BOOK SUMMARY 231 Four Seconds
·
Summary written by: Justin Gasbarre
"Four Seconds is the amount of time required to take
a single breathe. That short pause is all you need to see where you’re going
wrong and to make a little shift."
- Four Seconds, page 4
Despite
all of our efforts to accomplish what we want in our careers, our
relationships, and our families, we all struggle to keep up at times. We often
end up feeling more stressed, more overworked and end up becoming burned out
despite our best efforts keep up. InFour Seconds, author Peter
Bregman shares with us ideas, strategies and tactics that can help you make
smarter decisions and take more impactful actions. Peter Bregman is the CEO of
Bregman Partners, Inc. He is an author, speaker and consultant, and in this
book he shows us the power in taking just four seconds to course correct our
decisions and efforts to find the success that we’re looking for. The
book is broken down into three parts:
Part
1: Change Your Mental Defaults
Part 2: Strengthen Your Relationships
Part 3: Optimize Your Work Habits
Part 2: Strengthen Your Relationships
Part 3: Optimize Your Work Habits
Its
lessons and principles are told through a multitude of stories that fall within
the book’s short, bite sized chapters. This read helps provide us with simple
solutions for getting results – stress free!
The Golden Egg
Stop Performing. Start Experiencing.
"Try
to remember this: It’s not a performance; it’s an experience."2- Four
Seconds, page 51
I
absolutely love this paradigm shift that the author proposes in the quote
above. Think about the reality of our lives – what we do feels like a series of
performances. Think about how we’re graded throughout school, our performance
reviews in the workplace and the fact that many of us are paid for our
performance – “even little things – leading a meeting, having a hallway
conversation, sending an email – are followed by the silent but ever present
question, ‘How’d that go?’” Here’s the kicker: living our lives with the
perspective that everything is a performance lead to stress, unhappiness and
most often, mediocre performances. “If you want to get better at anything, you
need to experiment with an open mind, to try and fail, to willingly accept and
learn from any outcome,” Bregman writes.
When
you make this slight mindset shift, you’re taking the “pressure” off a short
lived moment in time. There’s going to always be someone there to judge your
performance and that will never change. When you’re going through an
“experience”, you remain fluid and agile. Yes, you may “bomb” your speech but
at least you did it. Now you have an experience to lean on to do better next
time.
Easier
said than done, right? Of course, luckily for us Bergman gives us some advice.
“So how can we let go of performance in favor of experience? – complete this
sentence: This is what it feels like to _____ (fill in the blank). IE: This is
what it feels like to be in love; this is what it feels like to be nervous for
a sales meeting; etc.” Try it out!
Gem #1
Let People Fail – or Almost Fail
"Learning
anything – isn’t about doing it right."- Four Seconds, page 176
We all
learn differently. That’s been drilled into our heads from the time we’re
young. What we also know to be true, although it’s not ideal, is that failure
helps us learn. “Our natural instinct is to prevent all failure, but doing so
stunts growth,” writes Bregman. Consider this example:
“If an
employee comes to you with a presentation that doesn’t meet your expectations,
what do you do? Take it, fix it and present it yourself? Tell him what he’s
doing wrong and ask him to fix it? Allow him to present it without making
changes and let him face the consequences? Each choice is legitimate in
the right circumstances.”
What
would you do? Your job as a leader is to determine and gauge the circumstance
correctly. It’s certainly easier said than done, but luckily, Bregman gives us
some questions we can ask ourselves, when facing these types of situations:
·
What’s the risk, the consequences of failure?
·
Is it time critical?
·
Will mistakes destroy the person’s reputation
forever?
·
Will it being an effective learning experience?
Failure
is a valuable part of the growth and development of people in all areas of our
lives. Being a leader or parent puts us in a position to make determinations on
if failing is going to help or hurt the person and their development. Whether we
are succeeding or failing, it’s all part of the experiences that make up who we
are, our skill sets and abilities. Once we learn to embrace failure and see it
as an opportunity to grow, the faster we’ll get to where we, our teams or our
children are trying to get.
Gem #2
Not everything needs to be sustainable
"For
something to be a great success, it doesn’t have to last forever."- Four
Seconds, page 236
Today,
things change… fast! What got yourself to where you are today isn’t going to
get you to where you want to be tomorrow. We’ve seen throughout history
brilliant ideas, companies, processes that are incredible. Then they aren’t.
Nothing is perfect and nothing lasts forever. We’re going to have to evolve as
individuals, leaders, and businesses to keep up with the changing economy,
business landscape and competition. By having this paradigm of looking at
solutions and ideas as temporary rather than permanent, it becomes easier to
commit to. It becomes easier to implement. It becomes easier to get others involved.
It becomes easier to pay for.
Keep
in mind that we change. Situations change. The people around us change. And the
tools we use should change, too.
Four
Seconds is an enjoyable read filled with ideas,
strategies and tactics that will help you to make better, more impactful
decisions. Some of these ideas will help you today, others will prove helpful
later in life.
Just
remember to take that deep breath, pause, and make a deliberate choice that
will get you where you want to go. Ready? Take a deep breathe (1, 2, 3, 4…),
go!
No comments:
Post a Comment