Excerpt: Suzy Welch's "10-10-10"
Welch's strategy on making thoughtful decisions.
April 5, 2010 — -- In "10-10-10" Suzy Welch explains how she applies her strategy to all of the decisions she makes in her life.
By asking herself what the consequences of that decision are in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years in her life, Welch writes that 10-10-10 has become a sucessful "life management tool."
Check out an excerpt of the book below, then head to the "GMA" Library for other great reads.
It Was What?10-10-10 in the Light of Day
To tell you the truth, I didn't know precisely what 10-10-10 was at the moment of its inception, except that I suddenly felt as if I had a new, different, and massively better operating principle in my (albeit tenuous) grasp. I had come upon, it seemed, an enhanced thinking process of sorts, a methodology for getting systematic about things. All I really had to do to reclaim my life, I realized that morning on my Hawaiian balcony, was to start making my decisions differently—proactively—by deliberately considering their consequences in the immediate present, near term, and distant future.
In ten minutes . . . ten months . . . and ten years. If I did that, I figured with a fair amount of wonder, I might actually have my very own "life management tool." And thirteen years later, that term continues to be how I define 10-10-10 in quick and easy shorthand. That said, I've certainly heard 10-10-10 described in other ways.
One dedicated 10-10-10 practitioner I know calls it "a road map for clarity and courage," another, "my little guilt eraser." A grandmother from Houston once told me she refers to 10-10-10 as her "kick-start to get unfrozen." A Canadian minister who has preached about 10-10-10 describes it as "a great bridge enabling us to put things in perspective."
But none of those handles for 10-10-10—mine included—really describe the nitty-gritty logistics of the process. So before we go any further, let's break them down.
THE HOW OF 10-10-10
Every 10-10-10 process starts with a question. That is, every 10-10-10 begins with posing your dilemma, crisis, or problem in the form of a query. Should I quit my job? Should I buy the house with the great backyard and leaky roof? Should I hold my son back a year in school? Should I stay in my relationship or end it?
Having a defined question is essential to 10-10-10, I've come to discover, because so many messy problems are intertwined with side issues and sub-issues, distractions and digressions, red herrings and bit players. Thus, the most effective 10-10-10s always tend to start with determining exactly what issue, underneath it all, you're trying to resolve.
The next stage of 10-10-10 is data collection. Not to worry; you can conduct this part of the process in your head, on your computer, with pen and paper, or in conversation with a friend or partner— whatever works. The only real "requirement" is that you be honest and exhaustive in answering the following prompts: Given my question, what are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes?
In ten months?
In ten years?
Now, to be clear, there is nothing literal about each ten in 10-10-10. The first 10 basically stands for "right now"— as in, one minute, one hour, or one week. The second 10 represents that point in the foreseeable future when the initial reaction to your decision has passed but its consequences continue to play out in ways you can reasonably predict. And the third 10 stands for a time in a future that is so far off that its particulars are entirely vague. So, really, 10-10-10 could just as well be referring to nine days, fifteen months, and twenty years, or two hours, six months, and eight years. The name of the process is just a totem meant to directionally suggest time frames along the lines of: in the heat of the moment, somewhat later, and when all is said and done.
My "on to something" feeling, however, did not prepare me for the response. Heartfelt emails and letters soon poured in. 10-10-10, I discovered, wasn't just useful within one or two or three degrees of separation. It worked for men and women, young and old, near and far, in decisions large and small and in-between, at home and at work, and in love, friendship, and parenting.
It even worked for a twenty-seven-year-old government employee named Antoine Jefferson, who wrote me to say that he was using 10-10-10 to guide him in his personal goal of reinventing the welfare system, one act of kindness at a time.How exciting that new journey sounds. 10-10-10 does have a way of galvanizing people into forward-thinking action and out of a fixation on the present. But it would be a mistake to think that the only purpose of 10-10-10 is to clang long-term alarm bells during the decision-making process.Yes, heightening your awareness of ten years out is one purpose of 10-10-10, and a very good one. All too often, we make decisions just to avoid an immediate ouch—the sulking child, the disappointed family, the complicated logistics, the angry coworkers, and so on. The third 10 in 10-10-10 has a powerful way of mitigating that tendency. It helps us decide whether (or not) it's worth it to endure short-term flame-outs in the service of our larger, more deeply held goals in life.
