itself. It often triggers bad behavior against our will and better judgement, and without our awareness. On the other hand, if we could control our environment, it could trigger our most desired behavior. A well-designed feedback loop triggers desirable behavior.

Goldsmith maps triggers into two axis: Encouraging-Discouraging vs Productive-Counter-productive. The resulting quadrants help us take inventory of our triggers and increase awareness about our environment.

  • We want it and need it. Where encouraging triggers intersect with productive triggers… this is where we’d prefer to be all the time.
  • We need it but don’t want it. Rules push us in the right direction, but nobody likes them.
  • We want it but don’t need it.
  • We don’t need or want it

Even if our environment does not always help, we always have a choice. Goldsmith proposes a modification to the classic sequence of antecedent, behavior, and consequence —by interrupting it with a sense of awareness and an infinitesimal stoppage of time. We can make any impulse run in place for a brief moment while we choose to obey or ignore it. The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable circumstances.

Superior Planners, Inferior Doers

Goldsmith makes a parallel between Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership1 and the dynamic that exists within us when we attempt to change our behavior. There are, inside us, two different personas. The Planner, and the Doer. We are, says Goldsmith, superior planners, and inferior doers.

As we go through life making plans to be a better friend, partner, worker, athlete, parent, son, or daughter, inside each of us are two separate personas. There’s the leader/planner/manager who plans to change his or her ways. And there’s the follower/doer/employee who must execute the plan. We think they are the same because we unwittingly function as one or the other throughout our day. They are both part of who we are. But we are wrong. In fact, we start each day as a bifurcated individual, one part leader, the other part follower—and as the day progresses, the two grow further apart.

Just like the effective leader, we should size up the situation and adopt the appropriate management style for the doer in us. Measure the need, choose the style.

Anticipation, avoidance, and adjustment, are tools for correcting this conflict between Planner and Doer in us.

Anticipation. “When our performance has clear and immediate consequences, we rise to the occasion. We create our environment. We don’t let it recreate us.” However, most of the time, most of our days, we don’t associate the situation with any consequences. We forget about the environment. And when we are not anticipating the environment, anything can happen.

Avoidance. Peter Drucker, quotes Goldsmith, says that “half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.” Quite often our smartest response to an environment is avoiding it.

Adjustment. Finally, when avoidance is impossible, we adjust to the circumstances.

Goldsmith proposes a framework he calls The Wheel of Change. In pursuing any behavioral change, we should consider four options: change or keep the positive elements, change or keep the negative. These options lead to four actions:

Creating. “The challenge is to do it by choice, not as a bystander. Are we creating ourselves, or wasting the opportunity and being created by external forces instead?”

Preserving. We rarely ask ourselves “what in my life is worth keeping?” When we face the choice of being good or getting even better, we instinctively opt for the latter, and risk losing some desirable qualities. “We rarely get credit for not messing up a good thing. It’s a tactic that looks brilliant only in hindsight —and only to the individual doing the preserving.”

“Eliminating is our most liberating action —but we make it reluctantly. (…) We’re all experienced at eliminating the things that hurt us, especially when the benefits of doing so are immediate and certain. (…) The real test is sacrificing something we enjoy doing that’s not ostensibly harming our career, that we believe may be even working for us (if not others).”

“Accepting [what we cannot change] is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.”

The Power of Active Questions

Goldsmith discovered the power of active questions from her daughter Kelly, Ph.D. from Yale in behavioral marketing. Passive questions lead people to think of what is being done to them rather than what they are doing for themselves.

Along with apologizing, asking for help, and optimism, Goldsmith considers active questioning one of the “magic moves” in his coaching practice.

The problem with usual questions —passive questions— is that when people are asked passive questions they provide “environmental” answers. The employee seldom looks within to take responsibility, assigning blame elsewhere. Active questions, on the other hand, challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action.

Consider, for example, the common employee survey passivequestion: “Do you have clear goals?”. The response leads the employee to consider if her boss is giving clear directives, while the employee herself adopts a passive stand. Compare it to the active version of the same question: “Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?”

