Richard Yong

You've got to find what you love.

Here are a few if's worth thinking about.

• If you were going to die in 15 years. Would you do anything different? What about 50?

• If you had a dream, are you still dreaming?

• If you  were going to be remarkable, what would you do?

• If you had the resources and the time to do anything... what would it be?

• If you could be a good person, who would you be?

• If you didn't have to please your parents/wife/children/friends/golf buddies, what would you do?

The power isn't in the if. It's in the question of the when.

I've got one more piece of advice from Steve.

Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Flickr credit: Voetmann

TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, the other TLA about spending.

I only buy something if it adds some value to my life. One concept, stalwart to my buying decisions, is considering the TCO. The Total Cost of Ownership. The cost beyond the dollar price of buying.

So what are the costs beyond the dollar price?

• Maintenance
• Health
• Time
• Mental anguish
• Mental and physical clutter
• Opportunity

Before I sound melodramatic, I'll use the example of a car. If you buy a car, you need to spend time cleaning it, you might drive instead of walking or cycling, you need to maintain and fuel it. Some people have their cars as objects of desire, and the mental anguish from being in an accident or the car being stolen can be really high (remember your first car?)

I've always loved video gaming, but I secretly suspected that as a past time, it didn't really contribute to anyone or anything. I had been looking at the Sony Playstation 3 for quite some time, and was impressed, enthralled even. I could easily afford it, but I spent a long time debating the TCO.

The TCO analysis of the Playstation 3 (you could apply this to a TV too!):

• Health. The late night, sedentary lifestyle of gaming can make you seriously unhealthy. This is against my values of living a healthy life.
• Time. If I game for a long time, it means I've chosen, consciously or otherwise, not to spend the time with my wife, my family or working on projects and my health.
• Encouraging more 'screen time,' I spend over 12 hours a day working on a PC, it's seems silly to swap to the next 'screen' after work.

Sure I could use it in moderation and still have a balanced life, but then I wouldn't be able to justify the cost per use, and therein lies the magic relationship, and the hook of deciding to own stuff. Just because you can afford it or like it, doesn't mean you should get it.

I caved. I'm only human! I ended up buying a PS3 for 50% off. I rationalised it by saying I could easily get my money back. Sure enough I started spending late nights, and long periods of time playing the PS3. The short story - I got fat. I wasted time reading game reviews and gaming websites. The cost of ownership was more than I could stomach, literally.

I sold it, made my money back (Cost Per Use = $0!) and breathed a big sigh of relief.

So what does TCO mean to you?

• Stop. Think. Before you buy something, consider the hidden, non monetary costs. Use the ten second rule.
• Use don't own. Most of us just want to get the pleasure of using something.
• Borrow or rent as an alternative to owning, especially things with lots of added ongoing costs like maintenance, repair or health costs.
• Enjoy what you do own, lots of people get worked up over repair costs or broken things. That's the price of ownership, and if you know that when you hand over your money, you're a step ahead.

* This is a follow up to the Cost Per Use post

** TLA - Three Letter Acronym. I hate acronyms, so the title is a little tongue in cheek.

Flickr cred: Kate_A

CPU will make your wallet fatter. and it's got nothing to do with computers.

As the weekend approaches and a weekend of glee is upon us, I want to share a cautionary tale on shopping.

Read this cracker. 10 xbox games sitting idle is the same as not going for a weekend holiday to Hawaii. I'm not kidding. Intuitively you and I would rather have a weekend in Hawaii lazing on a beach than a pile of unused stuff, but realistically, we all have a pile of stuff somewhere, and it comes from our relationship with buying stuff.

I use a simple concept when I buy new things. Cost Per Use. CPU. To justify a purchase to own something, the CPU has to approach zero. I like to use my things so much that by the time it's broken, given away or sold that it's pretty much cost nothing per use. Here are some examples:

Clothes - I hate unused clothes, every piece of clothing I own must have a cost per wear approaching zero. So if I buy a $200 jacket it better be lasting at least 20 years. That's a long time for a jacket to last. Alot of my clothes end up being of a multi use or utilitarian nature. It makes you think twice about buying that really nice shirt when the cost per use is in the hundreds of dollars. More if it's on credit.

