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In January, I spent 30 hours in meetings nudging. Influencing a decision or direction by contributing my own viewpoint to the discussion. Selling an idea. Selling a solution.

The list is long of how you can become more influential. A simple start could be to become more likeable. The more you like someone, the more you will be persuaded by them.

Remember, when dealing with people, we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion.

“Winning friends begins with friendliness.” says Dale Carnegie.

Here are timeless tips for becoming more likeable.

• Smile. A smile says "I like you." You make me happy. I am glad to see you. It costs nothing, but creates much.
• Become genuinely interested in other people. We like people who admire us. We are interested in others when they are interested in us. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view. There is a reason why they think and act as they do.
• Remember the name (and some facts). The bigger a company gets, the colder it becomes. One way to warm it up is to remember people's names. A person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Give people a chance to talk. Let them finish. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.
• Talk in terms of the other person's interests. The road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she likes most.
• Always make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

What do you do to become more likable?

Incentives send signals. Unfortunately, too often there is a conflict between what you say and what your incentives signal.

• You encourage teamwork, but incentivize individual success.
• You say you value autonomy, but punish deviation.
• You want innovation, but reward predictability.
• You talk about empoweremnet, but override decisions.

An incentive is a tool used to motivate people to do something they would not do otherwise. It can be used as a solution to a problem. We can use it to better understand why people do what they do.

When you push people to increase one dimension of their output, you can create unintended effects on the other dimensions.

You need to make sure what you incentivize is indeed what you want to encourage because sometimes incentives achieve the opposite of what they were designed for.

Such as the fine introduced to discourage parents from being late picking up kids in the kindergarten, that actually promoted late pickups. Before the policy, parents felt bad when they arrived late. Now parents could just pay to avoid the feeling of guilt.

You need to understand the psychology behind the incentives to make them work.

For instance, we have a tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than to wait for a larger one in the future. The idea is simple: "now" is very strong and hard to resist.

With behavior change, the costs are now; the benefits are in the future. Therefore, make the incentive not too far in the future. If someone changes their behavior in the desired direction, give them an immediate reward.

My eight key takeaways from Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke.

1. You need a method of setting and achieving goals, which is what OKRs are. But it's tempting to just try to apply the OKR technique, without giving people the freedom and trust to figure out how to achieve them.
   
   
2. You can't just set up goals and hope they happen. Willpower is not enough. You have to execute against them as a team. You need a cadence that keeps you on track. A plan to get things done.
   
   
3. Objective is what you want to do. Key Results are how you know if you have achieved them. They keep the objectives real. You create them by asking, "How would we know if we met our objective?"
   
   
4. Only have one Objective with three Key Results. Focus is hard, but it's necessary. OKRs don't work if you stuff them full of every single business-as-usual initiative you have going. And don't try to jam years of work into a single quarter.
   
   
5. But running a business, a product, or a team takes work all by itself. So what about everything else we have to do? They don't need OKRs, as they are not regularly looking for radical improvements. You monitor the OKRs while tracking the things you want to protect while shooting for the moon.
   
   
6. In a big organization not everyone will lead; some will support. You don't need an OKR for every department. We can't all be the hero of the story. Give respect to supporting folks.
   
   
7. We value the things we make together. Set your Objectives and pick your Key Results together as a team.
   
   
8. The farther we predict into the future, the less accurate our predications become. But without a long-term goal, it's hard to make long-term plans and move from reactive to strategic. We solve this by having a specific goal for the near future, and lightweight drafts for the less knowable far future.

A focused goal. Inspiring and measurable. Tracked regularly. That's the core of OKRs.

Clear thinking

There is nothing stronger than biological instincts hardwired within us. They control us often without us even knowing.

For instance, like all animals, we are naturally prone to defend our territory.

Territory can also be psychological. When someone criticizes our work, status, or how we see ourselves, we stop listening and go on the attack. We instinctively defend ourselves.

We react without thinking.

We have a set of defaults that our brains will automatically execute when triggered unless we stop and take the time to think.

The emotion default.

We tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. Emotions can drive us away from clear thinking. Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero.

Sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, emotion, distraction, stress from feeling rushed, and being in an unfamiliar environment. If you find yourself in any of these conditions, be on your guard.

The ego default.

Our ego can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We get a bit of knowledge on the internet and suddenly everything seems easy.

When someone steps on how we see ourselves, or how we want to be seen, the ego leaps into action, and we often react without reasoning. The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.

The social default.

We fall in line with an idea or behavior simply because other people do. The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others.

We want to belong to the crowd. We fear being an outsider. It comes from our history. Survival inside the tribe was hard but survival outside the tribe was impossible. Our individual interests became secondary to the group interests.

The inertia default.

We resist change even when it is for the best. Keeping things the way they are requires almost no effort.

The inertia default leverages our desire to stay in our comfort zone, or the "zone of average", relying on old processes and standards even when they are no longer optimal. It's the point where things are working well enough that we don't feel the need to make any changes.

Groups create inertia of their own. Group dynamics end up favoring people who don't deviate from the defaults. People are rewarded for maintaining status quo.

Protect yourself from yourself

We can't eliminate our defaults. But we can reprogram them into forces for good. We need to learn to manage them. Which defaults do you struggle with the most? How do you think clearly? Which tools do you use to protect yourself from yourself?

"Clear thinking" by Shane Parrish

What do we mean by Excellence?

Is it a grand aspiration or a destination at which we arrive one glorious day? No. Excellence is not a finish line. It's a way of being.

I believe we are what we repeatedly do, and therefore, excellence is not an act but a habit. It isn't complicated. Just hard.

Few of us can watch a video or get something explained and then know how to do it. We have to do it several times to absorb it. If it doesn't become a part of us we lose it the second we experience difficulty.

Don't focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

For example, "Prioritization is so hard.", many say. To become great at it we should do it more than once a year then.

Unfortunately, the harder a thing is, the less often we do it.

Find the painful things you want to become extremely good at, and start practicing them. Deliberate repetitions with feedback. Outside your comfort zone.

Working with a master firsthand is one of the best educations. Learn from people who've done it before at a higher level than you. Apprenticeships have existed for centuries, helping people develop skills and transfer knowledge across generations.

You unconsciously adopt the thoughts, attitudes, behaviors and standards of the people around you. The master's excellence demands your excellence. Their standards become what you measure yourself against.

Is excellence the pursuit of perfection then? No. To be excellent in some areas, you must let others go. Know when to push for the very best and when to settle for good enough.

Over time, the habits you build become your culture, and your culture becomes your excellence.

What is excellence for you?