Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

Feeling good about getting some "work" done this holiday season - making some phone calls, checking off the to-do list and of course checking my emails, I realized I simply invested my time in keeping busy, and not producing anything of worth.

Was your weekend spent checking emails or was it spent producing something remarkable?

Read what Seth Godin has to say about "busy-ness"

Measuring busy-ness...

Watcha gonna do with that duck?

by Seth Godin

We're surrounded by people who are busy getting their ducks in a row, waiting for just the right moment...

Getting your ducks in a row is a fine thing to do. But deciding what you are you going to do with that duck is a far more important issue.

They don't teach you how to solve interesting problems in school.

Memorize the information and take the test.

Repeat with new information.

Receive diploma - congrats - you are very good at memorizing information.

Is it any wonder so many young professionals lack the skills or courage to make decisions or champion a project that will change how you do business for the better?

Next time you have an opening on your staff hire an architect, or at least someone excited to solve interesting problems.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Hire an architect by Seth Godin

Architects don't manufacture nails, assemble windows or chop down trees. Instead, they take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways.

It used to be that if you wanted to build an organization, you had to be prepared to do a lot of manufacturing and assembly--of something. My first internet company had 60 or 70 people at its peak... and today, you could run the same organization with six people. The rest? They were busy building an infrastructure that now exists. Restaurants used to be built by chefs. Now, more than ever, they're built by impresarios who know how to tie together real estate, promotion, service and chefs into a package that consumers want to buy. The difficult part isn't installing the stove, the difficult (and scarce) part is telling a story.

I'm talking about intentionally building a structure and a strategy and a position, not focusing your energy on the mechanics, because mechanics alone are insufficient. Just as you can't build a class A office building with nothing but a skilled carpenter, you can't build a business for the ages that merely puts widgets into boxes.

My friend Jerry calls these people corporate chiropractors. They don't do surgery, they realign and recognize what's out of place.
Organizational architects know how to find suppliers, use the cloud (of people, of data, of resources), identify freelancers, tie together disparate resources and weave them into a business that scales. You either need to become one or hire one.
The organizations that matter are busy being run by people who figure out what to do next.

Laziness has changed.

It used to be about avoiding physical labor. The lazy person could nap or have a cup of tea while others got hot and sweaty and exhausted. Part of the reason society frowns on the lazy is that this behavior means more work for the rest of us.

When it came time to carry the canoe over the portage, I was always hard to find. The effort and the pain gave me two good reasons to be lazy.

But the new laziness has nothing to do with physical labor and everything to do with fear. If you're not going to make those sales calls or invent that innovation or push that insight, you're not avoiding it because you need physical rest. You're hiding out because you're afraid of expending emotional labor.

This is great news, because it's much easier to become brave about extending yourself than it is to become strong enough to haul an eighty pound canoe.

In athletic development or fundraising this question should be easy to answer.

Your salary is 100K and you fundraised 500k for your organization in the first quarter. Net profit of 400K for your organization right?

Nice job.

But what if you work in sports medicine or strength and conditioning?

I often hear professionals groan about needing to get paid more, (and just for the record I agree with you) but what did you do this past year to deserve more pay? What makes you believe this?

Was it a salary survey that clearly shows you at the low end of the pole within your athletic conference?  Maybe it was that nifty online salary conversion tool that shows how much you would make if you worked in Alabama rather than Boston?

How about looking at this instead - What interesting problem did you solve this year?  Show your boss that.

Did you save your department 10K in tape and bracing because you researched and found a better way to do business? Did you move your summer strength manuals to an online Iphone application making them accessible to athletes at home saving your department 4K in annual printing costs?  How about starting an injury prevention plan lowering your school’s athletic injury insurance premium?

Before you begin to start looking for a new place to work because you aren’t getting paid enough at your current job, ask yourself what interesting problem needs solving and show your current employer  that you are worth your salary first.

** thanks to Seth Godin who opened my eyes to solving interesting problems rather than working the “ordinary” job where waiting to be told what to do gets you paid ordinary amounts of money.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Seth Godin does it again...

Do You Need A Permit?

Where, precisely, do you go in order to get permission to make a dent in the universe?

The accepted state is to be a cog. The preferred career is to follow the well-worn path, to read the instructions, to do what we're told. It's safer that way. Less responsibility. More people to blame.

