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The annoying habits of highly effective people

economist.com

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Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#11

Post by weberc2 »

What a strange, disappointing article. I was expecting trends in annoying behavior, but this was just some low-grade complaining about rich people. And I'm not complaining about people complaining about rich people, I'm complaining about the poor quality of the complaints:

- Richard Branson once said that he didn't like when people were late, but Virgin's trains aren't very timely

- Tim Cook would probably be just as successful if he got up three hours later (opines the writer)

- General fear mongering about the dangers of executives like Jobs and Zuckerberg wearing the same attire every day

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#12

Post by bcheung »

mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Early rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job.

The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#15

Post by giobox »

bcheung wrote: post #12
mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Early rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job. The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.

Is the idea that working on your “important goals” in the first few hours after waking is more effective an evidence based opinion?

I can’t imagine myself performing my best at any task I do the first two hours after waking, and that certainly seems to be the case for almost all of my colleagues too, if early AM meetings are any indicator.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#16

Post by keyle »

mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Yep, and as an example of billionaire... Notch is a night owl and rolls out of bed pretty much at any hour and he did alright with Minecraft...

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#18

Post by PhilWright »

throwaway82729 wrote: post #6
phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

I don't think it's helpful to copy what they do as CEO. I look for what they did in their lowest paying job and how they changed as they progressed in their careers. Of course, very few autobiographies cover this.

Great point. Telling us how the CEO operates day to day now when they are the finished product is not helpful in understanding how they became that person. A step by step description of their career would be more useful. How did they get every promotion, how much was luck by being in the right place and how much from hard work and talent. What were the thinking and strategies they used along the way.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#19

Post by toomuchtodo »

jjoonathan wrote: post #4
phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

Same appeal as any other type of cargo-culting: it's a lot easier to get up at 5am, shake hands firmly, and dress for success than it is to spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct.

> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct.

Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#20

Post by jessaustin »

phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies.

We can't assume that book sales perfectly represent public interest in the books sold. Anytime someone who is very well-compensated in fields other than writing has an inexplicably successful book, we have to wonder how many of those books ever touched a reader's hands. Publishers just want to sell books; they don't care if lots of them are sold to a CEO-author as some sort of vanity project.

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