14.1 Work for goals that you and your organization are excited about … and think about how your tasks connect to those goals.
If you’re focused on the goal, excited about achieving it, and recognize that doing some undesirable tasks to achieve the goal is required, you will have the right perspective and will be appropriately motivated. If you’re not excited about the goal that you’re working for, stop working for it. Personally, I like visualizing exciting new and beautiful things that I want to make into realities. The excitement of visualizing these ideas and my desire to build them out is what pulls me through the thorny realities of life to make my dreams happen.
a. Be coordinated and consistent in motivating others.
Managing groups to push through to results can be done emotionally or intellectually, and by carrots or by sticks. While we each have our own reasons for working, there are unique challenges and advantages to motivating a community. The main challenge is the need to coordinate, i.e., to get in sync on the reasons for pursuing a goal and the best way to do it. For example, you wouldn’t want one group to be motivated and compensated so differently from another (one gets big bonuses for example, and another doesn’t under the same set of circumstances) that the differences cause problems. The main advantage of working in groups is that it’s easier to design a group to include all the qualities needed to be successful than to find all those qualities in one person. As with the steps in the 5-Step Process, some people are great at one step and some are terrible at that step. But it doesn’t matter which is the case when everyone is clear on each other’s strengths and weaknesses and the group is designed to deal with those realities.
b. Don’t act before thinking. Take the time to come up with a game plan.
The time you spend on thinking through your plan will be virtually nothing in relation to the amount of time that will be spent doing, and it will make the doing radically more effective.
c. Look for creative, cut-through solutions.
When people are facing thorny problems or have too much to do, they often think that they need to work harder. But if something seems hard, time-consuming, and frustrating, take some time to step back and triangulate with others on whether there might be a better way to handle it. Of course, many things that need getting done are just a slog, but it’s often the case that there are better solutions out there that you’re not seeing.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio