Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff
Author:Jon Acuff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-06T14:00:00+00:00
You probably don’t have one. I’ve flown around three hundred times in the last two years, spread out on different airlines to make sure I never acquired any sort of status, and I didn’t have one at first.
The night before every flight, I would essentially sit down and say to myself, “Let’s act like this is the first time I’ve ever flown to a speaking event! That’s the best way to make sure I didn’t learn anything from last time and can make this experience as miserable as it can possibly be!”
Then I’d throw a bunch of things together, inevitably forgetting something that matters. I have bought running shorts in most major cities. And a tie a time or two. You do this, too. Maybe not with packing, but with something else in your life. You make every time the first time, and you never bother to learn from the last time.
That’s what sharpening a skill is, learning something new and then building on what you learned. Each repetition is like laying another brick on the foundation; you get higher and higher. But most of us never stack the bricks. We start each foundation like it’s new, never progressing.
This is bigger than just skills. We act like every new job we get is completely new. It’s not. There are great skills you learned at the last job that you need to unpack at the next one. That’s why we focused in Chapter 12 on winning the way we’ve won before. (There are also bad habits you need to leave behind.)
What if we could pay attention the first few times we did something? What if we could pay the upfront cost of effort at the beginning of a skill? That’s why we don’t learn, it feels like too much work at first. Take me and packing my suitcase. If I was honest with myself, I could probably sit down with a piece of paper and figure out 90 percent of the things I need to travel with every time. That might take me an hour of focused attention. But I don’t want to invest that hour. So I take 20 minutes packing each time multiplied by those 300 flights in the last two years, for a total of 6,000 wasted minutes.
But if I was intentional, I’d have the mental capacity to figure out the patterns for success and eliminate as much wasted motion as possible. It wouldn’t take me 20 minutes to pack, it’d take me 5 minutes with my trusted list. I would have saved 15 minutes, 300 different times. That’s 4,500 minutes, or 75 hours, almost two solid workweeks. Should I have traded 60 minutes at the beginning for 4,500 minutes overall? I should have.
If I take the time up front, I can sharpen my packing skill to such a precise edge that I no longer have to think about it. Do you think that the Brazilian chef Alex Atala, whom we met in chapter 11, has to think when he cuts vegetables anymore? He’s sharpened that skill so much it’s a rote action.
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