Hello, my name is ‘Daryl the Magnanimous’. I was considering ‘Daryl the Magnificent’ but my mind-reading skills still need work so… I’m kind of a work in progress, and um… whatever.
Where was I? Oh yeah. We’ve never met, right? If we have met, just play along. Even though I don’t know you at all, I am seeing that recently… or many years ago… or somewhere in between… you attended a seminar!
Please… hold your applause.
You were really looking forward to this seminar but when it was over, tragically, you walked away with nothing. You were deluged with information, scribbled a bunch of notes but ended up remembering nothing.
Although it may be possible, it’s very unlikely that a seminar would contain absolutely nothing that you could use and benefit from in the future.
My personal goal in seminars, meetings or even chance encounters with people I respect, is to walk away with one nugget. That’s it. If I can leave with one idea that I can incorporate into my life, the engagement was worthwhile.
Twenty years ago I took a time management course. It was part hocus-pocus and part ‘heard it before’. I was almost fully checked out when the instructor dropped the nugget. “After you finish a task, ask yourself – what is the most important job I need to do next?”
The premise was - if you finish a task at 11:30 and you know you’re leaving for lunch in 20 minutes, you might do a few “C” jobs on your to-do list because you can get them done in a matter of minutes. That means you leave the important “A” job untouched. The instructor said – start the “A” job. In 20 minutes, you might only have time to lay it out and start thinking about it, but you are thinking about it. Over lunch, you might have an epiphany, or someone might say something that triggers an idea, and when you come back from lunch you’ve already organized your plan of attack. Your “A” job is well on its way to being completed because you decided to do it first.
Twenty years later, I still ask myself several times a day, “what is the most important job I need to do next?”
You never know when you’re going to find a nugget. My good friend C.R. Nichols was interviewing a man who was celebrating his 100th birthday. At one point in the interview, C.R. asked him how his life had changed as he got older and he shared this simple thought.
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
Keep your mind open to finding the nugget. You might miss that brief flash of gold in the pan if you’re not looking for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment