Chad Silverstein (Day 243) gives brief coaching on using writing as a tool for self-evaluation and performance analysis. He urges builders and leaders to spend 15–20 minutes writing a narrative about current challenges and performance—documenting pros/cons, confusion, and decisions—to gain clarity, slow thinking, create a personal record/legacy, and enable later comparison (including having someone else evaluate you simultaneously).
Questions this video answers
15–20 minutes
Chapters
So day 243, you've been in Build to Lead now, going down this builder's journey for quite some time. And we talk a lot about the power of writing. We talk about building your core. We talk about authoring an opus. The one thing we don't talk about that much is to actually write out a narrative about your performance, whatever it is you do, if you're in sales, if you're customer service, if you're the leader of the system, but to write out out a narrative about your performance where things are hard for you, where you excel, spend 15, 20 minutes writing that out. It's an incredible exercise. 1. It's really cool to be able to have that as a snapshot of where you are today. You'll be able to keep this. You know, I say that, you know, your writing is your legacy. It's what you get. It's probably one of the only things you leave behind that's going to be of meaning to anyone in your life that loves you when you're no longer around. But you, you'll. You'll see things that kind of surface, and you'll be able to pull out some of your writing and share this with people that you're working with on your team or a builder, if you're working with, you know, build to lead and write out, you know, scenarios that are happening that you're struggling through. Instead of just ruminating in your head and thinking about the solutions, write it out. Spend some time and just try the exercise. Build the discipline and see how powerful, even if you're writing out your pros and your cons of a decision that you're making. Put those words on paper and see what happens and see what comes out of it. Ask yourself the questions, even if you don't know what to write about in regards to the situation that you're currently knee deep in. Write about that. Write that you don't know what to do, that you're confused, and just write. What you're going to do is you're going to slow down your thinking and you're going to write things down that you wouldn't normally think of if you just sat and thought about it. And it's a powerful, powerful exercise. Get in the habit of writing out what you got going on, and you'll see that when you look back at your writing, what was accomplished and how you solved problems and how you made decisions and how you pivoted because of your writing, because of the clarity that you got when you slowed down, there's a lot more going on than just writing it down on paper. It's the fact that you're slowing your brain down and you're studying and analyzing your own work. You know, it's easy to do performance evaluations on people on your team. How about do one on yourself? You know, if you're someone who has performance evaluations and you do that for people, which people hate, by the way, do one on yourself. Do one better. Have someone else do one as you do it simultaneously, and then compare it. If you're the leader of a system, this can be very eye opening, but write and evaluate and analyze your own performance and do it by being honest with yourself on paper.
