Chinese Bamboo

I'm listening to Aleph - Paulo Coelho on CD from the library - a wonderful way to make the driving fun, enjoyable and useful. It's great on many fronts and I'm sure they'll be more nuggets but today the nuggets is all about Chinese bamboo.

Paulo says he read a throwaway article about Chinese bamboo taking 5 years to establish it's roots with no apparent growth or activity and then boom it storms ahead making huge changes growing up to 25 metres in the next can't remember months or years. Wonderful metaphor for introverts and the idea of mastery.

The difference between outcomes and outputs

Interesting clarification on outcomes and outputs and what they mean.
An outcome is the motivating force, the outputs are the things you can do to get the outcome to happen.
for example:

"You may be doing a marketing project that is supposed to deliver a TV commercial, which is the output. But did you ever wonder why they wanted that commercial on TV? Did you know they wanted to increase sales by 10%? That would be the outcome." I read this in http://pamstanton.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/things-are-out-of-control-what-do-i-do/

From a coaching perspective this is very important to know. It helps int he breaking the big thing (outcome) down into small things (outputs). I separates the busy work of life from the essence of who you are, the type of person you want to be.