Non-practice

Dr. Julie Gurner on Twitter:

What is the secret of truly confident people? Let’s pull back the curtain.

Even when you’re fantastic at what you do, you may have moments of insecurity professionally or elsewhere.

[…]

The secret is ridiculously simple: Their focus & where they operate.
– Insecure people focus on what they’re *not* good at & confront it often.
– Confident people focus on what they *are* good at & operate here regularly.
This mentally positions them for everything that comes.

The answer seems to be simple – try to focus on what you do best.

A lot of times we focus on the negative.

When you think of feedback from colleagues, negative thoughts come to mind.

When you consider feedback in the formal education, generally the „you’re lacking this” comes up.

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Sometimes, I compare myself with great thinkers and writers, and look at the things they’ve read and, most of them, I haven’t.

There’s just a tiny, small, miniscule issue with this thinking – I’m not a professional writer. My main job is not writing.

It’s like comparing a person who jogs half an hour in the evenings with a professional.

And whom do I admire, the „regular” professionals or the top performers? You got it – the top performers. So, coming back to the comparison, it’s like comparing myself with people who win national contests and go to Olympiad to represent the country.
I’ll let myself go this time. ;)

Are those people better? The problem is that there are no terms of comparison. What’s better – water or a spoon? You can’t compare these.

Give me some slack. :)

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If you really think about the worst things that happened to you, you might notice they’re not that bad.

At least, this is what happens to me.

A lot of people give this advice: „Focus on the positive, don’t think about the negative aspects!”. But if you look at the negative, and see it’s not that bad, it might be worthwhile to reconsider the logic.

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Once, a friend asked me about creating a website to post memes (funny things, images, texts, perhaps videos, although it was a bit more complicated those years).

I told him that such ideas already exist in various forms, and his idea is doomed to fail.

9GAG was only founded in 2008, and, at least in Romania, only in recent years, it got very popular.

Did I advise him wrong? Sure!

What would I do now, would he ask me again?

I’d tell him it’s not the idea, but the execution that matters.

Even today you could make a funnier website.

And we’re extremely poor at predicting.

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I think there’s a lot of value in negative comments.

They tend to offend me, but I tend to learn from them.

It’s a form of feedback, from which I can grow.

Sure, if a comment is a personal attack, or it doesn’t use polite words, I’ll delete it, but, generally, if someone tells me something bad, I try to learn from it, although that’s not my initial reaction (which is to feel offended, even if that’s not the case).

One guy on an online forum, long ago, told me something similar to: „Olivian, you wrote above that reading books helps with intelligence. Everybody, does it look to you that Olivian says smart things?”.

Boy, that comment really hurt me, I got so offended for it. But it was true, on multiple levels: I wasn’t a big reader (so I wasn’t speaking from direct experience), and I didn’t practice thinking about tough subjects that much. When I look at various messages written in those times (this happened almost 20 years ago), I feel rather ashamed on how silly I used to write.

That person was right.

Did the message motivate me? You bet.

I don’t think that there’s an upper limit on how much you should learn (Why You Don’t Need to Be Exceptional – YouTube).

You always need to learn a lot of things, there’s always a need to grow.

Still, since that message was posted, I tried to improve myself in various means.

It may be paradoxical, but I don’t think that just by reading books you can get very smart. So, I tried various means.

I’m not saying I’m a genius/wise man, I’m just saying that I think I’m a bit smarter than in ~2004, when that message was posted.

And the message was a motivating factor to me, all these years.

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Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise, there are only cost centers. Results exist only on the outside.

Peter F. Drucker – Management and the World’s Work, Harvard Business Review.

When you make a sale, you shouldn’t stop when the package leaves your store, you need to make sure your client is happy using the product.

If someone visits your medical practice, you don’t need to only solve that particular issue the patient came to you, you need to make sure the person is healthy, overall.

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