It’s not only about the company’s responsibility in employee’s engagement. It’s about what the employees are doing to engage themselves.

After 79 studies with 2,537 participants, Goldsmith came to a list of six “Engaging Questions”. In every study, for a period of time, participants were asked to use the questions at the end of each day. The results are impressive: 37% of participants reported improvement in all six areas, 65% improved on at least four items. Only 12% didn’t change on any items.

For years, Goldsmith has been using a set of questions that he calls “the Daily Questions”. to measure his own progress. Your daily questions, he says, should reflect your objectives. You can use whatever works for you. The only considerations should be: a) are these items important to my life? b) will success on these items help me become the person that I want to be? The important things is that the daily questions should be active questions. Injecting the phrase “Did I do my best to…” triggers trying. “

Trying not only changes our behavior but how we interpret and react to that behavior. Trying is more than a semantic tweak to our standard list of goals. It delivers some unexpected emotional wallops that inspire change or knock us out of the game completely.

Planner, Doer, and Coach

At the highest level, a coach is a source of mediation, bridging the gap between the visionary Planner and short-sighted Doer in us.

We resist coaching, says Goldsmith, because of our need for privacy (some pieces of us are not to be shared with the world). But also because “we don’t know that we need to change. We are in denial, convincing ourselves that others need help, not us. (…) Then, there’s the successful person’s unshakable self-sufficiency: we think we can do it all on our own.”

If we use the Daily Questions, we eventually get better. Not only that. With practice, as we become more efficient at the process of getting better, we get better faster. Eventually, we learn. We become our own coach. “That’s the moment when the Planner and Doer in us are joined by the Coach in us. We don’t need an outside agency to point out our behavioral dangers zones, or urge us to toe the line, or even hear our nightly scores. We can do it on our own.”

The First Principle of Behavioral Change

Goldsmith closes this part of the book by introducing what he calls the “first principle of behavioral change”: Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?.

Every endeavor comes with a first principle that dramatically improves our chances of success at that endeavor. (…) I have a first principle for becoming the person you want to be. Follow it, and it will shrink your daily volume of stress, conflict, unpleasant debate, and wasted time. It is phrased in the form of a question you should be asking yourself whenever you must choose to either engage or “let it go.”

When we confuse disclosure with honesty, when we have an opinion, when our facts collide with other people’s beliefs, when decisions don’t go our way, when we regret our own decisions… all these are opportunities to apply this first principle. This first principle “is the delaying mechanism we should be deploying in the interval between trigger and behavior —after a trigger creates an impulse and before we may regret.”

More Structure, Please. We Do Not Get Better Without Structure

Imposing structure on parts of our day is how we size control of our environment. Structure limits our options so that we’re not thrown off course by externalities. It’s about the power of constraints. The Daily Questions, says Goldsmith, is the core structural element of his book.

Not any structure helps, however. Whether the target is an organizational goal or a personal one, “it has to be structure that fits the situation and the personalities involved.” The right structure increases the chances of success, and makes us more efficient at it.

Goldsmith cites the studies of social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, who coined the term ego depletion:

We posses a limited conceptual resource called ego strength, which is depleted through the day by our various efforts at self-regulation —resisting temptations, making trade-offs, inhibiting our desires, controlling our thoughts and statements, adhering to other people’s rules. People in this state, said Baumeister, are ego depleted.

Not limited to self-control, depletion applies to many forms of self-regulated behavior, for example, our decision making. When we reach decision fatigue, we make careless choices, or surrender to the status quo and do nothing.

For example, in a 2011 study of an Israeli parole board, researchers discovered that prisoner cases reviewed early in the morning were granted parole 70% of the time. In contrast, cases reviewed in the afternoon had a 90% rejection rate.

Depletion is a silent enemy. “Until someone invents a body gauge to tell us we’re running on emotional empty, we can’t measure it, so we don’t appreciate how it’s grinding us down.” Goldsmith comes back to one of his central arguments about the environment’s influence over our behavior. Depletion, says Goldsmith, is an environmental hazard.

Recognizing depleting events can provide us with a clearer picture of how diminished we could be in terms of willpower, and anticipate, avoid, or adapt accordingly. However, the real key to avoid depletion is structure. “In an almost magical way, structure slows down how fast our discipline and self-control disappear. When we have structure, we don’t have to make as many choices; we just follow the plan. And the result is we’re not being depleted as quickly.” Discipline requires effort. “If we provide ourselves with enough structure, we don’t need discipline. The structure provides it for us.”

The Trouble with Good Enough

Good enough isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In many areas of life, chasing perfection is a fool’s errand, or at least a poor use of our time. (…) The problem begins when this good enough attitude spills beyond our marketplace choices and into the things we say and do. (…) In the interpersonal real —we’re talking about how a husband treats his wife, or a son deals with an aging parent, or a trusted friend responds when people are counting on him —good enough is setting the bar too low.

Four environments that trigger ‘good enough’ behavior are:

  • Marginal motivation makes us vulnerable to mediocrity. “Skills is the beating heart of high motivation. The more skill we have (…), the more we enjoy it, the higher our motivation to continue doing it.” But we forget that insufficient skill, if we cannot improve it, leads to low motivation. Marginal motivation produces marginal outcome.

The takeaway: If your motivation for a task or goal is in any way compromised— because you lack the skill, or don’t take the task seriously, or think what you’ve done so far is good enough— don’t take it on. Find something else to show the world how much you care, not how little.

  • Working pro bono. By pro bono, Goldsmith means not just not getting paid but rather any voluntary activity that is a personal choice. “We create casual equivalences between volunteering and our level of commitment. (…) This is how our fine and noble intentions degrade into good enough intentions. This is how our integrity gets compromised. Integrity is an all-or-nothing virtue.”

If you thing doing folks a favor justifies doing less than your best, you’re not doing anyone any favors, including yourself.

  • Behaving like amateurs. “A professional shoots for the higher standards. An amateur settles for good enough. (…) Most of us fall into this amateur-versus-professional trap each day without knowing it. (…) We are professionals at what we do, amateurs at what we want to become. We need to erase this devious distinction —or at least close the gap between professional and amateur —to become the person we want to be.”

  • Compliance issues. “When we engage in noncompliance (…) we’re thumbing our noses at the world, announcing: the rules don’t apply to us. Don’t rely to us. We don’t care.” People “think they have a better way of doing something”, or they are “unwilling to commit fully when it means obeying someone else’s rules of behavior.”

The Hazard of Leading a Changeless Life

While we probably find it difficult to imagine at a personal level, when it comes to our interpersonal behavior and our resistance to changing how we treat people, “we wear changelessness as a badge of honor. (…) When we prolong negative behavior, we are leading a changeless life in the most hazardous manner.”

The author ends the book by encouraging the reader to think about one change that he or she won’t regret later on, and commit to it.


  1. Hersey and Blanchard’s premise was that leaders need to adapt their style to fit the performance readiness of their followers. Readiness not only varies by person, it also varies by task. Followers have different levels of motivation and ability for different tasks. ↩

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: behavioral change, marshall goldsmith

Create or Hate. Successful People Make Things, by Dan Norris

2016-10-06 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

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Even if some factors that lead people to be successful could be attributed to sheer luck, a common trait is that successful people create things.

In Norris’ vision, creating something –that is, being creative– has little to do with wild talent and is more about productivity. The first requisite for being creative is to start to do something.

In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about The Resistance, the voice that delays us from doing our work, the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness. Dan Norris’ nemesis to creativity is Hate.

“Haters don’t create anything, and instead get caught up in a never-ending cycle of Hate feeding Hate and criticism triumphing over creation.” The hate ecosystem nurtures from negative people that may surround us or work with us. However, what most hinders our capacity to do things is own self-hate.

