Shun the people who have transgressed against cultural norms.
And shun the people who have stood with those people.
Shun the people who have a different solution to an urgent problem.
Shun the people who didn’t invite you.
Shun the people who aren’t shunning the right people.
Shun those who have slighted you.
And shun those who didn’t realize that they should be shunning those that you’re shunning.
Not much left.
Shunning is a powerful tool, it is a sanction that society uses to maintain norms. But it’s an absolute tool, a final resort.
It’s possible to connect with people without endorsing their worst actions. In fact, the best way to undo negative actions may be to engage with people to persuade them that there’s a different way forward.
August 25, 2019
Giving a talk to three people is easy. No sweat. Giving it to 100 costs you a night’s sleep.
Sending an email to six colleagues is normal. Sending a note to a list of 400 is cause for concern.
Where, exactly, is the line?
Is an audience of 21 different from 24?
If you spend some time looking for the line, perhaps you’ll discover that there’s rarely a reason to freak out. It’s just one more than the number you’re fine with, after all.
August 24, 2019
I did a live QA and rant today at 10 am NY time. Topic: there’s a difference between reckless, fearless and generous, and once you see it, it’ll help you move forward. You can watch (and chime in) live, or see it once it’s archived (the insta version is only available for 24 hours).
You can follow me on Instagram (Check it out… Taylor and the team are working with me to do some innovative things in this medium) and we’ll be simulcasting on Facebook as well.
Also, as long as we’re talking about other places, don’t forget to check out my podcast Akimbo, now in its fifth season. Here are some examples of favorite episodes.
Thanks for tuning in, wherever and however.
August 23, 2019
What does it sound like when you put something off?
All of us have a catalog of voices in our head. We’ve got the one for feeling behind, the one for not feeling good enough, the one we use when we’re trying to avoid a sore spot.
There are good reasons to decide to wait until later.
Waiting for later keeps our options open.
Waiting for later helps us avoid the short-term hustle.
Waiting for later feels safer.
Too often, waiting for later also keeps us from leaping, from leading and from making a difference. It keeps us from moving on, moving forward.
The feeling of “later” doesn’t go away. it actually gets harder and harder to leap as the time goes by.
It’s easy to turn waiting for later into a habit. It’s a great way to hide from the work we truly care about, especially if it’s uncomfortable.
Today’s the last day of 2019 to apply for the altMBA.
It’s possible that you’ve heard about it, read the case studies, seen the impact it’s made on the thousands of people who have completed it, but perhaps you decided to wait until later.
Today is later.
Today’s the last day to apply at our current tuition. Our upcoming session is this October, and after that, we won’t be back until 2020.
Now is usually better than later.
Short-term thinking repeated again and again doesn’t lead to long-term thinking.
Rand Fishkin shares a thoughtful analysis about a trend that now affects just about everyone: Google is hoarding more and more traffic.
When I worked at Yahoo, there were 183 links on our home page. The stated strategy of the company was to build more and more internal content and services (Yahoo mail, Yahooligans, Yahoo Finance) to keep as many surfers on their site for as long as they could. The math was simple: if you’re getting paid by the impression, having someone stay for twenty or thirty clicks is way more profitable than encouraging them to leave and go to another site.
Google blew this status quo wide open. Their model was very different: “come here on your way to somewhere else.” There were only two links on their home page, because the only place they wanted to encourage you to go was wherever a good search led you.
If you were a company or an individual with something to say, this hub and spoke model was essential to your ability to make a difference online. The web is a very big haystack, but if your needle was sharp enough, the promise was that you could get found.
And if you were someone looking for information, commerce or connection, you could rely on Google to take you there.
This, as much as anything, enabled Google to draw huge amounts of traffic away from Yahoo. It didn’t take very long for surfers to realize that they wanted to see what else was out there, not be shunted around a walled garden.
