🛠️ Pivot Toolkit: Pilot

Pilots, in the career context, are small, low-risk experiments to dip your toe in the water of your new direction. Pilots help gather feedback, and build the bridge between where you are now and where you want to end up. 

A strong pilot will answer the Three Es:

1. Do you enjoy this area?

2. Can you become an expert at it?

3. Is there room to expand within your current company or the marketplace more broadly?

Templates

For each one, go to File → Make a Copy to save a working version for yourself

• Opportunity Grid Brainstorm: Scan and pilot with a plan; this template will help you brainstorm potential skills, people and projects.
   

• Pilot Risk Map — Evaluation Spreadsheet: Full of ideas but not sure which one to pursue next? This spreadsheet will help you map opportunities across four categories, ranging from high risk, high reward to low risk, low reward.
   

• Travel Pilot Planning Template: Travel pilots are different from vacations in that they stretch us farther outside of our comfort zone to shake-up stagnant thinking. This template will help you brainstorm travel pilots and provides a framework for evaluating them based on factors like distance, cost of living, and time away.
   

• 30-Day Decision Tracker: Without the proper perspective on a situation, it’s all-too-easy to get mired in the weeds of emotion, hope, future worry and past regret. Choose one area you’d like more clarity on and rate how you feel about it each day. This template will certainly encourage you to take a more objective stance on a big question you’re grappling with and see how you feel over time, not just in the heat of the moment.
   

• Decision-Making Template: Weighing a big decision? Pro/con list not doing the trick? This template will help you break down fears/concerns and brainstorm next steps to move you forward.
   

• Bottleneck Buster Template: You might feel a vague sense of where you’re operating inefficiently, but if you already knew exactly what was clogging up the works, you probably would have fixed it by now! As with many habit changes, awareness is the first step. This template will help you pinpoint bottlenecks and brainstorm ways to improve your systems.
   

• Tracker: 5 Minutes for 5 Days: Studies show that we can build habits or a new skill in as little as five minutes a day for five days, aided significantly by tracking our progress. So why not give it a shot? Use this template to track your progress, with a few reflection questions at the end. Bonus: do this together with a friend and share the same spreadsheet!

• Attached Relationship Compatibility Quiz: This is a great assessment for understanding how you relate to others and approach relationships!

Related Books

• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less  

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

• Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America

• Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

• Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

• The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

• Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

• Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die