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Personal growth paradox: Doing last things first March 20, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Get Organized, Personal Growth Books.
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The more we study personal development and growth, in our efforts to improve ourselves, the more often we will encounter the advice to “put first things first.”

Stephen R. Covey, in fact, as the lead author, wrote a 370-page book on this topic, First Things First*. Co-authors are A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill.

The implication is that most of us are often tempted to do last things first.

“Last things” being those activities that are not important.   In his time management matrix Covey presents a quadrant which is now familiar to many: (1) Important and urgent (crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects)

(2) Urgent, but not important (some phone calls, some reports, some meetings)

(3) Important but not urgent (planning, relationship-building, empowerment)

(4) Not important, not urgent ((trivia, busywork ‘escape’ activities, irrelevant mail, excessive TV)

In a chapter entitled, The Urgency Addiction, Covey goes into considerable detail about how to overcome the mistake of attributing the quality of urgency to things that are actually not important; how to distinguish between the demands of the four quadrants; and how to manage our time between the four elements of the quadrant.

The book contains this insight: “Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behaviour that temporarily fills the void of unmet needs. And, instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent.”

With time pressures being so pronounced for everyone these days, we could all benefit from revisiting the ideas and solutions proposed in this book.

* First Things First, A Fireside Book, published by Simon & Schuster

Personal growth and the creative process – the challenges February 26, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Growth Books, The Creative Process, Uncategorized.
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If developing and increasing your creative capability is part of your personal growth program, disciplined work may be a better route to success than trying to cultivate “inspiration”.

In discussing the process of innovation,  Brewster Ghiselin, in his book, The Creative Process, says:

“A great deal of the work necessary to equip and activate the mind for the spontaneous part of invention must be done consciously and with an effort of will. Mastering accumulated knowledge, gathering new facts, observing, exploring, experimenting, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination, are all more or less conscious and voluntary activities. The sheer labor of preparing technically for creative work, consciously acquiring the requisite knowledge of a medium and skill in its use, is extensive and arduous enough to repel many from achievement.”

He notes that it does not matter how smart or innately creative a person may be – they still need to do the requisite work to master the fundamentals of the creative field they are interested in:

“Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression.”

If, then,  we are interested in being involved in a particular creative activity as part of furthering our personal  development potential ,we need to be prepared to put in the hard work to thoroughly learn the elements of that creative field.

Knowing this truth would help decrease the frustration many of us can feel when we embark on a “creative” pursuit but find at the start that we do not have any creative insights on the subject matter involved.

Simply put, we need to pay our dues (work) before we can reap any creative rewards.