How the Hotshot Rule Can Change Your Life
Rethink the way you live and work
My friend, Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad, shared a provocation she heard from Cinnabon CEO Kat Cole. Cole would go off on a personal retreat and ask herself a question: "Let's say a hotshot takes over my job today. What two or three things would the hotshot look at and say, 'That's unacceptable'?" (ref)
If I left my job and a hotshot came into my role tomorrow, what is the first thing they would do?
The great thing about the Hotshot Rule is that it spurs you to take action on something you know you should do but have been refusing to do for one reason or another. Maybe you’ve fallen into the sunk cost fallacy and you can't get yourself unstuck enough to do it. Maybe you know what you need to do, but you’re not sure what steps to take to make it happen.
Sasan Goodarzi has been the CEO of Intuit for the last three years, taking the reins six months before the COVID lockdowns began. He led the company through a challenging time, when small businesses were struggling and the tax rules were in flux. Recently, he did a listening tour, asking internal stakeholders, the board, and external thought leaders what advice they would give if they were the new CEO at Intuit. This was his own hotshot exercise, allowing him to seek counsel on blind spots from those around him. He then shared his findings widely with thoughtfulness and openness.
When you are deep into the day-to-day progress of your project or your company, you start to lose perspective. The hypothetical “hotshot” is someone new, who comes in with fresh eyes and has a different take on where you are and what’s possible. Rather than thinking about how far you have come, the hotshot only identifies the gaps between where you are and where you want to go.
Take a moment to think about your job or your product or your team. If someone took over for you today, what would they think? What things would they find that could be improved, or done away with completely, to be more efficient or make a bigger impact? What’s stopping you from making those changes right now?
What is the one thing I would change about my life if I had a magic wand?
Every year, I write New Year's resolutions with the intention of irrevocably changing something about myself. This exercise has taken me on a journey of learning, evolution, and growth.
Usually, I start this process with some variation on the question, “If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about my life, what would it be?” Just like the hotshot question, this forces me to step outside myself and imagine someone bolder, stronger, or braver in my shoes. I am then faced with the natural follow-up question: “Why am I not doing it?”
I struggle with clutter in my life. I have old clothes from college that I am still attached to, file boxes full of memorabilia from previous jobs, and extra linens from years long past. The mental load of keeping it all outweighs the value of the things themselves. I often have dreams of just donating everything, of declaring bankruptcy on the clutter, and starting over without the stress and the mess. So why not now?
I decided to start small, with something manageable that would ease friction in my daily life. We had broken so many dishes from our old sets that we were left with a motley crew. In the end, I donated everything that we had and bought 100 pieces of Corelle, which is reputed to be indestructible. (In our household, we put that claim to the test.) When everything was the same, it was suddenly much easier to load the dishwasher. The kids stopped fighting over which bowl they got to use. That small change simplified taking things out and putting them away, saving us a little bit of time every day.
What is one thing I want to change about my habits for the better?
It is easy to fall into a rut, both the good kind and the bad.
I make a point to work out every single day. I don't exercise super hard—I get on the elliptical for half an hour to 45 minutes—but it is a discipline that I have maintained for the past ten years. If I know I won’t be able to work out one day, I will double the exercise I do the day before. It has become so ingrained in me that I feel bad for even contemplating not exercising.
But something that really bothers me about myself is that I am much less careful about my sleep. Insomnia is something I've struggled with for a long time, over the same decade that I have been exercising regularly. The one good thing about COVID has been that I have been able to get much more sleep. Being at home and traveling a lot less has allowed me to maintain a regular bedtime. Even now, though, I am not the greatest at sleep hygiene. If I had a magic wand, I would sleep on a more regular basis and have more discipline around it.
Everybody has one or two things in their life that are just a little bit off-kilter. I kept telling myself for years that I would fix my sleep, and it took being in lockdown at home for two years to finally get my arms around it. But when I imagine someone else taking over my life, I think that would be the first thing they would fix, because it was so chaotic that it affected everything around me. I'm hoping that as things open back up, I will be able to maintain the discipline of getting about seven hours of sleep a night.
We spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week with ourselves. That’s a lot of time to get our priorities mixed up and slip into bad habits, whether at home or at work. This is why the Hotshot Rule is so transformative: it takes you out of yourself and pushes you to look at your life from a new perspective. You notice all the things that you hold back on, things that you avoid, things that you overlook. These become the background of your life. When someone else comes in, they aren’t trapped by the sunk cost fallacy. They don't have an attachment to all the behaviors, possessions, thoughts, and memories that you have become desensitized to—and that means they can push you to move past what’s holding you back.
This week, use the Hotshot Rule to rethink the way you live and work. You will be surprised what sorts of changes you can make to your life.
One of those mindsets that applies to both being a great product or business leader, but also just to life in general! Thanks for sharing.
The Hotshot Rule is a simple yet powerful idea. I do a similar reflection every year on my birthday; it's my annual life reflection. Now, I have a new language to contextualize the ritual. Thanks for sharing, Deb!