January 17th, 2012 — 5:30am
When you are creating something, like a business, an invention, or a screenplay, you don’t know the hourly rate you’re working for. It could be negative, it could be higher than any reasonable salary.
Monty didn’t know the hourly rate he was working for when he started creating MySQL in 1995. I guesstimate he spent at least 26,000 hours coding MySQL before he sold it to Sun thirteen years later. That’s over 3,000 work days filled with problem solving, fatigue, doubts, and no guarantees.
On top of that, Monty was giving MySQL away as free open-source software the whole time. He saw the long view. He wasn’t playing for a paycheck at the end of the week. He lived with the risk that events out of his control might mean the long view never even came true.
In 2008 he finally knew the hourly rate. His capital gains from the sale were roughly $26 million dollars. That’s $1,000 an hour. On top of that the software he created became a staple of the Internet software world, used by Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress (including this blog), and more.
If he had approached any software company in 1995 and said “I’d like you to pay me $1,000 an hour to write database software.” would any owner have agreed to that deal? No, he had to be his own owner, take a lot of risk, and show a lot of perseverance to make that deal come true.
When you don’t limit yourself to projects with a known hourly rate, you open up a big world of possibilities.
January 16th, 2012 — 5:30am
Habit #7: Sharpen the Saw
This habit is named after the popular illustration about taking time off from woodcutting in order to sharpen the saw. Of course, this time off spent sharpening will increase the amount of woodcutting you can do in a day. This habit is about allocating a portion of your time to develop and renew yourself, so you will be more effective the rest of the time.
In practice this is a CEO taking one day a month away from the business to attend a development group. It’s a professional attending continuing education. It’s making your workday a little shorter to make room for exercise.
That’s it for my review of Covey’s book of broad and timeless wisdom. You can buy it on Amazon.
January 14th, 2012 — 5:30am
Habit #6: Synergize
When you trust the people you are interacting with…
When you believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts…
When anticipate that other people will add good things to the mix, but don’t know what those additions will be,
Then you can interact in a state of creative cooperation to bring about a result that no one person in the group could have done on their own.
This is about discovering what each person has to contribute, and connecting those contributions together into something bigger.
January 13th, 2012 — 5:30am
This is the easiest for me to explain, and the hardest for me to do.
Habit #5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
This is about listening to people and truly understanding their perspective before asking them to hear yours. It’s hard because it’s an act of giving. It requires setting aside our own needs and impulses for a while. It’s effective because everyone is better ready to listen when they feel they’ve been heard and understood. It’s wise because by listening we learn things we didn’t know before.
The second half of this is equally important. Win/win requires mutual understanding, so take your turn to speak up. But avoid the tug-of-war of two sides talking over each other by graciously accepting the role of first listener. I think this habit has huge power to turn resistance into cooperative forward motion.
January 12th, 2012 — 5:30am
Now Covey moves from the personal realm to the interpersonal.
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
This is about seeking a mutually beneficial outcome in all kinds of negotiating and interpersonal situations. The most obvious alternatives are to take advantage of the other side, or to give up too much and let the other side take advantage of you. Win/win says “If we are going to do a deal, I want a deal that’s good for both of us.”
It requires believing that the world is a place of abundance where there is plenty to go around. I don’t need to get a bigger piece of the pie than you get, or to give up my piece to you. It’s a big-pie world.
You can’t reach your goals if you give up too much, and you can’t maintain relationships if you take too much. This is about a mature balance and a creative persistence about searching for a win/win if one can possibly be found.
