What's Your Special Sauce? #touchthefuture

The other day, I found myself trapped inside on a treadmill during my morning run.  

Any one of you who runs knows that this can be devastating and mind-numbing. Typically, I find this to be the perfect time to tune into a good audio-book or podcast or blast AC/DC, but this day my gurgling stomach wanted to watch the cooking channel. 

Check out Christa McAuliffe Academy and their #touchthefuture campaign

And this one Italian boisterous chef kept talking about his secret special sauce to make the spaghetti sauce notevole. 

I never ended up making the spaghetti for dinner, yet kept thinking about how it only takes one simple ingredient to make a leader unique and potentially remarkable. (Tweet this!)

Every day, I come across creative people who want to step outside the doldrum of their work or school and engage in their creative juice.

They want to be remarkable. And my guess is you do to. But, being remarkable doesn't have to be overwhelming.

Too many people start a project, begin a new class, or write down an extraordinary goal only to find a hundred other people doing it much better than they can. 

How many times did you add a new mind-blowing project in September only to regret it come December? (Tweet this!)

It's normal to want to stop here and be overwhelmed, thinking "I can't do that!". 

So, here's the key. Put away Google, stop looking outside and look deep within. Find your Yoda. Find your special sauce. 

Mastery comes from practice and we all can become experts. After a certain point, however, we all start to branch into our own niche and it's the special sauce that makes us extraordinary. 

We all can be good at something, but to be great - you have to reflect, dig deep into who you are, and harness the uniqueness that makes you you. 

Here are 2 tips to find your special sauce and once you do, you'll see what makes you unique. 

Start Journaling

Okay, you're probably thinking…what!!? Just listen for a minute. Pick up a moleskin journal (because they're cool) or open up an Evernote notebook and write in it for 5 minutes a day. Choose either the first 5 minutes or the last 5 minutes of your day. 

Forget complete sentences. Use words, or bullet points if you want. Do what Kerouac would do and just separate your thoughts by dashes. 

Write about whatever is on your mind. Write about your memories and what they make you think about. You’ll want to stop when you begin to write about really personal stuff, but push through. Don’t worry about who will read it and if this fear does stop you, just rip it up, burn it, or delete the file after you finish writing.

Memories possess a power many people fail to harness. They cause us to act a certain way and many never reflect on them to learn one's own thought process. 

Reflecting like this helps you find your drive. What makes you tick. Once you find what makes you tick, you may just find your special sauce.                                                  

Be Zen like Steve Jobs

Many don't know, but Steve Jobs practiced zen meditation. It's one of the few key influencers that brought the simple and beautiful designs behind Apple products. 

Steve found that, through zen meditation, he harnessed the energy to find his special sauce. In a rare peak into the younger days of Steve Jobs, when he would practice zen rigorously, he once said,

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use." (Tweet this!)

Completing a remarkable goal means breaking it apart and going step-by-step or else you'll be normal and stop, say okay, "I give up" to your fear. 

So, try it. Instead of just stopping, sit down and look inside your self. Pick up the journal and talk to yourself about it. Or sit and just listen to your breath. As David Life once taught me, breath in and think the word "Let" and breath out and think the word "go". 

Eventually, you'll start to fly, then throw a big party and cook your own spaghetti dinner. 

Please, leave a comment below. What's your special sauce? 

Arianna Said to Take a Nap: Lessons on Productivity at The Huffington Post

 This past week, I had the chance to meet Arianna Huffington for a few moments at #Inbound13 where she spoke to us about effective leadership.

My goal is to share a few of her key points with you today.

As a global leader, Arianna Huffington has the unique ability to influence real movers and shakers – people like you who are leading the next generation of leaders. Her words and advice are like the books we listened to as children. They act as a guide.

Now, to give you a perspective of how hard Arianna Huffington works, she once worked so hard that she eventually fell over from exhaustion and cracked her jaw on her desk – leading to an array of stitches and recovery time. Ouch!

I’d rather not have that happen to you, especially because it’s far too easy to be overworked and eventually burned out in the education system.

Here are three principles to apply to your school and be the best leader you can be, even if you disagree with Ms. Huffington’s politics.

2 Not-So-Usual Leadership Traits

1. Take a nap.

At the Huffington Post, they have two nap rooms (soon to be three) where employees go when quality work turns to mush and they need an uplift. Thirty minutes of napping – eyes shut and zonked – can create more hours of highly productive quality work.

