Personal Development Training and Motivational Humor from the Motivational Smart Ass!

Are you thinking about picking up a new activity, hobby, or skill? Before you do that, I’d like to suggest that you have a quick bite of guacamole first. Here is a super simple recipe for you:

Ingredients:
1 ripe avocado
lime juice
salt and pepper

Directions:
Mash all ingredients together.
Eat.

Mmm, delicious 🙂

Why am I sharing a super simple guacamole recipe? Because I wish someone had shared one with me a few years ago, when I tried to make guacamole for the first time…

Years ago, back when I still had a corporate job, my department was having some kind of a party, and everyone had to bring in a food item to share (ah, the glorious “office potluck”). For some reason, I decided to make “7 layer dip,” complete with home made guacamole.

You may be thinking, “ah, Avish must have decided that because he makes a killer guacamole!” That would make sense, but that was not the case. Not at all. I decided to make guacamole because I had never made it before and I figured, “hey, why not complicate my life?”

Having never made guacamole before, I turned to the one person I knew who could help me: my Mexican friend who loves to cook. Turns out, this was a mistake…

My buddy did in fact have a great recipe for guacamole. Unfortunately, it was an “authentic” recipe that had more steps to it than the pyramids of Chichen Itza.

There were tons of ingredients – all fresh! Many of the ingredients required special prep (more on that below). Some of the ingredients I had never purchased or used before, so I was flying in the dark.

The guacamole turned into a disaster. Suffice it to say, there were quite a few…ah…shall we say…technical problems making the guacamole. I can’t tell you how it tasted, because either:

1. I don’t remember because it was so long ago
2. My brain, in an attempt to protect myself, blocked all memory of the guacamole from my consciousness
3. The guacamole was so bad it instantly destroyed the taste buds it came in contact with

I don’t know; I’m going with “D. all of the above.”

I learned my lesson. Nowadays when I need to bring some kind of food to a pot luck type event, I volunteer to bring a bottle of wine or liquor. That keeps everyone happy. Especially me. For multiple reasons.

You may be wondering, “what does your “guacamolic ineptitude” (past ineptitude, I might add – I’ve gotten much better at it) have to do with me?”

Simple. We all will (or all should) try new things from time to time. There are very different ways to approach a new endeavor, and there are a few things you can learn from my failed guacamole experiment to make sure that you have much more success when you try something new:

Start Small

Having never made guacamole before, I have no idea why I jumped right in and started with a master chef’s level of complexity. My friend’s recipe required me to use tomatillos. He was very adamant on the superior quality of a tomatillo based guacamole. *sigh*

I swear to you, at that point in my life, I:

1. Had no idea what a tomatillo was
2. Had no idea how to properly select a tomatillo
3. Had no idea how to prepare a tomatillo

I assumed he meant “tomato” but was saying it with a heavy Mexican pronunciation (which would be odd, since he doesn’t have an accent). But no, I quickly learned that a tomatillo is not a tomato. It’s it’s own fruit, created by the devil to confound me (in my defense, my spell checker doesn’t seem to know what a “tomatillo” is either…).

My friend told me to “blanch the tomatillos in boiling water for two minutes, then shock them in cold water, then peel them.” Guess how many times in my life I had “blanched” something? That’s right: ZERO. To this point when someone said the word “blanche” I assumed they were talking about the Golden Girls.

At this point I clearly should have aborted this plan, but lacking any semblance of common sense I pushed forward like Napoleon invading Russia: stubborn, stupid, and oblivious to my impending peril.

To this day, that is still the only time I have bought, prepared, and subsequently thrown away tomatillos.

I had never made guacamole before. If I had done nothing else but mash up an avocado and add some salt, pepper, and lime juice, things would have worked out just fine. But oh no, not me, I had to make super fancy guacamole with tomatillos.

Starting small is usually your best bet. I don’t want to discourage anyone from pushing themselves to do the most they can, but when you are trying something new it is usually a smart bet to minimize the number and complexity of the new variables you add to your process. This allows you to learn each step as you go while building positive momentum to keep you going.

Crawl before you walk. Walk before you run. Run before you fly. And you’re better off mastering unassisted human flight than you are making guacamole with tomatillos. Or maybe that’s just me.

Master the Basics First

Interestingly, the tomatillos were not the most confusing ingredient for me, nor were they the reason the guacamole failed. Oh no. My guacamole failed mostly because I had no concept what a ripe avocado felt like!

In my fruit buying history, which, admittedly, was limited, I had always been led to believe that “firm=good.” Mushy fruit meant overripe fruit. So, when I went to buy avocados I picked up the ones that were firm to the touch; the ones that when I pushed in with my thumb did not give at all.