Year after year, driven by the short-term (shortsighted) demands of the public markets, Google has been losing its way on this effective (and community-based) strategy. In the most recent data Rand quoted, we see that more than half the time, a search on Google leads to someone either clicking on nothing (because they found what they needed without leaving the search results) or visiting a property Google already owns.
On a regular basis, Google makes changes to their UI and algorithm that destroy companies or industries in order to keep more time and clicks from the person who was expecting to find themselves somewhere else after visiting Google.
If you’re a fan of the open web, this is bad news.
If you’re an individual or business that’s hoping to be ‘found’ via a search, this is bad news.
And if you’re a Google employee or shareholder this is bad news as well, because monopoly is a tempting place to extract cash and drive the stock up, but it’s not stable.
The resilience of the connected open web is one of the shining lights of our modern culture, and my hope is that we can avert lock-in before we calcify around the current status quo.
Every monopoly seems like it’s going to last forever, until it doesn’t.
August 22, 2019
You might know one.
The busy person has a bias for action, the ability to ship, and a willingness to contribute more than is required. The busy person is wrong more than most people (if you get up to bat more often, you’re going to have more hits and more strike outs, right?). Those errors are dwarfed by the impact they create.
Being a busy person is a choice.
It might not work for you, but you could try it out for a while.
We need more busy people.
August 21, 2019
If you’re creating something where widespread inputs, usage and adoption lead to significant benefits, it’s worth considering who you’re excluding.
The curb cut turned out not simply to be a boon for wheelchair users. At low cost, it opened the sidewalk to a significantly larger audience of strollers, delivery people and skateboarders, too.
Often, we make the mistake of focusing on too broad an audience. Obsessing about the minimum viable audience forces us to make something that’s truly better. But once we identify those we seek to serve, broadening access is a powerful way to add impact.
This isn’t a matter of high or low, more or less. It’s the power of thinking hard about who it’s for and what it’s for.
August 20, 2019
For more than a decade, I’ve been working with the fine folks at 800 CEO READ (and yes, that’s their phone number, and yes, people have asked me how to reach them.)
It’s where I exclusively sell my book What To Do When It’s Your Turn.
It’s the place my project ChangeThis is still happily thriving.
And it’s the place that makes it easy to buy a big box of books for an event or organization. If you need more than three copies of a title, give them a call and ask. You already know the number.
I’ve never said ‘thank you’ to them here on the blog, so today’s a fine day to do that. They’re changing their name and their website today: PorchlightBooks.
Thanks to the entire team for making the world of books a whole lot easier and more friendly.
August 19, 2019
If you’re trying to help yourself (or those you serve), the most effective thing you can do is create long-term habits. They become unseen foundations of who we will become.
The goal of running a marathon in six weeks is audacious, but it’s not a habit. You might succeed, but with all that pressure, it’s more likely you’ll simply abandon the project.
On the other hand, the goal of running to the mailbox (at least) and back for 50 days in a row is the sort of habit that might stick.
The same goes for education (“we do flashcards every day” is very different from “I need to cram to learn quantum mechanics for the test.”)
And it goes double for our lifestyles. If you can replace a bad habit with a good one, you’ll live with the benefits for decades.
The challenge is to set up systems that are likely to create habits, not sprints that lead to failure.
Pema Chodron’s story has stuck with me for a decade: At a meditation retreat, the guy sitting near her kept making an annoying clicking sound. Again and again, she was jolted from her practice because he kept clicking his tongue.
During the break, as she gathered up her courage to tell him that he was ruining the day for her and for everyone else, she realized that in fact, it was a nearby radiator that was causing the clicking.
Suddenly, the fact that it was an inanimate object changed everything for her.
It wasn’t about her any longer.
It wasn’t intentional or selfish.
It was simply a radiator.
The rest of the day was fine, because it was simply a radiator.
My biggest takeaway is that the key leap wasn’t in discovering that the sounds came from a radiator. The lesson is that acting like it comes from a radiator completely solves the problem.
Sometimes (often, usually), it’s not about us. It’s simply weather.
August 18, 2019
