Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 19 - Don't Be a Fool

In this podcast episode, the host discusses the concept of "sharpening the saw" and shares a personal dream experience. The dream involved the host prioritizing trivial things like changing clothes and putting on makeup over catching a flight to an important meeting. The host reflects on how often we sacrifice what truly matters for things that don't add value to our goals. The host emphasizes the importance of making wise choices and focusing on the things that bring the most value to our lives. The host also references Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, particularly the idea of sharpening oneself. The story of a man cutting down trees without sharpening his saw is used as an analogy to highlight the need for self-care and personal growth. The host encourages listeners to take time to reflect on their actions and ensure they are pursuing the right goals. Sharpening the saw in a professional context involves investing in education, seeking mentorship, and nurturin Hello, hi, welcome to this week's instalment of the Dirty Chai Podcast with me, your host, Chiyo. The podcast where we focus on holistic personal and professional success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today we're talking about Stephen Covey's concept of sharpening the saw, but with my own take on it, a company that is a nightmare I had last night that I also want to talk about. So in the dream, in this very unpleasant dream, I was traveling with the CEO and the CFO of our company. It's something that happens regularly, so it's not a shocking thing that I would dream about it. So we're traveling somewhere for work. As you know with dreams, some details are not specific and other details are overly specific. So we're traveling somewhere for work. We get to the airport. For some reason, my friend Aziza is at the airport conducting an interview with a celebrity. Let's leave that aside. What's important is we knew what time the plane was leaving. We were checked in, and then I decided I didn't like the dress I was wearing. And for some reason, I was able to, while we were waiting to get onto the plane, dash off somewhere and change my dress into this flowery, not flowery, flowy, tulle, yellow number. Right? In real life, I don't even like yellow, so I don't know what was happening. But anyway, so I put on this yellow, summery, light, Disney-like dress, but it's like a tea dress. I come back. As I said to you earlier, in dreams, some details are weirdly specific and others don't matter at all. I come back, and now we are boarding the plane. And then I realized I didn't put on any makeup. And I think I would like to put on at least a little bit of makeup. For some reason, I'm able to jump off the plane and run to my room to go and get the things I need for a quick to-go makeup phase. Here's the thing. As I get off the plane, I am aware that the meeting that we're going to is not one I can miss. Right? So I'm aware of what it would mean if I were to miss the flight going to get these things. But I still make the dash, right? I still dash off to try and get the makeup. And I get it, and I don't even get a chance to put it on because I'm stressed about what I might lose. And then I'm running back. And as I'm running back, I see one of the onboarding staff, and they say, weren't you on flight number mung-mung? And they say the number very specifically. And I know this number. And I said, yes. And they said, oh, it just taxied. It just taxied off. And I look out those big windows at Ouattambo, and I see the plane taxiing off without me. And I realize, oh, my God, I have missed that meeting. This is a career-limiting move. And then I start thinking, oh, my God, can I get another plane? Can I get another ticket? Can I still get there on time? What can I do? Is there any way you can stop the plane? And as all of this is happening, I also have the realization that the makeup didn't matter that much, that the dress didn't matter that much. And what I realize is sometimes we leave the goal that matters to go and chase little things that would be nice to have but do not add any real value to the goal that we're trying to get. In fact, the thought that I woke up, the thought that terrorized me really, the nightmare in the dream was waking up and realizing I would have forfeited that makeup for the plane to stop and allow me to get back on, which means that that makeup never mattered that much in the first place. And yet I took such a big risk. And I thought to myself, how many times do we sacrifice the thing that matters most? Whether professionally or personally in pursuit of a thing that we would later, if we were to lose the thing that we are actually pursuing, the thing that we would for forfeit entirely and easily in order to get back the chance that we already had. We need to be wise. We need to be discerning. We need to be present in choosing the things that we are chasing so that we choose the things that add the most value to our lives. Most of the time, I know that you can't always make the right choice 100% of the time, but the goal is to make the right choice as often as possible and certainly to make the choice that brings the most value. We talked last week about how 80% of results come from 20% of the actions that what I did there was forfeit an action that would give me 80% of the result for an action that would give me less than 1% return. In that meeting, as with all meetings that I typically attend, whether I'm wearing makeup or not really doesn't matter. And yet I prioritized it to such an extent that I lost the opportunity that would contribute 80% to my success. It's interesting that that is my definition of a nightmare, but it really got me thinking and I woke up feeling acutely unsettled and deeply grateful that it was a dream, but it just had me reassessing some of the things that I've been doing lately and checking to make sure that I'm not missing the flight that takes me to my 80% to go and fetch a 20% that doesn't matter. While I was thinking about that, I thought of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but particularly the habit number seven, which is sharpen your soul. And habit number seven speaks to keeping the tools that you're working with sharp. And he has a particular take on it. And I'm going to go slightly left field or slightly specific or slightly use a different lens on the same topic. So let's start with one of the stories that he tells in support of the idea of sharpening your soul. He talks about how a man is hired to cut down trees. He is given a sharp saw and he is told to cut down as many trees a day as he possibly can. He gets paid per tree. Then the man gets the saw, he heads off into the forest. On the first day, he works super hard and he cuts down 80 trees. Brilliant job. The next day, same. Next day, same. After a couple of weeks, he works just as hard, but he's only able to cut down 70 trees. A week later, he's working just as hard, but he's only able to cut down 60. What's wrong? Right, says the owner. I'm not sure. Let me work a little bit harder. And so the man starts waking up earlier, putting in more hours, working even harder to try and get this thing right. And the result is he's cutting down even less. Now he's cutting down 40 trees. What is going on? But now instead of the normal eight hours, he's putting in 10, 12 hours, but he's still cutting down less and less every day. And then the owner says to him, did you sharpen the saw after I gave it to you? No, he sharpened the saw. And he says, I don't have time to sharpen the saw. I need to get on