Agreeable
You can be agreeable without agreeing.
In fact, most of the time, we’d rather spend time with people who have a different point of view but are willing to be agreeable nonetheless. It’s far better than the alternative.
Attitudes are skills
Three words that changed my life.
Once you realize that you can improve, amplify and refine the things that other people call attitudes, you may realize that they are skills.
Which is great news, because becoming better at a skill is something we’re able to do.
Some people call these, “soft skills.” That’s because they’re not easy to measure. But for me, they’re real skills. The skills that actually determine how far we’ll go and how it will feel to work with us as we move forward.
Akimbo is hosting the third Real Skills Conference on Saturday, October 17 from 3 to 5 pm ET. You can find all the details here.
It’s truly a conference. No keynotes, no experts, simply a group of people who want to understand what it means to level up by seeing what’s possible and then deciding to do something about it. If spending an afternoon with people like that in service of making a difference would be helpful, I hope you can join in.
The cold open
No one ever bought anything on an elevator. The elevator pitch isn’t about selling your idea, because a metaphorical elevator is a lousy place to make a pitch.
When you feel like you’re being judged and only have a minute to make a first impression, it’s tempting to try to explain the truth and nuance of who you are, what you’ve done and what you’re going to do in the time it takes to travel a few floors.
That rarely works.
The alternative is the elevator question, not the elevator pitch. To begin a conversation–not about you, but about the person you’re hoping to connect with. If you know who they are and what they want, it’s a lot more likely you can figure out if they’re a good fit for who you are and what you want. And you can take the opportunity to help them find what they need, especially if it’s not from you.
Too often, we feel rejected when in fact, all that’s happened is a mismatch of needs, narratives and what’s on offer.
Instead of looking at everyone as someone who could fund you or buy from you or hire you, it might help to imagine that almost no one can do those things, but there are plenty of people you might be able to help in some other way, even if it’s only to respect them enough to not make a pitch.
No one wants to be hustled.
The clarity (and risk) of graphs
You might not agree with something you read on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, but at least you understand it. There’s simply no way a sentence like this would make it through the editing process: “Are we not pure? “No, sir!” Panama’s moody Noriega brags. “It is garbage!” Irony dooms a man—a prisoner up to new era.”
And yet, major publications continue to post graphs and charts that are nonsensical and redundant at the same time.
Following their lead, we’re busy putting similar junk in our presentations and brochures as well.
Consider this one from a recent issue of the Times. (click to enlarge)
Why are the months on the vertical axis? Why is it symmetrical, repeating all the information?
Most important… what is it trying to say?
If you don’t know what you’re trying to say, not saying it with a graph is a good way to hide.
Better clients
That’s it. Two words.
If you’re a freelancer, that’s the hard part. The important part. The part that will open the door to the work you seek to do.
Better clients challenge you. They support you. They spread the word. They pay on time. They pay more and expect more.
Everything else will take care of itself if you focus on getting better clients.
It’s possible, but alas, unlikely, that better clients will simply appear. That outsiders will realize how hard you’re working and will show up. Alas, while it may seem unfair, it turns out that you don’t get better clients simply by working hard. It’s much more productive to take the steps necessary to attract them and keep them instead.
Today’s the best day to sign up for The Freelancer’s Workshop. The team at Akimbo is running it again because it works. It will change the way you do your work, whatever sort of freelancing you do. The Akimbo secret isn’t the videos, it’s the ability to learn together. To be surrounded by your peers, to challenge and be challenged by sharing your insights with people on a similar journey.
The first rule of the game
“All players must agree to not cheat.”
It’s simply too difficult to enumerate all the rules necessary to engage with people who don’t have goodwill about the process. If you want to cheat, you’ll figure out how to cheat.
When all the players enroll in the spirit of the game, the game works. No matter what the game is.
Cultures and industries change. They often embrace the idea of fairness and a mutual respect for agreed-upon rules. But, over time, the spirit of the game can fade–and it incurs a cost on all the participants, because it’s difficult to move forward if you’re not sure what the rules actually are.
As the stakes have risen in marketplaces–of ideas, of commerce, of governance–it’s become more acceptable to play to win while cheating. To buy a slot on a bestseller list, to coerce or to collude, or to rig an outcome of one sort or another.
No one wants to be hustled.
Breaking the first rule ensures that the rest of the systems will be under great stress. Let’s play or let’s not play. But cheaters aren’t welcome.
What does it mean to be smart?
Termites and squirrels are successful. They’ve persisted through millennia, and they do things to survive that we could never figure out. They have good instincts. But they’re not smart, not smart in the sense that we hope a leader or a colleague will be.
That kind of smart requires you to be open about how you do your work, how you make choices and the sort of change you seek to make in the world. There’s no need for a smart person to change the story or be evasive or lie, because that’s not part of being smart.
You want a smart heart surgeon, because she can tell you precisely why she’s going to do one procedure instead of another one.
This kind of smart also requires domain knowledge. Smart people have done the reading, and they understand what has come before. They know that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And they’re not interested in making a mistake that they could have avoided with informed preparation.
And a smart person, in addition to revealing their methods and goals, and being alert as to what works, most of all, will change their methods and goals based on what they’ve learned.
Look around you. If you’re seeing buildings that don’t fall down, public health systems that are functioning and products that delight you, it’s because a smart person did the difficult work of creating them.
Walking away from the idée fixe
“It’s going to be exactly like THIS. It has to be, and I don’t want to hear otherwise. Don’t you believe in me?”
The wedding with the perfect dress, the perfect cake, the perfect groom. It doesn’t matter that the family, the finances and yes, our spouse all don’t want it.
The business with the famous venture capitalist behind it, the IPO, the business model. It doesn’t matter if the people we seek to serve can’t support that.
The musical career with a debut at Carnegie Hall, the glowing reviews and the fancy record deal. It doesn’t matter that the practice and the compromises make you unhappy…
There are industries in place that groom us to do things a certain way. Not because it’s good for us or our mission, but because it’s easier or more profitable for them.
In fact, you can make a ruckus online without venture funding (most people who do don’t have it). In fact, you can have a happy marriage without a big wedding. And in fact, you can happily write your novel without Random House publishing it.
I know you’ve been proving the naysayers wrong for so long that by now it feels like a regular part of the journey. It’s entirely possible, though, that the folks who are pointing out that the industry’s path might not be your path have a point.
For every person who has proven the skeptics wrong, there are a hundred who should have listened to them and done the work they cared about instead of keeping track of the wrong metrics.
Begin at the beginning: who are you serving? What does a successful contribution look like?
The arc and the arch
They sound similar, but they’re not.
An arc, like an arch, is bent. The strength comes from that bend.
But the arc doesn’t have to be supported at both ends, and the arc is more flexible. The arc can take us to parts unknown, yet it has a trajectory.
An arch, on the other hand, is a solid structure. It’s a bridge that others have already walked over.
Our life is filled with both. We’re trained on arches, encouraged to seek them out.
But an arc, which comes from “arrow,” is the rare ability to take flight and to go further than you or others expected.
“Well, that’s a dumb idea”
As dumb as selling shoes, an item that comes in 100s of sizes, over the internet.
As dumb as expecting people to find a date or a spouse online.
As dumb as building an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
You get the idea. Electric cars with 100-mile range, vegan hamburgers, milk made from oats, free college courses…
The next breakthrough is almost certainly going to be something really dumb. Or perhaps merely obvious and unoriginal.