Three tricky words.
Tricky because home used to be a refuge from work. Home is safe, work brings tension. Home is long-term, work might not be.
But mostly because the industrial, cog-oriented mindset of work is that you should keep your head down, avoid responsibility and look busy! The factory owner seeks productivity, which equals more, which means pushing people to go faster. The natural response is to hold a little bit back, because if you don’t then you’ll just have to do more anyway.
Some might wonder about kids who are homeschooled, because they haven’t been processed by the compliance-focused industrial schooling system. Can they really be trusted in a factory environment, they ask.
An aside about the clickers: Large universities now require undergraduates in lecture classes to bring a clicker with them to class. The clicker confirms their attendance. The clicker can be used throughout by the professor to ensure that students are paying attention. The clicker can easily lead to better training. Sort of the way it works on dogs, but backwards.
Click training is not going to create the sort of professional who can work from home. It simply pushes us to comply even more closely with a system that monitors us as we work to find an answer that the boss knew all along.
And when Harvard sends every student home to take virtual classes after spring break, they give up the social dynamic that is Harvard, but are they also going to learn anything, really?
They will if they want to.
That’s the key to the whole thing. Unless you’re doing easily measured piecework in the old-fashioned cottage industry mindset (the original work from home job), then the opportunity is to raise your hand, not keep your head down.
Some jobs and some schools reward people who lead, connect and volunteer.
Slack and other distributed online systems make it easier than ever to build a flat organization. Which makes it more likely that people who want to lead can lead.
When you work from home, you can sit back and wait for assignments and hope you won’t get picked. You can be sure to click the clicker when required.
Or can you decide to change your posture. With all the time you save by not going to meetings and not commuting, you can run with the opportunity. Turn the freedom into responsibility instead of fearing or hoping for authority.
Some jobs don’t lend themselves to this opportunity. If that’s true, you could figure out how to change the organization or go find one that deserves you and your commitment to the work.
The best way to work from home is to plan your own agenda, organize your peers, make bigger promises, show up often, lead, connect, innovate and ask hard questions. And then do it all again.
You will if you want to.
Stay home.
Stay home, it’s a good idea. It’s a generous way to help people stay safe. Stay home and lead.
In the long run, which is getting shorter all the time, people with a linchpin mindset are valued more highly, given more opportunities and make a bigger impact. This is a chance to enroll in the journey of making a difference.
From wherever you’re working.
March 11, 2020
All the easy ones are already solved.
Difficult problems are precisely what we signed up for, right?
Or, at the very least, the only problems that are left.
Difficult problems are rarely solved immediately, and sometimes they’re not solved the way we might have imagined, but with effort, they often yield.
March 10, 2020
A friend told me that she was dreading a possible quarantine in response to the worldwide health emergency.
“But you work at home,” I said. She agreed with me, but made it clear that when it was her choice, it felt different.
The first job is taking care of the people around you and helping others get their health back.
After that, we have choices to make. Choices about how to spend our time, how to connect and how to view the change to our lives.
What if we committed to watching less Netflix, not more? Fewer news updates, fewer YouTube videos, fewer digital distractions.
What if we decided to find a way to connect with people who need us, to lead people forward, to weave something generous for the community?
And what if we chose to learn something? All the time not spent commuting or in meetings–a chance to dive deep into the work of McCoy Tyner, or to understand how probability works.
Even as we retreat from physical interaction, there’s a huge opportunity to actually connect, to learn and to understand.
Panic is a choice, and so is productive generosity.
Good health and peace of mind to you and to people you care about.
March 9, 2020
We have two choices:
We can buy into the stress, the noise and the craziness and make it even more chaotic. That’s certainly how it spreads. It feels like the right thing to do–to join in on the anxiety. But it’s not. In fact, the anxiety doesn’t help anyone, and probably makes it harder for those in need. If you’re needed, then help. But if you’re not, if the chaos will get worse if you amplify it, consider a different path.
The other path is to take this moment in time to dig deep and figure out what’s next. In the middle of every market interruption, someone starts building a new market. In the midst of a career adjustment, new careers are built.
The altMBA has a regular decision deadline tomorrow. The session begins April 20.
We’ve engaged with more than 4,000 people around the world over the last four years. The altMBA is not an online course, it’s not video-based and it’s not for a grade. Instead, we’ve committed to finding people who want to work with each other in a journey to level up. You can do it from where you are in your career, and where you are in the world, and a month later, you will have learned a new way forward.
The magic of learning is that it’s yours. Even after the chaos subsides.
When the world changes, it’s easy to feel stressed. That’s because stress is wanting to do two things at the same time–stay and go.
When we’re surrounded by people who are also seeking control over an uncontrollable situation, it magnifies those feelings.
It’s okay, probably even helpful, to begin by clarifying the emotions that we’re feeling, especially when we’re apparently talking about something else. Panic is never a useful plan, and it’s even worse if it seems to be about something else.
People rarely say, “I wish I’d panicked more.”
Day by day, step by step, the present becomes the future, and we make the best decisions that we can.
That’s a pretty silly thing to write on the store window.
It says to loyal customers, “watch out, someone new is in charge.”
And it says to strangers and the apathetic, “this place failed.”
If you think about it, though, every day, every store is under new management, if we define ‘new’ to mean, “we learned from what happened yesterday.”
Each of us has a chance to be new tomorrow, if we care enough.
The only way to get better is to walk away from what you used to believe. And the person you become can’t possibly be the same as the person you were.
