“Wake me when it’s over,” is a natural instinct during a short-term interruption in our usual pattern. A crisis is there to be managed or waited out. The goal of each day is to simply get through it. Until things are back to normal.
But sometimes we’re dealing with a slog. Where the number of days is not small enough to simply throw them away. In a slog, the pattern of only getting by undervalues our days and diminishes our ability to contribute.
During a slog, we have a chance to accept a new normal, even if it’s temporary, and to figure out how to make something of it. You don’t have to wish for it, but it’s here. There’s very little value in spending our time nostalgic for normal.
When we get to the other side of the slog and look back, what will we have contributed, learned and created?
May 6, 2020
Today, the new book from Jacqueline Novogratz arrives. Manifesto for a Moral Revolution is brave, personal and audacious. This is an important book, now more than ever. Please share this with people you care about.
Retail truth-speaker Steve Dennis debuts with a definitive book about the future of stores. Remarkable Retail is prescient and practical.
Eliot Peper has a new book this month. Veil is about collapse, redemption and heroes. As always, his near-future science fiction will stick with you.
Economics in Two Lessons is a thoughtful rebuttal of most of what we think we know about how markets work.
I read The Quantum Thief a few months ago, and it’s still resonating with me. Far-flung science fiction, much more relevant than the space opera cover gives it credit for. It’s a great audiobook if that’s your thing.
This is the 20th anniversary of The Art of Possibility, the book I recommend more than any other. The audiobook is terrific as well.
Cookbooks from Alison Roman (easy crowd pleasers) and Chad Robertson (patient bread).
Fanocracy is a handbook and guide for anyone seeking to build a tribal brand in our modern media culture.
And I loved Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, a book of short stories.
Binge-reading might be the new binge-watching.
May 5, 2020
Maybe you work with an organization. They have systems and charts and boxes.
But the very nature of an organization is that someone developed it, figured it out and has to approve its changes. After all, it’s organized.
Perhaps you work with an organism instead. An organism constantly changes. The cells develop, die and are replaced. It adapts to the current environment or goes away.
If you engage with a culture, if you’re part of an organism, you’ll do better understanding the system that it lives in. The org chart is insufficient.
And of course, organisms tend to be more resilient than organizations.
May 4, 2020
Our experience of time always goes in one direction.
It might seem to speed up or slow down, but entropy and the outside world conspire to keep things moving from yesterday to tomorrow.
Given that nothing is ever going to be the same, and that backwards isn’t an option, our only choice is forward.
That’s always been true. As soon as we encounter something, anything, it will never be as it was.
Fortunately, we have a chance to make things better. Every day.
May 3, 2020
Without a doubt, today’s average jazz producer has heard more jazz than any jazz producer working in 1960. And today’s VC has seen more business plans than her predecessor forty years ago. Today’s journalist has read more stories, as well. The same is true for doctors, editors and critics.
In any endeavor where there’s a reason to care about more information, more information is available. A lot more. It’s impossible to have read all the books, seen all the movies, heard all the songs.
Domain knowledge is required, but domain knowledge is no longer a sufficient competitive advantage, because it’s widespread.
After you do the reading, then what are you going to do? Good judgment and a thoughtful point of view are now scarce assets worth seeking out.
What have you done with what you’ve learned?
May 2, 2020
Mathematicians don’t need to check in with the head of math to find out what the talking points about fractions are this week.
That’s because fractions are fractions. Anyone can choose to do the math, and everyone will find the same truth.
Most of the progress in our culture of the last 200 years has come from using truth as a force for forward motion. Centralized proclamations are not nearly as resilient or effective as the work of countless individuals, aligned in their intention, engaging with the world.
We amplified this organizing principle when we began reporting on progress. If you’re able to encounter not just local truth but the reality as experienced by many others, collated honestly, then progress moves forward exponentially faster.
Show your work.
One of the dangers of our wide-open media culture of the last ten years has been that the signals aren’t getting through the noise.
Loud voices are drowning out useful ones. It’s difficult to determine, sometimes, who is accurately collating and correlating experience and reality and who is simply making stuff up as a way to distract us, to cause confusion and to gain influence.
I’m betting that in the long run, reality wins out. That the practical resilience that comes from experimentation produces more effective forward motion.
In the words attributed to Galileo, “Eppur si muove.”
It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work.
May 1, 2020
I just noticed something about the ubiquitous sign at every diner.
On one hand, it means, “the special that was assigned to today.” It’s possessive.
But on the other hand, it could simply mean, “today is special.”
Because both are true.
