:::1::: Copyright Zach Browman - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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2 WARNING: This PDF is for your personal use only. You may NOT Give Away, Share Or Resell This Intellectual Property In Any Way All Rights Reserved Copyright 2012 Zach Browman. All rights are reserved. You may not distribute this report in any way. You may not sell it, or reprint any part of it without written consent from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. :::2:::

3 Intermediate Rewards We talked about immediate rewards. These are what I called intermediate rewards. They don t kick in right away, but within an hour and never more than a day. Things like: Sense of accomplishment. Relief from the guilt that you ve been putting this thing off. Endorphins, in the case of exercise. It s not immediate. It s not the moment you get to the gym and get started, but after an hour, you feel pretty good. They re not as powerful as immediate rewards. We talked about swimming versus cigarettes; immediate are almost hard to resist. But they re a lot more motivating than long-term goals. I exercise for one reason: because I feel good afterwards. I don t exercise so that I ll live longer; I don t exercise so I ll look better, although at times that definitely is motivating and that does help. But really, every day I go because I know that when I come out an hour later, I m going to feel good and enjoy my day more. I m going to give you a technique that I use that increases my motivation using intermediate rewards. Again, it has to be within that day. I m going to use going to the gym as an example, and then we ll apply it to working. The 2 Doors Technique This is when I m feeling like I need a bit of drive. Let s say it s exercise and I think, :::3:::

4 I have a choice. I could get up and go to the gym and work out, or I could take a nap and work after. I ve got two doors. I ve got two choices. What I do is I walk them each through. I visualize them. You could write it down for it to be even more powerful. Say, Let s go through door number one. I don t go to the gym. I get to nap, which is nice. In an hour, I start feeling groggy and get to work and can t focus quite as much. After work, I m going to watch a show with my wife and won t be able to enjoy it quite as much. It will be harder the next day. I follow that road. Then I follow this road and say, I get up and go to the gym. It s a little hard at first, but I start feeling good quickly. Afterwards, I feel really energized and empowered. I sit down to work and I m more productive. In the evening when I sit down and watch a movie, I m able to really enjoy it because I now that I ve got my exercise for the day. It s that simple. What I found is visualizing this, by the time I ve finished going through that exercise, I m excited to go out and exercise. By the time I m finished visualizing both, the visualization of it makes the intermediate reward more immediate. It doesn t work as well for long-term motivation because there s not that one-toone correlation. It s not If I do this now, I will get success later for sure, but things like going to the gym are different. It s the same thing with work for me. I feel a lot better if I can do two 45-minute sessions. I take days off now to spend time with my family. I don t take them off because I don t want to work. Ever. I really enjoy getting my little chunk of work done. To me, it s like going to the gym. I feel better afterwards and my mind feels more focused. My brain feels better. If I can get up and go to the gym, the rest of the day is fantastic. :::4:::

5 The Intrinsic Rewards of Work We ve talked about this reward system using this system of immediate goals, using tracking, using points and that sort of thing to motivate yourself to get started and get rolling. What that does is it gets you to a point where these more intrinsic rewards of work kick in. You re not just tracking something, but after you ve been working for a little while, there are things about work that are naturally rewarding. We re going to enhance these intrinsic rewards, and it makes it even better. For some people, work is naturally engaging, exciting, and fulfilling. The late Steve Jobs did not show up for the paycheck. Richard Branson, Pablo Picasso. These are all people who had enough money that they didn t need to work. They worked because they enjoyed it. If you look at the wealthiest people in the world, they keep working after they have enough money to pay for their great, great, great grandkids education all the way down the family tree. They do it for other reasons. And they were likely successful because they enjoyed what they did. It works the other way around, too. When you re successful, you enjoy it a lot more. But when you re enjoying what you do, that releases dopamine and dopamine enhances creativity, productivity, and focus. If you enjoy what you do, then you re going to be better at it and more likely to be successful rather than having the attitude, I m going to get all this stuff done and then I ll be successful and I can really start enjoying myself. Autonomy The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it s a different kind of life. Buckminster Fuller There is a book out called The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot. He is an epidemiologist. If you re not familiar with what they do, they look at statistics and world trends, particularly in health. He was investigating the role of autonomy: being in control of what you do and its impacts on health. :::5:::