March 8, 2020
In the future, of course, there are no handshakes. Star Trek, Star Wars, even Spaceballs… no one shakes hands.
And handshakes haven’t been the standard default for as long as we think–they were codified by the Quakers five hundred years ago, because they were thought to be more egalitarian than tipping a hat or bowing.
Today, of course, a handshake is often seen as a threat more than a disarming form of intimacy and equality.
In addition to being a vector for disease transmission, handshakes reward a certain sort of powerful personality and penalize people who might be disabled or uninterested in that sort of interaction. And judging people by the strength of their grip doesn’t make much sense anymore.
Until a week or two ago, demurring a proffered hand (how antiquated to use ‘demurring’ and ‘proffered’ in the same sentence) was seen as odd and a bit insulting. Today, it comes across as generous.
Add to this the fact that in a video call, there’s no way to shake hands. Hat tipping (or perhaps an informal Vulcan salute or simply a smile and a wave) might be making a comeback.
March 7, 2020
Getting found.
No clients, no work.
And the clients have a problem as well: Figuring out who the truly good freelancers are.
A marketplace like Upwork is supposed to solve a classic two-sided problem like this one. But the problem is so difficult that marketplaces often make it worse (and charge too much as well).
They make it worse by pushing people to be bottom-fishing cheap commodity providers. If someone searches for ‘logo designer’, there is a huge amount of pressure to be the freelancer who checks all the boxes, has decent reviews and is also the cheapest.
The problem with that race to the bottom is that you might win. Compliance and commodity pricing can’t possibly work well for an independent freelancer, because there’s always someone cheaper than you.
And clients? Well, every once in a while a good client encounters a freelancer who is worth sticking with. The marketplaces, though, want to be sure to get paid for every hour worked, not simply surface the good ones. Upwork is trying to slip through a change in their terms of service (effective in four weeks) that will subject any client who hires a freelancer they found on their site to a fine of up to $50,000–per freelancer. That’s not good for either the freelancer or the client.
The gig economy is based on the magic of finding the right person for the right job. It falls apart when it becomes a commodity marketplace in which each freelancer struggles to be valued for the work they are able to create.
For most freelancers, the hard part isn’t doing the work–it’s being tricked into believing that they have to be the lowest bidder to succeed.
More on this in our upcoming workshop for freelancers. Sign up for updates now and we’ll let you know when it’s launching.
March 6, 2020
That’s not the only way we experience the world, and until relatively recently, it wasn’t even the dominant one.
The sun rose this morning. You don’t have to agree with me, but a stranger to our disagreement would confirm that it happened.
Objective reality is measured. It’s not based on talking points. It’s repeatable and verifiable.
When humans share an understanding of how things are objectively, we’re able to make enormous progress, because this objective reality is consistent. It doesn’t matter which group we’re in, or who our leaders are. We don’t have to check with someone else before we can decide if what’s in front of us is true or not. So we can work together to build roads or bridges, to cure an illness or make an omelet.
Much of our life is actually driven by shared cultural reality instead. This is what happens when ‘we’ all agree that brides wear white, or that squirrel isn’t worth eating. There isn’t a universal ‘we’, simply groups that define themselves that way. Shared cultural reality is essential to create harmony within groups, but it can drift over time, sometimes erratically, because the compass can change. It can change when leaders insist it does, and it can change in the face of other changes in the culture.
Our cultural and our objective realities overlap and often conflict. For example, too often, we’ve made the cultural decision that people of certain races, backgrounds or genders are somehow inferior. In the face of objective reality, the cultural reality is (too slowly) changing. Shared cultural reality can stick around for a long time, again because there’s no agreed-upon compass to point to. It’s surprising but likely true that the most devout cheerleader for a given cultural tribe would have been stoned as a heretic by that same group a hundred years ago. The context shifts.
Amplified by the media, divisions over this cultural reality are getting worse. Spin, widely spread, not only seeks to divide us on cultural issues, but resorts to insisting that the objective reality that is challenging those issues isn’t real. By seeking to deny the things we ought to be able to agree on, it sets us back.
The other two corners of 2 x 2 grid are:
Unshared objective reality. This is the scientist or scholar we call a genius. Someone who sees the objective truth before the others, who is pilloried and then celebrated for challenging the status quo we all will be abandoning one day soon.
And unshared cultural reality. This is the artist, the poet or the offbeat person who is living with a different set of cultural rules than the rest of us.
The conflict of our time is between people who are challenging our shared objective reality by claiming that their shared cultural reality takes precedence over what we’ve discovered. And vice versa–objectivists who insist that cultural reality doesn’t matter. It does. It makes us human and helps us find meaning.
They’re different, but we need them both. One way to accomplish this is to not confuse them.
The banana is not a threat to the bicycle.
March 5, 2020
Often, we choose to be selfish because we feel insufficiency.
“I don’t have that much, how can I possibly share it?”
The insecurity that comes from feeling like our foundation is weak or our future is uncertain can cloud our instinct to be generous. Like a drowning person, we cling ever tighter to the life buoy.
You see where this is going…
The single best way to find sufficiency and confidence and trust and forward motion is to do precisely the opposite of what our instincts might tell us.
In an economy based on connection, trust and attention, the posture of generosity is not only the highest-yielding strategy, it’s also the right thing to do.
Ideas shared go up in value. Doors opened turn into new opportunities for all.
TODAY is the last day for signups for The Podcast Fellowship. It’s not too late to be heard. Hope to see you there.
March 4, 2020