Video Games - I abhor owning video games. Counter intuitive for a gamer like myself? Well it isn't. In the gaming industry there is a term called an 'attach rate' which is the number of games sold for every console. For the console to be worth losing money on (and Sony and Microsoft are losing money on every console sold) there needs to be a correspondingly high 'attach rate'

What this means is that consoles are great value for money, but games aren't. So owning games I don't play has never made sense to me. I only ever have one or two games at a time, and once I'm done with them, they're off to Ebay. The loss I make between purchase and sale is my cost for having played it for however long, and the cost per use generally starts to approach zero (because I used to game a lot).

Why CPU rocks.

CPU changes our behaviour towards purchasing stuff, it's not about owning stuff anymore, it's about use and enjoyment. I don't mind paying $7 to rent a dvd rather than pay $29 to own it outright, because the utility I get out of a dvd, is the one night watching it. I'd love to find a person with a large library of dvds that has watched them all twice.

One of the biggest paradigm shifts for me was over my ownership of books. Cost per use for most of my books is the cover price, which is ludicrous, $30 to read something once? I now use the library, why buy when I can borrow, and my cost per use hits a whopping free.

It also turns decisions into no brainers when it comes to experience. The thing with experience, whether it's exotic holidays or deep learning, is it's in constant use while you are paying for it. That 30 euro a kilo fiorentina steak, in Florence, cooked rare in front of me, in a crowded trattoria... worth every penny.

So next time you look at something you just must have. Take 10 seconds, ask yourself... what's the real cost per use? And if it is really valuable, spend with all your ability and happiness!

Have a great weekend!

Flickr cred: John Pannell

SMS and Mobile Calls. Kinda like Alcoholism.

There was a key message about my $50 a year mobile bill.

I had two bad habits that became normalised behaviour.

1. I called back any missed calls and made calls while walking between meetings or doing things I didn't need to concentrate on.

2. Replied by sms to any messages received, instantaneously.

The mobile phone companies thrive on because everyone thinks it's normal. Normal doesn't make it right. Or valuable.

The reality of communication is that almost nothing is required instantaneously. The world doesn't fall over because Bill in Accounts Receivable wanted to find out if you had the invoice for the taxi trip in your left pocket. Or your boss wants that budget sent to him ASAP.

So how do we stop normal but pointless expensive behaviour?

Habit change using filters.

Filters are quick rules to live by. Here are my filters for choosing to make a call from my mobile, and not when I reach a land line or PC.

• Can I personally do anything about it right at this very second? No? Then there is nothing to worry about.
• Even if a catastrophe has happened, could I do anything, or is it just more (useless) information?

The most powerful single change though was this question, if I'm using a mobile right now, and I've let myself be interrupted, is what I'm doing even that important? If it isn't important, why the heck am I wasting my attention, energy and ability.

These two filters mean that I don't react to missed information anymore. 99% of calls are made from home. I've had to fight the itch when I'm delayed 10 minutes by the pizza man to call my wife, because either way I'm late and if I make the mobile call, nothing changes (except i might as well have thrown some coins in the bin).

Mobile phones (and any bad habit) reminds me of the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer.

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference

Flickr cred: Kian Esquire

Meditations Monday: We're just human.

The pain of labour for hand or foot is not contrary to nature, as long as the foot is doing the work of a foot and the hand the work of a hand. So lifewise for a man, qua man, there is nothing contrary to nature in pain, as long as he is doing the work of a man.'

- Marcus Aurelius - Meditations 6:33

We're just human.

I will only ever have two eyes, two ears, two hands, two legs and two feet (If I'm lucky). No matter how much stuff I own, I can only ever be doing one thing at a time. No matter how much stuff I own, I'll still only have 24 hours a day.

This works two fold.

