Karen Firestone: MOVE! principles for Even the Odds
MOVE! For Karen Firestone, Investor, Author, Athlete - and More
Publishing a book doesn’t happen like magic – particularly if you have a big job and a big life. It takes strategic goal setting and follow-up.
Here Karen Firestone tells how she used two MOVE! principles – setting short-term successive goals and evaluating performance objectively -- to achieve huge, concurrent accomplishments, including publishing her first book, Even The Odds (http://www.amazon.com/Even-Odds-Sensible-Risk-Taking-Investing/dp/1629560987).
She wrote that, as you’ll read, on top of leading Aureus Asset Management, an investment firm that manages $1.7 billion in assets for individuals, families, and non-profit institutions. Karen is its CEO. And her extra-curricular life, while perhaps pared down a bit when on writing deadlines, has always been active. She is a competitive age-group runner (whom I have coached for key races), a strong tennis and golf player, mother of four, and grandmother of two.
Karen shared her experience implementing MOVE! principles in specific terms.
C.U.: How have you applied the MOVE! principles of setting short-term successive goals to build your business?
K.F.: MOVE! principles tie in nicely with the four tenets of sensible risk-taking about which I wrote in Even the Odds. They are right sizing, right timing, relying on knowledge and experience and remaining skeptical of promises and projections. To achieve our goals, we often need to take risks, both personal and professional.
One essential mantra of the investment business, in which I have worked for my entire adult life, is to build a long-term track record, but to do that, you need to pay attention to the short-term decisions we make every day. Even though we want to build our performance record for the long term, we need to pay close attention to fundamentals and market conditions.
In terms of creating a company that has durable attraction to clients and employees, we have always used short-term milestones as a measure of our progress. From the beginning of Aureus Asset Management, which was eleven years ago, we had objectives such as achieving a certain level of assets under management, forming a strong and committed team, breaking even, and building a solid track record quarter by quarter. Without those goals on which we focused, we would never have been able to build on each level of success.
C.U.: How did you use the concept of short-term goals in writing Even the Odds?
K.F.: Once I had a contract for the book, I knew that I had about nine months to write it. That meant writing 55,000 words in total, which I broke down, with the help of one of my colleagues into a schedule of weekday and weekend words to write per day and research to have completed. I insisted that we review that schedule every Monday to see if I was adhering to plan, and if not I needed to be more disciplined the following week.
Without those short-term goals, I doubt that I would have completed Even the Odds on time, since I have a full time job with major time commitments from Monday through Friday. All last summer, I wrote for at least six hours at night on weekdays and fifteen hours between Friday night and Sunday night. However, because being fit is a definite plus for any act of stamina, and this was one, I kept running, cycling and playing tennis. Only my golf game suffered some because of the time it takes.
Those short-term objectives were essential to my progress and I highly recommend Cathy’s MOVE! program to authors. Of course, my book is about risk taking so I was careful to plan my writing to avoid the risk that I would not complete it on time.
C.U.: How did you fit in your workouts while writing? ….and do I remember correctly that you don’t need much sleep? (Can you share any details on that?)
K.F.: I tend to get about 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night, during the week, and a little more on weekends, but I almost always exercise first thing in the morning. That’s what helps give me energy, makes me feel better, and certainly prevents me from getting colds or getting generally warn out. I run, go to spinning class, or meet my trainer before 6AM most days of the week. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.
C.U.: How have you used the principle of evaluating performance objectively after project completion?
K.F.: In the investment business we must consistently evaluate the results of our choices. The stock market gives us that opportunity daily but assessing returns on a quarterly and annual basis is more instructive, if sometimes sobering. If we don’t learn from our mistakes then we are bound to repeat them and we will never adjust our behavior in a positive manner.
If you lose races consistently despite being ahead for the first half, it makes sense to consider whether you are going out too fast. If we fail to analyze the results and do not try to address that shortcoming, then we are limiting our own potential. Both in athletics and in investing or business, that failure is often a function of nerves – not having the guts to buy a stock that’s really low, sell one that’s very expensive, shift to more cash, hold back at the beginning of a race, or push ourselves a little harder at the end.
C.U.: You wrote about risk taking. How does that tie into the MOVE! principles?
K.F.: The four tenets – right sizing, right timing, relying on knowledge and experience, and remaining skeptical of promises and projections – can apply to risks across all facets of our lives.
For example, in running the Boston Marathon, there are many risks – injuries, time taken away from work, time with our families, and limits to our other responsibilities. Even the Odds offers a framework to help us consider and evaluate these risks. We can train for a marathon and remain committed to our jobs, but we need to make the effort and not ignore the potential risks. Goal setting and risk evaluation complement each other and both can be used by everyone.
