Good morning all and happy Monday!  I am sorry to start the morning by cursing at you, but I wanted to go a little out of the box today.  This quote is from Dutch adventurer, scientist, endurance athlete and contrarian Wim Hof.  Wim’s nickname is “the iceman,” because many of his feats revolve around cold exposure.  He is most famous for having climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in nothing but shorts.  He set another record staying submerged in an ice bath for 1 hour and 13 minutes on The Today show.  He currently holds more than 20 world records for his feats of endurance and cold exposure.  You can learn more about Wim at these links below.  The pod casts are long, but definitely worth the investment.  I think you will be amazed by Wim’s outlook on life and its’ possibilities.

Wim Hof on Joe Rogan 1  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np0jGp6442A

Wim Hof on Joe Rogan 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2NtdOKn630

Wim Hof on School of Greatness https://lewishowes.com/podcast/wim-hof/

Wim Hof on Vice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaMjhwFE1Zw

But, why did I chose Wim’s quote for today’s motivation.  Here are two of the things I have learned from reading about Wim that can apply to a life in restaurant management.

• There is very little more important than breathing. All of Wim’s feats and philosophies start with the importance of breath.  Wim feels through trained breathing techniques he can raise his body temperature in order to withstand extreme cold.  He also feels he can use his breath to combat sickness.  I won’t go there, but I will let you explore if you are curious.  Even if it is not your goal to stay submerged in ice bath for an hour, your breathing is still important.  Breathing is the most important thing our body does, and for the most part it happens totally subconsciously.  Yoga & meditation practices are all about harnessing breath to improve the health of your mind and body.

 

For all of us, when we find ourselves stressed or anxious, the first place to start is by controlling our breath.  It is very important not to manage “angry.”  There is a ton of frustration in what we deal with on a daily basis.  It’s totally normal to get upset or stressed.  This is when it is very important to regain control before we start to manage others based on emotional instincts.  Step away, take a deep breath and get some control before you do anything you will regret.  Concentrating on your breathing will help you with this for sure.  When I need to take a moment, I often say to myself Wim’s, “breath, motherfucker.”  This little aside helps me cut through the tension, and get a little a chuckle about how seriously I am taking myself or the situation.

 

• There is a whole lot in the world that has yet to be discovered. Wim has some very progressive theories about the potential of the human body.  I don’t know a thing about how true some what he believes is, or will be proven to be true or false in the future.  What I do know is that as humans, we don’t know as much as we think we know.  All the time, new things are being discovered that shatter thousands of years of commonly held wisdom.

 

In business, we need to have the same curiosity and drive for discovery as Wim.  We are all shaped by our beliefs, our surroundings & our frame of reference.  It is vitally important to not let these influences shut down our capacity to innovate.  Innovation is not possible until you are more open to world of radically different possibilities.

 

Have a great week, and a above all…… breathe!  If you wind up researching Wim, please come back and let me know what you think!

Happy Memorial Day Monday!  I hope you are having a great holiday weekend.  Today’s quote is a simple yet powerful thought from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.  The idea is pretty clear: if you want to create or do anything interesting, new, or out of the box, you need to prepare yourself to face critics & naysayers.

The future is created by those who can put aside the natural fear of criticism & take the chance to do something special.  Creators do things that they believe in, unafraid of the reactions of others.  Doubt & negativity from others is no reason not to start a great idea.

Let’s look back at two “crazy ideas,” that never would have seen the light of day if their creators had been afraid.

In The Heights – everyone knows about the smash hit musical Hamilton.  Hamilton is Lin Manuel Miranda’s second musical.  His first, In The Heights opened it 2008.  It is an entirely hip-hop ode to the neighborhood he grew up in: Washington Heights.  In the Heights was like nothing ever seen on Broadway at the time.  Imagine the tenacity it took for Miranda to get his story produced and onto the Broadway stage.  I am sure there were plenty of people who thought it had no chance at success.  Good luck getting any of them to admit it now!

Airbnb – Airbnb is the brain child of 2 college buddies who were about to be evicted from their San Fran rental when they came up with the idea.  As meteoric a rise as Airbnb has had, there was a long few years where no one was particularly interested in their idea.  The founders had to persevere through rejection and legal challenges in order to make their company a success.  Today Airbnb is valued at more than Marriott & Hyatt combined.  Oh yeah, they don’t actually own any hotels.