6 Basically, if you make $300,000 a year or $500,000 a year as a lawyer and you have a boss, you have a likelihood of having a shorter life, not being as happy and more illness than somebody who makes $50,000 a year working for himself as a shopkeeper. He found that your level of autonomy or the feeling of control you have over your own life is a better predictor of happiness, health, and lifespan than your wealth or your lifestyle. It feels good to be in control. I read about this a number of years ago. Just knowing that really inspired me to go out on my own and even to leave my business partners. I didn t have a bad situation there, but I knew that I really wanted to be in full control of what I was doing. They said you have lower stress, less illness, and less accidents. It lets you set up work the way you want to when you re more autonomous. You can set up work that aligns with your values. You don t have to do what someone else wants you to do if you don t agree with it. It lets you set up the kind of lifestyle that makes sense to you. You can work where you want. These days, with the Internet, you can pretty much work from anywhere. You can do work that stimulates you. You can do all this stuff we re talking about and build up these naturally rewarding elements so you feel more in control of your own tricycle. There are really three ways you can do this. I m not suggesting that everyone quit their job and start out on their own, because that s not for everybody. 1. You can change what it is you re doing, 2. You can change how you re doing it, or 3. You can change when and where you re doing it. I was in my late teens/early 20s and I got a job working for a landscaper. We d drive around in his truck mostly cutting lawns, but we called it landscaping. We did the odd weed pull. I heard from the other guy that was working with us. He :::6:::

7 started giving me an idea of how much money the boss made versus what I was making. We worked right alongside each other and I was getting paid $8 or $9 an hour. From my point of view, we were doing just as much work, but he was getting a little more money. Of course he did other things. He had to market, find the clients, payroll, hire people, etc. But he wasn t making more money because of those things. He was making more money because it was his business. He had taken the initiative, he had taken the risk, and he had just gone out there and done it, and I had gone and taken a job. I realized that entrepreneurs don t get paid more because they work harder. They get paid more because they took the initiative and the risk. It s that simple. It s not the person that works the hardest that makes the most money. Lack of initiative is a huge barrier to autonomy. I remember when I learned the word initiative. I was in class and a teacher decided to teach us what initiative was and made it very clear that initiative would be rewarded in her class. A great teacher. So, when you put up your hand, you did something extra, you pointed something out (a mistake the teacher had made), she would call attention to it and say, Good initiative. This was great. Not everybody was rewarded for initiative. Not all teachers were like that either; that s for sure. I tried to bring that philosophy in other classes and had disastrous results. You made a spelling mistake. I remember getting in big trouble for pointing out the teacher s mistake one time, because another teacher had told us it was a good thing to do. Here s little bit about my story. I lived in a Buddhist monastery for four years of my life. Indirectly, I heard this from one of the other monks. He was driving with our teacher and he said, Without initiative, it s impossible to have a happy life. That stuck with me. :::7:::

8 Without initiative, you re going to be blown by circumstances, what other people want. You ll go where it s convenient. You want to start cultivating initiative. Look for opportunities to take it, even in small ways. One of the reasons it s hard to do that is because there are so many choices when you start something, it s intimidating. I remember in high school I took a painting class. There were only six or seven people in the class. We were all working on longer-term projects that would take a week or month to paint. Then every couple of weeks, we d get together and, not critique each other s work but show it and offer suggestions and help. I remember seeing how easy it was to get into everybody else s painting and see what they needed to do with it and where they needed to go and how they could improve it and what needed to be done next. Then, of course, I got up there with my painting and everyone else felt the same way. It s so easy to get into somebody else s. Someone else has already set the parameters. You want to be an artist? Sculpture or painting? You want to paint? Great. What kind of paint do you want to use? What size canvas? What canvas do you want to use? Do you want to use canvas? Do you want to paint on wood? What are you going to paint? There are all these questions and that can become really intimidating. Boy, I m having all these memories of great teachers. I did have some really good teachers. I had some really horrible teachers, but I had some really great teachers growing up. One of them was for a creative writing class. The very first class, she had us go to the recycling bin and take paper out of that and write on that for very first writing assignment. She said, A blank piece of paper sometimes feels too valuable for us to ruin with our writing. It s too precious, so write on garbage. This stuff was going to be tossed out anyway, and you felt free to make mistakes and free to start things and free to just make choices. I talked about the reason why entrepreneurs are rewarded in society is because they take risks. But really, it s a bigger risk to have a job to be honest. A friend of mine was just laid off after 18 years. Another friend of mine worked for a :::8:::

