Lessons of Stephen Covey

"Quadrant II tasks are the cornerstone to Stephen Covey's time management strategy. These responsibilities are those that are important but not urgent. Some that would qualify are improving the efficiency of your filing system, brainstorming new ways to increase sales, or spending twenty minutes a day to refine your writing skills. These activities would add to your abilities and give you a better opportunity for success in the future. These activities are also the ones that often get pushed to the back of the queue. They are the kind of things that you’ve been meaning to do that kind of fell off the wagon along the way.

Dr. Stephen Covey uses an extremely apt jungle metaphor to unite these concepts of leadership and management. Many people are fantastic managers. They are able to push forward on whatever projects are thrown their way. In a jungle, if given the task to slash through the brush and clear a path, these amazing managers would wield their machetes valiantly. They would cut through the flora no matter what problems came up to face them. These managers don’t care about the big picture; they just accomplish the task at hand.

Meanwhile, the leaders are doing something quite different. Leadership is all about making sure that the direction the solution is going in is the right one for the future. The leaders are up high in the sky surveying the jungle. They are the ones who are willing to say, “This is the wrong jungle! Let’s move on.”

A manager might respond to the leader by saying, “But we’re doing so well!”

The manager doesn’t care about the bigger picture. He’ll chop whatever jungle is put in front of him.

Are you the leader of your own life or just the manager? To be a leader for yourself you need to ensure that you’re going in the proper direction for you. Many creative people get locked into the trap of going for security. They find an undesired but high enough paying job. They tend to the management of their lives by making enough money and getting insurance with few plans of the far off future. Little do they realize that at the top of the company they work for is a group of leaders. They are visionaries who are thinking of the future and you are doing all their management for them.

Getting mired in a life of management is a dead end for a creative person. I suggest taking thirty to sixty minutes a day to brainstorm about your future. Understand where you are right now and come up with potential ideas of where to go from here. Sure, some if not most of the ideas will not work in the slightest. But if you don’t make the effort to come up with your own ideas, you are allowing someone or something else to be the leader of your life.

I realize that a certain degree of management is necessary to keep things steady in your life. Most of my day is still spent doing these management tasks. But I have looked at my jungle from the sky and I can see that the direction I’m headed in is a correct one. Also, one of my future goals is to outsource as many of my managing tasks as possible and to focus primarily on leadership. Once I reach that point, I will be able to try new and crazy challenges for myself while other people help my life chug along. This could take a long time to achieve, but I know that my daily actions are bringing me closer to that future, one step at a time.

Choose your desired end result. Adapt your daily management to direct your result toward it. Be the leader of your life. Become the kind of person that you want to be."

Art

Seen on a sign in the hallway of my daughter's elementary school:

"Earth without art is just "eh" "

The Markets Have Replaced Government and Religion

I have started reading the book The Art of Possibility. One of the co-authors works in the arts. Part of the authors' premise is that the arts now are in the position to create values and direction for people because government and religion no longer do (or can) This is interesting to think about. The authors feel the arts are necessary to create values because RELIGION and government NO LONGER create peoples values . . .

Here is a quote from the book that stopped me in my tracks:

"In our new global society, no institution has the wide acceptance to create values and direction for the majority of people. Markets in free societies are rapidly replacing governments and religious institutions as regulators of the highest authority, and markets perform without values; they do not converse in a human tongue."