Let’s be clear you don’t need to be a visionary playwright, or a tech company founder to be held back by the fear of criticism.  In my business, I worry all the time about how many great ideas I don’t hear because people are afraid to suggest something out of the box.  If you have an idea at work, say it.  If you have something you want to try, do it.  Don’t let people scare you out of executing a good idea.  Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow that safe is the new risky.  With the pace of change in society playing safe is not what it used to be.  Here is a link to Seth talking about the concept http://99u.com/videos/35027/seth-godin-keep-making-a-ruckus .

Please feel free to add in the comments any “crazy” ideas you can think of that were willed to life by someone strong enough to not let fear of criticism slow them down.

Have a fantastic week!  In Seth’s immortal words: “go make a ruckus.”

Hi everybody, Happy Monday!  I hope you had a great weekend.  While I was away, I managed to find  time to read a really interesting book.  Nothing like a 6 hour flight to Los Angeles to provide for a little reading time!  The book was called The One Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan.  The premise of the book is that extraordinary results are achieved by leaders who are able to determine the one thing that is the most important thing they could be doing to achieve a defined goal, and focusing themselves, and their organizations on executing this one thing.  The concept is really powerful, because first, it forces you to set one clear goal and then to examine all of your actions to determine how they are either advancing or working against achieving the goal.   The process forces you to determine what is the one action at any given time that will have the biggest impact in helping you reach the goal.

At some point, some of you may have heard of something called Pareto’s Principle.  This scientifically proven principle states that 20% of our actions are responsible for 80% of our results.  These means it is only a small amount of what we do that is responsible for our most important results.   If this is true, it stands to reason that we should want to spend more attention, time and effort on these high-powered actions.  We should also want to identify and maximize these efforts that generate all this bang for the buck.

In each of our days and weeks, it is important to keep focused not just on being busy, but on getting the most valuable work done.  We need to look at all of our actions to determine which ones deliver the best results.  Once we have identified them, we need to make sure that we always prioritize them.

Let me give an example.  As a restaurant company, goal setting is pretty easy.  We come to work every day to make our guests happy.  If this is the goal, what is the one thing we can do that will have the greatest impact towards this goal?  For the GM, maybe this is hiring.  We have big robust teams, and the GM needs to make sure they are dedicating enough of their time to attracting & retaining and great teammates.  For the AGM and the MGR, maybe it is training and coaching, and for the Chef maybe it is time spent on quality control.  With the most important action identified, now we need to structure everything else around making sure there is enough time for our most important thing.  Cash outs, inventory, ordering, cleaning the office, checking side work, talking with vendors, meetings, etc are all important tasks, but none can be allowed take on more importance than our most important thing.  This is only one example, I look forward to working with you all to define the highest priority together

This week, think about what you do that delivers the best results.  Once you have found it, figure out how to spend more of your time doing it…… the results will follow!

Have a great week!

Today’s quote comes from recent NY Yankee history.  As the story goes, 37-year-old Yankee legend Don Mattingly was finishing a workout with a first year rookie you might have heard of: Derek Jeter.  They finished their workout in the farthest practice field in the late afternoon.  There were no fans or teammates within site, and both players were exhausted after a long day of training.  As they began to make the trek back to the clubhouse, Mattingly looked at Jeter and said, “Let’s run it in.  You never know who is watching.”  As it turned out, this would be Mattingly’s last spring training before his retirement.  It would also be the beginning of the Jeter legend and a run that would include 4 world series titles in the next 6 years.  In many ways, this story was the passing of the baton from one Yankee captain to another.  Mattingly never won a championship, but with this one line he passed along a lesson that would stay with Jeter through his whole career, and inspire countless others.

The lesson that Mattingly imparted that day was pretty simple.  If you want to be the best, you need to act like the best all of the time, not just when people are watching.  What Mattingly was teaching that day is that being tired is not an excuse for shortcuts.  Likewise, having no one around to impress with your actions is not an excuse either.  If you want to be the best, the person you need to impress the most is yourself, and “you” are always there to watch and judge.

What does it mean in a restaurant to “run it in?”  As I see it, it is all about doing things the right way all of the time.  Mostly this about the small stuff.   As a leader, our actions set the standard for the entire team.  As much as our action, we need to be very careful about what we endorse through our inaction.  For example, every time we walk by a piece of garbage on the floor, or see a sad looking tin of French fries, or a dirty front door and don’t take action, we have given everyone on the team the permission to do the same.  It is really as simple as that.  If you want to be the leader of a group, or the captain of team you need to let everyone see you do the small things the right way…..even when they aren’t watching.

