A five second joke is just as effective as a one minute joke during small talk and prevents an awkward lapse in attention from the listener. 92% of the laugh comes from 8% of the joke.
When sitting through a meeting or presentation, write down the key takeaway(s). Looking for this will engage your brain, helping you process and retain more of what you’re hearing. This works for students and professionals alike.
Frequently people give assignments without explaining the why. Even the military has begun acknowledging the weaknesses of orders given without understanding. When you’re given a task or instructions, ask what it means. What’s the main idea? You might be able to ask yourself this question and come up with the answer. The value in this exercise come from mentally capturing the guiding principles and vision. It will help you understand the purpose for your action, the actions themselves, and give greater insight for improving that performance.
When some type of performance is required from you, practice performing. If it’s a speech, try giving the speech. If it’s a number of push-ups, see how many you can do now. If it’s solving a math problem, try an example problem. You will quickly become keenly aware of your deficiencies. This will tell you where to focus your efforts in acquiring the requisite proficiency.
When faced with an unfamiliar or ambiguous situation it is helpful to put a strategy in place and take exploratory action. Much time can be wasted on low value theorizing. This is particularly true as the risks or costs of failure fall. In comparing the time investment of researching and theorizing a solution for an hour versus experimenting on a solution in that same time, the latter approach usually yields better and more specific insights. Thus, better solutions are obtained faster. Particularly with internal work assignments I’ve benefited from the fast to failure approach. An additional benefit to testing ideas with action is that you will know why an alternative is not viable. This is a strong point from which to champion your final solution.
I was put in a group of more experienced people with the assignment of delivering a 20 minute presentation. All the experienced people in the group began some serious navel-gazing. I tried to steer the conversation toward the content of our presentation, but a couple of people were focused on pinning presenting assignments on others than themselves. After 30 minutes had passed I realized the stupidity and futility of the room. I volunteered for a five minute assignment and the meeting ended almost immediately thereafter. Putting the extreme stubbornness of several individuals aside, we saw that one question provided all of the friction that wasted everyone’s time.
If you’re at a conference or some other event where meals are unstructured, just pick someone to eat with. Adding yourself to a group of two or three is an easy way to borrow some of their pre-existing familiarity to break the ice and can make for easier conversation. You will certainly gain more than a meal. The alternative is eating alone or worse, sitting at a sparsely populated table where nobody talks.
I was speaking with someone through a messaging app and the conversation was escalating in complexity. I stopped the chat and took it to the phone. We immediately accelerated the pace of the conversation and increased understanding. Sometimes more contact is less friction in communication. Whether it’s 140 or 160 characters, it lacks the auditory experience that efficiently provides the valuable context.
I watched a presentation from a colleague and paid special attention to his transitions and how closely he followed the script. This gave me specific insights as to how I could glue my presentation together and where there was room to put my own spin on it. This helped me learn two demos in less than three hours. The key takeaway for me was to find an expert and watch what they do.
I asked my manager for clarification of expectations. The reply eliminated a challenging process and cut out significant low value preparation. My mind was free to focus on the meat of the presentation. Instead of memorizing a script, I quickly learned the concepts and was able to present in my own words. Also, using slides with diagrams and pictures related to the key concepts helped me bypass memorization and led to a more natural style of presentation. Memorization exponentially becomes a less efficient strategy as the quantity of material increases. Learning is the meta-skill that becomes exponentially more efficient as the quantity and complexity of material increases. For many years I mistakenly conflated memorizing with learning. This is a Pareto Guide 2 in 1 tip. Asking for clarification can reduce the size of a challenge and learning can be much more efficient than memorization.
As I was working on a presentation I walked through my planned sequence asking the question, “So what?” What was important about this information? How did it apply to the individuals listening to the presentation? Through this I came up with three personal stories to inject into my presentation that made it much more engaging and memorable. These stories also helped me better internalize the information. A simple walkthrough and question provided the elements that connected the audience to me and the material.
I was following written instructions and noted several discrepancies. I noted the questions and later met with someone one year more experienced than me on the job. He quickly explained that I had discovered several inconsistencies and told me to disregard. He also pointed out a few key concepts that I needed to focus on. One morning of working with a friend gave me two months of guidance.
I had a video and some text documents giving me examples of the proficiency I needed to develop in a subject. I needed to learn the content and demonstrate it. More than once the text documents did not provide sufficient detail or screenshots for understanding. Instead of clicking around the software at random, I turned to the video to see how the presenter handled the concept. A common application of this process is bypassing instructions included with a product and instead watching a video on YouTube or another site. Entire homes have been built or remodeled from knowledge gained on YouTube.
I needed to learn a presentation. I took the sample provided and divided it into coherent sections. Now I had manageable, related chunks of information I could analyze and digest. These sections more readily fit in my calendar in the blocks of time available prior to my deadline. Thus time spent deconstructing the subject yielded most of the conceptual and structural understanding I needed.
I received a request that at first glance appeared to be a lot of work with something I'm not familiar. I knew I had bigger priorities so I reached out to someone familiar with my situation. This person gave me several key insights and prevented me from spending any time on a very low value task. In fact, the requester completely forgot and hasn’t brought the task up in more than a month. This is one of the great benefits of Pareto analysis applied to life. Unimportant tasks can fall to the wayside leaving more, valuable time for critical tasks.
I had a one-on-one scheduled with someone up the chain of command in my organization and spent five minutes in advance preparing three or four questions. My questions became an immediate lifeline that kept the conversation flowing in a natural and meaningful way. The VIP was impressed with my preparation and the meeting easily went through the allotted time. My five minutes of preparation covered a 30 minute meeting and enhanced my professional brand.
I attended a training session that included opening presentations and instruction followed by hands-on lab work, all completed remotely by web conference. The lab consisted of a script to follow with software in a demo environment. The script provided an excess of information that distracted from the core goal of becoming familiar with the software. The greatest benefit of the training came from reading the lab overview and following the prescribed steps through the software. In other words answering the ‘what’ and ‘why’ and then stepping through the interface provided the most learning. All the other details were less critical to the core concepts and quickly forgotten. Thus spending any serious time focused on those non-core details was inefficient.
My experience with making purchases online is limited mostly to niche items and books which I intend to keep or utilize for a known and specific purpose. I don't buy stuff online just to try it out. Thus I found myself at a strange place recently where I wanted to return something big and expensive purchased through Amazon. My thoughts had changed on the object as well as the problem it was solving. It was a functional and appreciated solution to my problem, but I knew I could do better. In fact, holding on to the purchase was getting in the way of taking action toward a better solution. So I turned to an expert, a woman. This expert shopper not only regularly returns items both online and in-store, but does so frequently enough that she has various return policies memorized. She informed me that on Amazon the process was terribly easy. Find the order, click the return button, print the label, and deliver to the UPS store. Had I not asked the question, I'd still be holding on to a large, expensive item and missing out on a better solution. Not only did inquiring about how to make a return provide a nudge toward action, but I was also encouraged to take the next steps necessary to move toward the better solution. While my original solution yielded at least 80% of the desired results, my new solution will yield greater results with fewer moving parts, less associated clutter, and more simple operation. While I confess that my labor investment is increased by these changes it is important when applying the Pareto Principle to not settle for unacceptable results in the name of minimizing inputs. The quality of inputs is more important than the quantity.