I did a talk about this on Thursday night, as I wrote about in macinhome.com – Living Extraordinary. It’s something I’m quite passionate about.
I believe that your Mac, your iPhone, your gadgets, and your online presence these days are incredibly dynamic and powerful tools for designing your life. Achieving reality results that help you build a company or live the life you want to live. Results like: I connected with mom. I closed the sale. I booked the meeting. They signed my contract. I watched the movie in HD.
You get the idea.
The mistake I see people make quite often is they learn by doing and don’t usually re-evaluate. They learn by necessity just what they need to know in order to do their work then settle into a very productive… comfort zone. Once they get there, they want to keep things running smoothly and not rock the boat. I even had someone tell me that once:
“I recognize that better is possible, and I recognize that things are not optimal, but I don’t want to tip the apple cart. I prefer to keep limping along as I am now, because I know how everything works.” (I made sure he was aware of his pun.)
If there’s a problem, it’s a big urgent problem because their work has stopped. And: “no, I do not have time to learn the fix right now.”
I want to remind people of their big awesome ambitious goals. Or even their medium-sized exciting projects. I want to help people see how constant learning and self-improvement in using their technology tools can help make those things happen faster.
If you are approaching technology with a problem focus; solving the problem, band-aids, reparation, resuming status quo – you’re spending money just to maintain the productive comfort zone.
I believe that in order to constantly strive for better it’s critical to lock onto the reality result you’re after in life or work and tirelessly seek new options. Then, you can custom tailor a hardware, software, internet service, learning, and documentation solution to help achieve the results more easily.
The meeting is booked. How technology makes that happen doesn’t really matter as long as it’s simple and fast. Example solution: While talking on your hands free headset, just turn your iPhone sideways to see your iCal week at a glance and find the open spot, then press and hold your finger in the spot you want to add the appointment. You can add an invitee as well so they get the email.
The proposal is received by my client. The keyboard shortcuts, Mail setup, Pages or Word layout skills, email attachment settings, PDF export, sending server – all of these are steps and tools to achieve the desired result.
The sale is closed and signed. Everything can be digital for this. Phone calls, SignNow for legally binding digital document signing, iPads with Keynote presentations, Dropbox and DropDAV syncing files and PDFs from Mac to iPhone, all the training and documentation for not only making it possible but also troubleshooting any little issues that come up… Sales just happen more quickly with less effort.
When you approach consulting with the reality goal and result improvement focus, you can’t go wrong. If you set up the wrong software solution you’ll know right away because the result is harder to achieve – not easier. Then you can just fix it with a new solution and make sure results are actually achieved more easily, with feedback from the client as the final indicator.
The easier and faster reality results are achieved, the better the life you can design for yourself.