For you people who are avocado novices, let me tell you, this is a recipe for disaster (ha! get it? “*recipe* for disaster” while talking about a guacamole recipe? That’s right folks, I’m a professional humorist and comedian. I’ll be here all week, and please, tip the wait staff well…) A perfect avocado gives a little when you push on it. If it doesn’t give, it isn’t ripe enough.

Not knowing this, I tried to make my guacamole with an under-ripe avocado, and this did not work at all. If you’ve never attempted to mash up an under-ripe avocado, let me tell you, it’s hard! It’s like trying to make whipped cream out of wood chips; it’s just not happening. Having never done this before, I assumed I just needed to “try harder,” so I kept mashing longer than any normal intelligent human being (or most chimpanzees) would have.

The lesson here is that I had a master chef’s recipe for guacamole, but I didn’t even know how to pick a good avocado.

In the same way, before you start going crazy about learning the advanced techniques for what you are doing, master the basics first. Remember, crawl, then walk, then run, then fly (then try tomatillos).

(There’s also a side lesson here about “working smart vs. working hard,” but I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself)

Consider the Source of Your Advice

My buddy is a great cook, and he loves complicated, involved, “from scratch” recipes. And that works for him (believe me, I know; I have benefited from his cooking before).

As for me, I actually enjoy cooking, and I like to make stuff from scratch, but I also have no problem throwing a jar of Prego into a pan with some pre-packaged frozen meatballs and calling that dinner (sorry, I know some of you die-hard, “My sauce so authentic I always make it from scratch and call it ‘gravy'” people just popped a synapse reading that). I don’t need my recipes to read like the U.S. tax code. Short and simple is fine with me.

I should have considered this when I went to him for cooking advice. Of course he was going to give me the “best most authentic” recipe, which translates in Avish language to, “unnecessarily long and complicated for my purposes.”

Let me be clear: my friend was not wrong at all. I’m sure if I was more experienced the guacamole would have turned out great. His food is always awesome. The fault was mine, for not considering three things:

• The source of the advice
• My goals
• How those two things fit together

Often when you are trying something new, you seek out the most knowledgeable person on the topic. That’s smart, because they are clearly the experts. However, I have found that sometimes top experts give you advice from their perspective, not yours. They may share with you the absolute best way to do something, as opposed to the way that is best for you. There’s a big difference there.

Be sure to carefully consider all advice you get (instead of blindly accepting it), understand the perspective, and then determine whether that advice makes sense for you.

Remember, regardless of who gives you advice, only you are responsible for your own success…

In the end, my “7 layer dip” became a “6 layer dip,” it tasted fine, and I ended up with a funny story to share at work. No harm, no foul. However, in many other situations when we try something new we set ourselves back (or worse, make our lives so hard we give up altogether) by jumping in too far too fast. I am all for going whole hog on a new activity, but consider the three steps above to make sure you don’t make your own life harder than it has to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get dressed for a fun day of tomatillo picking…

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Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Motivational Humorist page now!
 

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John McClane, protagonist of the Die Hard movies, is quite the action hero. He has foiled 4 different terrorist plots that rang in scope from taking over a building to shutting down the country. McClane is an amazingly capable badass, but it’s not just his own prowess that allows him to succeed. No, he is helped by the fact that his opponents tend to convolute the heck out of their plans.

This past weekend I re watched Die Hard 2: Die Harder. It’s actually a fairly entertaining, if mindless, movie (guess the “mindless” part goes without saying, eh?). It wasn’t very well received, and I think that is for two reasons:

1. It suffers in comparison to the original Die Hard.
2. It is truly ridiculous.

There are many ridiculous things about Die Hard 2: John McClane happens to once again be in the middle of a terrorist plot. Bruce Willis’s wife happens to be on a plane with the dumbass reporter from the first Die Hard. Laws of physics are summarily ignored. Grenades take forever to explode when it helps the plot. A bad gut is out run by an airport moving walkway. Two men die in a massive shoo tout in the hidden “baggage conveyor belt area” (that scene is like the swinging doors scene from Monster’s Inc, but with guns. And Bruce Willis) using automatic weapons, and not only do the police not take this seriously, but they don’t even close off the crime scene. Amazing.

But the most ridiculous aspect of the movie is the villain’s ridiculously convoluted plot. I could go on and on making fun of how unnecessarily involved their plan is, but Cracked.com already wrote a very entertaining article on the subject. You can read their take Die Hard 2 (and four other bad villain plots) here.