It turns out that people can be very good at making up reasons [for not making things]. Not all reasons are invalid, but we have to beware of Hate breeding excuses.

Some common excuses are:

  • It’s expensive
  • I don’t want to divide my attention
  • I don’t want to be one of those guys/gals that teaches people something before they know it themselves.
  • There is too much effort needed to start
  • The learning curve. I will definitely suck at the first try
  • I see no purpose to get it going
  • I don’t have what it takes

The second half of the book is about how to fight hate. For conquering hate, we need to accept failure as part of the creative process, an essential part of creating anything. Self awareness and gratefulness are our allies in our fight for being creative.

The final chapter gives practical advice that can give you some ideas on how to improve your creative process.

I specially liked to chapter on how empathy breeds creativity. Empathy is hard, and not commonly understood.

Your goal in being empathic is to imagine what it’s like to be that person and feel what they are feeling. If you can improve your empathy, you improve your imagination. And imagination is the source of all creativity.

The author is not shy about his own failures and learned lessons. For me, this showing himself vulnerable by reflecting about his own experiences is one of the things that makes the book valuable.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: creativity, entrepreneurship, failure

7 Pasos para lograr resultados extraordinarios

2016-07-18 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

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Solo una cosa: Enfócate en lo único (The One Thing), por Gary Keller, es uno de mis libros favoritos. Keller propone un marco mental aterrizado para lograr resultados extraordinarios tanto en el trabajo como en la vida personal. La premisa del autor es que los resultados extraordinarios vienen determinados, directamente, por lo enfocados que logremos ser. Más concretamente, por nuestra capacidad de enfocarnos en lo esencial, en lo que llama lo Único.

Concuerdo con la mayoría de lo que Keller propone. Podemos usar este framework tal cual, o podemos adaptarlo a nuestras necesidades. En este artículo he resumido en siete los principales puntos que propone el libro, de un modo orientado a la acción directa, pero recomiendo vivamente leer el libro completo.

1. Discernir lo esencial de lo accesorio

Los triunfadores (…) tienen un ojo clínico para detectar lo esencial. Se detienen lo justo para decidir qué es lo que importa y luego dejan que lo que importa guíe su vida. Los triunfadores hacen antes lo que otros dejan para más tarde y posponen, incluso a veces indefinidamente, cosas que los demás hacen antes. La diferencia no está en la intención, sino en la prioridad de paso. Los triunfadores siempre avanzan partiendo de un sentido claro de lo que es prioritario.

2. Adquirir los hábitos necesarios

Sacar adelante las cosas importantes no es cuestión de disciplina sino de desarrollar los hábitos que nos ayuden a enfocarnos en la tarea que tenemos entre manos. Se requiere disciplina para adquirir el hábito, pero no podemos funcionar a base de disciplina en el largo plazo.

3. El balance de vida no es una meta, es un esfuerzo diario

Lograr resultados extraordinarios requiere esfuerzo extraordinario. En ese sentido, Keller no considera el “balance de vida” como una meta, sino más bien en “contrapesar tu vida”. Hay que esforzarse diariamente en mantener el balance en tu vida.

Si piensas en el equilibrio como en el punto medio, entonces el desequilibrio se produce cuando te alejas de él. Si te apartas demasiado del centro vivirás en los extremos. El problema de vivir en el centro es que ello te impide dedicar grandes cantidades de tiempo a ninguna cosa. En tu afán por atender a todo, todo se ve mermado y nada obtiene el tiempo que merece.

Esto a veces está bien y a veces no. Saber cuándo buscar el punto medio y cuándo ir a los extremos es en esencia el punto de partida de la sabiduría. Mediante esta negociación con tu tiempo conseguirás resultados extraordinarios.

Un día te acabas dando cuenta de que el trabajo es una pelota de goma: si la dejas caer, rebotará y volverá a subir. Las otras cuatro bolas –familia, salud, amigos e integridad– son de cristal. Si dejas caer alguna de ellas, irremediablemente se rayará, se agrietará o incluso se hará añicos.

