Monday, January 02, 2006

How I set New Years Resolutions - let them stew.

Today will be a regular work day for me except I will take a couple of hours off for a long slow run. I took most of Saturday and Sunday off. I have been letting my New years resolutions stew this weekend. One of my friends, Ric Asselstine, and author, entrepreneur, professor writes about letting ideas stew:

"You ever heard of chile or chile con carnie (did I spell that right?). Anyway, here's the drill... Cook chile in the morning and serve it at noon. How's it taste? Exactly,..... not bad. Now, cook it in the morning and serve it that night (or the next day for lunch for that matter) and how does it taste?

Exactly!!! It tastes awesome. Same thing with:
a) ideas we have
b) talks we give
c) essays we write
d) letters we write
e) tough decisions we have to communicate
f) blogs we want to post...

Point is, if we let them simmer - get started and let it sit for a while, let our thoughts distill.... if we let things incubate (which is the formal term to "ideation" which is what we are really talking about here), our end product (no matter what that end product is) is almost always guaranteed to be better."

I use Ric's idea (but vegetarian of course). I plant the seeds of ideas and let them incubate and grow.

Today will be a highly productive day. I am heading into a fairly aggressive travel period so need to prepare for that. Deadline pressure never hurts. But most importantly, I have also started enough on my resolutions that they have been “stewing” and are ready.

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