I apologize to team Boston for looking to NY sports 2 weeks in a row.  I promise, Ill grit my teeth and look to Tom Brady or Bill Belichick soon!  Have a great week!

Happy Monday!  What better way to start the week than with some words of wisdom on confidence from Joe Namath.   Confidence is truly the secret ingredient that allows great things to happen.  Without confidence and belief in yourself there is really no way to achieve your goals in business or in life.

As leaders, confidence is the name of the game.  If you are going to lead a team, you better project confidence if you want people to follow.  If you can project to your team confidence in your skills, your preparation, your plan and your vision, you are well on your way to winning.

Of course, there is a thin line between confidence and cockiness.  Being confident and humble in equal measures is the true goal.  As we talked about earlier, owning mistakes, asking questions and showing vulnerability are also important.  Displaying humility and confidence in equal measure will get a team fired up to follow you.

So many of the problems leaders get themselves into stem from the opposite of confidence: insecurity.  More often than not, the leader who is no fun to be around, has an insecurity issue.  This lack of confidence, is what causes managers to yell and belittle, or play games.  You have all seen managers who constantly need to show everyone they are boss.  Where do you think this comes from?

Having confidence in yourself is one thing.  If you want to lead, you need to go further, and figure out how to give your team confidence in themselves.  If you want servers to sell a special, you better make sure they are confident into how to describe it.  If you want the work environment to be fun, you better make sure everyone on the team has confidence in each other.

But, how do you build confidence if you are not the most confident person?  First, do your homework.  It is a lot easier to be confident when you feel prepared.  Once your preparation is done, remember confidence is skill that can be developed.  Here is a little exercise I heard about recently on a podcast called “the Art of Charm” https://theartofcharm.com/ by Jordan Harbinger.  I encourage you to try this out this week:  every time you walk through any doorway this week do these 3 things:  1.  Stand up straight with your chest up and shoulders back  2.  Take a deep breath  3.  Smile.  This one is a little harder than, “go first.”  It takes some effort to remember.  But, when you do remember, this effect is pretty powerful.  Give it a shot.

This week, walk tall and confident in your shoes, and look for ways to help others stand tall in theirs!  Have a great week!!!

Get Started!  It’s pretty obvious, but without action there is no achievement.  If you want something to happen, you have to put in the work to make it happen.  The problem is, it’s often really hard to get started.  It is super easy to convince ourselves that a task is too hard or too daunting to start now.  There are always a million reasons to start tomorrow.

They key is to ignore the reasons not to start and to just take action.  Most of the outcomes we want are not the results of one action, but the result of many sustained small actions.  I was with a great friend from college today, and I remembered an important lesson I learned from him back then.  He was a good student and a hard worker.  But, what I learned from watching him was the value of constantly moving forward.  He always used to “chip away” at his work.  It was my natural style to get work done in big chunks.  If I didn’t have a 3 hour window, I wouldn’t sit down to start a project.  I learned from him the benefit of sustained perpetual action.  If he had 15 free minutes, he would sit down and knock out a little work.  He repeated this cycle throughout the week, and little by little he got all of his work done without ever needing to stress.  I, on the other hand, was king of the last minute all-nighter.  Fortunately, I have learned over the years to drop this painful habit.

Work is obviously a little different than school.  At work, we don’t really have too much of a choice to not get the work done or to procrastinate.  We all come in and work hard every day.  Where this theory comes into the play is when you need to work on the big, game changing stuff.  There are always projects that could improve service, or make things more efficient if only we could take the time to make them happen.  With these projects, the same thing applies: chip away.  You will never find time to sit down and write descriptions for all 50 beers on a beer menu.  But, I know you could sit down and write great descriptions of 2 beers every day for the next 4 weeks.

There is a Stanford psychologist named BJ Fogg, who writes and talks about “tiny habits.”  His research has shown that the best way to create habits is to break tasks down into very manageable chunks.  He talks about flossing one tooth.  It is hard to find the motivation to floss.  But, in his example, it’s not such a big deal to floss one tooth every time you brush your teeth.  You can see a speech where he outlines this theory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8

Lastly, some of you might have heard me say, “build a statue.”  The process of sculpting a statue is literally chipping away at a piece of rock tens of thousands of times.  It is pretty mind boggling to realize the collective power of these small actions when you see something as beautiful a Bernini statue.