9 software development company for six years. He had been in the industry for twelve years. Everything was going fine. He gets his quarterly performance review and he was fully expecting a promotion. He had been doing a great job and hitting all the benchmarks. He noticed that he had been given a five out of ten on every single category of his performance review. He went in to the guy that gave the review and saw that he had a new manager. There was some turmoil in the company and problems with communication, and all of a sudden, he had a new boss who gave him this low evaluation. Things flipped for him at work overnight. All of a sudden, showing up for work wasn t so much fun anymore. This boss micromanaged; he wasn t open to suggestions; he would talk badly in front of other employees in front of other members of the team. If you have a job, this can happen. Somebody could get promoted, and all of a sudden, you have a new boss. That s it. You re not in control of that. Eventually, my friend was fired. Of the 20-person team, he said 15 of them had already quit this boss was so bad. And finally, he was fired. He decided that he had enough of working for other people and went out on his own. He realized that was the safer bet. Not only could your boss change, your whole industry could change. Your whole company could go under. Job security doesn t exist anymore. The most secure option is to know that you can do something on your own, to know that you have the resources, and to be self-directed to use the skills that we re learning here. Self Leadership I want to talk about a concept now along those lines. I ve been using the word self-directed. When I was looking at time management programs, I was looking at this sort of thing. They talked about the importance of selfmanagement and managing yourself. I didn t really like that word because it sounded oppressive. I thought of that bad manager self-management means bossing yourself around and self-punishment. :::9:::

10 But the method that we re talking about is what I call self-leadership. Leaders inspire. Leaders get cooperation. When someone leads you, you re on their side. You have a common goal. One of my goals is to shift the relationship between your two selves so that you re not managing yourself anymore; you re leading yourself. You do that through self-rewarding. You set the vision, you know where you re going, and you give yourself rewards for getting there. This is what I call self-leadership. I believe it s the most important skill you can have right now if you want to be successful. More and more the world is going towards it needs self-leaders. Even if you re not an entrepreneur, there are virtual offices. Those didn t exist. Someone I know has 200 employees all over the states that all work from their home computers. That takes a bit of self-leadership to be able to do that. They have quite a bit of autonomy. Again, it doesn t mean you have to start your own thing, but you can get more autonomy that way. It s not so much the big company that gives you the job anymore. There s a lot more freedom. If you don t have a lot of autonomy in your work right now if you have a job, you really have three options. 1. Quit your job and start something else. 2. Start something on the side that gives you that autonomy. Start a project; maybe something that starts small and gets bigger. 3. Try and find more autonomy within what you re currently doing. Speaking of starting a side project, I was doing a little research on people who were good self-leaders and there s a local Vancouver guy named Markus Frind. I was reading his account of how he started his business and got it up and running. In his own words, he said, I was jumping from one sinking ship to another. He kept on getting hired and then they d lay everyone off. He was working in computers. So, he started putting some free time into an online dating site called Plenty of Fish that he registered a couple years ago. I think in 2006 it was making :::10:::

