How Successful People Think – Chapters 2 & 3

This is a continuation in a series of blog posts.  You can read my review of the Introduction and first chapter of the book here.  Chapters 2 & 3 of John Maxwell’s “How Successful People Think” concentrate on how to engage in focused thinking, and harnessing creative thinking.

Removing distractions is critical when looking to engaging in focused thinking.  Sometimes its not so easy to remove those things that we’ve grown to expect in our daily routine.  One of the suggestions that Maxwell makes is “Don’t allow yourself to look at e-mail until after 10AM.  Instead, focus your energies on your number one priority.”  If you are like me you probably have a routine that you go through nearly daily.  Mine is:  Check the Charlotte Observer (I NEED to see if there is any breaking Panthers news), Check ESPN (why not watch highlights from the game that I JUST WATCHED last night), Check GMail (no idea why i do this), Check Fannation (once again…maybe there is a rumor that my boys may be picking up a player in free agency).  I know this is not productive in any way, yet I engage in it first think…shamefully almost daily.  Once I’m finished with my rounds of procrastination, I usually choose some the tasks that will take the least amount of time to complete to focus on first.  Now whether this is right or wrong is up for debate, but here are some words of wisdom that Maxwell has offered up..

This is something that may be easy for some to digest, however for myself, this is something that I’ll have to work at doing.  My nature of being a procrastinator does not want me to dive in head first…first thing in the morning….into a task that may take me days to complete.  To be fair, I’m using the word “procrastinator” for myself by what I believe my standards of focus and hard work should be.  There are plenty of folks that would look my way and not see a huge problem, but I think everyone should hold themselves to their own standards as long as they are reasonable.  Back to the topic, doing first things first sounds to me like a tip that I should embrace and could make a major impact in my life.  The author goes on to recommend how one can begin to put this tip to practice.

Insulate yourself from distractions.  Maxwell speaks of how he needs blocks of time to think without interruption.  Mastering the art of making yourself unavailable when necessary is critical to focus.  In a world where instant messaging, twitter, and the internet is king, making yourself unavailable is not really hard to do, but it definitely is sometimes hard to make yourself willing to do.  Will I miss something?  There’s no problem with just having the applications up in the background right?  I learned to multi-task well in college (won’t go into my learning methods)…that should still work well for me right?

When I was in college, mutli-tasking was crammed into my mind as the way (and likely the only way) to survive in the “real world”.  Reading this chapter has really caused me to question how useful multi-tasking really is.  I’m not saying there is never a time to balance multiple tasks, however I’ve found that the moments that I do allow myself to focus for an extended amount of time on one particular task, I’ve seen the best results.  So my next thought naturally was, how can I have those moments of focus more often?  What brings about that focus?  Reading a little further, a few nuggets worth noting were revealed..

Not only do my objectives need to be clear, I’m really buying into the fact that I need to write down my goals…both long and short term.  Having that flag in the distance to, at the very least, give you something visual to indicate where you are headed is more valuable that you can imagine.  There was another quote in the book that I want to remember because it really stood out to me…

I think brainstorming and “vision” are two of my stronger characteristics.  Often I have these ideas that I believe in, but articulating them to someone else is not the easiest thing.  Sometimes my ideas are so elaborate, or rely on so many details, that I try to spew them all out to people at one time…..leading them to become confused and/or think the idea is not as great as it is.  I want to make note of this quote, so that I’ll remember to try and be concise and articulate the purpose of an idea clearly rather than focusing on detail.

Chapter 3 was about harnessing your creativity.  For the most part, I didn’t find much in this chapter that I felt a need to make note of.  I do think the chapter is worth reading, however I don’t feel led to share much of it.  I did find one quote in the book that I’d like to share, which is simply a definition of creativity from the author’s point of view.

Here’s the question at the end of the chapter.  I’ll have to learn to not overlook these questions and try and answer/apply them….most of the time I read them, but it all ends there. 

Question to ask yourself:  Am I working to break out of my “box” of limitations so that I explore ideas and options to experience creative breakthroughs?