5 High Performance Lessons From Monsters Inc
Exercise To Start Your Day
Avoiding the temptation of the Monday morning lie in and reap the benefits — in addition to the well documented health benefits of exercising for as little as 20 minutes each day it also forces you to balance life and work.
Instead of sleeping, or reaching straight for emails. Even better — find an exercise buddy like Mike here and it can also be a great breeding ground for new and fresh ideas.
Be Prepared To Improvise
I’m a big believer in routine and process driven performance — being well drilled in a particular discipline provides you with a muscle memory style ability to rise to a challenge. However, the REAL benefit of being well drilled in your process, pitch-deck — support escalation process etc. is the extra time and freedom it provides you improvise when real-life throws you a curveball.
Make the effort to form valuable habits by repeating and repeating the most important actions your take (be it 21 days repetition or this method noted by Forbes).
Then, take serious steps to practise being out of your depth — go to meetings that stretch you — volunteer for extra projects or calls — practise thinking on the fly — providing you’re prepped with the core skills to problem solve you’ll be able to get the job done — and the rush and benefit of pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone might just lead to that breakthrough.
It’s a numbers game
It’s often quoted that sales is a numbers game — even thought that idea is now criticised and sales (and other departments) try to work smarter, it’s important to realise that every lead, bug, support ticket is just another door to be opened.
There’s no guarantee the next blog post, ad-click, inbound lead will lead to anything — but more than just ploughing through the numbers — it’s important to know them and use them to motivate you and your team.
Don’t Panic
A common symptom of the absence of the above suggestions — panicking won’t help.
Deadline missed — email deleted — password forgot — meeting missed. It happens, but from even the worst disasters (letting boo through the door), an open mind can help you turn it into an opportunity and hit the next big innovation, deal or introduction.
Everyone fucks up — but not everyone panics.
Respect the Paperwork!
As much as I believe in optimising (or deleting) the duller tasks of life like weekly reports, pointless paperwork, the unread exec summary or the skimmed details tab. It’s important to know your boundaries and realise that somewhere — theres a Roz — diligantly filing your success and mistakes away — for that day you really do need to know something.
So as much as I encourage anyone to optimise their paperwork — find the limit, and don’t miss it — it’ll cost you in the long run if you’re known as the doger of the office.