When the Huffington Post first opened its doors, the nap room stayed vacant throughout the workday. Cultural norms make it quite clear that you should work harder and longer. Eventually, after Ms. Huffington persuaded some employees to take a nap, the cultural perception of work,work,work = burnout flew away and employees engaged in naps. Mental downtime led to coming back and producing better work in a refreshed state of mind.

It’s hard to take a nap as a leader in school. The industrial bell schedule makes this extremely difficult. “Sleeping on the job? Are you kidding me? Your Jiminy Cricket probably says.

“Are you kidding me?” is what your board would most likely say. Perhaps, however, Arianna’s permission will give you enough reason to persuade your board.

Of course, this may be unrealistic if your school runs on an industrial schedule, say 7AM -2PM every Monday through Friday. So, even though your workday may be outside those hours, best not to take a nap during school hours. Instead, tell your secretary that you are resting for 30 minutes after school hours, so that you can return a better leader at the 4pm game you promised to show up at.

2. No technology in the bedroom

It’s far too easy to work 24/7 now. Even though your school may be run from 7AM – 2PM, your work day can run all the time if you let it.

Ms. Huffington has one simple principle. Even though she runs a global media agency that depends on digital technology, she does not allow any modern technology in her bedroom. No television, no cell phone (even to recharge), no digital book reader, no nothing that requires a battery.

@ariannahuff stays unconnected during rest time, because rest time is for rest. Rest is priority. The cell phone can wait till after breakfast.(Tweet this!)

The best leaders recognize quality over quantity. Sounds easy, yet in a culture that favors more, more, more, it’s not easy to lead your team to rest.

From Cruft to Useful Stuff

From Cruft to Useful Stuff

As physicists in the 1800s at Harvard worked on projects before the influx of new technology, they began to pile up any old equipment that grew unnecessary and annoying. Imagine a room full of tweed coats and wiry gray hair with piles of equipment grown rusty on the windowsill and you get the picture of what became known as ‘cruft’.

Today, techies and programmers work to remove ‘cruft’ - the unnecessary - by removing crufty annoyances like old code and old software to make your experience of viewing this website, for instance, much better. 

Step out of the techie world and into many schools and cruft has begun to fill the windowsill.

It's cruft that causes teachers, parents, and school leaders to become overwhelmed when new technology is added to the curriculum. To avoid this burnout, school's need to throw out a lot of cruft and focus on one long-term technology integration curriculum that ties in all stakeholders.

It's impossible to try to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest and it's a bit too exhausting for teachers to try to learn new technology when a school replaces the programs every three years. 

For technology integration to work, all stakeholders in a student's education need to be involved. Think holistic and try to pull motivation from multiple streams to get students, parents, teachers, and school leaders all on board to use the technology.

Think beyond the student. Who else needs to be motivated to use this technology? 

If the ultimate goal is to get students to use the technology to enhance learning, then consider motivating more than just the student. How can the technology help improve the lives of teachers, parents, and school leaders? 

When all of these stakeholders invest time in learning the technology because it helps them, it makes it far easier for them to want to share this helpful technology with the students. Cruft becomes useful stuff. On top of improving the quality of life for parents and teachers, this modeling shows students how the skills we are teaching them are being used in the "real world". 

Consider sharing a few digital literacy tips for students and parents on the school's website. For instance, share a program like Evernote as a super-easy way to help students (and parents, school leaders, and teachers) organize their bookbags. With Evernote, students can search for any notes, including photographs with words, to find anything. It makes that super-messy book bag appear neat and organized even for the most disorganized students. And of course, it's free. 

The goal aims to get as many as possible excited to benefit from the school's technology integration (Tweet this!). Ask yourself, is the community using this? Are businesses using this? Will employers ask students to use this? Will this help students be entrepreneurial?

Think evergreen. Right now, Google is an evergreen example of a digital-literacy platform that students, businesses, and the community use. Many education companies fail to realize this and provide edu-programs to schools that are great for learning, but not necessarily tools that students will be able to use after graduation. 

Consider thinking quality over quantity. It's overwhelming to think that schools are responsible for jamming everything a student will ever need to know into the school curriculum. How silly to think that twelve years of schooling should fill a life’s worth of  education. Instead, successful school leaders think about creating life-long learners - students who will be able to build an engine instead of operate it, find any information when they need it, and have the yearning desire to grow like an evergreen.

For many schools, the products are there. We just have to show how everyone can benefit from using them. 

What do you think? What software or programs do you use that students, parents, and school leaders can all benefit from?