with the cutting, otherwise I won't cut the number of trees I need to cut. When you tell the story that way, it sounds ridiculous that a person loses sight of the fact that the sharpness of the saw contributes to the quality of the output and the quantity of the output. But that's what happens to most of us today. A lot of us will not pause to take care of ourselves, will not pause to breathe, will not pause to figure out how to be mindful, will not pause to figure out whether we're going in the right direction because we are too busy going. The reason why the illustration of working really hard but not necessarily achieving anything is a hamster running in a circle is because it's the perfect illustration. It looks and feels like a lot of work, but when you take a step back from inside the hamster wheel, it looks and feels like a lot of work and a lot of activity that is taking you somewhere. But when you take a quick step outside, when you look at it objectively from the side, you see the hamster just running in the same spot in a circle that goes round and round and not producing anything different and anything new. When Stephen Covey puts this idea forward, he is talking about your ability to take care of the four key aspects of your well-being, your spiritual, your personal, your physical, and your mind. We've talked about those things before. Today, I want to talk particularly about your mind. When you're at work, it is absolutely vital that you work out the things that make you the most productive. You see, you must never let the narrative of being busy because we worship being busy. We worship being hectic. We worship being under pressure, so much so that sometimes we don't pause to dissect why we're so busy, why we're so under pressure, whether the things that we are doing that are keeping us so busy and under pressure are worthwhile. You see, leadership of the self and even leadership of others is the ability to take time from time to time to step back and say to yourself, yes, I'm going up a ladder, but is the ladder against the right wall? And that is very important. Is the ladder against the right wall? Are you pursuing the right goal? And so many of us do not leave time to sharpen our acts in that particular way. So many of us do not leave time to ask the big questions, the directional questions. We simply want to get on with the doing because that gives us the instant gratification and the instant relief of feeling like we are doing something and we are progressing in a particular direction. But what I want to leave you with today is don't miss the flight to your 80% because you've dashed off to get a 20% because you're in the mire of busy and you can't think clearly. As far as your professional growth, maybe even personal, but mostly your professional growth, sharpening the sword looks like continuing to invest in your education, continuing to invest in your professional growth. In other words, making time to seek out mentorship, continuing to invest in the relationships that may form into sponsorships. It's continuing to show up as your fullest, most authentic self instead of being swept up in the narrative of what everyone should be feeling in a particular company. It's so important, particularly to understand that if you're standing still, you're not staying the same level of skilled. What I mean by that is when you enter a company and you have a certain skill set, right, and you have that same skill set unchanged five years from now, you haven't stood still professionally. You've actually experienced something called negative growth because the value of your offering as the world around you progresses, reduces. What you want to do is to stay on top of what is current in your field. You want to pay attention to what's developing. What has AI done for your field in particular? For example, the modern story and the modern change, this fourth industrial revolution is bringing us many things, but one of those is AI. Have you paid any attention to what AI will do for your field? Have you tried to understand how your skill set and AI can work together? Have you tried to understand how it can add value to you and how you can use it to better your offering? That's what sharpening your soul professionally looks like. It looks like getting mentorship so that where you're not able to say to yourself, stop, don't go and get the makeup and miss the flight, your mentor is able to say, stop, don't go get the makeup and miss your flight. That's what it means to sharpen your soul in the professional sense. What I would say to people who can help you look, help you observe what you are doing and help you make judgment calls that matter to you pursuing the 80 versus achieving the 20 and wishing you had gone for the 80 is assessing whether you are in the right place to nurture you. There's a thing that goes around social media about how if a flower is dying or something like that, you don't throw away the flower, you change its environment. That's a great metaphor for your brain and for your mind and for your mindset in professional settings. If you find you're not doing well, do you just continue working hard and running around that wheel like a hamster or do you stop and assess what is the problem? Do I not have water? Do I not have fertilizer? Am I not getting enough sunlight and what are those things and where can you get them from? Should you be walking to the HR office or to your mentor's office? Should you be walking to a training course? Should you be walking to a book to read it? You need to give yourself time. You need to create time to pause, think and take in the macro picture. People like Bill Gates are known for having think week. Think week is when Bill Gates goes away with a ton of books, he can't be reached, all he's doing at that place of his is thinking. He takes time to pause, take a step back and reassess what has happened over the year and work out whether this is the right direction, what other thought leaders are saying, whether he should be going that way, whether he should be adapting that viewpoint, how that viewpoint applies to his company and then he returns revived with fresh ideas and he takes the company in the direction that he thinks is best and that has worked swimmingly as far as I can tell. But the point is even if Bill Gates, even a person like Bill Gates understands what it means to pause because you need to pause. If you're busy, your brain is also busy. You need to pause and think. Am I going in the right direction? Am I making the right choice? And when you're going through this thought process, think about it from a macro level. Is my ladder against the right wall? Think about it on a micro level. Are the decisions that I'm making on a day to day basis leading me towards the macro goal that I want? Am I generally headed in the right direction? It does not need to be perfect. You just need to be scoring high on the right answers. You will get some things wrong from time to time. That is life. There will be times when you make the poorer choice. That is okay. All that is required to win at life, truth be told, is for you to just do your best and try to score right most of the time and that is entirely achievable. Today's idea is not overly complex. I don't need a thousand words and I feel that the ones I've said are sufficient to get the idea across and to get the point across and I hope that you find some value in the nightmare that I had and in Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Effective People. Have a great week and create something. Thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, please like, share, subscribe.