Chapter Three
THE DUMP LIST
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
—Lee Iacocca
By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.
—Lao Tzu
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
—Raymond Lindquist
I’ve had people tell me this is their favorite step because it’s so easy. They tell me it makes them feel great to get things out of their heads.
Once you’ve stopped immediately when faced with a challenge, new situations, or multiple concerns, the next thing to do is to create what I call a Dump List.
In this step, you must list all of your concerns on a piece of paper—or on a laptop or smartphone. And I mean all of your concerns. Just dump them out of your head.
Follow this format:
- List each concern on a separate line.
- Don’t worry about complete sentences, grammatical structure, or details, just dump!
MEET JOHN
Consider the situation of one young executive, John. His is the story I had you imagine at the beginning of this book.
John had just returned to the office after a two-week vacation in Cancun. He showed up for work Monday morning refreshed and ready to go, only to be hit from all sides with urgent demands.
Poor John. To put it briefly:
He returned to the office, in a way similar to the situation described in the first pages of this book, to learn that Human Resources were behind schedule in cutting another 5 percent of the employees at ...
