Everyone gets the same 24 hours. Reset every day, a fresh start.
Some of us are privileged enough to have the choice on how to spend some of that time. We can feel busy, but the busy-ness is largely a choice, a series of decisions we’ve made over the years about the things we choose to do, but have come to believe we have to do.
These habits are now comfortable. Walking away from spending that time will cost us comfort. In the short run. But if we don’t walk away from how we spent time yesterday, it’s hard to imagine that tomorrow will be much better than today.
HT: This riff from Derek Sivers is still resonating with me.
August 2, 2020
The problem: how can we get people what they want and need?
It turns out that the simple short-term answer is the market.
The marketplace makes it possible to buy a nail clipper made of hardened steel for just four dollars, but only when you’re ready. The marketplace offers some people a solid brass set of the cups and balls magic trick and other people a hand-blown glass vase.
The marketplace is hyper-alert and never tires of finding overlooked corners of desire.
But the marketplace is not wise.
It’s blind, short-term and fairly stupid. Because it has no overarching goal. The market is nothing but billions of selfish people, trading this for that, without regard for what’s next.
Left alone, capitalism will devolve into corruption, bribery and predatory pricing leading to monopoly. Left alone, capitalism will pollute rivers, damage our health and create ever greater divides.
Capitalism gets us an opioid epidemic, the dark patterns of social media and doom scrolling.
Because the market isn’t wise. It has no sense of time or proportion.
The only way for the simple answer to solve our complicated problems is for it to have guardrails, boundaries that enable it to function for the long haul.
That’s something we need leadership to get done. And it’s more likely to get done if we acknowledge that we need to do it.
August 1, 2020
One way to make a decision with a team or a partner is to clearly make a decision. Have a budget, do the math, lay out the risks and the options and decide with intent.
The other method is to weasel your way forward.
Act as if.
Be presumptive.
Hide relevant facts or conceal your fears.
Avoid talking about the real issues, figuring that you’ll figure it all out as you go.
When you are uncomfortable with here, and it’s really tempting to want to be there, it’s easy to weasel your way forward. It feels urgent and appropriate. It rarely is.
July 31, 2020
Ordering in instead of cooking.
Working from home instead of commuting.
Using a dishwasher instead of the sink…
All that time saved. Now that you’ve got the time back, you get to choose what’s truly important to you.
How will you spend it?
[Time spent on TV and social media has gone up every year of my lifetime].
July 30, 2020
Here’s a rusty knife.
Here’s a video I saw on YouTube once.
Here are some instructions I read on Quora…
Okay, how hard can it be?
Actually, it might be very hard. Actually, expertise has value. Actually, just because someone said it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Or useful.
Experts aren’t always right. But I’d rather live in a building built by an expert, fly in a plane designed by an expert and yes, have surgery done by an expert.
Even barbers get trained.
July 29, 2020
Not a retreat, but a chance to advance.
Set up a zoom room. By yourself, perhaps. Weird but do-able. Or possibly, bring a coach or a colleague. But only one person.
No phones. No internet besides Zoom.
Spreadsheets.
Pads.
Spend four hours in isolation, with nothing to do but figuring out what’s scaring you and what you’ve been avoiding.
Spend half a day figuring out the difference between urgent and important.
If you’re too busy to do that, it’s probably because you are spending too much time on the urgent.
Forward!
July 28, 2020
The resolution of communication has been on a downward slide for more than a decade.
Careful hand-tuned typography shifts to endless Helvetica, poorly kerned.
Face to face goes to landline phone call goes to cell phone call, goes to yelling into a speakerphone goes to lazy Zoom etiquette.
Music goes from live to vinyl to mp3.
Much of this is driven by the need to squeeze more and more stuff into a narrow pipe combined with a cultural desire for more instead of better.
But…
It will flip.
It always does.
Because better is better.
July 27, 2020
The quick comeback. The clever repartee. The ability to, in the moment, say precisely what needs to be said.
As the world gets faster, more of us feel the regret of the staircase. The perfect remark, often cutting, comes to us just a little too late.
Don’t worry about it.
Because as the world keeps getting faster, there’s actually a shortage of thoughtful, timeless ideas that are worth sharing an hour or a week later.
July 26, 2020
Random House isn’t in the bookstore business, they’re in the business of publishing ideas that matter.
Audi isn’t in the gasoline business. They sell personal transportation.
You’re not in the business of having a job with an office. You are willing to trade time and effort in exchange for money and a chance to do work you’re proud of.
When the world changes, it’s tempting to fight hard to maintain the status quo that feels safe.
And so, utility companies lobby to ease emission standards, when they would be just fine if the standards were tightened. And so tech companies fight against new formats and new forms of exchange instead of leading with them. And of course, powerful cultural forces fight to preserve their hierarchies instead of figuring out how to thrive with new ones.
What we want and how we believe we get it are often two different things.
July 25, 2020
Because there’s a cost to using it on one thing instead of another.
And because the person who invests money has choices, and often chooses the choice that works best for them.
Most people would be happy with a hotel that generates a profit of a thousand dollars a day. But if the hotel cost $50,000,000 to build, you’re bust.
Time costs money too.
That’s not the same as saying “time is money,” which it isn’t. Time is magnificent, hard to stockpile and impossible to recover.
But it still costs. Which means that it’s worth considering whether something worthwhile comes back for your investment and your effort.
July 24, 2020