11 $10,000 a day. In 2011, 15 million messages are sent back and forth between people a day and it s continuing to grow. It s become massively successful, and it was something he started on the side. But he had the self-leadership to be able to do that in his free time. I m talking about starting something else, because it s pretty obvious we re talking about initiative. But if you need to get more autonomy within what you re doing now in your current situation, you can t always change what you do, but you might be able to change how you do it. Look at the way things are done where you work and the way you re asked to work. A lot of times things are done that way because that s the way it s always been done. See if your boss or manager is open to you working in a different way and trying something differently. Brainstorm better ways. Take initiative and talk to your manager. When and where you work can be negotiated. In the book The 4-Hour Workweek he talks about suggesting to your boss that you start working one day a week from home, and on that one day a week, make it your most productive day of the week. Let him see the results of that, and maybe you can start doing two, and maybe you can shift to having your job working from home and not working from the office. If you like going into an office, that s another story. But if you want more autonomy of when and where you work, that s an idea of something you can do. Initiative is not something someone can give you. You really have to take it. I want you to recognize if you re thinking about taking on a big project like writing a book or starting a business, you never feel ready. Nobody feels ready. You always feel that uncertainty. By the nature of what we re talking about, you re always going to feel that uncertainty, so don t let that hold you back. Recognize that and move on. The next inherent reward of work is mastery. :::11:::

12 Mastery I ve been playing guitar for years on and off. I remember I even sold my guitars for a couple of years and then bought a couple more. A little over a year ago, I was listening to some music and I really wanted to learn how to play this one song. Prior to that, I never really practiced. I started playing guitar because I was a singer in high school and I wanted to back myself up. I d just play sloppy chords and it was enough to allow me to show off my voice. I never really did deliberately practice and get better. About a year ago, I decided I m going to learn this song. It was the John Mayer version of Boldest Love, the Jimi Hendrix song. I loved the guitar on that song. I thought, This sounds pretty difficult to play, but I m going to slowly break it down chord by chord, lick by lick and learn to play it. So I started practicing it. Very quickly I started improving. I found if I played it through slowly and exactly rather than quickly and sloppily, the next day I d come back and I can play it a little bit quicker and cleaner. I started doing exercises to make my fingers more nimble. I started working on my picking for the first time. Then I started learning scales and theory. As I said, I had the guitar for years and I played on and off. I was able to hack around on it. But as soon as I started investing in getting better in it, it became self-rewarding. I got to the point where I was playing for hours. It was one of my greatest procrastination tools, but I was playing for hours every day. What I looked forward to was getting my hands on my guitar and practicing getting better and better. We will invest a lot of time and energy into the feeling of getting better at something. And of course, it s very rewarding to hear the feedback of playing music and that sort of thing. But the sense of improvement is naturally rewarding. Leveling up in video games and getting achievement badges is rewarding. :::12:::

13 Work with opportunities for mastery is important. It s important to have the sense that you re able to grow in your job. A friend of mine who s a lawyer, a number of years ago he started at a big firm right out of law school. I don t know if you know how the big firms work, but they pay you a lot of money to start and then they increase it dramatically year by year, which makes it really difficult to quit because you get used to the lifestyle. You think, If I wait another year, I ll make an extra $30,000 or $40,000. He decided to quit. He decided to leave. He had been there for two years. I asked him why and he said, I m not really learning anything anymore. The first year was great because I was challenged and I learned more, but I think I m just going to be repeating the same thing again and again. He ended up taking a much lower-paying job that had a lot more litigation. He really wanted to go to court and he s been there ever since. He s much happier now. He s also working less hours and that sort of thing. To him, mastery was really crucial and he knew it. As soon as his job got stagnant, he found another job. You don t have to necessarily leave what you re doing, but you can find the mastery in what you re already doing. I went to Japan once. I was there for a week and I absolutely loved it. One of the things I loved about it was that they took mastery very, very seriously there in their work. I had the best pizza of my life in Japan made by a guy who pizza making was an art to him. It was actually also sort of a spectator sport. We sat around a pizza bar and watched this guy roll the dough. He only made two kinds of pizzas. It was a margarita with just tomato sauce and cheese, and one with no cheese but chopped garlic. That was it. There were two kinds of pizzas you could order, and they were fantastic. He was constantly improving. My brother moved to Japan for a year and got a job as a bartender. He had to practice with the martini shaker with rice in it every day. Right before he left, :::13:::

