The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.
So, let’s go with some discoveries from the week!
#1 – Reinventing Your Business Model
#2 – Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
#3 – How to Beat Procrastination
#4 – The Procrastination Matrix
#5 – Disrupt Yourself: Four Principles For Finding the Career Path
Reinventing Your Business Model
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann
Summary: Why is it so difficult for established companies to pull off the new growth that business model innovation can bring? Here’s why: They don’t understand their current business model well enough to know if it would suit a new opportunity or hinder it, and they don’t know how to build a new model when they need it
3 Highlights:
“… When Apple introduced the iPod, it did something far smarter than wrapping good technology in a snazzy design. It wrapped a good technology in a great business model. Combining hardware, software, and service, the model provided game-changing convenience for consumers and record-breaking profits for Apple…“
“… Successful companies already operate according to a business model that can be broken down into four elements: a customer value proposition that fulfills an important job for the customer in a better way than competitors’ offerings do; a profit formula that lays out how the company makes money delivering the value proposition; and the key resources and key processes needed to deliver that proposition…“
“… Great business models can reshape industries and drive spectacular growth. Yet many companies find business-model innovation difficult. Managers don’t understand their existing model well enough to know when it needs changing—or how…”
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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
Source: Wait But Why
Author: Tim Urban
Summary: No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!” The same people will say to a real procrastinator something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.” The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do.
3 Highlights:
“… It’s a mess. And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground…”
“… The Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up when a deadline gets too close or when there’s the danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster, or some other scary consequence…”
“… Of course, this is no way to live. Even for the procrastinator who does manage to eventually get things done and remain a competent member of society, something has to change…”
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How to Beat Procrastination
Source: Wait But Why
Author: Tim Urban
Summary: The procrastinator is in the bad habit, bordering on addiction, of letting the monkey win. He continues to have the intention to control the monkey, but he puts forth a hapless effort, using the same proven-not-to-work methods he’s used for years, and deep down, he knows the monkey will win. He vows to change, but the patterns just stay the same. So why would an otherwise capable person put forth such a lame and futile effort again and again?
3 Highlights:
“… Effective planning takes a big list and selects a winner…”
“… No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until house is built…”
“… Nearly every big undertaking can be boiled down to a core unit of progress—it’s brick. A 45-minute gym visit is a brick of getting in great shape...”
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The Procrastination Matrix
Source: Wait But Why
Author: Tim Urban
Summary: But if you’re a procrastinator, you’re in luck. You have an ace up your sleeve—someone daring and fearless, with bountiful energy and dynamic talent, and someone who can defeat the monkey-like stepping on an ant: Future You. Future You is a procrastinator’s most important ally—someone who’s always there and always has your back, no matter what. When my alarm goes off and I don’t want to wake up, I just press the snooze button, which doles out the job of getting out of bed to Future me instead.
3 Highlights:
“… The Impostinator seems productive, but she’s really an imposter—a procrastinator wearing a productive person mask. It relies on one major delusion of the Impostinator—that busy = productive…”
“… But at the end of the day, the satisfaction she feels has a hint of emptiness to it, and the Happy Playground is never quite fully happy. She may have deluded herself into thinking she’s living a productive life, but in her subconscious, she knows she’s not doing what she’s supposed to be doing. Her feelings of accomplishment come along with an undercurrent of despair…”
“… I have not conquered procrastination, but for the time being, at least, I’m in the least bad type of procrastinator situation—I’m a Successtinator…”
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Disrupt Yourself: Four Principles For Finding the Career Path
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Whitney Johnson
Summary: Disruptive innovation has been a pioneering concept in business since 1995. Johnson, a founding partner at Clay Christensen’s investment firm, explains how you can apply disruptive thinking—responsible for the success of many products, companies, and even countries—to your own career. Using the stories of highly successful personal innovators, including herself, she articulates four principles of self-disruption.
3 Highlights:
“… Playing in a market where no one else is or wants to be might mean leaving your comfortable career perch for an amorphous role. But it will enable you to head off the competition and could generate rewards you’d never envisioned…”
“… Think about what you do exceptionally well that most others can’t. Then use that discovery to make an innovative transition…”
“… Personal growth can stall at the top of a classic S curve. Avoid that problem by jumping to a new plane and putting yourself on an entirely different growth trajectory…”
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