An Environment for Succeeding

Chris Brogan of Human Business Works  is a tireless campaigner for doing the work. You can have great ideas, you can love what you do and you can dream big, but there's no substitute for doing the work.

He's on a campaign about doing the work right now in his podcast, and here's a post he wrote two years ago on discipline. It's been a long campaign and it always will be, because we're human.

And because we're human you've got to find ways to help yourself and your team stick with the discipline. Brogan mentions Ernest Hemingway's trick, also used by Roald Dahl, for not getting stuck. Basically, only stop today when the going is good, so you've got a great place to start tomorrow.

Next you have to build those tricks into work routines. That's the part Brogan calls "setting up the perfect environment to achieve the goals you have." His example is of a man who can't bring himself to practice his guitar each night until one day he takes the instrument out of the closet and puts it in front of the television. Problem solved.

What's the guitar-in-front-of-the-TV that newsroom managers need to build into reporters' routines to get them to dig in to social media each day?