No Bullshit: The Science of Getting Things Done

Do you want to hit your goals, work smarter, and actually feel like you’re moving forward?

Here’s what science says about creating your own reality. It takes common sense, pragmatism, and a little elbow grease.

Most people don’t fail for lack of skill. They fail for lack of consistency. Iker Aguirre

Stubborn as a mule: when rigid thinking works against you

Stanford University

Some people dig in and defend what they already believe. Others question themselves all the time. Researchers at Stanford University have names for these two mindsets. Carol S. Dweck and her teams call the first one a “fixed mindset.” They call the second one a “growth mindset.”

You might think this simply separates the stubborn from everyone else. It doesn’t.

It all starts in childhood. These mindsets are largely shaped by how we were raised. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

A fixed mindset tends to show up in children who learned to act out of fear. They grew up with artificial limits, and their first goal was to avoid failure. According to the research, those children become adults who learn less and get discouraged more. They put in less productive effort. Their results are less impressive. They set more limits on their lives, their work, and their careers. And the grand prize? They tap into less of their potential. All in all, a recipe for a pretty miserable life.

A growth mindset does the opposite. Its benefits are measurable, and they mirror everything described above.

Now, maybe you don’t change your mind easily. Maybe you’re hard to convince. In other words, maybe you’re a fixed-mindset pro. Don’t worry: there’s a cure!

We all have a dominant mindset. But according to Carol S. Dweck, we shift from one to the other depending on our path and what life is throwing at us. So once you spot your default pattern, you can change it. You can build a new habit that sticks and changes the game for good. Goodbye, fixed mindset!

Here’s the thing. People who cling to their certainties are less likely to spot opportunities. They resist change. They avoid questioning themselves. Over time, those certainties go stale. Meanwhile, others who dare to try new paths pass them by. Eventually, these people can no longer create anything new. They become masters of optimization instead. But when a system is broken, optimizing it doesn’t fix it. You just get a broken system that runs a little more smoothly.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Knowing where you’re going and thinking clearly has nothing to do with a fixed mindset. In fact, it fits perfectly with a growth mindset.

So before you read the rest of this article, ask yourself this:

Do you tend to say “no” to new ideas? Do you dislike change? Do you act to avoid risk rather than seize opportunities?

Do you answer mostly with “Yes, but…”? Are you secretly proud of being hard to convince?

If you answered “yes,” your life and your career are probably far from what they could be.

So the real question is this: are you truly happy with your results today?

If you’re not, you can create a new reality. Here are a few ideas to help you get there.

Why focus is the key to getting results

Stanford University, 2009

If you’re into time management, you’ve probably heard the story of the Big Rocks and the sand. It’s a classic. It has opened the eyes of plenty of people buried under overloaded calendars.

Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University set out to prove it scientifically. If you want to get anything meaningful done, you have to tackle your Big Rocks. And to do that, you have to get away from everything that pulls you off course.

In case you’re new to the idea: a Big Rock is an important, essential task on your plate. When it moves forward, you, your business, and your projects are better off. Sometimes survival is on the line. Now that’s a Big Rock!

And yet, how many times have you sworn you’d finally tackle your Big Rocks? Then the day ends. You got nothing done, or the project has barely moved an inch. And you’re left feeling frustrated.

When it comes to Big Rocks, there are three kinds of people.

First, there are the procrastinators. We’ll set them aside today. The only reality they create is a stressful life full of half-baked results.

Then there are the people who roll up their sleeves and attack their Big Rocks head-on. But they do it while juggling everything else the day throws at them. When they do hit their goals, it usually takes a huge amount of effort. Let’s call them Group A.

Finally, there are the Big Rock pros. They lock the door and vanish off the face of the earth for a few hours. They come back out with one less Big Rock, ready to take on the rest of the day. These are the ninjas of priority management. Let’s call them Group B.

Group A likes to be available: “My door is always open.” “You can reach me 24/7.” The Stanford researchers showed that when these people tackle a Big Rock, they get interrupted every 11 minutes on average. Add up all those interruptions and how long each one lasts, and a third of the day goes up in smoke. That’s a massive price to pay.

Every interruption forces the Group A person to drop what they’re doing. They switch over to whatever the interruption is about. They deal with it and wrap it up. Then they go back to their original task, refocus, and pick up where they left off.

It’s exhausting mental gymnastics. It leads to mistakes and projects that go nowhere. Your brain needs space to perform, and here it never gets any.

The Group B person works differently. They block off a set amount of time and let the people around them know. They lay down the ground rules: zero interruptions unless it’s a real emergency. They define what counts as a real emergency and how to reach them if one happens. With those boundaries in place, they get peace and quiet during their high-output work sessions.

Professor Clifford Nass measured the difference. Group A had more stress, more mistakes, lower efficiency, and weaker results. Group B had more free time, more mental clarity, better results, and a real sense of satisfaction with their work.

Big Rocks, yes. But first thing in the morning!

Stanford Graduate School of Business and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

J. Levav, L. Avnaim-Pesso, and S. Danziger studied how fatigue affects big decisions that require focus and willpower. To do this, they looked at rulings made by judges. The judges worked very long days, with a huge number of cases and very short hearings. Every hearing was different. Many were complex, and the stakes were high: convictions, sometimes actual prison time.