Publishing a book doesn’t happen like magic – particularly if you have a big job and a big life. It takes strategic goal setting and follow-up.
Here Karen Firestone tells how she used two MOVE! principles – setting short-term successive goals and evaluating performance objectively -- to achieve huge, concurrent accomplishments, including publishing her first book, Even The Odds (http://www.amazon.com/Even-Odds-Sensible-Risk-Taking-Investing/dp/1629560987).
She wrote that, as you’ll read, on top of leading Aureus Asset Management, an investment firm that manages $1.7 billion in assets for individuals, families, and non-profit institutions. Karen is its CEO. And her extra-curricular life, while perhaps pared down a bit when on writing deadlines, has always been active. She is a competitive age-group runner (whom I have coached for key races), a strong tennis and golf player, mother of four, and grandmother of two.
Karen shared her experience implementing MOVE! principles in specific terms.
C.U.: How have you applied the MOVE! principles of setting short-term successive goals to build your business?
K.F.: MOVE! principles tie in nicely with the four tenets of sensible risk-taking about which I wrote in Even the Odds. They are right sizing, right timing, relying on knowledge and experience and remaining skeptical of promises and projections. To achieve our goals, we often need to take risks, both personal and professional.
One essential mantra of the investment business, in which I have worked for my entire adult life, is to build a long-term track record, but to do that, you need to pay attention to the short-term decisions we make every day. Even though we want to build our performance record for the long term, we need to pay close attention to fundamentals and market conditions.
In terms of creating a company that has durable attraction to clients and employees, we have always used short-term milestones as a measure of our progress. From the beginning of Aureus Asset Management, which was eleven years ago, we had objectives such as achieving a certain level of assets under management, forming a strong and committed team, breaking even, and building a solid track record quarter by quarter. Without those goals on which we focused, we would never have been able to build on each level of success.
C.U.: How did you use the concept of short-term goals in writing Even the Odds?
K.F.: Once I had a contract for the book, I knew that I had about nine months to write it. That meant writing 55,000 words in total, which I broke down, with the help of one of my colleagues into a schedule of weekday and weekend words to write per day and research to have completed. I insisted that we review that schedule every Monday to see if I was adhering to plan, and if not I needed to be more disciplined the following week.
Without those short-term goals, I doubt that I would have completed Even the Odds on time, since I have a full time job with major time commitments from Monday through Friday. All last summer, I wrote for at least six hours at night on weekdays and fifteen hours between Friday night and Sunday night. However, because being fit is a definite plus for any act of stamina, and this was one, I kept running, cycling and playing tennis. Only my golf game suffered some because of the time it takes.
Those short-term objectives were essential to my progress and I highly recommend Cathy’s MOVE! program to authors. Of course, my book is about risk taking so I was careful to plan my writing to avoid the risk that I would not complete it on time.
C.U.: How did you fit in your workouts while writing? ….and do I remember correctly that you don’t need much sleep? (Can you share any details on that?)
K.F.: I tend to get about 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night, during the week, and a little more on weekends, but I almost always exercise first thing in the morning. That’s what helps give me energy, makes me feel better, and certainly prevents me from getting colds or getting generally warn out. I run, go to spinning class, or meet my trainer before 6AM most days of the week. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.
C.U.: How have you used the principle of evaluating performance objectively after project completion?
K.F.: In the investment business we must consistently evaluate the results of our choices. The stock market gives us that opportunity daily but assessing returns on a quarterly and annual basis is more instructive, if sometimes sobering. If we don’t learn from our mistakes then we are bound to repeat them and we will never adjust our behavior in a positive manner.
If you lose races consistently despite being ahead for the first half, it makes sense to consider whether you are going out too fast. If we fail to analyze the results and do not try to address that shortcoming, then we are limiting our own potential. Both in athletics and in investing or business, that failure is often a function of nerves – not having the guts to buy a stock that’s really low, sell one that’s very expensive, shift to more cash, hold back at the beginning of a race, or push ourselves a little harder at the end.
C.U.: You wrote about risk taking. How does that tie into the MOVE! principles?
K.F.: The four tenets – right sizing, right timing, relying on knowledge and experience, and remaining skeptical of promises and projections – can apply to risks across all facets of our lives.
For example, in running the Boston Marathon, there are many risks – injuries, time taken away from work, time with our families, and limits to our other responsibilities. Even the Odds offers a framework to help us consider and evaluate these risks. We can train for a marathon and remain committed to our jobs, but we need to make the effort and not ignore the potential risks. Goal setting and risk evaluation complement each other and both can be used by everyone.