4. ¿Qué es LO ÚNICO que puedo hacer gracias a lo cuál todo lo demás me resulte más fácil o innecesario?

El modelo que propone Keller se construye aplicando lo que el llama la Pregunta Esencial (the Focusing Question) a las diferentes áreas de nuestra vida. ¿Qué es LO ÚNICO que puedo hacer gracias a lo cuál todo lo demás me resulte más fácil o innecesario?

La productividad no consiste en trabajar como una mula, en no parar ni un segundo, ni en trabajar hasta las tantas… Tiene más que ver con las prioridades, con la planificación y con defender tu tiempo con uñas y dientes. (…)

Para mantenerse en el buen camino y vivir cada día, cada mes, cada año o toda una vida profesional lo mejor posible, hay que seguir haciéndose continuamente la pregunta esencial. Si te la haces una y otra vez, te obligará a organizar las tareas en su correspondiente orden de importancia. (…)

Puedes volverte loco si te dedicas a analizar hasta el menor aspecto de todo lo que puedes llegar a hacer. Yo no lo hago, y tú tampoco deberías hacerlo. Con el tiempo desarrollarás un sentido propio para decidir cuándo hacerte la pregunta esencial general o la puntual.

5. Las metas altas requieren hacer grandes preguntas y buscar grandes respuestas

Las respuestas a la Pregunta Esencial se pueden agrupar en tres categorías:

  • factible, la respuesta más fácil que podemos buscar, algo que ya está a nuestro alcance;
  • asequible, todavía al alcance de nuestras posibilidades, pero en el extremo alejado de nuestro radio de acción;
  • posible, una respuesta que existe más allá de lo ya conocido y ya hechoen ese campo o tema.

“La gente altamente exitosa”, explica Keller, “opta por vivir en los límites más extremos del triunfo. No solo sueña con lo que está más allá de su alcance, sino que lo ansía intensamente. (…) Han hecho una gran pregunta y quieren la mejor de las respuestas.”

6. Aspira a la pericia, a la maestría

La Pregunta Esencial no es suficiente. Hay que asumir la mentalidad del que aspira a la pericia, a la maestría: el compromiso de convertirnos en lo mejor que podamos ser, y abrazar el esfuerzo que esto requiere.

Más que con cualquier otra cosa, la pericia está en relación con las horas invertidas. El renacentista Miguel Ángel dijo: “Si la gente supiera cuánto he tenido que trabajar para conseguir esta maestría, no les parecería todo tan maravilloso.”

También tendremos que enfrentar el techo natural de nuestros logros con “mentalidad de propósito”, sin aceptar que el enfoque que hemos intentado es la última palabra. “Cuando estás dedicado a lo Único, tendrás que superar cualquier techo que pueda surgir, y eso exige una manera distinta de hacer las cosas: con un propósito”. Tendremos que aprender a tomar responsabilidad del resultado de nuestra vida (en contraste con ser una víctima de la situación). Esto, según Keller, es esencial para lograr resultados extraordinarios.

Si tienes que suplicar, suplica. Si tienes que hacer algún trueque, hazlo. Si tienes que ser creativo, sé creativo. (…) Resuélvelo. Busca una manera.

7. Los cuatro ladrones

Debemos estar prevenidos contra los cuatro ladrones que pueden interponerse entre nosotros y los resultados extraordianrios: la incapacidad de decir que “no” , el miedo al caos —”centrarte en lo Único garantiza una consecuencia: que dejas de hacer otras cosas. Siempre habrá trabajos sin acabar y cabos sueltos a tu alrededor (…) Acostúmbrate a ello y supéralo”—, hábitos poco saludables, y un entorno que no te apoya con tus metas.


Solo una cosa de Gary Keller está disponible en librerías Íbero. También se encuentra en Amazon en español, y en la edición original en inglés.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Español

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