Greetings!
This is Nico writing today from a small town in beautiful Calabria, Southern Italy, where I am currently staying with family, eating copious amounts of pasta, drinking enough espresso to give a horse the jitters, and even keeping up with my work. It's the same small town my great-grandfather, also named Pasquale, came from before immigrating to the US. Around here, if you throw a stone at random, chances are you'll hit a Scopelliti. You think I'm kidding. Here's a picture I took from the town next door...  Pops is off this week, so I was thinking about what might be the best thing to share with you. The piece I decided on, that you see below, is one of the strongest tools my father employs with his clients in their one-on-one work. I hope you enjoy it, and do be sure to try out the simple math of comparing the time you spend in preparation - and the timing of how frequently you do so - to the amount of time you invest into execution. In this, our shortest newsletter ever, there's not a lot of text to pour over, so spend some time analyzing and really thinking about what the diagram means and how it applies to your performance and practice. Slow Down to Speed Up The purpose of this diagram is to help you visualize your mission. Our goal is to SPEED UP our Might and Explode our Performance. The problem is that all human beings suffer Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual holes and gaps. Often our head is NOT in the game. Our hearts and souls are often asleep right when we need them at their sharpest. In order to progress, we must FIRST SLOW DOWN, find and fill in these holes.  In considering daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual performance, perhaps the ultimate question is how much preparation - and when - is needed in proportion to how much work in execution? As you consider the two sections of the diagram above you'll note that preparation is a quality-driven process, whereas execution is a quantity-driven process. Do meditate on the resulting proportion: Preparation/Execution. If you were to turn those terms into numbers, what would your optimal proportion be, and what would be the time pattern or rhythm that would best optimize your performance? |
