In the United States, Thursday night launches Black Friday – the opportunity for people to start their Christmas shopping early.
While this push for early Christmas shopping creates bizarre behaviors and demonstrates some very scary aspects of our culture, I do have to applaud the value of EARLY.
While early is a struggle for lots of people, it pays to start early because it has many benefits for successful performance.
Early:
- Provides extra time for strategic thinking before doing.
- Lets you DECIDE how much time to spend on strategic thinking vs. doing.
- Allows you to get the easy stuff out of the way first to build momentum.
- Maximizes your creative and development options since the passing of time typically removes options.
- Lets you reach out and involve other people so they have adequate time to perform successfully.
- Affords you time to explore many possibilities.
- Lets you explore surprises that appear along the way toward developing what you are developing.
- Allows you to make multiple, really juicy mistakes you can learn from and improve.
- Does not force you to skip steps - unless you want to – in order to finish by the deadline.
- Gives you time to screw around and chase dead ends as you go.
- Allows you extra time on the hard stuff so you can keep the easy stuff to do until later as a reward.
- Saves time at the end to finish early and tweak what you have done.
Yup, if you can start early, it is definitely good for successful performance.
But how about spending that early shopping time actually spending time (not money) giving thanks and saving your shopping for a regular time?
Happy Thanksgiving! - Mike Brown
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