Robert Moses, the road builder, understood that that building tunnels takes just a little longer and costs just a little bit more.
And it turns out that bridges are monuments and create glory for those that find the resources to build them, there in the sky, for all to see.
Those are the two reasons why we end up with more bridges than tunnels. (Same is true with work culture and society at large).
But tunnels allow all sorts of productivity without calling attention to themselves or those that build them. A tunnel creates progress without changing the landscape. Many times, it’s an elegant solution to the problem for someone with the guts and fortitude to build one.
Less glory, more upside.
[Moses made consistent errors in his pursuit of glory, just as he undermined thriving communities, particularly those that involved people of color. It was a shameful use of power at the expense of people.]
One of my books took more than a year to write, ten hours a day. Another took three weeks. Both sell for the same price. The quicker one outsold the other 20 to 1.
A $200 bottle of wine costs almost exactly as much to make as a $35 bottle of wine.
The cost of something is largely irrelevant, people are paying attention to its value.
Your customers don’t care what it took for you to make something. They care about what it does for them.
We’ve worked overtime to create a sports imagination. Kids dream of dunking a basketball or scoring the winning goal at the World Cup. That’s a pretty new phenomenon. Instant replay, endorsement deals and trading cards make it easy to imagine.
We’ve certainly established a profit imagination. Everywhere we turn, the p&l mindset isn’t far away. Add a zero. That’s winning.
And there’s a health imagination as well. The ideal of fitness and well-being, the very nature of an immune system that we’re supposed to support.
But what about the moral imagination?
Visualizing what’s possible. Deciding to do something about it. Wondering (to ourselves and then to the world, “how can I make this better?”)
Not because it’s our job or because we’ll win a prize. Simply because we can.
We can start where we are and we can make things better.
[PS Acumen has transformed Jacqueline Novogratz’ new book into an online course about moral imagination and our ability to make change happen. It’s usually $200 but free for anyone who buys a copy of the book. Details are here.]
If we’re holding back because we think someone (or the culture) might not be ready to give us what we want, it’s probably a good instinct. Nobody likes to be hustled.
But if you’re hoping to contribute, particularly if it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, then go ahead. It’s probably not too soon. Or never too late.
People almost always want a smile, a kind word or a hand up sooner than we think and for longer than we imagine.
What did we just tell ourselves about what happened?
And why do we choose to take the actions we take?
How does that narrative change the way we’ll deal with tomorrow?
Lots of things can trigger a change–some local, some global. But once a change occurs, the ripples that spread are almost always in the form of a story.
It’s a story that causes us to change our minds, to take action and to tell the others.
We don’t know what that book or that project is like until we experience it, but we have to decide now, so we tell ourselves a story. We must make a decision about how to engage with a stranger before we get to know them, and we do that by telling ourselves a story as well.
It’s on us to find, spread and ultimately create better stories. We aren’t passive consumers, dandelions in the wind. We’re active agents in what the people around us believe and what they do.
We’re relaunching the Story Skills Workshop today. Because it works. Because we need better stories. Because a story will grow your practice, expand your organization and help your neighbors too. It’s one of our most popular workshops, for a good reason. Bernadette Jiwa is an empath, a bestselling author and an experienced teacher. I hope you’ll check it out. Click the purple circle to save a bunch of money today.
Marketers used to have little choice. The only marketing was local. The local neighborhood, the local community.
Mass marketing changed that. Now, the goal was to flip the culture, all at once. Hit records, hit TV shows, products on the end cap at Target and national TV ads to support it all.
With few exceptions, that’s being replaced by a return to clusters.
The cluster might be geographic (they eat different potato chips in Tucson than they do in Milwaukee) but they’re much more likely to be psychographic instead. What a group of people believe, who they connect with, what they hope for…
The minimal viable audience concept requires that you find your cluster and overwhelm them with delight. Choose the right cluster, show up with the right permission and sufficient magic and generosity and the idea will spread.
In my most recent book, I helped people see how we’re always tracking status roles in the way we make decisions. Who’s up and who’s down? What does this interaction or this purchase do to maintain or change my role?
It comes down to “who eats lunch first” and the instinct has been around since the savannah.
One place we see this really clearly is in world politics. Some candidates personify affiliation (who is with me/how are we working together) while others depend on dominance to gain and exert power (who am I defeating).
Jimmy Carter was an affiliation president. It was important to him to be in sync and to build alliances while diminishing conflict. Winston Churchhill was primarily a dominator, and using that posture, he built alliances that saved the UK in World War II.
Likability isn’t always related to this choice of dominance vs affiliation, but it’s often more difficult for a dominator to be seen as likable at the same time.
In many settings, dominance can be seen as bluster (if it’s on the surface only) or bullying (when applied in settings of unequal power).
In a world of fast media cycles, we see again, again and again the easy optics of domination. Professional wrestling is a sport of nothing but dominance–it’s a theater of status. And as we strip away the long-term from discussions of politics, Twitter and the rest of the chattersphere has created a similar theatre for politics.
In the short run, this is satisfying, because people get to feel as though their avatar, the leader who represents them, is moving up, which of course means that they’re moving up as well.
Even without a pandemic, the game theory of this short-term measure is flawed. Because in sports, not every team makes it to the finals, and not every wrestler becomes the world champ. And in politics, the repercussions of non-cooperation can last for generations.
Bluster is hard to maintain in places where performance is easy to measure. And so it tends to move to places where it’s not as easy to measure output.
Almost no one who takes an intro to economics course becomes an economist. One reason might be that within a few days of starting the class, it becomes abstract, formula-based and dull.
The same ennui kicks in for having to memorize things in chemistry or world history.
We don’t have these fields because we need to employ professors. We have them because they give us a chance to understand and to figure things out. Once you are enrolled in the journey of discovery, decoding a formula or engaging with a taxonomy becomes urgent, not merely an assigned task.
Because a testing regime is in place, particularly now when so many other tropes in the education-industrial complex are disrupted, the textbook authors and administrators work together to skip the ‘fluff’ and go straight to the stuff that’s easy to test.
That’s not how passion is discovered or nurtured. No one becomes a baseball fan because they read the baseball textbook and did well on the baseball test. The same goes for people who devote their lives to cooking, leading or healthcare. These are journeys that require emotional enrollment, not a good test score. We need to stop holding the future hostage in exchange for an exam.
A friend writes, “it is so frustrating not being able to control people.”
Of course, there’s a flipside.
If you could control people, just imagine how heavy that responsibility would weigh on you.
Freedom of choice brings with it the realization that our choices belong to us. One is the choice to lead. The other is the choice to follow.
If we make the choice to lead, we need to be prepared to own the consequences of our leadership, even (or especially) if we can’t actually control what others do.
May 7, 2020
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