1. I appreciate what I have more. Everyday I see people with perfectly normal legs catching the escalator up from the train station. I love to walk up them. While I've got them, I'll be walking everywhere I can, if I lose them, I guess it's time to catch the escalator.

2. I'm careful about what I own. With my limited time and my physical human limitations, I can only use so much at a time. So why have anymore than I need?

In the quest for more, we're still just human, bound by physical boundaries equal to all men.

Persistence and carrying 74.6 Big Macs

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the USA

Yes, I've said it's a false belief to believe thats it's always true that you have to work very hard to be successful.

No, it's not true either that being lazy is going to get you success.

It's about working persistently on the right things.

It's about focus and working only on the valuable. I'm not talking about the corporate doublespeak of 'adding value to our customers/clients.' I'm talking about a complete shift of focus from let's do it better by increments to should we be doing something entirely else?

The pain of not doing the valuable is evident in the politics and infighting of nearly everything. For example, labourers in Australia have worked so hard, but are now trying to keep their jobs in car manufacturing plants, when it's fundamentally not valuable to do it here.

Big businesses that have eaten 'working hard but not on the valuable pill' include giants like IBM, Microsoft and Apple. Because while they were running hard up the mountain, someone moved the peak.

It really comes down to value per awesome.  You can be closer to success if you spend your time on the value (awesome) work instead of the flurry of not so awesome work. Sounds simple, but in reality we go through a masochistic habit of doing painful things for little or not gain, working in jobs we might not like so much, surrounding ourselves with distractions. Then we tell ourselves stories about how it's what we do to live. The risk of this reasoning, is that you never really end up anywhere you want to be.

So if we've got the right goals now what?

Persistence.

The art of self discipline. It's not about being perfect, it's about being on mission critical 80% of the time. I learned a lot about persistence a few years ago.

In one year of work and university I put on 15 kilos. That's like carrying 3 bags of oranges, 15 bags of frozen vegetables or 74.6 Big Macs all the time. A 20% increase in my body weight, I was 1/5th more Richard. Something was wrong, and it was a mixture of sleep, nutrition and exercise. I had to have a plan.

• I ate nothing but oats for breakfast, yoghurt and nuts as snacks, and lean chicken with steamed vegetables for lunch for a few years. But once a week, cheat day, I would flip out and gorge. 10 chocolate self saucing puddings? sure why not...
• Scheduled gym time between lectures. Contracted in, no matter how tired I was, I would just turn up, change into my gym clothes and do it. To be honest, I think the biggest obstacle to exercising is a gym membership (I don't have one now).

The plan wasn't so simple to keep. But I ignored emotion, headfaked it. Persistence goes beyond emotion. It's all about the mission. Happy, sad, anxious, upset, tired, gym membership or not. It never matters. You just do it.

So what is persistence?

• Focusing and working on mission critical tasks only.
• Forgeting emotion, emotion doesn't get things done.
• Reflecting often on what mission critical is. Cut the distractions.

I dropped down to 78kgs, sometimes I falter, but never long.

I'd put a caveat here and say that, sometimes, work is a job, and if it lets you find freedom, pays the bills and can let you get on with the best bits in life, then it's well worth it.

Happy Easter, and press on... on the right things!

Richard

   

Flickr courtesy of lakshmi.prabala

The dance or the balcony?

Dancing or watching?

Rosamund Christie, executive coach and adjunct professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management recently spoke on cultural diversity and team building. She raised an interesting study by Ronald Heifetz (author of Leadership without easy answers) at Harvard, on the challenge of adaptive leadership and how team members and managers can perform with more awareness and direction.

The concept of the balcony and the dance floor is explored by Heifetz, the distraction, the bright lights and the constant action of the dance floor is the metaphor for the day to day 'on the ground' flurry of work and meetings that lead us astray of our goals. Heifetz believes most leaders spend too much time in the dance. The balcony view, is the step back approach, looking from a far, seeing the big picture and making sure everyone is dancing to the same tune.

Dancing and watching can happen at the same time.

