Quotes

I’ve just enrolled in a year-long coaching school program and wanted to share some quotes that I’ve come across:

• Time is a created thing.  To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to’.
• You fix your life, your work, and your world by fixing yourself

That is all.  Cheers!

 

Status check

Just logging a few to-do’s:

1. Finish up my “first deck” on Myers Briggs.   I’ll be using it for small groups at work!
2. Write a blurb on how I got into all this “people” stuff in the About Us section.
3. Be proactive on getting links to other people’s blogs and communicating out about my boring one.

Have a good weekend!

 

Learning vs Adding Value

What do you think of this high-level observation that I’ve been having at work?

When you’re in the act of learning, you’re not adding value. When you’re in the act of adding value, you’re not learning.  They feel like mutually exclusive things. True, sometimes the line blurs so quickly between the two like when you learn  something immediately after adding some value … this is less interesting to talk about right now.

So this graph just tries to capture what I think is the trend that happens over time … ignore for now points not on the blue line (e.g. not be doing either).  That if you’re spending most of your time learning, you’re probably not adding as much value.  This feels a bit like college for me — a ton of class without much doing much other than homework.  Whereas if you’re adding a ton of value, you might be learning a bit less — like if you’re giving back through a community service event.

I’ve felt like in my strategy rotation, I’ve learned a ton about the lending market, made a lot of process mistakes … but haven’t added much value. In my programming rotation, on the other hand, I felt like I didn’t really learn as much about programming, but instead coded up a scalable, automated testing application that’s still adding value. In marketing, I feel like it was more balanced where I’ve done a decent amount of both.

So what? Well, if I’m in a scenario where I’m not adding that much value, then I just ask myself if I’m at least learning … then it’s ok.  And the contrary is true also.  But ideally hitting a good balance between the two is solid.