The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People

When I thought of this post, I realized that the first article with this title probably came out about two days after Stephen Covey's book.  Sure enough, a search of the Internet finds books, posters, articles, everything.  Still, I have something to say on this topic.

1.  Procrastinate

This one habit is so pervasive and so powerful that I suspect it is the one thing that nearly all ineffective people have in common.*  Any task, from the smallest to the largest, from picking up your socks to a big work project, can be screwed up by putting it off.  The wife will end up picking up your socks, and you will probably get the project done, but just won't be as good as it should be, or someone else will have to help you finish it.  Need to exercise?  Start tomorrow!  Tomorrow you can put it off again.  Going to start a diet?  Finish off those M&M's first -- you already bought them, can't let them go to waste.  Procrastination can be applied to nearly anything, and it is guaranteed to make you less effective.

*I say "nearly" all because I recently met a highly ineffective person who was a type of  anti-procrastinator.  Any problem, no matter how complex, she would come up with a solution within minutes, if not literally seconds, and would be hell-bent on implementing it if no one stopped her.  I suspect that this is even more ineffective than procrastination, because it means trying to solve problems without actually thinking about them first; however, it is very unusual in my experience, not a common trait of ineffective people.

2.  Go for the B

There will always be people who want to excel at everything they do; from school to work to everyday tasks to their hobbies, they like being the best.  That means, by definition, someone has to be not as good as they are, and this can be you.  Those overachievers are working their buns off to do everything as well as they do; with considerably less effort, you can just be OK, hopefully doing enough to keep your spouse from leaving and your boss from firing you.

3.  Failure Is an Option

On those occasions when even going for the "B" seems like too much effort, you can actually fail altogether, and the world won't come to an end.  Didn't bother to pay the bill?  They'll send you another with an extra charge next month.  Don't want to fix dinner?  You can eat out.  Didn't do that project at work?  Maybe you can find another job, if they bother to fire you.  It's hard to screw up so badly that your life falls apart completely.

Sure, when astronauts returning from the moon are running low on oxygen, and you need to make sure they don't run out, failure is not an option.  But let's face it, if you can master even a few of the seven habits of highly ineffective people, no one is ever going to give you that kind of responsibility. You won't ever find yourself in that type of situation.

4.  Be Afraid

Be afraid to take a risk, to try something unfamiliar.  Whether it's something small like learning to cook, or something larger like moving across the country, fear of the unknown can keep you from moving forward.  I think this habit is an underrated reason why some people manage to avoid accomplishing all they could.  Many of us (and "us" most definitely includes me) go through life generally making the safe choices, taking the path of least resistance.  Go to school, go to school some more, get a job working for someone, put money in your 401K, make safe investments.  Fear keeps us from starting a new business, changing careers, running for office, or becoming on-line poker players.  Those things might not have worked out anyway.  We'll never know.

5.  Dabble

Try a lot of different things, but don't put too much effort into any one of them.  Keep moving on to something new.  The important concept here is "diminishing marginal returns."  Here's how they work:  Let's say you want to learn to play golf.  It's a tough game; if you just go out and play, you'll be pretty bad.  However, take a lesson or two, hit some balls at the range, play a few rounds, and you will start to improve.  But to get to the point that your scores are consistently under 100, you are going to have to do much more, probably devote time every week to playing, take some more lessons, lots of practice.  And by the time you try to get your handicap down to single digits, you are going to be playing golf all the time and probably spending some serious money just to make the slightest improvements.  The better you get, the more work it takes to get even better.

It's a lot easier to just take up skiing before you get in too deep.

6.  Sleep In

The corollary to sleeping in is usually staying up late, and what are you doing during those late hours?  Working in the yard?  Running errands?  Exercising?  No, usually people who stay up late are pursuing some leisure activity, watching television, Facebooking, playing video games, reading.  And this is the secret to sleeping in; you are trading potentially productive time for time spent having fun.

7.  Video Games

I know that we wasted lots of time when we were kids, but it is almost hard to imagine how we managed it as well as we did without this incomparable time-wasting invention.  Video games are just the perfect way to sit and waste hours, days, weeks, years, and they have the added bonus of allowing you to isolate yourself from other people.  This is one area where you don't have to go for the "B" or dabble to be ineffective; feel free to waste your life away becoming the very, very best at Angry Birds, Everquest, Zuma's Revenge, or whatever your favorite obsession may be.

