Kai Z.'s Key Ideas from The 12 Week Year
by Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington

To tap into the incredible power of a personal vision, you need a future that is bigger than the present. Your business vision needs to be anchored on your personal vision.

When things get hard the connection between your personal and business vision will help you to focus.

When you think about a compelling vision, the neurons that fire in your brain are the same neurons that fire when you act on your vision. What that means is that you can literally train your brain to act on your vision just by thinking about it.

Having an annual plan has the following benefits:

• It reduces mistakes
• It saves time
• It provides focus

Having a 12-week plan has three additional and distinct differences from annual planning:

1. Is more predictable than 12-month planning. The further you set your plan in the future, the less predictable it becomes
2. More focused. Annual plans have too many objectives and this can cause failure in execution
3. More structured. Most plans are never implemented because they don’t have a good structure

• The actions that we take create our long-term results. While we plan for the future, we act on the day.
• If you want to be truly effective, your daily activities must align with your long term vision, strategies, and tactics.
• A weekly plan will translate your 12-week plan into daily and weekly action. Your weekly plan should cover your strategies and priorities.
• Your long term and short term tasks and your commitments in the context of time.

• Scorekeeping will provide you with a knowledge base that will guide decisions and lead to better performance and success.
• Scorekeeping will let you know whether what you are doing is effective.
• Measurement builds self-esteem and confidence because it documents progress and achievement.
• The data simply focuses on achievements. It is not concerned with effort or intentions.

Your supply of time is completely inelastic and perishable.

When you are not purposeful about how you spend your time, you leave results to chance.

Block out regular time each week to deal with strategically important tasks. Examples of performance time:

1. Strategic blocks. A three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week
2. Buffer blocks. Time set aside to deal with all the unplanned and low-value activities like email and voicemail
3. Break out blocks. Time for resting and reflection

Accountability is accepting that you have a choice. That everything that you do in life is a choice. It is small thinking to see accountability as a have to rather than a choice.

With such a mentality you will only produce a minimum of results.

When you understand that true accountability is about choice and taking ownership of your choices, everything changes. You move from resistance to empowerment, from limits to possibilities, and from mediocrity to greatness.

Commitments improve relationships, strengthen integrity, and build self-esteem. Commitment is a state of being bound emotionally and intellectually to a course of action.

The ability to keep commitments is fundamental to effective execution. The difference between interest and commitment is that we only do the things we are interested in when we feel like it. But with commitment, we make no excuses.

1. Strong desire. A clear and personally compelling reason will make you do things
2. Keystone actions. A few core activities account for a majority of your results
3. Count the costs. Counting the costs means being ready to commit time, resources, and so on
4. Act on commitments, not feelings. If you learn to do the things that you need to do despite your feelings, you will surely be successful

To achieve life balance, you need to be purposeful in how you spend your time, energy, and effort.

• When our attention is spread over various subjects and conversations, we apply very little of ourselves to any individual activity. This can result in feelings of being burned out, exhausted, frustrated, and disconnected.
• To make the most of your time, be present in the moment. Your thinking will be clear, and decisions will come easily.
• You can neither change the past nor act in the future. All you have is the eternal, right now.

The eight elements that are fundamental to high performance are:

1. Vision
2. Planning
3. Process control
4. Measurement
5. Time use
6. Accountability
7. Commitment
8. Greatness in the moment

Applying the 12 Week Year will be uncomfortable because change is uncomfortable.

1. Uninformed optimism. This is the first stage and the most exciting as we imagine all the benefits that we are going to get from the change.
2. Informed pessimism. This stage is characterized by a shift into negative emotions.
3. The valley of despair. Most people give up at this stage. They abandon the reason they wanted to change in the first place
4. Informed optimism. The likelihood of success at this stage is higher. The benefits of your actions start to bear fruit
5. Success and fulfilment. This is the stage where you complete the cycle and enjoy the full benefits of the change process.

When creating your vision, focus on three-time horizons:

1. Long-term aspirations.
2. Mid-term goals about three years to the future.
3. 12 weeks.

Pitfalls when creating a vision:

• You don’t take the power of vision seriously.
• The vision isn’t meaningful to you.
• Your vision is too small.
• You don’t connect your vision to your daily actions.