PNTV: The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth (#235)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, the Achievement Habit. The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth. Subtitle Stop wishing, start doing and take command of your life. Bernard Roth Bernie is an extraordinary human being. He's been a professor of engineering at Stanford for over 50 years. 50 years. He's one of the world's leading thinkers in robotics and he co founded the design school at Stanford known as D School, which came up with the whole framework known as design thinking. This book is all about applying design thinking to the most important design project of your life, which is your life. How do we optimize our lives? How do we actualize our potential? How do we make achievement? I have it. That's what this book is all about. We've got the Philosopher's Note and some of my favorite big ideas. Let's jump in. Design thinking. There are five key aspects to design thinking. Here they are. 1. We need to empathize. When you're doing design work, you want to empathize. You want to start with the person you're serving. What do they want? What do they need? How can we help them? Right? It's not about us, it's about them helping them experience something better, have a better user experience. Then we define the problem. Bernie talks about a lot of ways to make sure we're defining the problem properly. And then we ideate, we can brainstorm, we can mind map, we can do a bunch of different things to get unstuck and to ideate and to create ideas. And then we prototype. We don't worry about being perfect. Kind of like a lean startup idea. You ship right, you get a sense of what the prototype would need to look like. And then you test it, which is our fifth step. You test it, you get feedback and then you iterate it. It's the basic idea of design thinking. Of course it doesn't work quite this perfectly. And very importantly, Bernie tells us we need to embrace failure throughout the process. Now again, the book is about applying these five design thinking ideas to our lives. So when we empathize, it's not with someone else out there, it's with ourselves. We need to have self awareness. We need to actually take the time to see what, what do I really want? Which leads us to defining the problem. What do you want to see in your life? What do you want to see? Ideate on how you can solve those problems or that problem in your life. And then don't worry about being perfect. Prototype. What you think might be a good solution to your problem and then go test and get feedback and remember to have your lab coat on and your goggles on and be an experimenter on learning mindset. We're not trying to be perfect here. We're trying to go out and get a little bit more data, embrace failure in the process and master the whole process. That's the basic idea of how we apply, very basic idea of how we apply design thinking to our lives. And again, the book basically unpacks how to go about doing that. Second big idea is to do versus try. Bernie says that in his classes, he'll bring a student up to the front and he'll say, hey, try to take this water bottle from me. And the student will try to take it and he'll resist and then they'll give up. Interesting. And then he says, take the water bottle from me. And then they try to take it or whatever and they do that. Then he says, no, seriously, take the water bottle from me. And then they just take it. And it's easy. There's no resistance. He doesn't have time to react. They just take it. They're unbelievably clear. And rather than trying to, they do it. So he makes a huge point that the essence or one of the key factors of design thinking is favoring action over overthinking. Just do it. There's a huge difference between trying to do something and doing it. When you make 100% all in commitment, you're going to run into inevitable obstacles. But if you're just trying, you'll give up after one or two or three tries or attempts. But if you're committed to doing it, those obstacles are just data that you're using in the process of getting the outcome that you're committed to getting. Yoda said, do or do not. There is no try basic idea here. So what in your life are you trying to do that you can upgrade to doing? He uses another metaphor, flipping the switch. Imagine walking into a room and it's dark. Now what you need to do is flip the switch and turn the light on. If you're. We'll talk about this, the cause of your experience in life, you do that. You flip the light, you flip the switch and you're on, right? You don't try to do that, you just do it. Now, if you're a little bit too passive about it, you might wait until someone else comes in and things change and someone else flips the switch. We need to decide what we need to flip the switch on in our lives and go out and do it. And we have done that a number of times. And anything that you've changed in your life, you got to a point where you decided and it moved from trying. You're no longer trying, you're doing it. And then when you really get to that point, it is done. No discussion, 100% all in. I'm going to make this happen. Move from trying to doing Big idea. Third one, Odds Schmodz. Bernie has a great passage about the fact that all great things were achieved against the odds. If all you did was live your life based on what has the best odds of success. If everyone did that, you literally would never have anyone achieve anything great. You'd have no movie stars, you'd have no full time musicians, etc. The odds are clearly stacked against someone being able to make a living as a full