A story goes like this:
A man went to his boss and asked, "Why cannot I get a salary increase after 10 years of working experience?"
The boss answered, "What you have is not ‘10 years of experience’. You have been using the same experience for 10 years."
Effective methods are far better than ineffective pains.
A successful person actually wins by their ways of thinking.
01 Backup Rule
A variety of possibilities
A programmer will always prepare a backup when he is doing programming work to prevent catastrophic losses caused by hard disk failure or loss of password. Backup is preparation for something unexpected. The same is true of life.
A western philosopher once said, "Learn to cut your nails with your left hand, for your right hand may not always work." This is the backup rule. People with clear thinking have two strings to their bow. They never go to the end with one mind.
Everyone hopes to have a stable and peaceful life. But real life is always full of unexpected changes. What is terrible is not a sudden change, but the lack of alternatives when a sudden change occurs.
Giving yourself a backup is giving life more possibilities.
02 Occam's Razor
Simplification
Do you know how long you work efficiently in a week? Research shows that people work 45 hours a week on average, of which 17 hours are not efficient at all.
Many people are used to doing more work, but the more things we want to do, the less we can accomplish. As a result, we are physically and mentally exhausted every day, but with little success. To change this situation, you should learn to simplify your work first. In the 14th Century, a logician Occam put forward a rule - Simplifying complex things like shaving off the extra steps by razor.
There is an anecdote in a well-known Chinese science fiction The Three-Body Problem. It goes like this:
Once military strategists from all over the world got together to discuss how to deal with the enemy cruise ship called "The Judgment Day", in order to eliminate all enemies without destroying the hard drive on the ship.
Some suggested dispatching spies. Some proposed using neutron bombs. Some others recommended using chemical gas, and even infrasonic weapons...
They thought of many complicated methods, but none of which could work. Only one officer, who was direct and decisive, outlined a simple strategy: "Set two columns on both sides of the river, with nanofilaments between them. As soon as the enemy warship passes by, it will be cut into two parts." All the people present were amazed.
A Master always prefers to defeat enemies and win the battle in one move, rather than fight for many rounds.
Those who can make things simple will succeed by taking shortcuts.
03 Walson's Law
Information
In our efforts to improve our professional skills, we often lose sight of another important thing: information. Many people do things better than you, not because they are more capable than you, but because they have more information than you.
American entrepreneur S.M. Walson once put forward a rule: Put information and intelligence first, and money will come rolling in.
In Florence USA, two young men named John and Harry began working in a vegetable trading company at the same time. Three months later, John was promoted to team leader with his salary doubled, and Harry was still in the same position. Very dissatisfied, Harry questioned his boss. His boss answered, “Now our company is ready to order a batch of potatoes, go and have a look.” Harry hurried back half an hour later to report that potatoes were sold in the Wholesale Vegetable Centre. The boss stopped him and called John over. John said methodically, "There are three potato sellers in the Wholesale Vegetable Center 20 kilometers away. Two of them charge $0.9 per half-kilo and the other charges $0.8 per half-kilo. By comparison I found that the potatoes with $0.8 per half-kilo was not only cheaper, but also of better quality."
A person who knows the real-time dynamics of the market and holds information without going out to inquire has won without competition. If you want to seize opportunities, learn to find them first. If you get information before anyone else and act quickly, it's hard not to succeed.
04 The Rule of Apple
Put first thing first
If there are good and bad apples in a pile, which one do you eat first? The answer is: eat the good apples first and throw the bad away. Because if you eat the bad apples first, the good apples will go bad slowly, and you'll never get the sweet good apple. This "Rule of Apple” also applies at work. What you do first is more important than how many things you do.
Dale Carnegie once told a story: One of the patients of Dr. Sandel, a famous psychotherapist, is a senior executive of a large company in Chicago. When he first came to Sandel’s clinic, he was in a nervous, uneasy state, in constant danger of breaking down. He said that in his office there were three large writing desks full of reports and papers, and things seemed to go on forever, driving him crazy.
Sandel listened and gave only a little advice: go back and clean out the entire office. Leave only the most important papers. The patient did as he said, cleaned up the writing desk, and finished with the important papers that were left behind. After that, as soon as work arrived, they were done immediately. There was no longer a mountain of work threatening to pile up, and he gradually recovered his health.
This is also the first rule of time management: always do the most important thing firstly.
05 Ostrich Syndrome
Don't make excuses
Not making excuses is the first step to correcting a mistake. No interest, no use doing it, I don't get it...It is a fatal weakness of a person to always look for objective factors to blame for everything.
There is a little story goes like this.
Someone asked the farmer, "Have you planted wheat?"
The farmer answered, "Not yet, I'm afraid it's going to rain."
The man then asked, "So have you planted cotton yet?"
Farmer said: "No, I'm worried that there will be worms eating the cotton."
The man asked again, "And what exactly did you plant?"
Farmer answered: "I don't grow anything. That's the safest way to go."
Social psychology explains that people are always attempting to rationalize their behavior with the intention of finding excuses for their every action, thereby preserving their self-esteem, or reducing their anxiety, as a psychological defense mechanism. Brave people make more progress, and those who push back only stay put. This is the biggest difference between ordinary people and successful people: when facing a problem, whether to look for the cause from the outside or from oneself.
06 Anti-barrel Theory
Irreplaceability
Promote your irreplaceability.
The barrel theory was popular for a while. It told people that the amount of water a barrel could hold depends on the shortest board. Your weaknesses would determine your height. But with today's social division of labor, people “of all trades” are often not proficient in any of them. It's your strengths rather than shortcomings that will really set you apart.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker, father of modern management, wrote in the "Harvard Business Review": Focus on your strengths and put yourself in those areas where you can excel. You should waste as little energy as possible on areas where you are not competent, because it takes much more effort to go from incompetence to mediocrity than it does to go from first class to excellence.
Rather than struggling in an area you are not good at, you should put all your experience on the improvement of your strengths. It is also the best strategy for a person's ability to be " expert in one thing and good at many with zero defects" as they say in the workplace.