Book Review: The 1% Solution For Your Work and Life
With the New Year upon us, we thought providing content to help you focus your life and ministry would be a good thing.
So here ya go:
This book is all about goal clarity and deliberate practice.
Goal Clarity. Be clear about what you want and don’t want. At the heart of this are two concepts that sound the same but are very different: The first is effectiveness, which is doing the right thing. The second is efficiency, which is doing things right (pg. 31-32).
Deliberate practice. Everyone who spends time in deliberate practice improves his or her performance. Turn daily tasks into deliberate practice by:
a) assessing how well you do a task and how you can improve next time b) getting constructive feedback
c) tackling goals that are challenging but achievable with support.
Compare yourself to you, rather than to others. Plan ahead and set goals, but do your best in the present.
Connellan talks about the The 30-day formula. Here’s the formula he suggests:
1. Practice your habit every day for 30 days, so it will become automatic.
2. Do the same for other habits, one at a time.
3. Be aware that beliefs determine how you feel and act in response to events:
– Activating event (an event or life stress)
– Belief (a thought, opinion or conviction)
– Consequence (a feeling or an action)
4. Reframe negative beliefs to help you achieve your goals. 5. Don’t let a slip become a fall.
Why Not Doing Anything Is Helpful. Work in a focused way for no more than 90 minutes at a time, and have rest breaks in between. Make at least three of your rest breaks each week 20-minute exercise sessions. Nap during the daytime for between 10 and 30 minutes. Get at least 8 hours sleep a night. Take regular vacations.
INTERESTING FACT
• To become the best of the best takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
• New Year’s resolutions rarely work. Eighty-eight percent of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions.
A SNEAK PEEK INTO EACH CHAPTER
Chapter 1: It’s Turning Point Time – Basically, when you average it out, the difference between exceptional and exceptionally exceptional is one percent (pg. 9). We can all be one percent better at hundreds of things.
Chapter 2: The Upside-Down Way to Boost Your Motivation – The more you get done, the more motivated you are to do things. So you do more things, and you get even more motivated. It’s a self-feeding cycle. There’s no point in doing well that which you should not be doing at all (pg 32).
Chapter 3: The Physics of Personal Success: How to Create A more Powerful You – Taking action overcomes the inertia holding you in place. The 20/80 Principle suggests for one to focus on small shifts in our actions that will produce large shifts in our results. Momentum, leverage and the ripple effect lead to engagement.
Chapter 4: Why Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect, and What to do About It – Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. It is able to be repeated. It comes with constructive feedback (pg. 69). The toughest thing I’ve ever done was ask for help.
Chapter 5: The 30-Day Formula That Will Change Your Life – It takes a minimum of 21 days for your brain to get used to something new and form new connections
Chapter 6: How Not Doing Anything Helps You Get More Done – What sets apart the top one percent is that they cycle throughout the day between periods of concentrated effort and planned recovery.
Chapter 7: The Circle is Complete – There are no shortcuts to excellence.
Topics: Advice from Orange Specialists
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