No one, however, should make every decision based on its consequences in the long term. First, such prudence is pretty much guaranteed to make your day-to-day life a total bore. You cannot banish spontaneity! But the main reason not to set your sights exclusively on the third 10 is that it can be too damn risky.
Pete Turkel taught me that.
Pete was an editor on the swing shift at the Associated Press back in the mid-1980s, when I was all of twenty-six years old and a reporter in the Boston bureau. At the time I met Pete, I was working the overnight shift myself, reporting for duty at midnight and released to freedom at 8 AM when, oddly enough, I found myself hungry for a burger and a beer. My skewed body clock was unpleasant enough, but at least I was still able to see friends and family at breakfast and dinner. Pete, who came in at 4 PM and left at midnight, missed everything. He was asleep when his kids left for school and his wife for work, and he was at work when they all came home, ate dinner, and went to bed.
One day, bitching and moaning about my own hours, I turned to Pete—twenty years my senior—and blurted out, "I don't know how you stand it. It's like you're living on another planet or something."
To this day, I admire Pete for not smacking me for my temerity. Instead he smiled in his familiar, good-hearted way. "You'll understand this when you're older, Suzy, and have real bills to pay and a family to raise," he said. "I'm paid a premium for working this shift. If I keep at this job, I'll be able to retire early, send my kids to college without loans, and buy a house with a dock on a lake. What I'm doing will be worth every minute of it when I walk out that door on my last day."
I was one year gone from the AP when Pete was killed in a car crash. (His wife was gravely injured and died later.) But it was never lost on me that Pete was postponing life— for all the "right" reasons—at the time of his death. I still think about Pete. His life reminds me that while it's important to consider the long-term consequences of every 10-10-10 decision, they cannot be consistently more important than the short- and midterm. The far-off future often matters more than we give it credit for and should influence our thinking more than it usually does. But it should not trump all other time frame considerations, all the time.
TURNAROUND TIME
If there is one piece of push back I receive about 10-10-10, it concerns timing and it generally goes like this: "I'm just too busy to do that kind of thing."
With life-changing decisions, it's true that 10-10-10 can take hours or longer to conduct. Later on, we will meet an advertising executive who leaned on 10-10-10 to help her decide what to do about her career after her son was diagnosed with a genetic mental illness. Because it required the gathering of medical opinions, her 10-10-10 decision unfurled over the course of two weeks.
Far more often, however, 10-10-10 slows you down just enough to get your decision right. It doesn't squander your time as much as invests it wisely.
Take Natalie, a tech company manager I met last year. Along with her busy job, Natalie tries to stay deeply present in the lives of her two teenage sons, both high school athletes, and her husband of eighteen years. Most days, she keeps all of her balls in the air, but when a new one gets tossed into the mix, sometimes unexpected decisions need to be made—quickly.And 10-10-10 is always there. No matter what the scope of the dilemma it's applied to, no matter what the details. Since the morning that I found 10-10-10, or it found me, I have seen the idea evolve into its full form and spread from person to person, across boundaries of every kind.Because it works.
In a time when the world moves at warp speed and decisions can feel inexorably complex, 10-10-10 can help you forge an intentional life, choice by choice. It can make you far less likely to find yourself outside looking in at your life, in shock, dismay, or the kind of regret that rusts in you forever. It helps you decide whether you want to be a career woman or a mother, or both, whether a relationship should go forward or end, or if a job is worth saving.
10-10-10 adds reason where it is lacking. It inserts deliberation where there is only instinct. It replaces opaqueness with transparency. Or as Antoine told me once, 10-10-10 "hushes the noise so the mind can see what it needs to."Which brings me back to my first description of 10-10-10 as a life-management tool.
The truth is, if you use 10-10-10 consistently, it becomes less of a tool or a process or a device or a methodology— and more of an infinite and sustaining heartbeat.
It becomes a way of life.
Click here to return to the "Good Morning America" Web site.
Popular Reads
ABC News Live