Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by people who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.
– Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his excellent book Let My People Go Surfing
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Does he or doesn’t he?
Some of Fred Gratzon’s readers refuse to believe his claim that he’s the laziest man in North America. If he is, then how could he have created two successful multi-million dollar businesses? Fred’s answer is classic:I did not do it with hard work. I did not do it by busting my butt. I did it by having fun – so much fun that people were attracted to that fun. I then picked the most competent attractees to be on my team and off we went. Whatever “hard work??? there might have been, I had long since turned into a game and we had fun “playing??? it.
Read Fred’s post – it’s excellent.
That’s a blueprint for happiness at work and success right there! I agree 100% and wrote a post a while back on why laziness is the major force behind my success and happiness. Also read my review of Fred’s brilliant book The Lazy Way To Success.
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How to make yourself happy at work: Attention, Intention, Action
So you want to be happy at work. What should you do?
There are certainly enough things on the menu. Should you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Or maybe the Getting Things Done system is right for you. You could focus on Personal Excellence or develop Brand You. Is coaching what you need? Or to learn to coach others? Assertiveness? Maybe some anti-stress training. Or some conflict mediation. Career counselling? Or developing your communication skills, your presentation skills or your…
The options are almost endless and most of them are even pretty good. But it’s better to start somewhere else. With something even simpler. Something more basic.
The best model I know for creating positive, effective change is attention, intention, action. And in the case of happiness we have to it positively, so the model becomes:
- Positive attention – notice what’s already good and what has worked previously
- Positive intention – make a positive intention that focuses on what you want more off, not what you want to avoid
- Positive action- do something positive to fulfill your intention
Let’s starts with attention.
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Monday tip: Take five
Work has become quite hectic for most of us. Emails, phone calls, meetings, deadlines, questions, customers all vie for our attention. If we want time for reflection and calm at work we have to create it for ourselves. That’s the point of this Monday Tip.Your mission: Take five. At some point during the day, take five uninterrupted, quiet minutes to relax. Here’s how it works:
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About the Happy at Work Book
About the book
The book aims to convince you that:
- Each and every one of us can be happy at work
- Being happy at work will not only make work more fun, it will also improve your quality of life outside of work and make you more successful
- Happy businesses are much more efficient than unhappy ones so happiness makes great business sense
- Happiness at work is not rocket science – what it takes to make yourself and your workplace happy is simple to do
Structure
The book is structured around the three basic questions we must remember to ask about any important topic:
- What – What is happiness at work anyway
- Why – Why does happiness at work matter to you and me and to our workplaces?
- How – So, how exactly can we make ourselves and others happy at work. What works, what doesn’t?
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Selling by giving
I was asked by Paul Thornton to contribute to a booklet he’s writing called How to Succeed in Today’s Business World. Paul wanted to know the best piece of business advice I’ve ever received.This is what I submitted:
One day, quite by accident, I found an article on the internet by some crazy Lithuanian guy called Andrius Kulikauskas. As if his name wasn’t strange enough in itself, the article examines what it would mean to give everything away.The premise of the article was this:
I accept the idea that I should give everything away.
The challenge is to put this into practice. This is a design problem for personal life and social economy. We can venture attempts and draw experience from them.
My intent is to clarify the problem and offer solutions, especially by documenting ideas that have proven helpful in giving everything away.
This sparked the idea of selling through giving, and that has been the single most efficient and fun sales tool I have ever tried. In every single sales situation I face, I ask myself this question: What can I give?
It’s clear that I can’t give everything away. I couldn’t make a living if I did.
But I repeatedly and reliably find that the more I give away, the more I get back. That my sales results are directly proportional to my generosity.
Not to mention the fact that approaching any situation with an intent to give is much more fulfilling, natural and fun, making “selling by giving” not only more efficient but also more – dare I say it – giving.
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Work less achieve more
The idea that working more does not necessarily mean achieving more, and that we need to end the cult of overwork, seems to be cropping up all over the place these days.
Here are a few great, recent sightings.
Fred Gratzon lists the Top 10 signs you’re made to be an entrepreneur, including “You are unemployable” and “You have the uncanny ability to get other people to do all the work”.
In Spend less time working, get more done Adam Wiggins follows up on my post on why seat time does not equal productivity. Excellent!
Impact of overtime on productivity is on overwork in software development, but applies to all fields.
A common effect of putting teams under pressure is that they will reduce their concentration on quality and focus instead on “just banging out code”. They’ll hunker down, stop helping each other so much, reduce testing, reduce refactoring, and generally revert to just coding.Interview with vacation advocate Joe Robinson
What is a gross national product when you don’t have a life? A few years ago, the Norwegians found that they were 14 percent more productive than we [Americans] are. So they elected to take more time off.Tom Hodgkinson tears apart some recent bad business books
The books under review recommend all sorts of immoral actions. In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch’s Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover – despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate.
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Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong
When the customer isn’t right – for your business
One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.
She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’
In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
- Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
- Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.
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Monday tip: Five things that made you happy at work today
This monday tip is about reminding yourself what’s good about your job.Your monday mission: Today before you go home, grab a piece of paper and write down five things that made you happy at work today. Big or small, doesn’t matter, as long as it made your day a little better. Meat loaf day at the cafeteria. Making a deadline. Talking to a co-worker. Anything.
Make the list just before you leave work. If you can’t come up with five items for the list, that’s fine, write down as many as you can. If you can’t think of a single one, then either it’s been a bad day, or it’s time to look for a new job :o)
Why is this a good thing? Well, let’s say you’ve had ten good experiences at work today and one bad one. If you go home, thinking only of the bad one, you will remember this as a bad day. It will even feel as a bad day. And most people do have a tendency to remember negative experiences better than positive ones. This makes it a good idea to take extra care to remember good experiences, eg. by writing them down.
The Chief Happiness Officer’s monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.