This week pick something you want to get done and get started.  Don’t look for a reason not to start, and don’t worry about how hard it will be to finish.  Get started chipping away, and before you know it you’ll be done and onto the next big rock.  Have a great week!

Good morning everyone, Happy Monday! 

This week, I wanted to talk about the value of asking questions.  Asking good questions is a hugely important skill for a leader.  The job of being a leader involves making a lot of decisions. Asking questions will allow an effective leader to come up with good answers to the right questions.

Why ask questions?

First, asking questions of your team will give you a much better idea of what problems need to be solved.  Never forget, the people in the trenches know where all of our opportunities and vulnerabilities lie.   Asking questions will allow you to find out what we should be working on.

Next, once the problem is identified, the best way to solve it is by asking questions of the people who the problem affects.  It is a common trap for the leader to think he or she alone has all of the answers.  If you want the best answers, ask the team.   Even if no one comes up with a stroke of genius, there is tremendous value in getting everyone involved.  Everyone wants to feel they have a voice, and asking questions of everyone on the team can give them this voice.

Don’t be afraid. 

Often managers are afraid to ask questions of their team because they don’t want to look like they don’t know it all.  Let me remind you – you don’t know it all!  No one does.  There is tremendous value in showing the vulnerability to ask a question if there is something you don’t understand.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions up, or down in an organization.  Also, if someone asks you a question you don’t know the answer to…… say you don’t know.  There is no quicker way to lose credibility then by faking answers.

Stay Curious

It is very important for managers to be curious.  Our jobs as managers is to make things better, so we can make more guests happy.  In order to do this, you need to be curious.  There are thousands of tasks that happen in a restaurant.  Our job is to be curious and to constantly question if there is a better way.    Being curious about things going on in the world and in the industry is also a vital part of gaining experience and maintaining relevance.

Have a great week!  Get out there and ask questions of your team and each other!

Here are some good ones to try:

How can I help you?

What could I do that would make your job easier?

Is there anything that gets in the way of you serving our guests?

What do you think we could do to improve the guest experience?

If there was one problem you think we need to solve, what would it be?

What do you think would happen if we did it this way?

How did this way of doing things come about?

What was the idea behind this?

Did we ever think about doing it this way?

Can you explain this to me?

This week’s Monday motivation comes from Gabby Reece.  “Go First.”  Not much of a quote, but a pretty cool concept.  If you don’t know who Gabby Reece is, you should.  She is former professional beach volleyball player, model & TV personality.  She is married to legendary big wave surfer Laird Hamilton.  Together, they are 2 of the most interesting celebrities out there.

The concept behind her, “Go First,” is to go out of your way to say hello first, or smile first to anyone you come in contact with.  It has become so common nowadays, especially in this city, to keep your head down and keep to yourself.  It is so rare to interact with a stranger and have a friendly, personal interaction.  The idea is, it really doesn’t have to be hard.  If you make it a habit to, “go first,” you can so easily brighten someone else’s day.  The kicker is, that someone is just as likely to be you as it is the other person.

One of my mentors, is a very successful businessman from Montreal.  He comes down to NYC every few months, and we usually make time to grab dinner.  The thing I respect most about him is how he goes out of his way to try to get a smile out of everyone he interacts with.  Security guards, waiters, taxi drivers, you name it.  He works really hard to say something kind or funny, in an attempt to spread a little bit of joy.  Inevitably, everytime I see him, I am reminded I really need to slow down in order to enjoy the little moments in life.

Anyone who knows me, knows I love all things Italian.  In Italy, it is still common to greet anyone you are face to face with on the street with a “buon giorno” or a “buona sera.”  At first this is a little jarring, but very quickly it becomes very comforting, and feels natural.

For those of you working in hospitality, we all need to set this example in our restaurants in order to lead others to follow.  I tried to “go first” last week everywhere I went, and it felt great.  It wasn’t always easy, and I often caught myself missing opportunities.  Either way, the experiment was definitely worth the effort.  I hope to turn the concept into a personal habit.   I encourage you to try to “go first,” this week and I hope you can brighten a few days along the way.

Here is an audio link of Gabby discussing the concept with Tim Ferriss: https://soundcloud.com/tom-donald/gabrielle-reece-on-going-first

Have a great week!