Be the Dumbest Person in the Room

Would you rather be the smartest one in the room, or be in a room where everyone is smarter? This question was recently posed to me by Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. Sullivan went on to say that most people sitting around trying to prove how smart they are, but what do they get from this? Admiration? A confidence boost? Maybe, but how does this help them grow?

It doesn’t. I grow a lot more when I’m the dumbest guy in the room. I’m still the same guy as I was hours earlier, but now I’m afforded the opportunity to learn from people who know so much more than I do. And this got me thinking: I’m always the dumbest guy in the room. Sometimes I’m the best wealth legacy coach, or I know the most about the tax code. Sometimes I’m better educated, but I’m always the dumbest guy in the room.

Every single person I encounter knows more about something than I do. My challenge is to shut up and listen to them, to stop worrying about a bruised ego, and to learn how to grow from other people’s wisdom.

Today’s Challenge: With each person you encounter, remind yourself that you are the dumbest one in the room. Ask yourself: What can I learn from this person?

--Tony Rose is the author of Say Hello to the Elephants: A Four-Part Process for Finding Clarity, Confronting Problems, and Moving On.

Ultradian Rhythms

A few months back, I read a Harvard Business Review article by Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project. Upon reflecting on the good sense his parents had to name him something as fantastic as “Tony,” I went on to actually read the article. Tony talked about Ultradian Rhythms, which are 90- to 120-minute energy-related cycles that human bodies go through. These are cycles of peaks and valleys. Tony concludes that if we take breaks every 90- to 120-minutes and temporarily get our minds off the work at hand, then our efficiency increases significantly.

This theory was tested successfully at Wachovia, where employee work groups took breaks every 90 to 120 minutes. And guess what? They were more efficient.

For go-getters, taking frequent breaks might seem lazy or ineffective. I know a guy who has his day planned to the minute. He races around all day long from one meeting to the next, timing his phone calls with his wife. And sure, he’s effective sometimes, but more often than not, he ends up crashing. I’ve actually been in meetings with him where he’s fallen asleep. His wife tells me that he comes home and just sits. He can’t help around the house. He can’t interact with his kids.

He would be much more productive if he took five-minute breaks every 90 minutes or so. I know this is true because guys named “Tony” don’t lie.

Today’s Challenge: Honor you body’s Ultradian Rhythm by taking five-minute breaks every 90 minutes or so. Note whether your level of productivity increases, decreases, or stays the same.

--Tony Rose is the author of Say Hello to the Elephants: A Four-Part Process for Finding Clarity, Confronting Problems, and Moving On.

Wielding Your Strengths

My wife refuses to shop anywhere but Gelson’s, the upscale supermarket in our neighborhood.

What does Gelson’s have that its cheaper counterparts don’t have? I can think of a few things. The parking lot isn’t a zoo. It is always clean. Its produce and meat are of higher quality, and the lines are shorter.

Shopping anywhere else is simply unacceptable for my wife. With respect to my wife, Gelson’s has a monopoly on her shopping needs.

This got me thinking: What can we all do individually to become monopolies of one?

Everyone does something especially well. I am a passionate advocate for my clients that brings them new information in ways they can understand. It is my unique talent. And if anyone wants to get better clarity around a problem and how they can solve it, they come to me. I hold a monopoly on problem solving.

Recently, I blogged about the importance of wielding strengths. What would happen if we all identified that one thing that we, as individuals, hold a monopoly on? Maybe you are the fastest typist this side of the Mississippi. Maybe you can communicate calmly and effectively with everyone. Maybe you are the best damn night manager at a fast food chain. Perhaps you make amazing gut decisions.

Whatever it is, make that your focus. If you spend each day trying to secure a monopoly centered around your unique talent, all of your shortcomings would fall to the wayside. Who cares that you cannot operate a computer when you speak 16 languages? And who cares that you cannot speak 16 languages when you can dissect a computer and reassemble it in 12 seconds flat?

If you are the damn best (or the best that you can be) at one thing, you can offer the world so much more than your talent. You can offer inspiration.

Today’s Challenge: Spend time identifying your “Unique Abilities”.

--Tony Rose is the author of Say Hello to the Elephants: A Four-Part Process for Finding Clarity, Confronting Problems, and Moving On

Conflict is Good

The title of my book — Say Hello to the Elephants — was inspired by the reaction most people have to conflict. That is, they sit on their hands and refuse to acknowledge it. I was thinking about this during a team meeting with my managers, some of whom refuse to criticize the named partners at Rose, Snyder, & Jacobs.