time musician. Yet he says when you turn on the radio, you can listen to hundreds of people who have succeeded like that. So he says we need to have a strong relationship to odds because if you're in the 2% that can succeed, then your chances of success are actually 100% pretty awesome. So think about what you're here to do. Empathize with yourself, define your problem clearly. Ideate, prototype and test. And don't limit yourself unnecessarily. We want to be smart about it, but don't limit yourself by the odds. I've shared a story before. My grandfather shared with me once I came back from a leadership retreat. Arthur Andersen, back in the day when I graduated from ucl. Actually before I graduated, went on this leadership retreat and they were talking about the fact there were hundreds of us there and only one of them out of hundreds who joined would make partner. At the time I thought that was a pretty cool thing. Wow, that'd be awesome to do. Was talking to my grandfather and I said, wow, yeah, but only one out of hundreds of people are going to make this, you know. He says, well, those sound like great odds to me. How many of you are there? How many of you are there? One. Perfect. More than enough. Let's do this. So think about that. What are you telling yourself is just impossible when it might just be really difficult? We've talked about that before. There's a big difference between impossible and in really, really hard. Remember the guy who hopped on his bike from Sweden, rode all the way to Mount Everest, hopped off his bike, ascended and summited Mount Everest without oxygen, by the way, then came back down, hopped on his bike and rode back to Sweden? That wasn't impossible. Sounds impossible. It was just really, really hard. So pay attention to how you relate to odds and see if you can be more mindful there. Fourth Big Idea, the Final Countdown. He has a great exercise. He talks about the fact that all of our lives are going to end, share some stories about his friends who died in different ways unexpectedly. And he says, look, what would you do if you only had 10 minutes to live? If you only had 10 minutes to live, what would you do? It's worth thinking about, what if you only had 10 hours to live, what would you do? What if you only had 10 days to live, what would you do? But if you only had 10 weeks to live, 10 months to live, 10 years to live, what if you only had this lifetime to live? Because that's all we have, and we don't know when the final countdown is going to come. Now is the time to become the person we aspire to be. That countdown is going, and as he says, you're closer today to that final countdown than you've ever been. And the one thing we're sure about tomorrow is that you're one day closer to that final countdown. That's a exciting fact, really, because it can catalyze us to do the things we need to do now in order to optimize and actualize and achieve. The fifth Big Idea is being the cause. So he quotes Werner Erhart, who created EST back in the day and Landmark more recently a couple of times throughout the book. He attended one of his workshops decades ago. Being the cause. This is what we talked about last week in I Can if I Think I Can. Psychologists say you can either have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control. If you have an internal locus of control, you are the cause. Life is the effect. What you do dictates what you experience in your life. That's what a creator thinks. A victim, a passive individual who walks into the room, it's dark, and they want it to be light and just sits down passively. Right? Thinks that the world outside is the cause of their effect, their emotions, their experience of the world. You want to flip that around? Be the cause of your life. Even things that feel out of control, find the way that you can have control and be proactive. Stephen Covey, all the great teachers talk about this. Stephen. Stephen Covey called this being proactive rather than reactive. And he thought it was so important he made it the number one habit of his seven habits of Highly Effective people. Viktor Frankl, we just talked about this. He talked about the fact that between stimulus and response. There's a gap. In that gap, we can choose our response. We can be the cause of our response. And in that gap and in that choice is where our freedom and our growth exists. So we want to be the cause, not the effect. Quit complaining, quit criticizing, quit gossiping. That all demonstrates your lack of power. Bring it back. Cause the things you want to see in your life to come to fruition. You do that by doing rather than trying. You ignore the odds when it's appropriate and you decide to you honor your final countdown. We're all on it. It's just a question of what the velocity of that countdown is. And then our design thinking we had our five self awareness and empathy with ourselves defining the problem. Well, ideating, prototyping and testing. Enjoying the whole process as we cultivate a habit of achievement. Hope you enjoyed what was the big idea that jumped out at you. What about those 10 Final Countdown things? It's worth thinking about. Journal about it. Reflect on it. You learned a lot about yourself. That's a heck of a empathizing. To get that level of self awareness, you can get more clarity on how you want to change who you are and what you're doing. Go out and rock your design process as you design an optimal life. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube so so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. Ten bucks a month. 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