How to Be World Class at Anything

How to be world class at anything

Jodie Cook has a decorated career: a 7-figure business exit, book publishers, a triple bodyweight deadlift, an international powerlifting career and six-pack abs, a Forbes 30 under 30 listing, mental toughness, a 17-year relationship and has seen her live in 30 cities around the world.

It all comes down to developing and following a simple six-step success system: 

1. Set the intention — What is it that you want to do? Do you want your startup to hit certain targets? Do you want to write a book? Do you want to appear on a podcast? 

2. Find examples — Find others who are where you want to be. Look to your network and ask the right people about their experiences. 

3. Make the plan — How are you going to achieve these goals? What steps need to be taken to get there? 

4. Daily tasks — Break these steps into tasks so you can start to make progress. Even a small % forward is better than being static. What step can you take today that moves you toward the end goal? 

5. Visualise — See it into existence. See your startup hit those goals. See yourself finishing that final page of the book. See yourself speaking on that podcast. This motivates you, keeps you focused, and helps you stay positive. 

6. Persist — Until those goals are met, keep going. And keep going. Persistance is the key to any success story.  

👉️ For more on this system, head here: How To Be World Class at More Than One Thing

User stories or Job stories?

Let’s back up a second. What do we mean by user and job stories? 

Well, user stories tend to assume a solution. They focus on the actions that users are attempting to perform. This makes them more focused on the solutions themselves, seemingly skipping the step of understanding the core problem.

Job stories give room to ideate about an open-ended solution space. They focus on understanding the underlying pain points and needs of users. Because of this focus, they are ideal for ensuring a true understanding of why a user needs to do something — i.e., the problem being solved — which can wholesale change the solution to the problem.

So when it the right time to use each method when speaking to the needs of your users? 

• Use job stories when investigating a problem to solve — For example, when a product manager is writing a feature spec, it’s important to stick to job stories. Even if you think you know what the solution should be before putting pen to paper, it’s necessary to keep an open mind because focusing on the core problem may indeed result in an unexpected change in opinion as to what the right solution may be.

• Use user stories after the solution has already been determined — For example, when writing stories/tickets for the team to work on, user stories can be used to make sure engineers understand what they’re building so that a real live user can use the feature once it’s complete.

👉️ Head here for a deeper dive into the user vs job stories debate: Job Stories vs. User Stories: The Misguided Debate

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