What would it take to squeeze the marrow out of every waking minute?

Lisa and Dan have really got me thinking about the finite lately.

We’ll start with Dan.

Dan Blohowiak interviewed Bill Jensen recently, and in the interview, Bill pointed out that there are 1440 minutes in a day and we should stop wasting them.

I don’t want to waste my life, but what does that mean—not waste “my life”? It’s such a long-term concept that it’s difficult to get my head around. I know I don’t want to wake up at 65 and think, “I wasted my life.” Beyond that? You got me. Hell, I have a hard time thinking out past the next hour. A lot can happen in an hour.

When Bill said that we only have 1440 minutes in a day, a flip switched—I finally understood what it would take to avoid wasting my life. Not wasting my life means not wasting another minute. I can get my head around a minute. A minute is immediate. Its presence can be felt immediately and its absence can be just as immediately missed. The number of minutes in a day has more meaning than the number of hours in a day.

And then I read Lisa’s “Tip of the Day - #27”: “Lead like there’s no tomorrow”. She writes:

A coworker of mine got some pretty wicked news that she has a very aggressive form of cancer at 36 years of age. Another coworker recently lost a parent in a tragic accident. An old coworker recently lost her job when her company went belly-up.

It is a shame that it often takes events like these to snap us back to appreciating each day and living fully for the moment.

What serendipity.

I’m not going to be someone who lets life happen to them. I want to take life by the minute—and make every second count. As Lisa says, “I don’t want to live in fear for what could happen, but I do want to get better at living well, healthy, fully and for today (with an eye to the future).”

As you can see, Bill and Lisa have me asking some heady questions: Am I where I want to be? Am I spending my 1440 minutes wisely? They’ve also got me asking about my future: what I want to do with the next 5-10 years? After all, how I spend each of today’s minutes will affect the possible uses of my future minutes. In a way, you could say that the future is happening today.

Was thinking more about Pressfield’s Virtues of War. Specifically: why did Alexander die at 32? And what does the book’s title mean? In ferreting out the answers, I found a key life lessons.

First, let me review two important passages that will help answer both questions. The first passage details an encounter with a group of gymnosophists.

One of my pages, a bright lad named Agathon, was striding ahead to clear the lane, when he came upon a troupe of gymnosophists taking the sun in the public way. These declined to vacate for my passage. An altercation broke out between the boy and several vendors, who took up the cudgels on the renunciants’ behalf. A crowd fathered. By the time I arrived, a full-blown incident was in prgress. The nut of the quarrel was this: Who was the more worthy to possess the right-of-way—Alexander or the gymnosophists? As I reined-in, Agathon stood in spirited exhange with the eldest of the wise men. Indicating me, the lad declared,”This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” The philosopher replied without an instant’s hesitation, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

And the second passage is from Hephaestion, a close friend of Alexander’s, ranting at Alexander to give up conquest and return home—this comes after several years of war that has led the army thousands of miles away from home—farther than any Greek army had traveled.

“Till Persepolis I stood with you, Alexander. Wrongs done to Greece must be avenged. But we have slain Persia’s king. We have burned her capital; we have made ourselves masters over all her lands. Now what?” He gestures east, across the river. “Shall we conquer these honest yeomen next? Why? How have they harmed us? By what right do we bring war against them? Pursuit of glory? This army stopped being glorious a long time ago. Or shall we cite Achilles and say we emulate the ‘virtues of war’? Rubbish! Any virtue carried to its extreme becomes a vice. Conquest? No man can rule another. The most devoted subject will trade in an instant his wealth, earned beneath your rule, for poverty he can call his own. We had a cause. We have none now.”

I don’t think Alexander wanted to conquer the world. Rather, he had a burning need to prove himself to be the greatest warrior and general on earth, which could only be proven by defeating all other armies and their commanders. And in the end, he was never able to conquer this need to prove himself. He pushed his generals and his army too hard—to the point that they became afraid of their own success and eventually refused to continue.

Shortly after his return to Babylon, he died—died because he could not stop. His obsession with the virtues of war became his vice, and eventually destroyed him. At least, that’s my supposition.

If taken in this light, the book’s title, then, describes war (or any other undertaking of genius) as a double-edged sword: it’s virtues, if not controlled, are it’s most dangerous vices. That is, if you let the virtue of your genius define who you are, it will destroy you.

Rosa’s at it again. And, as usual, she’s hitting the nail on the head.

She’s posting more about the Daily Five Minutes. This time it’s a two part series. Today’s part focuses on the D5M from the employee’s perspective; the second part will focus on the boss’s perspective.

Now I’ve been remiss in actually telling you why I think the Daily Five is such a good idea. There are two reasons:

The first has to do with the core purpose of the Daily Five:

When your boss Takes 5 with you, the basic coaching they get from me is that the agenda for the D5M is yours, not theirs (hence Lucy’s question). They are supposed to come to you with nothing but an eagerness to talk to you, ready for some practice on being a better listener when you talk to them — about whatever you want to talk to them about.

That the employee has the opportunity to be heard and, more importantly, be understood is the key part of the Daily Five Minutes. Being understood is key, because it’s what we, as humans, really want. If your boss shows up for a Daily Five and doesn’t actively listen to you, she’s doing more damage than if she had just ignored you all day long.

Keith Ferrazzi writes a little about this in his column in inc magazine. Master Networkers, he says, can quickly create an intimacy with other folks by “allowing people to go deep into themselves”—that is, we can intimately connect with others by engaging them in an open conversation about the things that they are passionate. What’s more, this openness and intimacy are rewarded.

In this same way, a boss that takes the time to talk to her employees in a non-judgemental fashion about things the employee is passionate will be rewarded with hard-work and loyalty.

The second is a bit more practical in nature: it allows the employee and boss to connect without taking a lot of time, which gives the employee (and boss, for that matter) more time to get work done.

Anyway, quit reading my words and go read some of Rosa’s. Great stuff.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m reading Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield, and as Alexander was one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known, I’ve been thinking a lot about the qualities of a great leader. Great leadership certainly requires many of the personal qualiites that Alexander possessed: bravery, self-confidence, generosity, passion, mercy, vision, and honor.

Great leadership, though, has as much (if not more) to do with the quality of people you lead as with any of these personal qualities. If the people Alexander surrounded himself with can serve as an indicator, the right people for your company, both for startups and large corporations, is a combination of three virtues, listed in order of importance:

1. Trust. Can you trust the person? If you cannot trust the people around you, then you are not able to focus on your job at hand, and you will never create a successful company or product.
2. Passionate persistence. I’ve blogged on this before; passionate persistence is a combination of cardia, “heart”, and dynamis, “the will to fight”. In modern terms, this combination creates someone who is passionate about succeeding at what they do. They may not be the most skilled, but they will get the job done better than any other.
3. Skill. having the right skillset is a no-brainer, but is probably the least important of the three virtues. You can train someone to do a job, but you cannot change a person’s character or instill a sense of passion.

And then, once you have the right people in place,

1. Let them do their jobs. Micromanagement on any level kills passion. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t set performance expectations, but once those expectations are set, respect the boundaries, and let the person do their job.

2. Solve personnel problems quickly. Every leaders run into problems with their employees—even their best employees. In his book, *How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Carnegie details 9 principles for inspiring change in others. They are:

   1. If you must find fault, begin with praise and honesty
   2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
   3. Talk about your own mistakes first
   4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
   5. Let the other person save face
   6. Praise the slightest improvement and every improvement
   7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to
   8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct
   9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest

I’m certainly no expert on leadership—merely a student of great leaders. My thoughts, here are nothing new, but I do think they are powerful enough and important enough to warrant re-stating here.