During June 2022 my home city of Saint John, New Brunswick has been host to the Canadian Hockey League championship, the Memorial Cup tournament. I have followed the results and attended one game in person between the Shawinigan Cataractes from the Quebec League, and the Edmonton Oil Kings from the Western League. It was a close game with Shawinigan winning 4-3. I enjoyed watching the game in person but it wasn’t terribly exciting with the teams focused on very close checking, extremely effective defense, and skillfully limiting exciting goal scoring opportunities for the opponent.
At its best hockey is fast, fluid and can bring
fans to the edge of their seats. I appreciate defensive skills and in
championships like this one, the teams are extremely disciplined in limiting
exciting offensive plays. While mistakes do happen on the ice, and sometimes
offensive skills simply overpower, typically in high-level championship games
offence is minimized and opportunities limited.
I am a hockey fan. In 2019 I decided
to visit all the teams and rinks in the Quebec League and watch a game. This
was primarily an excuse for an extended road trip because I enjoy driving and
visiting new towns and cities. This road trip saw me visit 18 towns in Quebec
and the Maritimes over 49 days covering 9,790 kilometers during peak
winter conditions. If the thought of replicating this trip appeals
to you may enjoy the book which is available here amazon.com/author/jimkokocki
Limits On Your Opportunities
As I watched the Memorial Cup game and observed
how defense in hockey limits the more entertaining goal scoring, I thought
about limitations we place on ourselves. Here’s my example. In 2018 I had
decided to write a book on public speaking, as it’s a subject matter in which I
have a great deal of experience as a speaker and coach. To write the book I prepared an outline, opened Microsoft Word, wrote everything I knew about public
speaking, edited and re-wrote, then hired a professional editor (which I
recommend for any writer), then hired someone to properly format the material
with page numbers, page titles a table of content and more. I
published it as a paperback on Amazon Kindle, because I tend to read paperbacks
and hard covers. I would later publish the product as an e-book.
The paperback version sold quite well but I hated
how it looked. It was my content and my ideas, but the sum of my
knowledge and ideas displayed as about 45 printed pages. I was
unhappy with the look of my first product.
I should point out that I’m not a perfectionist.
I wrote about perfectionism here
https://gycz.blogspot.com/2022/06/perfectionism-is-kind-of-disease.html
Minimum Viable Product
Producing this first effort was an important step
to opening more opportunity. I suppose it was a minimum viable product, and did
have some acceptance. Regardless of that acceptance, I produced a revised
version of the book by adding some more stories about my speaking experiences,
adding some photos, and some other lessons. The revised version displayed as
over 100 pages (which I recommend to aspiring authors) and looked much better
to me. I am proud of that product.
Writing a Second Book – 9,790 Kilometer
Road Trip
My second book about my hockey road trip was easy
to write because I simply documented the planning and execution of visiting 18
towns and cities, and travelling 9,790 kilometers in January, February and March. The
difficult part of this product was minimizing travel, grouping scheduled games for travel efficiency, and
navigating around snow storms. With this book it was easy to produce more
than 100 pages of content.
Writing a Third Book – Overcoming a
Limiting Thought
My third book came about because I was asked by a
group to present on the topic of running effective meetings and injecting some
fun and variety into meetings. Injecting some fun has become important as more
and more meetings take place online these days and people are experiencing
‘Zoom fatigue’ sitting in their same seat while attending meeting after meeting.
I was happy to present on the topic, and after
the presentation and the Q&A I thought that maybe I should write a book on
this topic. Now previously I had a limiting perception of what a ‘book’ looks
like. My perception was that a book is usually over 100 pages, is available as
a paperback, maybe a hardcover, and maybe as an e-book. However, I have read
material from other authors who challenged my limiting perception.
Many people these days consume books on
e-readers. When an author publishes a book for consumption on e-readers the
publisher wants zero formatting. The formatting takes place real
time as the content is presented to a laptop, or an iPad, or a phone or other
device. The formatting varies based on the device displaying the
content.
While I didn’t believe I had enough content on
running effective meetings to produce my traditional version of a 100-page
‘book,’ I had enough material to be invited to speak on the topic, and enough
material to write something. So, I prepared and published an
e-book. It’s approximately 40 pages in Microsoft Word, but I don’t
know how it might display on your e-reader or laptop. It too is available at
this link amazon.com/author/jimkokocki
I had a limiting perception of what constituted a
book, but was able to overcome this limiting perception.
Perceptions That Limit You
My point in writing this
is to highlight that I had placed a limitation on myself. It’s interesting how
these perceptions take hold in us. This one could have prevented me from
sharing my content about running effective meetings. My perception
of what a book looks like limited my thinking. I have read other
material on how categories and labels we apply, while helpful in most cases,
can limit us in decision making. There is some fascinating material on how
quick categorization and perceptions limit our creativity and opportunities.
Here is an interesting academic paper on the topic titled Decision
Making Under Uncertain Categorization
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00991/full
Takeaway
Perceptions, beliefs and categorizations are helpful. They’re shortcuts. Here’s a good article on their helpfulness titled Categorization = Decision Making + Generalization https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739997/
While these shortcuts are helpful, and
unavoidable, they can limit us. If you have comments or experiences where you
have overcome such limiting thoughts, perceptions and categorizations, I would
love for you to share them with me. It will be good food for thought
and discussion.
