Clever Geek Handbook
27 October 2025

Make Every Second Count

Recommendation

Dilbert, Scott Adams’ sad sack cartoon antihero, is the modern-day Everyman. Micromanaged and overworked, Dilbert seldom gets what he needs – especially time. A recent commercial includes this voice mail for Dilbert: “You have 947 messages...all urgent.” And he is not alone. Men’s Health magazine recently reported that the average Fortune 1000 worker deals with 178 messages daily – more than 22 messages every hour. Today, few people have the time to manage their multiple responsibilities and tasks. People need to learn how to use their time more efficiently. Business author Robert W. Bly teaches you how. BooksInShort recommends his guide for its abundant useful tips and techniques for optimizing your productivity, enhancing your performance and becoming more efficient.

Take-Aways

  • Time is your “most precious commodity.”
  • To find more time, stretch the hours you have.
  • Stay organized by listing your daily tasks, ongoing projects and long-term tasks.
  • Accomplish more by setting firmly defined goals.
  • Schedule your day and prioritize your tasks.
  • Set aside intervals of time when no one can interfere with your work.
  • Bad habits, such as too much TV, waste time. Limit or eliminate these habits.
  • Information overload can bury you. Control it.
  • Optimize your time to be more productive by changing your pivotal activities.
  • Become more energetic by eating right, drinking lot of fluids, exercising and getting enough sleep.

Summary

It’s (Past) Time to Save Time

Everything today moves at lightning speed. Time is your “most precious commodity.” To protect your time, learn to work more efficiently and to complete your planned tasks each day. After all, as professional organizer Sandee Corshen says, “You can’t deal with today if yesterday is staring you in the face.”

“Time is a nonrenewable resource that’s consumed at a constant and relentless rate. Once an hour is gone, it’s gone forever; you can never get it back.”

Start by scheduling your activities. Break your day into segments of an hour, 30 minutes or 15 minutes, and schedule yourself by segments. Refer to your schedule during the day to remain on track. Use three checklists to manage your responsibilities:

  1. A “daily to-do list” of activities you must complete today.
  2. A “project to-do list” of ongoing projects and deadlines.
  3. A “long-term to-do list” of important tasks you can do over time.
“You may delay but time will not.” (Benjamin Franklin)

Prioritize

  • Work on your most important tasks first.
  • Do not procrastinate.
  • Take breaks as necessary.

Studies show that people can work well for 90 to 120 minutes, and then they need short breaks to recharge. If you can, focus on only one task during this work period. Tackle your hardest jobs when you have the most energy. Switch from one chore to another to avoid boredom and stress. Establish firm daily goals like author Stephen King, who “writes 1,500 words every day except on his birthday, Christmas and the Fourth of July.”

“More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000.” (author Richard Saul Wurman)

To make work go faster, look for joy and satisfaction in the task. The less worry the better, particularly since “only 8% of worries are about real problems.” Eliminate habits that waste time. List them and drop them. TV is an enormous time waster. Turn it off.

Goal Setting

To accomplish a lot, set ambitious goals. Use the SMART system. Make your goals “specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-framed.” Post your tasks on a four-cell “Priority Grid” that sorts them by urgency and importance:

  1. Upper left: “Highly urgent but not important” – Completing these tasks doesn’t support your goals, but you must do them quickly. Can you delegate them?
  2. Upper right: “Highly urgent and highly important” – Focus on your priorities.
  3. Bottom left: “Not urgent and not important” – Ironically, many people spend most of their time on these chores.
  4. Bottom right: “Not urgent but highly important” – People seldom focus on the tasks that support their long-range goals.
“Managing information overload is critical to time management.”

The more organized you are, the more efficient you become. Adopt these habits:

  • Carry “a pocket to-do list and a pen, or a personal digital assistant (PDA).” Write reminders and new ideas as they occur. Without notes, you will lose new ideas.
  • File everything, including warranties, bills and receipts.
  • Maintain a clutter-free desk. Clutter impairs efficiency. The typical executive wastes six weeks each year searching for missing information.
  • Maintain a calendar of events, appointments and deadlines. Post your calendar prominently. Visual organizers can help you stay on top of things.
  • Use a bulletin board to keep your most important paper items on display at all times.

What Is Your Time Worth?

Work hard on a daily basis, but don’t burn yourself out. Don’t let co-workers interfere with your schedule. Take breaks, but avoid sloth and wasted time, which slow productivity. Assign a dollar value to your time to understand how much money you lose to waste. As entrepreneur Victor Kiam cautions, “Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.” Big time wasters include cutting the grass when a high school kid could do it, shopping in person instead of online, doing errands that a freelance assistant could do and taking on community activities, except those that nourish you most. Have an accountant prepare your taxes.

“Irrelevant information is a great time-waster, but relevant information that is not organized properly can steal away precious hours of work time from a very busy schedule.”

Moving more quickly is only helpful if you’re also effective. Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts once concluded, “We move faster than ever, but never quite fast enough.” Use this nine-step process to think faster and do better work:

  1. “Identify the problem” – You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what it is.
  2. “Assemble all pertinent facts” – Organize all your research materials. Condense and type up the pertinent notes to gain familiarity. This helps develop new perspectives.
  3. “Gather general knowledge” – The more you know, the better. But avoid “information overload.” Be selective about sources of information. Use your high-energy periods to review demanding data.
  4. “Look for combinations” – That is, seek “new relationships between old ideas.”
  5. “Sleep on it” – Rest after you’ve worked hard to help your brain absorb data and develop solutions. Don’t waste precious sleep time stewing over today’s work or tomorrow’s.
  6. “Use checklists” – They save a lot of time and help you focus.
  7. “Get feedback” – That’s why Sherlock Holmes kept Dr. Watson around.
  8. “Team up with others” – An ideal team has two members who listen to one another.
  9. “Give new ideas a chance” – “Cars, airplanes, light bulbs [and] electricity” were once new, untried ideas.

Information Overload

Drowning in data causes stress and illness. Filter information selectively. Subscribe only to the publications you need. Instead of reading, scan printed material. Don’t read news stories that have no relevance to your day-to-day work. Reading the newspaper every day or watching the evening news can be unproductive. If it is, break the habit. To manage information overload:

  • “Subscribe to a customized news/data service” – Receive only the news you need.
  • “Get your voice mail under control” – To reduce telephone tag, insist that callers leave detailed messages.
  • “Reduce your email correspondence” – Keep your emails short and sweet.
  • “Protect yourself” – Don’t communicate with people who waste your time.
  • “Specify your desired content level” – You don’t always need all the details. Often, a snapshot is better.
  • “Cleanse and purge frequently” – Get rid of unneeded books and magazines.
  • “Know when you have enough information” – Stop researching when you have the basic information you require.
“Practice good filing ‘hygiene’...don’t let papers pile up. File what you need and toss the rest. If information is available elsewhere, don’t add it to your files.” (Jeff Davidson)

Most people do not work at maximum efficiency. To increase your productivity by 10% to 25%, apply your focus as follows: Set aside certain times for your hardest assignments. Let others know not to disturb you at those times. Never schedule appointments during these periods. Do easy jobs at other times of the day. Eliminate unnecessary tasks.

Personal Habits

Energetic people accomplish more. Increase your energy by drinking a lot of “cold water, juice or other fluids.” Use multivitamins. Eat well, with “protein, fats and carbohydrates at each meal.” Cut back on “caffeine and sugar.” To re-energize, periodically wash your face and hands. Get more sleep. Don’t think and fret at night. Before going to bed, write down the things on your mind and place the list next to your bed to free yourself from worry. Eat breakfast (even a small one). Avoid large meals at midday and alcohol during the day.

“The ‘lunch hour’ is fast disappearing from the American business world as workers more frequently eat lunch at their desks.”

A quick catnap (15-20 minutes) early in the day can restore your energy. Do not nap late in the day because that causes difficulty falling asleep at night. Exercise at least 30 minutes three times weekly. Go to bed and awake on a schedule. Get up on time. Never go back to sleep after waking naturally (with no alarm clock). Supercharge your productivity by getting up and beginning your work “an hour earlier every day.” Relax by using yoga, Transcendental Meditation and other techniques.

“Many people boast of going years without a vacation. This is a sign of trouble – not commitment.”

Most people spend one-third of their time at work, one-third sleeping and one-third at home engaged in activity. To save time with your home chores, list them “on a daily basis over a week’s time.” Review your list to see what tasks you can consolidate or delegate.

Online Resources

Consolidate your tasks. Combine your errands with taking your children to ball practice. Use your computer to organize your affairs. You may want to create a subfolder set titled “Home Office.” Inside this folder, you can create subcategories, such as Financial, Marketing, Clients, and so on. Do not clutter up your computer desktop with saved files. Keep them in their appropriate folders.

“I am always quarrelling with time! It is so short to do something and so long to do nothing.” (Queen Charlotte)

Some worthwhile scheduling programs and online resources include The Calendar Planner (thecalendarplanner.com), Salon Calendar (freedownloadscenter.com), and Microsoft Outlook and MS Project (Microsoft.com). Additional websites that can help you manage your time and organize yourself include: openbench; backpackit for project management; bigcontacts for customer relationship management; timetimer.com/applications/business.php to time “meetings, phone calls or other time-managed events”; earlytorise for great self-improvement programs; franklincovey for numerous planning and organizing programs; and workingmomsonly for valuable information for mothers who work.

“Yet you can solve most of your time-related problems – not enough time, too much to do, deadlines too short...simply by increasing the productivity of the one source you can control: you.”

Create a Google email account so you can use the site’s planning calendar, Google Calendar, which is very simple to master. Take advantage of “access to Google documents and a host of free tools to use for your online office needs.”

Social Media

With the Internet, you can network easily with your contacts. Social media websites include: Facebook, which has an “‘invitation’ feature” that you can use to invite your friends to “sign up for teleseminars” you create; Twitter, where you can join your customers’ conversations and LinkedIn, which lets you network through special LinkedIn groups in your area of expertise.

“List what you do on a daily basis over a week’s time...then you can find ways to consolidate events or pass tasks on to others.”

For help with social networking, try Ping.fm, which enables mobile phone users to send emails, images and text messages; FriendFeed, which provides a common interface for “Web page, photo, video and music updates” from your online contacts; and Scoutle, which lets you connect with bloggers who create content on subjects that matter to you.

Are You Mobile?

Advances in mobile technology increase productivity. Thanks to the BlackBerry and the iPhone, people can operate efficiently while on the road. Sophisticated 3G networks are commonplace, and a 4G network is now in operation. Cellphones are ubiquitous. Smartphones are incredibly sophisticated technology with such popular features as email, Internet access, document management, online gaming and more. Some mobile devices have moved beyond telephone communications. For example, Apple introduced the iPad, which it “hopes will be the coolest device on the planet.”

Get Someone Else to Do It

If you work around the clock, but still don’t have enough time to accomplish all you want to do, free yourself by delegating and outsourcing work as appropriate. To begin to delegate, give your staff members more responsibility. Demonstrate trust in them. Don’t monitor everything they do. As far as outsourcing goes, be expansive.

“You can’t jam 25 hours into a 24-hour day.”

To save time, many businesspeople and professionals routinely outsource research, bookkeeping, database management and word processing. After all, “everywhere within a one-hour drive are co-workers, colleagues, suppliers, vendors, retailers, service firms and other resources that are ready and willing to do the work you avoid.”

About the Author

Robert W. Bly is the author of 75 books. More than 65,000 subscribers receive his online newsletter, “The Direct Response Letter.”

Read summary...
Make Every Second Count

Book Make Every Second Count

Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success with Less Stress

Career Press,
 


27 October 2025

How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime

Recommendation

To learn about any subject, turn to the experts. To learn about military strategy, turn to Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War. To learn about hitting home runs, read The Art of Hitting by Ted Williams. To learn about investing, study The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. To learn about sales, read this specialist’s guide by sales guru Dave Kahle. He walks you through his “Kahle Way Sales Process,” explaining what to do at every stage to advance and close a sale. He promises that if you follow his time-tested method faithfully, you can surpass your sales quotas, no matter what you sell. Kahle also packs his book with valuable inside tips. Although Kahle’s volume won’t win prizes for innovation, BooksInShort recommends his excellent presentation to up-and-coming salespeople and to more experienced sellers who want to do better.

Take-Aways

  • Selling is simple and straightforward. Do the right things in the right way and you can successfully sell your products or services.
  • For top sales results, follow the six-step “Kahle Way Sales Process”:
  • First, identify people who want what you sell. Target only legitimate sales prospects.
  • Second, establish your credibility, and make your prospects comfortable with you.
  • Third, use prepared sales questions to learn what your prospects need and want.
  • Fourth, demonstrate how your offering matches their requirements. Focus on benefits instead of features. Engage your prospect as an active participant in your presentation.
  • Fifth, make your potential customers want to take each step in the sales process.
  • Sixth, stay in touch with your customers to sell to them again and to garner referrals.
  • Develop a spreadsheet to track your activities with each prospect.
  • Remember: The sales process never ends. Constantly connect with your top prospects.

Summary

Dos and Don’ts of the Sales Process

Selling is not a mysterious or magical process. It is wonderfully straightforward – as long as you know what to do. First, forget these misconceptions about sales and salespeople:

  • “Salespeople are glad-handing, outgoing people, and...you must fit into that mold” – Your personality does not determine your sales effectiveness. The determinants are your understanding and application of classic sales principles.
  • “Salespeople are good talkers” – You need to listen to what your prospects want and need. Constant talkers get nowhere.
  • “I must thoroughly know the product if I am going to sell it” – Product knowledge matters, particularly if you represent a technical product or service. Knowing your prospects matters more.
  • “I must believe in a product or service before I could sell it” – Selling depends on getting your prospect to believe in what you sell. To accomplish that, demonstrate how your offering meets your customer’s wants and needs.
  • “If I offer a quality product or service, people will come to me and I don’t need to sell effectively” – “If you do it better, people will buy it.” Wrong. With any successful product or service, selling remains the critical factor.
“Selling is not manipulating people so they take something they don’t want. Instead, it is finding out what they already want and appealing to that interest.”

Now that you know what selling does not require, here’s what’s important:

  • “Selling is the science of helping people get what they want” – Focus on what your prospect wants and needs. Not you, not your product, not your service – your customer’s wants and needs.
  • “Selling is the process of helping people make decisions that often lead them to purchase from you” – Even the simplest sale involves multiple decisions, from whether to contact a company and meet with a salesperson to considering making a purchase.
  • “Selling is both simple and incredibly challenging” – Anyone can bounce a basketball up and down and throw it through a hoop. But not many play like LeBron James. To become as effective a salesperson as James is a basketball player, learn and apply the following system.

Your Proven Program for Sales Success

No matter what you sell, you can succeed if you follow the six steps of the “Kahle Way Sales Process”:

1. “Engage with the Right People”

Reach out to prospects who need what you’re selling. Targeting anyone else is like trying to plant corn on the sidewalk. Even if you have a lousy product, you can make a sale if you find someone who truly needs it. Identify your ideal prospects with “precision and clarity.” Ask yourself who needs, wants and is willing to pay for your offering. Consider whether the market is big enough to make selling your product worth your while. Contemplate how you will “identify” and “access” your target market. To differentiate your offering from your competitors’, ask yourself why a prospect should buy the product you have to sell.

“Engaging the right people trumps every other piece of the sales process.”

Consider these issues carefully: Filter through the broad categories of prospects to find your ideal audience. Target precisely; for example, you could focus on executive directors of nonprofit organizations with yearly budgets of around $5 million that are located within 25 miles of your office. When you know who your ideal prospects are, engage them.

2. “Make Them Comfortable with You”

Prospects buy from salespeople who make them feel at ease. To develop a comfort level with customers, establish your credibility. Show that you are capable of handling their business and meeting their needs. Remember that first impressions count the most. Everything depends on what the customer thinks of you – and the risk that you introduce. Find ways to lessen the “financial, social, emotional and time” risks. Remember: As the cost of your product or service goes up, so does its accompanying risk – and so must the degree of comfort the prospect feels toward you. Get an outsider to help you evaluate your offering from a “credible and comfortable” viewpoint.

“Good salespeople are good listeners, and the best salespeople listen more effectively than the rest of the world.”

Big-ticket (high-risk) items demand “one-on-one selling situations” whose success depends on a strong comfort level with the prospect. Always show sincere interest. Be personal. Make sure your prospect benefits from time spent with you. Do what you promise. “Entertain strategically.” Other ways to establish rapport include showing politeness, being disarmingly honest, trying a little humor (if you’re funny), complimenting the prospect, asking smart questions, referring to any “personal connection” you have and sharing personal tales that create rapport.

3. “Find Out What They Want”

This is the “heart of selling.” You can’t sell to people if you don’t know their desires. Don’t project your own enthusiasm for your product or service onto your customer. Do not assume that just because you’re excited about your offering your prospect feels the same. Use surveys or focus groups to find out what your prospects want. Once you know what motivates your potential customers, write it down in 75 words or less. That kind of clarity and focus brings results.

“The skill of finding out what the customer wants is the highest and best of all the sales competencies.”

Develop good questions to find out what a prospect wants. Help your prospects focus their thinking. Smart questions provide valuable information and help nurture relationships. Most important, they let you dig deep to find out what matters to your potential customer. Follow these five steps to develop your best questions:

  1. “Frame the situation” – To uncover what’s on the prospect’s mind, create a relationship of trust and provide enough information so the prospect will want to see you again.
  2. “Brainstorm all the possibilities” – Write down all possible questions that pertain to each situation.
  3. “Edit and refine” – Choose the most effective, specific and revealing questions. Ask only those.
  4. “Develop an effective sequence” – Order your questions for maximum rapport.
  5. “Practice” – Run through your questions aloud until you know you can ask them in the best way to persuade your prospect during a sale.

4. “Show Them How What You Have Gives Them What They Want”

Anyone can tout the advantages and features of a service or product from a sales sheet. Professional selling involves demonstrating how your offering provides your prospect with a solution he or she needs. Discuss your product or service, and clarify how the customer would benefit from purchasing it. This stage should go smoothly if you did your work during the previous steps. Always stress benefits – the product’s value to the prospect – rather than features – what your product does. If you mention a feature, then say: “This means that you can...”, and explain the potential significance of that feature to your customers. Make sure they understand how each feature provides a benefit in their specific situation.

“You must work on the assumption that your opinion is secondary to the customer’s opinion.”

Prospects don’t want a laundry list of features. Focus your presentation on the most pertinent few. Match the product’s features to your potential customer’s wants and needs. Transform these “features into benefit statements.” Start your presentation by focusing on those specific benefits. Never cite another company or customer and how that other firm or person gained from your product. Keep your presentation – and the benefits of your product – personal.

“The more you can involve the customer in the presentation, the more powerful your presentation.”

Decide which marketing medium is best to showcase your product or service – for instance, a website, a sales banner or an ad. Consider which channel your prospect relates to best and showcase what you’re selling so your prospect will be sure to see it.

To build your one-on-one presentation, create your planned content and determine the specific media you will use to present the material: supporting literature, a DVD, a laptop display, a PowerPoint presentation, and so on. If you can, include third-party endorsements. Then practice, practice, practice. Involve your prospect as much as possible in the actual presentation – cultivate a back-and-forth so that you are not doing all the talking. Make sure your prospect feels like part of the show. Do your best to control the macroenvironment – where you make the presentation – and the microenvironment – what your prospect will focus on during the presentation. Keep distractions to a minimum and allow no interruptions. Speak in terms that are most relevant to your prospect.

5. “Gain an Agreement on the Next Step”

Selling involves many steps which culminate – if you’ve followed these instructions with care – in an agreement to buy something. Your task is to get the prospect to agree to each step, one after another. When you finish your presentation, apply this important principle: “Make it easy to buy.” Provide a reason for your prospect to purchase right now; for instance, use “limited time only” deals. When your customer has decided on a product, do your best to sell him or her something else as part of the deal. Fast-food restaurants understand this technique. To optimize every sale, chains train their attendants to ask “Would you like fries with that?”

“The returning customer is where you make your money.”

In one-on-one selling, make some form of action – for example, signing the contract – a natural imperative. High-ticket purchases – such as complex technical systems – may involve many steps. The salesperson must “ask the buyer...to take the next step” at each point in the process. Imagine that you are the prospect. Consider what your next step would be. Once you identify that step, “ask the customer to agree to it.”

“You are never as good as you can be, either individually or systematically. You can always do everything better.”

The essential sales strategy remains: “Always ask for action” at every phase of the sales process. Fail to do so and you will never get agreement from the prospect. Moving through your action plan step-by-step requires advance planning. Try to keep your prospect comfortable during the all-important action stage. Minimize the concerns the potential customer refers to that might interfere with the sale. Do what you can to limit the outside agreements he or she must make with other parties – such as a corporate superior.

6. “Follow Up and Leverage the Transaction to Other Opportunities”

Congratulations – you’ve successfully concluded the crucial agreement stage; your prospect is now your customer. Some salespeople think they are now done, but the real answer is: hardly. Your first sale is only an intermediate step. Professional salespeople know that their real money comes from return customers. It is so much easier to sell to someone who has already purchased from you. Work ceaselessly to maintain relationships with existing customers. Make sure your new customers are happy with their purchases and provide them with good reasons to buy from you again. Leverage their satisfaction to secure vital referrals.

“There are enough bad examples of irritating salespeople in this world to populate all of our bad dreams for quite some time.”

Business-to-business salespeople should use “relationship building, opportunity identifying” and “follow up” tactics with customers shortly after they begin to use their new products or services. Such calls promote “top of mind awareness.” Use “light, nonintensive communications” to remain close to your new customers.

Next Steps

Selling is a never-ending process. Expert salespeople constantly engage with their top prospects, making them feel comfortable, learning what they need and want, demonstrating that their products meet those requirements, securing agreement for the next steps in the sales process and following up with customers to leverage the good feelings they have about their purchase. Remember that this continuing process is a system. Develop a spreadsheet to track each of your specific activities with each of your prospects. This “flowchart” approach enhances your sales by enabling you to work efficiently and productively, and to use your time wisely. Your flowchart will remind you that every customer or prospect is an individual and requires specific individual care and attention.

About the Author

Dave Kahle is president of DaCo Corporation, a sales training and consulting firm. He is the author of nine books and numerous multimedia training products.

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How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime

Book How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime

Career Press,
 


27 October 2025

Clutch

Recommendation

Everyone faces “clutch” situations, those times when you need to function under intense pressure. Few excel in these stressful moments; most choke. New York Times columnist Paul Sullivan investigates what makes the notable few who can handle stress so reliable under pressure. He interviews top athletes – including Tiger Woods – highly decorated combat veterans, seasoned heads of financial institutions, and successful traders to discover their secrets and methods. Without making his prose sound like something from a self-help book, Sullivan outlines how to avoid choking and how to stand tall in the clutch. He includes everything from stage fright to keeping a cool head in combat and makes extensive use of real-life examples to bring home his points. The book is entertaining but frustratingly short of actual prescription, leading you to suspect that being clutch may be a more innate than learned talent. Nonetheless, BooksInShort recommends this intriguing overview to anyone who has ever choked under pressure and wants to see what it means to be clutch.

Take-Aways

  • To be “clutch” is to shine in stressful circumstances that require you to make crucial decisions quickly.
  • Very few people do well in the clutch. Most people “choke” or fail to rise to the occasion.
  • Excelling under pressure in one arena doesn’t mean you’ll do equally well in all areas.
  • The essence of being clutch is to behave under stress the same way you do at relaxed times.
  • Unwavering focus and clear-headed discipline underlie every clutch performance.
  • Clutch players are flexible when change happens; they stay “present” and ready.
  • Actors, soldiers, traders and athletes all live in the moment when they perform.
  • Shirking responsibility, overthinking a problem and being overconfident in your plans ensure that you will choke.
  • Performing in the financial clutch means accepting your economic realities and being accountable for your decisions.
  • “To be clutch in sports,” improve your game, stay fit, train like you play, and maintain a routine.

Summary

Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

The word “clutch” generally refers to the device that enables an automobile’s transmission to shift gears. But in the American vernacular, clutch has a completely different meaning. To “be clutch,” or to “perform well in the clutch,” is to do your best under the most stressful, pressurized circumstances that give you little time to make decisions that carry serious consequences. Very few people do well in the clutch. Most people “choke” or fail to rise to the occasion. “Transferring what you can do in a relaxed atmosphere to a tenser one is not easy – or else everyone would be clutch.” And of the small percentage of the population capable of being clutch, most of those only are clutch in specific circumstances.

“The reality is that most people fail in extreme situations...when the pressure mounts, their ability leaves them. They choke.”

Tiger Woods might be the most clutch professional golfer of all time; he is able to make incredibly difficult shots at crucial moments in elite tournaments with the same apparent ease he demonstrates on the practice tee. But Woods’s highly publicized, scandalous private life, and the choices he made there, suggest that his astute, high-wire decision-making skills in golf do not transfer to other areas in his life.

“Just because someone is successful does not mean he will be good under pressure. High-profile chokers are the car crash we can’t take our eyes off of.”

Clutch extends beyond the arena of sports. Some leaders of large financial institutions, faced with crucial choices under great time pressure during the recent economic meltdown, made sound functional decisions but showed a grave absence of moral judgment. Politicians may withstand the rigors of running for election, but few embody the “strategic excellence” clutch confers. To understand what makes someone a clutch player, consider these aspects:

“Focus”

“Many people confuse focus with concentration.” Most individuals can concentrate, moment to moment, on the issues right in front of them, but few can maintain the all-encompassing focus required to consider the ramifications of every action, every statement and every maneuver, and how each contributes to the larger picture. Think of trial lawyers, who have to maintain a single-minded attention to every aspect of their cases. Athletes can concentrate on their form in any given moment, but can they focus as intently on all their actions throughout the course of a competition? Focus enables you to see the entire problem and to understand each component. Unwavering focus underlies every clutch performance.

“Discipline”

“Discipline is almost always a battle against yourself.” You need discipline in the clutch because it’s hard to make calm, clear-headed choices based purely on the criteria of the moment. Most people find it difficult to keep the past out of the present. Undisciplined individuals unconsciously load their decision making with emotional and intellectual baggage from the past and, thus, make wrong choices.

“Focus is the foundation for any clutch performance.”

Financial market professionals, who make clutch decisions every day, must be disciplined in their trading or face ruin. If a trader sets a goal of a certain percentage of profit for every trade, then that trader must have the discipline to sell once he or she reaches that percentage, no matter the potential upside of hanging on. Undisciplined traders might – if they achieved their predetermined margin quickly – stay with the market to see if their lot improves. People become less rational under stress. Those with discipline know better than to trust instinct when they’re under pressure. Discipline builds resilience. All traders have losing days, but clutch traders show up the next day, ready to do battle once more. Discipline means taking a hard, objective look at your own strategies, having the courage to discard those that don’t work and embracing a new reality.

“Adapting”

US Army Sergeant Willie Copeland heroically demonstrated the importance of adapting in the clutch during an ambush on his convoy in Iraq. Throughout the ensuing battle, Copeland kept his nerve, remaining focused and observant. He didn’t stick to a predetermined strategy but changed his tactics and behavior as battlefield conditions shifted. Copeland’s cool performance in the clutch saved numerous lives and earned him recognition and a medal; it also showed how to “fight the fight” rather than “fight the plan.”

People love to plan, and in the clutch, most “fall back on what they expected to do ahead of time.” Their prior strategizing gives them a sense of safety, even if the situation that plays out renders their plan dysfunctional. Copeland focused on outcomes – staying alive and protecting his comrades – and stayed flexible, reacting to the battle as it unfolded. Copeland was wholly present; thoughts of what had worked in the past never clouded his judgment. Copeland also never considered his own emotions. He focused outward – on the event – and by doing so was able to gain control over the fear, excitement and confusion that could have paralyzed him.

“Being Present”

To perform in the clutch, remain in a “state of readiness”; embrace the present to the exclusion of everything else – as if you were in battle – when circumstances demand. Actors know all about the need to be present. They have to assume an emotion in a role in an instant and to live that emotion in their performance. If actors try to hold onto that sensation all day long, the likelihood is they will be unable to muster it when they need it. If actors think outside the present – about their audience, the job they might lose or the humiliation they will suffer if they fail – then they will falter. Actors, soldiers, traders and athletes all live in the moment when they perform. To do that, they must focus, exercise discipline and adapt.

People choke in the clutch for three underlying reasons:

1. Refusal to Take Responsibility

If you don’t take responsibility for your actions, you will choke. The fear of owning your potential failure almost guarantees that you will not be focused, disciplined, adaptive or present. Clutch individuals remain accountable for every decision they make and its consequences. One reason most people have trouble taking responsibility is that any reward for standing up comes well after the event. No one will applaud you at the crucial moment. “Responsibility here is not an accounting of your actions, it is your actions.” If you are prepared for the inescapable reality, you will be stronger, more relaxed and more likely to succeed in the clutch.

2. “Overthinking”

A comparison between two baseball players highlights how preparation, clarity and purpose can make the difference between success and failure. Pitcher David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays simply does what he was trained to do: Throw the baseball. He performs well in regular season games, and he shines in the clutch of the playoffs. Why? Because he never changes what he does, and he never alters his mental attitude. He does not think about the stakes as the games grow more important. He doesn’t let nervousness flood his system with adrenaline nor fear tighten up his body and restrict his motions. He trained in college under a coach famous for conducting rigorous practices at the speed and pace of real games. Because the coach made his players perform the way the real world requires, they grew accustomed to playing under pressure; they learned to trust their technique.

“What holds people back is the powerful emotional force that the decision-making part of the brain exerts over the rational part.”

In contrast, Alex Rodriguez, known as A-Rod, has been a baseball superstar since high school. His statistics and regular season performances are the stuff of legend, and he’s widely regarded as the best player in the game. Yet every year during the playoffs, he would choke: His number of hits plummeted, his defensive play suffered, and he struck out. The worse he played, the more he thought, and the more he thought, the more he tried to alter his playing style, his batting stance, his diet, anything to get a positive result. He was undermining himself by going against his lifelong training and technique. Then, at a low point in his career, A-Rod remembered that relaxing and living with the results of his actions, no matter what, are the essence of sport. As soon as he managed to let go of his anxiety, he stopped overthinking and his performance improved.

3. “Overconfidence”

“Overconfidence is the bigger, more destructive cousin of overthinking.” If you believe too much in your own judgment or methodology, and you discover in the clutch that either or both are flawed, you likely will suffer a paralytic meltdown. Overconfidence means not even considering adapting, because you’re sure your way is best. Prepare for the clutch by constantly questioning your approach to strategy and problem solving. Have a trusted outsider play devil’s advocate and try to find holes in all your methods. Owning the possibility of being wrong is not the same as lacking confidence: You can be confident while being realistic. If you never subject your processes to rigorous analysis, you never will fight the fight; you will forever fight the plan, no matter how obsolete events have rendered it.

Performing in the Financial Clutch

Take five steps to being clutch when you’re under financial stress:

  1. “Accept” – Step up to the reality of your situation. Don’t live in denial or hope your problem will go away or get better on its own. Being responsible and recognizing your predicament will help you reach potential solutions.
  2. “Psychologically readjust” – Understand your feelings about your finances. Giving in to anger toward yourself or others will prevent you from seeing your situation clearly. So will surrendering to self-pity. Emotions like stress impede rational processes. Examine your assets and liabilities coldly and clinically. Once you stand on a sound rational basis, you are ready for action.
  3. “Prioritize” – When you understand the hard choices you must make, make them. “Getting rid of what you can’t afford in a crisis will go a long way to bettering your financial position.” People often resist changing their lifestyles and try to live as they always did. If you are under pressure, own the changes that must happen.
  4. “Take responsibility” – Clinging to the past or wallowing in emotion will not help you. Own your mistakes, sell what you can, and let your past actions – right or wrong – remain in the past. Be present and sort out your best course.
  5. “Focus on outcomes” – You will prevail only if you remain committed to your goal: financial solvency. To be clutch means to look toward the future. Clutch performers seldom make the same mistake twice; they recognize and learn from their errors.
“Under pressure, sound fundamentals matter more.”

“To be clutch in sports,” pay attention to these four areas:

  1. “Technique” – All sports performances rest on technique. Learn your core weaknesses and work on them. Most people only like to work on the part of their game that already is good; it’s much more satisfying than working on the parts that are shaky. But the only way to be clutch in any sport is to have a sound, all-around game. Take lessons, read books, watch videos and work on the worst aspects of your game.
  2. “Physical conditioning” – No matter what your sport, you must be fit, strong and flexible to play. Work out, stretch, watch your diet and cross-train, that is, do something other than the sport you play most often. The better your conditioning, the better you will be in the clutch.
  3. “Simulate pressure” – Train as if you were in a match. Practice at speed, and focus on the quality, not the quantity, of your training. Put yourself under pressure as you practice with imaginary stakes before each shot or swing.
  4. “An unwavering routine” – Set up for your matches the same way every time: Warm up and do your workouts consistently. The more routine you can inject into your sports life, the more relaxed you will be before a big match. A preparation routine that you follow every day in practice will let you be clutch on the day of the big game.

About the Author

Paul Sullivan writes the Wealth Matters column for The New York Times.

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