Conflict in any organization is important, I told them. What I failed to add is that conflict in any relationship is important. To be clear, conflict doesn’t mean that you hate a person or hold grudges. It means that you simply have an inquisitive mind and ask questions when we see them dangling before us. It means that you have the courage to look at each other and say what is honest. It means that you do what you should be doing and, when something doesn’t seem right, you speak up.

In other words: If you leave an elephant in a room, it will not go away. In fact, according to Ellen James of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, an adult elephant produces up to three hundred pounds of dung a day. If you ignore an elephant too long, you will quickly find out what it is like to walk through a pile of elephant dung.

Finding Clarity Is Painful

Sometimes my clients sound just like my kids: “But Tony, this is hard wooooork. Finding clarity is painful.”

You bet it is. In my book, Say Hello to the Elephants, I tell the story of Doyle. Imagine that Doyle is your fitness trainer, and that you tell Doyle that you have always watned to run a marathon.

“No problem,” he says (of the 26.2-mile race). “It will be easy.”

You smile at him and say, “Swell.”

So you are off and running, expecting it to be a piece of cake based on what your fitness trainer has told you. It will be calming, he says. You will probably have one epiphany after another, similar to those deep, transformational moments during yoga. Doyle leads you to believe that running the marathon will be kind of like relaxing in a Jacuzzi, but different.

You set off running on your first training session. You start hopeful and full of confidence.

Then reality sets in. Your heart is about to burst out of your chest, and you are panting like a thirsty dog. You are convinced that your toenails will rub off, your arches will fall, and you will have shin splints, sweat rashes, strained Achilles tendons, blisters, chafing, and various knee and back ailments along the way. You have only run a half-mile before you decide that running is quite awful.

Swell? More like swelling!

I am simply not cut out for this, you decide, reflecting on Doyle’s claim that it should be easy.

On Day One of training, you quit.

Although it might seem that clarity should be intuitive, the process of reaching clarity is not always easy. Clarity can be difficult to achieve. It does not have to be painful, but it often is. Our choices muddy the waters. Our responsibilities add pressure, and our setbacks seem impossible to overcome.

Pain, at least when it has passed, can be palliative. Imagine for a moment a world in which we could set ambitious, challenging goals and then turn around and attain them without sacrificing a single ounce of blood, sweat, or tears. Not only would that take the “accomplish” out of the accomplishment, but it would also turn your ambitious goals into monotony. You probably would not want to achieve those goals any more. At best, the accomplishments would lack significant meaning.

Maybe your trainer, Doyle, disagrees. “Goals that are easy to reach would not be boring or monotonous,” he says. “That would be fantastic. We could have our cake and eat it too! Sign me up—I love German chocolate cake!”

You should fire Doyle.

Pain gives meaning to our desire and ability to reach goals. It strengthens us, builds our self-confidence and self-worth, and gives us the experience we need to get through the next round of pain. When you have fought for years and years to reach the top—and in the course of those years you have been beaten down, failed on numerous occasions, and rejected by more people than you can count—you will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have earned it once you get to the top. The pain you endured will make the reward sweeter. The scrapes and scars are all badges of courage proving you were challenged. The mettle was tested, and the mettle won.

The pain is priceless.

You hire a new trainer, Lance. Lance’s favorite movie is Predator about a U.S. Special under attack by a hideous creature from outer space known as “the Predator.” Lance’s favorite moment is when a fellow soldier informs the tobacco-chewing Blain that Blain is bleeding. Blain keeps chewing his tobacco, scoping out the terrain, matter-of-factly stating, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

And neither do you. When you have clarity, much of the pain is incidental.

The reward makes the pain irrelevant.

Take Theodore Geisel. In college, Theodore was voted the least likely to succeed. Though his art and writing professors disagreed, Theodore felt he had a knack for drawing and writing, so he sent his work to a number of publishing companies, all of whom rejected his books like clockwork. Twenty-seven publishers said no. (Those grinches!)

And then, publisher twenty-eight said yes.

With that, Theodore Seuss Geisel became Dr. Seuss.

Certainly, being rejected or meeting obstacles can be painful. Disappointment, frustration, and anxiety are normal. But whether that pain blocks you from moving forward is up to you. You can take rejection and let it cut deep, let the pain seer into your being. Or you can say, “I am only looking for one publisher to say yes. This is not the one, but I ain’t got time to bleed, so I will just keep looking,” and move on.