Video games can also be your go-to activity when you are exercising the other six ineffective habits, the thing you do when you are putting off something more important, avoiding being the best, staying up late.  Video games can be the mechanism that makes all of the other habits work.

Unlike the seven habits of highly effective people, the seven habits of highly ineffective people are easy to implement.  If you have read this entire post, you have already found an alternative to doing anything useful for at least a few minutes.  Now just keep up the momentum!

The Impossible Dream

Once upon a time, long ago, in fifth or sixth grade, I sang the song "The Impossible Dream" in my elementary school choir, at Del Rey Elementary School.  They sent everyone to the choir teacher to audition, essentially, and I guess I could hit enough notes.  A couple of years later, I might have recognized it as a chance to spend time with a lot of girls, but elementary school was too early for that.

Anyway, this post is not about singing.  It's about a video game.  The game is called Zuma's Revenge, and The Impossible Dream is a reference to trying to beat one of the modes of Zuma's Revenge, the mode called Iron Frog.  This is my current quest.  I can remember at least a couple of other times that I set out to beat a game that seemed almost unconquerable at first:  the time I played through 199 of 200 levels of a game called Lode Runner one night, or the time I played to the tenth level of the old Microsoft pinball game, or maybe when I solved Rubic's Cube.  I guess I like the challenge.

So Iron Frog is really a silly, simple, weirdly addicting game.  Jackie started playing it a lot (unusual for her), and I played a little and decided it wasn't worth it, but then I went back and got hooked.  The main idea is to shoot balls out of a frog's mouth and match up the colors to make them disappear, eventually making them all disappear before they go down the drain and you lose.  Sounds silly, looks foolish, but in concept it's not all that different from some of the old shooter games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, or Blazing Lazers, which my brother and I used to play on the old Turbo Grafx system.  (Actually, it's too bad most people don't know about Blazing Lazers, because it's a good analogy.)

Zuma's Revenge has four modes.  The first is Adventure mode.  You play through 60 levels, beat six bosses, with some little wrinkles at the end, and you win.  Beating adventure opens up the other three modes.  Second is Challenge mode, which I don't care for, so enough about that.  Third is Heroic Frog, which is Adventure only harder.  The saving grace in Heroic Frog mode (and Adventure) is that it saves your progress every five levels, so you only have to beat each group of five levels one time, and you can eventually win.  And then there is Iron Frog.

The trick with Iron Frog is that you have to beat ten levels in a row to win, without a single loss, without saving your progress, always starting from level one.  Some of the ten levels are easy, at least now that I have spent around 120 hours playing this game, but easy does not mean trivial.  I can still lose on any level.  Math says that even if I could beat each level 90% of the time, which I cannot even on the "easy" levels, I could only win about a third of the time.  In truth, I have a lot of trouble with level 4, and I hardly ever beat level 6, so in reality I have played this mode 169 times and made it past level 6 only three times.  See what I mean about the impossible dream?

However, by coincidence (because I was going to write this post anyway), I made it past level 6 for the third time this morning, beat level 7 for the first time, beat level 8 the first time I ever played it, and died on level 9.  The Internet says level 9 is definitely the hardest, so I still have a long ways to go, but the impossible dream does not seem quite so impossible now.

Go Dawgs!

It's settled, Lucas is going to the University of Washington, which is called just UW around here.  The decision was made easy because it was the only school he applied to that accepted him; however, they already credit him with sophomore standing, and they accepted him into Electrical Engineering, which most engineering students have to apply for as they enter their junior year, so he starts in good standing.

The Washington mascot is the Husky (the women's sports teams are called the "Husky Women", really), which is shortened to Dawgs, or DaWgs, spelled funny because of the W.  The big rivalry is with the Washington State Cougars, and I have ignored the whole thing up to now as much as possible.  It probably does not have the storied history of the Cal-Stanford rivalry I grew up around, but there are only really two big universities in this state, so a lot of people who live here went to one or the other.  I hope Lucas's attendance still won't mean that I have to care who wins football games, but I wouldn't mind showing a little Husky pride with a t-shirt or something.