When someone comes along and says, "not me, I'm going down a different path," we flinch. We're not organized to encourage and celebrate the unproven striver. It's safer to tear them down (with their best interests at heart, of course). Better, we think, to let them down easy, to encourage them to take a safer path, to be realistic, to hear it from us rather than the marketplace.
Perhaps, years ago, this was good advice. Today, it's clearly not. In fact, it's disrespectful, ill-advised and short sighted. How dare we cheer when a bold changemaker stumbles? Our obligation today isn't to spare the feelings of our peers from future disappointment. It's to establish an expectation that of course they're going to do something that matters.

If you think there's a chance you can make a dent, GO.

Now.

Hurry.

You have my permission. Not that you needed it.

Is just an excuse for not wanting to do the work required to get a project shipped.

If your boss truly won’t let you, it’s probably because you are asking the wrong questions.

If you want your boss to support you during a project which will ultimately reward you if it works, but punishes the boss if fails then of course you’re asking the wrong questions.

What exactly won’t your boss let you do?

Did you investigate it? Research it? Find a gap in your current operating procedures that is worth filling? Does it fit into your core principles? Values?

If the answer is yes, and your boss really won’t let you, then you might want to find another job where your boss supports the extraordinary work that you’re doing.

Unless of course, your happy with ordinary?

(rant inspired by Seth Godin and his most recent book, Linchpin)

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Remember when you were in college? It was great wasn’t it?  Not a worry in the world, house gatherings every weekend, Jell-O shots and streaking through the quad! Ok, maybe not the streaking through the quad but you get my drift.

Remember also the time you were assigned a 10 page paper at the beginning of the semester and all of a sudden it’s 9pm on a Sunday night and its due the next morning by 8am.  As impossible as it seemed at first, you got it done didn’t you? And I’d even bet that you did better than average on it? 

When we remove ourselves from all distractions, from all the things that inevitably sabotage us from shipping, we are capable of wonderful and remarkable feats.  Yet, when we allow others, as well as ourselves, to constantly get in the way, we find that each workday is an ongoing struggle.  That each eight hour day wears on and on and yet at the end of it all; the day, the week, or the month we have little or nothing to show for the massive amount of time that we sat at our desk.

I know that phone call was important and that you had to reply to a customer inquiry, but that’s not what really kept you from shipping was it?

What amazing piece of work could you ship (Seth Godin calls in Art – “an original creation”) if you weren’t so busy updating your status on Facebook, tweeting that you just spilled your coffee on your new dress shirt, or checking the latest email chain about the office photocopier being broken again?

Don’t have Facebook? What about the clerical, custodial, and catering that you’ve continued to do?  The challenge now is to identify all the distracters that are preventing you from shipping after of course you’ve eliminated the 3-C’s from your work place.  So what in your day stops you from shipping?

Hold that thought, someone just tagged me on Facebook, I’ll be right back…

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

I attended the Seth Godin conference this past summer in Boston where Seth shared his thoughts on ordinary people and ordinary organizations.

“Organizations hire ordinary people to do ordinary things and get paid ordinary money; but, if you build a team, an organization, or a staff with extraordinary expectations, to do extraordinary tasks, this will be rewarded with extraordinary pay.”

Do you work in a place that’s ordinary or extraordinary?

Do you expect extraordinary pay while working in an ordinary environment?

Extraordinary work means you shipped.

What did you ship this summer?

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Imagine you move into a new community and sign a four-year lease agreement just to find out you are only allowed to see a certain local dentist.  The decision has already been made for you.

You’re a plumber so you go see the dentist for all the plumbers. 

This might not be a problem at first since all dentists are the same right?  The trouble however is that the dentist now doesn’t really have to be that good.  They don’t have to keep up to date on the newest cleaning technologies or the research on gum disease because they know that you have to see them.  Sure there are other dentists in the community that you could see, but they’re busy taking care of waiter teeth or the gum lines of taxi cab drivers and really don’t have time for you.

Sound crazy?

The same scenario eerily exists on a college campus near you. 

In college athletics, there is no real incentive to be great. It’s about getting by and fulfilling your job description.  You don’t have to be a really great athletic trainer or strength coach because your “customers” already signed up for four years. They’re locked in.  There's no competing with your fellow office mates, or even other colleges once they've signed up.

Your customers HAVE to see you. There is no other choice. In fact, if they get upset and stop making an effort to see you, life actually becomes better not worse, doesn’t it?  More free time to play around on Facebook right?  By the time the college athlete gets so upset at the way they were treated, they are walking at graduation and are soon forgotten.  Bring on the new batch of freshmen!

The challenge then, is developing a community of dentists that not only appreciate their customers, but also strive to collectively raise the level of care in their community while also fostering an environment that promotes the sharing and referral of complicated and interesting cases in the search for better education and healthcare for everyone.

But that just seems too difficult, forget I even mentioned it.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.