I hate going to the dentist. Ever since I was about 14 years old, a visit to the dentist never came without a follow-up appointment for a treatment. I tried my best to prevent it, but to no avail. I also tried not doing my best … that obviously didn’t work either.

The torture treatment sessions were a story apart. I don’t respond very well to anesthetics, they work kind of slow on me. So one of my dentists (I’ve had several) simply didn’t believe me when I said I felt pain after getting a shot, only to get numb for hours after the torture treatment was over. The next one didn’t believe in anesthetics (which was fine by me, because it didn’t make a difference anyway), but he kept on passing guilt on me for needing treatment (I grew to dislike this guy very much).

Now the father of one of my friends is my dentist. At least I can laugh with this guy, because I like him a lot. The treatment and the anesthetics still are no fun and even at 31 years old, I’m procrastinating big time when it comes to making that dreaded regular check-up appointment.

So what’s with the dentist story?
So imagine what my first associations were, when I got to preview a book titled “What can a dentist teach you about business, life and success?”. Insert sounds of high pitched screaming dentist drills, and feelings of nerve pain down your jaw. Not pretty.

After shrugging those associations off, I really got curious about what the answer to that question was going to be and started reading. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Dr Joe Capista is the dentist we’re talking about here, and he’s also the author of the book. In the book he tells his life story, about how an average Joe with a vision of becoming a dentist grew to a successful businessman leading a multi-million dollar dentist operation.

The concepts in his book, like the circle of balance and the success triangle are not really groundbreaking if you’re an avid reader of personal development and business literature (like myself). They contain value and if you’re new to the matter they can be very useful to both areas.

What I liked about his book is the story. Joe Capista realized early in his childhood that he wanted to be a dentist (that was beyond my powers of imagination by the way). He set out to realize that dream, only to get massive amounts of obstacles presented by life. For one he was simply told he wasn’t smart enough and that he was never going to make it. Take that when you’re a child!

But Joe pushed on, and eventually made it to a dentist school, graduated and started his career. Joe is very successful, and not only on the financial measuring stick as he will point out in the book. But what’s interesting to read is that he isn’t a self-made man. Joe accepted mentorship, he listened, he learned and grew along the way.

Joe isn’t talking about how great he is, or how brilliant he has done stuff or how extremely talented he is. In fact he does the opposite, he tells the story of an average guy with a clear vision, determination and the guts to accept help. Kind of like the story that would apply to most of us.

“What can a dentist teach you about business. life and success?” by Dr. Joe Capista is launched this week with a massive Amazon promotion. Ordering this book makes you eligible for over $2000 of other products. If you want to learn more about the guy, check out his blog.

First impressions, mind reading, snap decisions and thin slicing.

Those are strong concepts, some of them even mind boggling. But these are the very concepts that Blink, the book by Malcolm Gladwell is all about. This book will help you think about the way you think, especially in the first two seconds of meeting someone or seeing something. The two seconds where our unconscious takes over and let’s us think without thinking.

First impressions

The book has many examples about first impressions. About instinctively knowing whether a statue is a forgery or whether a service at tennis ends up as a double fault. These are examples from real life where experts knew instinctively what the right answer was in a blink. But not only experts do this, we all do this all the time. The first two seconds we look at something or at someone are the two most decisive seconds we can imagine. It’s hard to grasp, but most of the information we use to make decisions are packed into those two seconds.

Thin slicing is the concept behind the 2 seconds. In those two seconds we observe a lot, but our unconscious picks out only a small amount of decisive information. But as it is our unconscious doing this, we don’t consciously know what those critical pieces of information are. It’s something we learned to feel intuitively or instinctively. Blink takes a look at studies that have been conducted about what those thin slices are in particular situations.

One of the studies I really liked was a study about facial expressions. In this particular study the movements of the face were broken down into the smallest bits of muscle contraction (action units). Every movement was identified and facial expressions where tagged with these action units. By methodologically eliminating action units from an expression and asking lots of people to interpret it, the decisive action units where determined. They thin sliced the human face (although that sounds gruesome…). Nice fact: the results of this research have been used to create realistic facial expressions in animated movies.