The researchers found that in the morning, the judges had an easier time understanding each case. Their decisions were more nuanced. In the afternoon, they tended to fall back on a standard, repetitive pattern. At the slightest doubt, they ruled against the defendant more readily, without digging for nuance.

From these observations, the researchers concluded something important. Past a certain level of fatigue, the brain switches to “default mode.” For these judges, default mode meant closing the case quickly and ruling against the defendant. So what caused all that fatigue? Common sense says it was the long days. It wasn’t. It was the number of decisions. After a certain number of big decisions, the judges slid into default patterns. Why? Because thinking things through took too much willpower. And their willpower had already been drained by all the big decisions that came before. Put simply: the more carefully and thoroughly you try to decide, the more you ask of your brain. And the more tired you get.

Walter Mischel at Stanford took this further. He showed that the bigger your “willpower reserve,” the more successful you are in life and in your career. And since the number of decisions you make each day drains that reserve, you need a strategy for spending your willpower wisely. The most successful people made all their important decisions in the morning. That’s when their willpower was at its peak.

That way, they could give each problem their full attention. Their choices were sharp, wise, and thoughtful, with an eye for every detail that mattered. Nothing was left to chance. And certainly nothing was left to “default mode,” which too often runs on fear instead of your real strategic interests.

Pragmatism and success: shoot for the Moon, one step at a time

American Journal of Physics, 1983

We all have huge goals, and we want to hit them as fast as possible. We feel unstoppable. Anything seems possible!

“We’ve got this!”

Then life happens.

A team of scientists got curious about the domino effect: one falling domino knocks over the next, which knocks over the next, setting off a chain reaction. But they added a twist. The first domino was two inches tall. They calculated that a domino can knock over another one up to 50% bigger. So they had fun building dominoes, each one 50% bigger than the last. The plan was to line them up and play like kids.

But the game didn’t last long.

The first domino may have been tiny, but the tenth one was over six feet tall! So they finished the experiment with a pen and paper.

Here’s what they found:

The 24th domino would be as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, at 187 feet. The 28th would be barely 40 feet shorter than the Eiffel Tower. The 37th would tower over Mount Everest by about 7,400 feet. And the 63rd would reach past the Moon by roughly 22,000 miles!

Now apply that to your work. Every day, take one more step. And make sure it builds on what you did the day before. One step a day, with no scattered effort. That’s how your work stays consistent, coherent, and aligned.

Next, add a growth factor. That’s the equivalent of building today’s domino a little bigger than yesterday’s.

At first, all the effort will come from you. But once the project picks up steam, you’ll almost always need to bring other people in. That’s when growth starts to compound. And reaching the Moon stops being a fantasy. Growing yesterday’s output by a few percent becomes doable. And you never have to run yourself into the ground.

Most people don’t fail for lack of skill. They fail for lack of consistency. Consistency means never breaking the rhythm. It means working like a metronome, at a steady, predictable tempo. Not in bursts of heroic effort followed by long stretches where nothing happens.

One step a day, no matter how small. One step a day that builds on what’s already done. One step a day that goes a little further than yesterday. And before you know it, you’ll have achieved the impossible. The impossible becomes possible. You’ve created a new reality.

A calendar full of dominoes

The School of Common Sense

How many times have you given your team goals they never reached? And how many times did they tell you those goals were “impossible”?

As much as we hate to admit it, we’ve all been there hundreds of times.

Do you think your goals were

“Impossible”? Of course not!

So is your team wrong?

Think carefully before you answer.

Because if you were about to say “yes,” you’re the one who got it wrong.

A goal becomes impossible when the task feels bigger than we are. Then come discouragement, throwing in the towel, and scattered effort. We’ve covered that already. So if you want you and your team to achieve the impossible, you have to make it bite-sized. The way to do that is to fill your calendars with human-sized dominoes.

Let me explain.

Pick one annual goal. Just one. Hitting it will already be huge. That’s your Holy Grail.

Break it into four sequential milestones. Those are your quarterly goals. Break each of those into three smaller milestones, still in sequence, one after the other. Now you have monthly goals. Take the first month’s goal and break it into four. Now you have weekly goals. Take next week’s goal and break it down into the key pieces that will make it succeed. Those are your Big Rocks for the week. Break each Big Rock into steps, and estimate how long each step will take.

Now put all of that on your calendar.

It doesn’t fit?

Then you’re being too optimistic, and you won’t make it. Rework your goals, your steps, and your time estimates. Update your calendar.

It fits?

Then stop overthinking it and get to work. You’ve got a goal to hit!

Week by week, you’ll know whether you’re on track. That means you can adjust in real time, from one week to the next. You’ll never get that sinking feeling of realizing, too late, that you’re not going to make it.

Week after week, you’ll set yourself goals you can actually reach. You know you’re aiming for the Moon. But you’ll only think about, and only work on, the one small step that matters this week. And one step at a time, you’ll reach the Moon, then Mars, then whole new galaxies!

It’s simple to say and simple to explain. Yet 95% of leaders and employees can’t stick to this routine.

Why?

Think about it.

And to help you, just remember this definition of leadership:

“A leader is someone who can guide a team to a shared result.”

The sky’s the limit. It all comes down to small steps… and smart leadership.

Originally published in French on Konxus Média ↗