14 they re like, You re finally starting to get it. We can let you make martinis now. They treated it like an art. You could do that. It could be just getting better at what you re doing, but it could be some peripheral skill. It could be practicing your social skills. When I took a sales job, one of the reasons I took it was because I knew it would force me to get out and meet with people every day and I felt like my body language was getting better. There was that opportunity for mastery as well. You could take on a new challenge, change departments, learn about another aspect of your business that you maybe outsourced in the past. Last year I had to learn a lot of technical stuff about Internet marketing websites that I had no clue on. It made the experience more enjoyable. The older we get, the more we tend to stick with our strengths because it feels good to stick with your strengths. It s not fun to feel like a beginner. I don t know this for sure, but I think as we get older, the more our identity is caught up with being competent. You don t want to be bad at stuff. If you don t take on new things, you don t have to feel bad at them. I ve had the good fortune of taking on a lot of new things, being a beginner many times in many different areas. I ve learned that when you practice, you get better. It s one of the reasons why it s a shame when they cut music programs from school. I talked about guitar, but I used to play piano and violin. I took lessons when I was younger. I learned that you suck one day and you practice and then you start to sound a little bit better, and then it actually starts to sound good. I think we need to experience that again and again and remember every time we go back and are a beginning again that it s going to get better with practice. Be willing to be a beginner to find opportunities for mastery. :::14:::

15 Meaning and Contribution Personally, I ve done a lot of jobs. I ve cycled through a lot of jobs. Some of them I started to feel after a while that I didn t really feel good about what I was doing. I didn t really agree with the ethics of the company. I can remember one time in particular where I stayed there a little bit too long. It s happened a couple times where I didn t feel quite right my integrity of staying there. But the moment I quit, it was so clear that it was the right decision. The moment I left, I felt like myself again. This is too important. Of course you can t always do it right away. I don t want you to go quit your job tomorrow and be left without a paycheck to feed your families, but start thinking about moving on if you don t have a lot of meaning in your life. You can find meaning within your work, as long as you re not doing any harm. We re in Vancouver. Have you experienced the trivia bus driver? There s a bus driver that does trivia over the intercom. Everybody has a fantastic time on the bus. He just lights up everybody s day. I m on the trivia bus today! I ve had some other fun bus drivers in Vancouver that make a difference. It makes a difference to everyone s day. They are adding meaning. You don t have to be curing diseases or changing the world. If you have a job where you deal with the public, you can brighten people s day. I had a bus driver that would say, Turn to the person beside you and tell them how beautiful they are, to get people interacting. How much more fun is that for him to go to work every day versus the grumpy bus driver that does the minimum and doesn t connect with people? It happens. It s unfortunate for you riding the bus when you get a grumpy one, but it s unfortunate for him or her. That s their entire life. You can find these opportunities to find meaning within your work. It s important to get feedback. There s a difference between knowing that you re having an impact and seeing it. It s one of the reasons why I ve moved more and more into writing and creating products and that sort of thing, and away from :::15:::

16 coaching and working with people one-on-one. But I still need to work with people because I need to see the impact of what s happening. I love getting e- mails from people telling me how I ve helped them. I need it. Yeah, I can put stuff out there and make money. But it s the s that come back that say, Wow, this has really changed my life. Those are what are able to keep me going. Sometimes you have to ask for feedback. Flow I m going to talk about one more intrinsic reward. That is what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow the experience of absolute engagement with what you re doing. This is one of the most rewarding parts of work, period. Some people describe it as a peak experience where your attention is so engaged in what you re doing that you don t have any brain power left over for self-consciousness, for selfdoubts and that sort of thing. It really is incredibly rewarding. The system that we worked on with these intermediate rewards is really what it did for me. It allowed me to start to focus much better. It gave me a small goal, and then after the first or second reward, I would start getting into this complete engagement with what I was doing. What leads to flow? The main thing is if you have your challenge on this axis and your skill level on another axis, if you re too skilled for the challenge, you get bored. If there s too much challenge for your skill level, you feel anxiety and incompetence. But there s a sweet spot where your skill level and your challenge level meet. That s where you find engagement. That s where you find flow. Part of that is also being able to get feedback that you re on the right track. So, if you re bored, you might need to increase the challenge level. If you re feeling anxious, you might need to get a new skill. The next section is purely about focus, because distraction is a huge cause of procrastination and the ability to take control of your attention is crucial to leaving procrastination behind you for good. :::16:::