Lucas plans to live on campus and has already picked out a dorm with several engineering floors.  I think it will be good for him to get out of the house; I know he really wants to live on his own.  We visited the campus a couple of times, and it's very nice, reminds me of Berkeley, very old, with lots of open space, long walks between buildings.  The dorms look a little nicer -- no surprise that they may have improved things in the last forty years.  It is less than an hour from home, and I know Lucas wanted to get away, but I remember living in Berkeley 30 minutes from my parents' house, and it was far enough.

It's a good school, and a good engineering school, and Lucas did well to get in.  Now, he just has to graduate.

Getting into College

Just a little note on getting into college:  It's hard to believe how competitive it is.  Lucas has about a 3.7 GPA, but that includes Running Start courses at the local college.  His grade average in his actual high school courses is over 3.9, with his worst grade an A-.  He has taken very rigorous courses, including honors Algebra 2 as a freshman, four quarters of college calculus and three quarters of Physics.  His SAT scores average over 700, with the lowest being 690.  He has good extracurricular activities, including the Boy Scouts, a top 25 national ranking in archery, and several volunteer activities.

Lucas applied to six schools:  MIT, Stanford, Olin College, Cornell, Berkeley, and University of Washington.  We knew that MIT and Stanford were a stretch (but not impossible), but I thought he would get into maybe three or all four of the others.  Instead he was rejected by MIT, Stanford, Olin, and Cornell, and Berkeley, and accepted by UW.

I'm not complaining -- UW is a good school, and it's the easiest for us financially.  Let's be clear:  it is similar to getting just one good job offer when you were expecting a few; you only need one, and one is good.  It's just that, by contrast, when I applied to college, I had a 2.7 GPA, average 670 on my SATs, and two AP classes, and my only significant extra activities were a couple of jobs I had in high school.  I got into Berkeley.  If there are really that many kids with better qualifications than Lucas, something has changed drastically.

We have speculated about what happened -- maybe the essays weren't the best (but he's an engineer; what do you expect?), or he didn't volunteer enough, or maybe it was because his junior and senior grades in college courses were a little lower than his first two years of high school.  It all seems a little crazy to me, that even at 17 years old we are telling kids that if they are having a good time being a kid, they are not good enough.  Let them know early that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, that we're going to keep raising the bar a little higher every year for what we expect from a teenager, and the reward for hopping over the bar won't get any better.  Sounds like work.  Yuck.

Like I said, not really a complaint, because Lucas did fine -- really well actually.  It's just an observation.

Finishing a Project

The "project" is Lucas, who will be off to college and out of the house by September, wherever he goes.

I have probably written before that I see my boys in terms of a project sometimes, a really big, long project, the project of a lifetime.  And reaching age 18 and moving out of the house may not be the end of the project, but it is certainly a milestone.  Okay, let's see if I can avoid any more work jargon from here on.

It's a little like we have been running a race, and now it's time to pass the baton to you.  Or maybe, it's like we have been running a race, and your mother and I have been carrying you and your brother most of the time, and now we get to set you down, and you are ready to run on your own.  We will still be running beside you, pushing and pulling sometimes (think college costs), but you will be running too.  One day you may have to stop and carry us.  Or maybe it's not really a race, and trying to find a metaphor to represent someone's life is a fool's errand.

Lucas has a few things to do before he moves on.  He got into a college; this is good.  To finish high school, he has to pass a college English course, the only course he is taking this quarter.  He also has to do a culminating project and write a paper about it.  Fortunately, he has a project in mind that was approved by the school; he is going to do some training as an archery instructor with a friend, then spend a little time teaching kids archery.  Lucas can start the paper at 8:00 PM the night before it is due, have it done by midnight, and get a good grade, so that part is fine.  Also, in order to get his Eagle Scout rank, he has to finish two merit badges (easy) and complete an Eagle Scout project.  He is working with a scout leader to determine what that project will be, so that task is also underway.

And those are the big things:  English class, high school project, paper, merit badges, Eagle Scout project.  Sort of like a big work project, I can see the end now, and it's a good feeling.