By being mindful while in the flurry of activity, a more strategic view can be taken. It gives more meaning to our day to day actions and there is a plan and direction to our individual actions. The dancers are the individual bricks, and the balcony view is the blue print. You can't have one without the other.

It's easy to get caught up in the minutiae of to-do lists but take a step back and ask, is the ship even going in the right direction?

Flickr credit: Lillian3000

Reflection time

'Only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced will you be able to hear the deeper vibration. Listen carefully.'

- Sarah Ban Breathnach

It's quiet in the garden today.

I close my eyes and let the warm dappled sunlight play kaleidoscopic games. I breathe deep the lovely warm musk of the tropical plants and the sweet scent of late blooming flowers. My mind is calm, gently rhythmic. The thoughts in my mind ebb and flow. I slowly begin to reflect on my life.

After some time, I stand up, brush the rogue grass off my pants, straighten my tie and place my makeshift pillow suit jacket back on. I step out of the Botanic Gardens and step back onto the city streets. The din of this smoky buzzy city is in full roar.

By the time I arrive back at my desk, the staccato of laptops, the whirring melody of mobile phones and the faint smell of the morning's coffees invade my senses. But it doesn't matter. My mind is relaxed and focused.

Reflect. Listen carefully.

Flickr pic courtesy of Hamed Saber

Dollars per awesome

There is more to life than increasing it's speed

- Mahatma Gandhi

In the busy-ness of life it can feel like we live in a blur of rushing from one task to the next, as though the neurotic need to do something will somehow provide some perverse sense of completion or satisfaction in our lives.

Hard Fact #23124: When you die, your inbox will not be empty. It's true, no matter how important you are, the day you check out is the day you will still have things to do.

Fortunately, we can make the most of our things to do. Tackling them with conscious appreciation and understanding can give us greater clarity about our choices to make clear decisions on whether to do, delegate, dump or defer.

Every task we choose to do, we're trading our life for. Read that again. A portion of your life is traded for every single thing you choose to do.

As morbid as it sounds, being conscious about every minute towards a finite end has shifted my perspective on how I decide to deal with my inbox items. I've become much more critical of how I spend my time and the value I place on my work time (hint: It's no longer in dollars per hour/week/year, it's in dollars per awesome).

flickr photo courtesy of veo

Mindfulness and the impermanence of life.

  The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius explored the frailty of man in Meditations, '... if we live longer, there is no guarantee that our mind will likewise retain that power to comprehend and study the world which contributes to our experience of things divine and human... so we must have a sense of urgency, not only for the ever closer approach of death, but also because our comprehension of the world and our ability to pay proper attention will fade before we do.'

If we consider this in our daily life, many people 'do their time' in painful, stressful jobs with some expectation of a greater life in retirement, we miss the urgency of the present and the attention we should pay to it.  If we always live for the future, when we retire, become rich, famous, or hit that big idea to really live life, it's as though we're waiting for future before we allow ourselves to start living.

These are the times when we launch into the 'if only I had' or 'If only I were' something or someone before we can be happy. The problem with the future is that it's not yet here and that we only have the present. And if we wait too long, we might miss our chance to really live. We may no longer have the youth, energy, vitality and ability to live in the moment as we do right now. Perhaps it's a reason why the most inspiring, talented, authentic and emotionally open people are those with terminal illnesses or disabilities, with finite dimensions on their lives, they are driven to make every single moment count.

One of the best techniques I've found for living in the moment, and living life right now, no matter what I'm doing is to think deeply and be mindful to each of my five senses. It's easy to fall into the trap of defining moments between scheduled 'events' as times to place your mind on cruise control, for example commuting, boring client meetings or talking to someone you dislike. Letting these times pass without thinking is a waste of your time, precisely because it is yours, it's your life, and we can only ever experience life in the present, everthing else is over or is yet to come. It's a powerful way to kick the habit of going 'through the motions', and it can bring a vivid experience to everything

Don't touch. Feel
Don't glimpse. See
Don't hear. Listen
Don't eat. Taste
Don't sniff. Inhale

Be curious, and make use of every thing you have. Now.

Image credit: Dominic's Pics