Plan accordingly.
April 30, 2020
Me & Now
vs.
Us & Later
This is the conflict every culture lives with. Modern industrialism has embraced the extraordinary power of instant gratification and has amplified it by reminding us that only you know what you want and need.
Fast food plus the me generation. What you want, when you want it.
Years ago, I co-authored a paper that, if implemented would probably have solved our shameful shortage of available organs for donation. In prioritizing people who need a donation, we’d settle a tie by sorting people by how long they’d been on the donor registry. If you’re not willing to sign up to give (one day far in the future) then you don’t get priority to get (when you need it). The self-focused need to be on the list early would essentially eliminate the need for a ranking at all, because humans have been taught to do what helps them now before worrying about later or everyone else. Enough people would panic and race to be on the registry that the shortage would soon disappear.
In our culture, turning the “us and later” narrative (you should sign up for the registry to help a stranger one day) into “me and now” (better sign up today or you’ll regret it) is a generous hack. We shouldn’t have to do it, it’s less resilient, but it would work.
How then, did the media respond to public health officials to flatten the curve on the epidemic virus (not perfectly, not soon enough, but they did)? They didn’t appeal to, “you should do this to protect strangers from getting sick.” They tried but it didn’t work well enough.
They did it by implying, “if you touch someone, you will die almost instantly and quite horribly.” And people, already frightened, embraced the feeling.
People generally aren’t wearing masks and socially distancing out of long-term philanthropy and insight about resources and epidemiology. It’s happening because of the panic of self-preservation.
A rational, generous, community mindset was effectively replaced by an immediate and self-focused desire to be safe. A generous hack.
The selfish dolts on spring break or in bouncy castles didn’t get that memo: they feel fine, why bother being careful?
A narrative of “save yourself right now’ is effective in this culture. In other cultures, less industrialized but hardly less sophisticated, an alternative could be a focus on “us” before “me.”
Without a doubt, short-term market needs are often efficiently filled by short-term selfish behavior. Resilience comes from a longer-term and more community-focused outlook.
The question is: Once people catch the virus and get through it (as most people will) and recover (as more than 9 out of 10 will), what will replace the selfish panic?
Cultural pressure is the sometimes unseen force that allows us to maintain civility. It helps us decide what to choose. People like us, do things like this.
As we face the need to pay for our recovery, for a new and more resilient safety net and for the shifts that our culture demands, will we have to resort to the short-term and the selfish yet again?
Pick your heroes. Whoever you look up to, my hunch is that it’s someone who took a longer and more inclusive view.
We can be those heroes.
April 29, 2020
If you’re under 14: “Good.”
It’s good that you’re feeling bored. Bored is an actual feeling. Bored can prompt forward motion. Bored is the thing that happens before you choose to entertain yourself. Bored is what empty space feels like, and you can use that empty space to go do something important. Bored means that you’re paying attention (no one is bored when they’re asleep.)
If you’re over 14: “That’s on you.”
As soon as you’re tired of being bored at work, at home, on lockdown, wherever, you’ll go find a challenge. You don’t have to quit your day job to be challenged, but you do have to be willing to leap, to take some responsibility, to find something that might not work.
Being challenged at work is a privilege. It means that you have a chance, on someone else’s nickel, to grow. It means you can choose to matter.
I’m glad you’re feeling bored, and now we’re excited to see what you’re going to go do about it.
April 28, 2020
The last eight weeks have been like no other. An unfolding tragedy, unevenly distributed. An economic freeze. A media frenzy.
It’s easy to be exhausted, especially since there’s still quite a lot of slog left to go.
Is it too soon to wonder what’s next? And at the heart of it: how can you contribute?
Average work for average people is going to be worth less than ever before.
Typical employees doing typical work are going to be less respected and valued than ever before.
And just as expectations are being shifted, new opportunities will arise. They always do.
So what’s next? A commitment to learning and to possibility.
The pandemic demonstrated, among other things, that we all have access to each other digitally. That if you want to learn something, the chance is there. That internet connections can be powerful, and that leadership is priceless.
The industrial era, struggling for the last decade or two, is now officially being replaced by one based on connection and leadership and the opportunity to show up and make a difference.
That’s why we’ve run 40 sessions of the altMBA and why we’re going to run another one this summer. We’re not going to wait for everything to be back to normal, because it never will, and because the best time to contribute is right now.
When I launched this four years ago, I had no idea that the world would shift in this way and we’d need new voices and new leadership so much right now.
I hope you’ll check it out. Today’s the very best chance to level up.
April 27, 2020