There’s no getting around it: some things are going to hurt. Confronting partnership problems is not easy, nor is it easy to plan for succession, take a new risk, or end a relationship. Our economic slow-down hurts. There is no shortcut. You must have clarity to minister your strength within.

So you tell Lance about your goal of running a marathon. He nods his head. With understanding and support, he says, “Your goal is worthy, and you can do it. It is going to take some time. Many people will not believe that you will succeed. You will have a lot of close calls—a lot of times when you think you cannot do it. Your body will shake. You will feel discouraged, but if you are sure you want to do it, if you want to call yourself a marathoner—a title only 0.13 percent of the population can claim—you can move past the pain. No matter how many disappointments or setbacks you encounter, you can do it. I will be there to help. You are unstoppable.”

You look at Lance and say, “Swell.”

[Today’s blog is modified from “Clarity Planning Takes Effort, and Pain Is Swell,” a chapter from Say Hello to the Elephants.]

Today’s Challenge: Find at least one occasion where you can say, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” Say it, and then go about doing what you should be doing.

You DO Have Control

To some degree or another, almost all of us are feeling a little scattered and out of control. We are unsure of the future. We don’t know what next year (or even next week) will bring. For many of us, this is the first time we’ve felt this out of control.

But the truth is, even now, we are all in control.

I remember having sushi with my daughter during her last year of high school. For the first time, she was realizing that the decisions she was making would impact the rest of her life.

“I am just so out of control. I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m a know-it-all for a dad. I give my children constant pep talks. I’m sure Kate knew she was in store for another enlightening talk from her old man.

“Let’s take a look around the sushi bar,” I told her. “You are probably in control of something here.”

Kate looked at me quizzically, and then she rolled her eyes. “Yeah Dad, I’m in control of what I order next.”

“You sure are,” I said. “And when you get home tonight, are you in control of anything?”

“I’m in control of whether I study or not,” she said.

We proceeded through a litany of seven or eight things she was in control of, and then I gave her my pep talk. It went something like this:

There will always be things inside and outside your control. The key is to focus on those thins you can control. The others will be what they will be, so there is no reason to focus on them.

Then Kate told me her real concern. “I don’t know if I will get into USC,” she said.

And to some extent, this is out of her control. She cannot control the pool of candidates who compete for a spot at USC. She cannot control the subjective factors the review panel will use to judge her application. But she can control how much she studies and how much community service she packs into her schedule.

And if she doesn’t get into USC, other opportunities will be open for her.

And with that thought, Kate ordered her next piece of sushi.

Today’s Challenge: Make a list of ten things you are in control of. When you are feeling like a thimble in the ocean, grab onto one of those things and take control.

Getting Control of Your Business

In the weeks surrounding the market crash, I received more than few calls from clients who basically said, “I don’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t know what to do. I’ve lost a lot of money. Things are not good.”

Things were not good for a lot of people. And though I’m a tax planner and not a financial advisor, I wanted to help. I wanted to give advice to my clients as to how to make that money back. I wanted to give sage advice that extended beyond: “Hang on…don’t do anything. The market went down, it will come back up.”

And then I realized that giving advice was not what I should be doing.

Collectively, we have all lost a lot of money. Collectively, things might not look so god. But instead of focusing on all that money lost, all those opportunities down the drain, let’s take a minute to redefine who we are and what our goals are.

We know that we will live to fight another day. Eventually, the market will come back up. So instead of focusing on all that money lost, let’s talk about who we want to be in the meantime. Instead of looking at the gap between what we had two, three years ago and what we have today, let’s simply look at what we have today.

By focusing on our current capacities, we can stop reacting like thimbles in the ocean to the waves crashing around us. Instead, we begin applying our strengths to address problems with confidence.

In Say Hello to the Elephants I talk about the importance of wielding strengths. Let me take the steal the following from my own book:

Strengths constitute your confidence. Your strengths will give you the confidence to discover hidden problems instead of evading them. Your strengths represent the confidence that gives you the ability to take advantage of opportunities and protect yourself from dangers. Your strengths stop you from standing in front of danger like a deer in headlights. By giving you confidence, your strengths develop, implement, and sustain your solutions. Your strengths will help you plan for various futures, be flexible about the paths you choose, and recognize opportunities others cannot.

Today’s Challenge: Answer the following questions...

• What are my strengths? 
• What attributes, resources, and skills do I have? 
• In what activities do I feel most confident?