I just got an email update from Pixel Peony, who, as I previosuly blogged about, found that being positive opened some new doors for her:

I never expected that a retail job would lead to meeting the owner of a company. Literally, it was all due to treating people well and having a good attitude. I’m convinced. I was pleasantly surprised by the lengths people will go when they like you and like the way that you work.

The whole experience taught me not to take a “little” job for granted, or to take the people you work with for granted. Everything counts.

Well she now has a new, exciting job and wrote to tell me about it, ending with this gem of a motto:

Hard work, a positive attitude, thank you cards and a few bouquets of flowers and voila! I could dance I am so happy!

Woo-hooooo :o)

Just as a concert orchestra isn’t a race to the last note, life isn’t a race to some exalted state called success.

This is the point of a short talk by Alan Watts, which has been animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park. This unlikely meeting of widely differing talents is an inspiration.

You can see it here and there others to choose from here.

Last week, an editorial in one of Denmark’s leading newspapers took aim at yours truly. Here’s the introduction:

Enforced mirth
The title alone guarantees some mirth: Chief Happiness Officer – senior happiness comissioner.

The line between embarrassing and funny may be a fine one, but you certainly can’t take a title like that seriously.

Truth to tell, among many other ridiculous titles, it has to be a candidate for some award: stupidest title of the year or something like that.
(source)

It goes on at some length…

When I first spotted this editorial it made me sad. Nobody likes to be criticized – I certainly don’t – and this criticism seemed both unfair and a little malicious to me.

A blog comment like this one is another good example. They’re very rare, but they do crop up occasionally.

As I was thinking about how to react to the editorial, I remembered this graph by Kathy Sierra:

In one of her very best posts (and that’s saying something) Kathy talks about the physics of passion saying:

You don’t really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of “drinking the koolaid.” You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it’s the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion… or rather passion in the hate dimension.

This means that the kind of criticism I got in that editorial is great news. It is a sign that my message is sharp enough that some people take an active dislike to it. They may not care for it – but they care!

If all I got was negative feedback it would probably be time to rethink my work in happiness, but fortunately it’s not all hate – far from it! Many, many people tell me that they enjoy my book, blog and presentations and have used them actively to become happier at work.

I think we can all use Kathy’s excellent reminder to do two things:
1: Whatever you’re doing, get yourself and others passionate about it. Your project, product, company, process, leadership, work, salesmanship – whatever you’re doing will go better with passion.

This means that your message can be anything but bland. Don’t set out to actively piss people off – that’s just crude. But if you’re pleasant, moderate, mild and soft-spoken you also run the risk of being utterly forgettable. No one will oppose you – but no one will be passionate about whatever it is you do either. That’s why you must hone your message to the point where it’s possible to be passionate about it.

2: When people get negative about you, remember that this is part of the process. As Kathy puts it:

Should you ignore the detractors? Diss them as nothing but evidence of your success? Should you just wave them off with a “just jealous” remark? Absolutely not.

Somewhere in their complaints there are probably some good clues for things you can work on. But if you start trying to please them all or even worse, turn them into fans, that could mean death. Death by mediocrity, as you cater to everybody and inspire nobody.

I’d rather go down in flames than risk death by mediocrity. Kevin Briody said it best:

I don’t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, …

I want “f**king cool! Period.

I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16–on-afterburners-rip-by so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy.

What about you?

I was looking through Christine Kane’s wonderful blog (thx Mike) and lemmetellya, the lady can write. She’s smart and funny – and that’s in addition to being a great musician and singer.

On her site I found a post called 8 things you get when you order my new DVD. Reason number 8 is my favorite:

8 – You get to feel better about yourself.

So, the concert ends with a song called The Problem with Jazz. And we mess it up! Right at the end! Right at the last drum beat! The band falls to pieces. Not only do we mess up a song — but it’s the end of the whole evening!

Now, as you know, these things can be edited. We could’ve re-filmed it. We could’ve even cut to a different shot and taken out the sound. But I was in the editing suite, and I said, “Nah. Let’s leave it. It’s funny.”

Here’s why I left it, really: If I can screw up the ending of a show in front of 400 people and thousands of other viewers, then you don’t have to feel so bad if you mess up, say, at your office in front of five or ten or twenty-five people. Or when you give a speech. Really, it’s a way to make you feel better about yourself. Most music videos don’t offer such a raw glimpse of human foibles. They’re all edited and perfected, and so you don’t get a chance to see the human side of performing.

Well, now I’ve changed that trend! By next week, you’ll see videos of Celine Dion tripping over one of her dancers and falling face first onto the stage and then laughing it off as she hoists her sequin gown back over her left buttock. Just you wait!

That’s hilarious. And it totally sealed it for me – I had to order the DVD just to see them get it wrong :o)

Christine’s point is also a great reminder to allow ourselves to fail – and to be seen failing. This goes great at work too.

Peter Drucker’s said that companies should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because the only people who never mess up are those who never do anything interesting.

Prasad Kurian suggests we should promote people the way some ancient societies chose a new chief – pick the person with the most scars. That person has taken risks – but not enough to get killed.

Randy Nelson of Pixar says that “You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.”

And finally, there’s my own experience from learning to wakeboard over the last two months. I’ve been getting pretty good at it (as you can see here), but it has cost me a lot of falls. Some of them very public and more than a little painful. Like last Sunday, when I got a little overconfident and steered right into a pier :o)

And yes, these days anything is an excuse for me to mention wakeboarding. I’m hooked, dammit :o)

My most controversial post ever, is still the one where I support having open salaries in a company.