In a nutshell, a former special forces operative wants to get a drug lord freed. The drug lord is flying in to Dulles Airport, so the soldier recruits a team to:

1. Infiltrate the airport by passing guns to each other in gift boxes
2. Hack in to take control of all communication between the airport and the planes
3. Set up an ambush at what will be the airport’s most likely response
4. Be in cahoots with a legitimate current special forces unit who they assume will be sent in
5. Set up a fake shoot out with the special forces unit which involves shooting blanks at each other to stage a shootout

Oh, and by the way, this entire plot hinges on there happening to be a blizzard on the day the drug lord is being flown into Dulles. A blizzard which:

1. Must be bad enough to prevent any of the pilots from visually seeing the landing strip…
2. …but not be so bad that the flights will be cancelled or diverted in advance.

Wow. Is your head spinning yet? Mine is about to explode…

It’s easy to watch a movie like Die Hard 2 and laugh at how overly complicated the bad guys made their plan. However, if you spend any time talking to people about their life goals and plans, you’ll see that they tend to make their plans (if they them) just as complicated. And that is no laughing matter.

It’s easier than you think to overcomplicate your plans. Here are are three ways to make sure your plan is less convoluted than a Die Hard villain’s scheme:

Maximize How Much Is In Your Own Control

In your plan, how many of the steps are things that rely on your actions vs. things that rely on other people taking action? The more things you can bring under your control, the more successful you’ll be.

In Die Hard 2, the bad guys leave a lot to chance. Primarily, their entire plan revolves around a snowstorm hitting Washington D.C. at the exact time they want to hatch their scheme. Not just any snowstorm mind you, but a blizzard so bad that it completely eliminates the pilots’ visibility!

Sure, it snows in D.C., but how frequently does it snow so bad that everything shuts down? A couple of times a year? Maybe? And what are the chances that that blizzard will hit on the night you need it to? That’s leaving a pretty critical element up to fate…

Sounds crazy for the Die Hard bad guys, but we do this all the time in our own plans. For example, you can have a plan that says, “I am going to do presentations in front of targeted groups and then people in the audience will want to hire me.”

Sounds like an ok plan, until you realize that once you finish speaking, you have left everything else out of your control. You are leaving it up to the audience to think about hiring you, go back to their office and try to sell you, and then contact you themselves.

A better plan would be, “I am going to do presentations in front of targeted groups. I will collect business cards in return for a free gift so I can collect contact info. I will then email a thank you to everyone afterward (and the thank you email will have info about my services) and then I will call each person on the phone to talk about working with them and getting referrals.”

See how the second plan puts a lot more of the process into your control? Guess which version has a higher likelihood of success?

Lesson: The more you put your fate in your own hands, the better off you’ll be. Take control and take action!

Minimize the Number of Breakdown Points

In Dies Hard 2, the plan involves something like 237 distinct steps. They needed to sneak guns in. They needed to cut the communication wire. It needed to snow. The proper special ops team needed to be called in. And so on and so on…If any one of those steps failed, so too would the plan.

Each step in your plan is a “breakdown point.” The more steps, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong.

See if you can simplify your plan as much as possible. Remove unnecessary steps. Replace three roundabout steps with one concise one.

Often we add in steps because:

1. We are following someone else’s plan which may be convoluted in and of itself
2. We are trying to avoid the simple route because we don’t like it or
3. We believe things are more complicated than they really are.

These are bad, bad traps to fall into. Reduce the number of steps, reduce the breakdown points, and keep things as simple as possible!

Lesson: Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Be Direct!

One of the best ways to simplify is to identify the most direct route to achieve your goal. In Die Hard 2, the bad guys objective was to get a drug lord and South American dictator freed from custody. Is it just me or don’t there seem to be many more direct ways of achieving that goal? If you have the technical expertise, manpower, and equipment to carry out an elaborate plan to hijack every aspect of an airport, don’t you think you could just launch a jailbreak? Or kidnap another diplomat and make a trade? Or hijack just his plan, and not the whole airport? I’m just saying…

Whatever your goal is, chances are that these is a short, direct path to achieving it. Make sure you first identify what that path is, and then do your best to stay as close to that path as possible. A little flexibility and variety is fine, but every step further away you take, the longer and harder your path will be.

Lesson: Identify the direct route and then take it!

It’s hard enough achieving the major goals in your life. Don’t make your life harder by over complicating what should be a simple plan. Keep things in your control, simplify, and take the direct route. That’s the surest way to success – unless you want your life to be an over the top Hollywood action move!

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Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Motivational Humorist page now!