Click to continue »

About two weeks ago, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits released an e-book on his concept of Zen to Done. ZTD is a series of habit changes associated with productivity systems. Combined they form a productivity system by itself. At only $9.50 the 83 page book is a steal!

Productivity systems are a series of habit changes
Leo states in this e-book that adopting a productivity system is in fact a series of habit changes. Usually this is true, you have a couple of habits that are not compliant to sticking to the system, and you have those habits for many years already. The system won’t change them, you have to.

If you fail to change the habits, the system won’t work and you’ll get disappointed. Yet another system that looked promising and doesn’t deliver. Back to square 1. I should know, I’ve been there (and it sucks!).

One habit at a time
Leo advocates to change only one habit at a time, using habit changing techniques. Changing multiple habits at the same time can be done, but takes a lot of determination and energy. I tried it when I started with GTD, and subsequently did not manage to keep up with all the aspects of the system.

I have experienced first hand that this is the best way to change habits. So I did try to change all my habits at the same time when implementing GTD…and failed. After a month or two, I noticed that I picked up one habit of the system though: Keeping my inboxes empty. And I was getting pretty solid at this too! One habit changed, and other habits followed. One at a time.

Zen to Done: changing habits to be productive
Zen to Done, how is it different from GTD? Well GTD focuses mostly on the system for productivity and ZTD focuses more on the habits needed to sustain that system. There are more differences, but this is the most notable in my opinion. Click to continue »

Gtdfrk is a frequent commenter on this blog, a fellow Dutchie (I think) and a blogger that produces very useful content and resources. He’s celebrating that he has reached a 1000 subscribers on his blog (I’m one of them) and wants to go to the next level. So he started an experiment and hands out cash to other bloggers to review him.

I have to say, the cash is going to be a nice bonus, but the resources gtdfrk is presenting on his blog Getting Things Done and with his accompanying resource list The Ultimate GTD Index are excellent. His approach is more strict GTD than you’ll find here, but I suspect he’s broadening his perspective.

The site design of Getting Things Done has changed over the last couple of months. Gtdfrk has integrated his ultimate GTD index and his blog into one portal. He also added a tumblelog and a “Post Index” to the site as well.

The post index has all the posts conveniently categorized by topic. This way it’s easy to scroll through the posts and decide upon the next read. There are articles for beginners in GTD, lessons learned and for enhancing your system.

The ultimate GTD index is a great starting point for GTD users. It has the 5 most recent posts of 57 blogs about GTD, a softwarelist for both offline and online solutions and more. The major downfall of the index is that it doesn’t list my blog

There’s room for improvement on the tumble log and it can be a lot more valuable than it is right now. I see tumble logs as a reference to good reads elsewhere, but there are about 50% links back to the blog.

The about page is a bit short, so we’re not really getting a grip on who gtdfrk really is and why he’s blogging. My experiences with gtdfrk so far tell me that he speaks dutch (I know that through MyBlogLog), he’s an early riser (comments on this site) and he’s got a family (comments again).

Pay Getting Things Done a visit and if you like what you see, subscribe to his feed.

This post is part of habits tuesdays.

The past 7 weeks I have discussed Covey’s habits one at a time. I really enjoyed writing these articles, both because I like the subject very much and because writing and explaining deepens your knowledge. So even if no-one read it…I learned a lot

But thankfully there were readers, and looking through the incoming Google-traffic people are finding the articles when they are specifically looking for one of the habits. I hope you enjoyed the series, and I hope it will remain a reference for people in the time to come.

Revisiting the habits in the future
I will be visiting the habits in the future. I did not cover all the elements of the habits in the posts, and there still are a lot of interesting concepts to be addressed. I already have some ideas for posts in the future.

For now I conclude with an overview of the links to the articles:

Habit 1 Be proactive
Habit 2 Begin with the end in mind
Habit 3 First things first
Habit 4 Think Win Win
Habit 5 Seek first to understand then to be understood
Habit 6 Synergize
Habit 7 Sharpen the saw

If you enjoyed the articles, and consider buying The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (or one of the audiobooks), I would really appreciate it if you use my Amazon links. Thanks!