I was surprised by how very provocative this idea is to a lot of people, but I remain convinced that it’s the best way to ensure motivation, happiness and fairness.

And Today’s Dilbert strip supports me :o)

Recently I’ve been serving as an expert at The Job Lounge, answering career related questions. If you’d like to see some of the sage advice I and others are dishing out, go check it out.

Here are my answers so far:
What to Study to Make Money and Be Happy
Do you choose your studies based on money or on happiness? Do you even need to choose?

Bad Boss, Bad Reference
What if your boss is a horrible person – but quitting will mean that she will give you a bad reference?

Susan Ireland (author The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Resume) who runs the site has been getting together a lot of great answers – everything from explaining a gap in your resume to handling a job that ends badly to how to become a dealer in Vegas(!)

So – as I blogged about yesterday, emails have been piling up in my inbox to the tune of 200 unanswered emails, some of them – I kid you not – from way back in Februrary.

I really wanted to get down to an empty inbox, but lately when I sat down at my computer to get it done… I didn’t. I looked at that mountain of mail, many of which I really should’ve responded to long ago and felt really bad about, and kinda gave up in advance.

And this is where I could choose between two approaches. There’s the “Just get it done” approach. This means ignoring how much it sucks and just doing it anyway. Knuckling under, putting my nose to the grindstone and my shoulder to the wheel and some other body part to some other part of machinery and answer those darn emails.

Or I could ask myself the following question: How can I make it fun? How can I answer those emails in a way that feels effortless and makes me happy?

Being the Chief Happiness Officer, I couldn’t really go for the former option so I was forced to try to make it fun. I asked for advice on the blog yesterday and got some really good input.

After thinking about it I designed a strategy – and got all of my emails answered in less than a day. That also includes the 50 or so emails that came in during the day.

So without further ado, here’s the strategy that worked for me:
1: Accept myself
First of all, I stopped wasting time berating myself for getting into this situation. If there’s one thing experience has taught me it’s that I’m the kinda person who lets a mess build and then cleans it all up at once.

I know that other people ar way more organized and get stuff done as they go (the bastards!) – but I’m just not one of them and I’m not going to waste time beating myself up over it.

I’m a lazy person – and this is not a problem, it’s a huge advantage.

2: Track and publish the number of unanswered emails
I published the number of unanswered emails and kept updating it during the day. This meant that I could see progress all the time. Your inbox looks pretty much the same with 100 emails in it as with 200. Keeping track of the number meant I knew I was getting results.

Also publishing the number kept me going a few times when I felt like quitting because I reminded myself how cool it would be to end the day with 0 unanswered emails – AND brag about it here :o)

3: Move tasks to my todo-list
But possibly the single most important thing I did was use my todo-list. If answering an email required me to perform a more serious task, I’d put the task on my todo-list and answer the email saying when I would get back with the actual information.

This allowed me to stay in the flow of answering emails, without getting sidetracked by writing documents etc.

4: Get out of the house

And of course I went to my favorite café. But I always do that when I need to get work done.

5: Use snippets
I also used a tip from Michiel Trimpe who suggested using email snippets that can easily be inserted into an email. Specifically, I used the following text a lot:

I apologize for taking so long to reply to your mail – I’ve been drowning in email lately :o)

6: Don’t be afraid to say no (Updated)
I almost forgot this one: Making sure to say no, when no is the answer. I get a lot of invitations, links, ideas, proposals, etc. Most of them are very good, but some are just not suitable for me.

I’ve been training myself to “just say no”. In a polite way, of course :o)

One tactic I considered, but didn’t use
I did think about declaring email bankruptcy as George suggested but I decided that would be cheating :o)

The upshot

The result of all of this was that I spent a nice, fun, productive day doing a task that I’d been dreading. A lot. For a long time.

The key, for me at least, is that I didn’t ask myself how I could get the job done the fastest or the most efficiently – my focus was on making it fun and pleasant. If I can do that, I know I can get the job done and I think that aspect is missing from most of the productivity systems and advice out there, which is focused entirely too much on the mechanics of productivity.

Make a task fun four yourself and you will be productive.

Your take

What about you? How do you take tasks you’ve been putting of for way too long and make them fun? I’m not talking about how you get them done – but how you do it so that you enjoy yourself? Got any great ideas? Please write a comment!

Related:

• How to procrastinate effectively
• The cult of overwork
• Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster

I’m taking a short break from blogging until I’ve done something about the staggering amount of unanswered emails in my inbox :o) I’m telling ya, it is totally getting out of hand…

In the meantime I could really use your ideas: How can I make answering all those emails fun? How can I do it in a way that will make me happy? Any and all ideas are welcome- just write a comment.

I’ve already thought of one thing I’ll do: I’ll post the current number of unanswered emails right here. Right now the count stands at:
202 unanswered mails (10:30 PM, Aug. 14)
214 unanswered mails (8:15 AM, Aug. 15) – Yikes, that’s what I get for going to bed :o)
172 unanswered mails (10:01 AM, Aug. 15)
100 unanswered mails (11:10 AM, Aug. 15) (WOO-HOO!)
67 unanswered mails (11:57 AM, Aug. 15)
43 unanswered mails (2:22 PM, Aug. 15)
17 unanswered mails (3:23 PM, Aug. 15)
5 unanswered mails (3:34 PM, Aug. 15)
0 unanswered mails (3:50 PM, Aug. 15) WOOOO-HOOOOOOOOO!!!

Phew, I made it. Tomorrow I’ll be posting on my strategy and on what tips I used or didn’t use.

And please don’t let this post hold you back from sending me email – I would LOVE to hear from you. And my inbox suddenly looks so… barren :o)