If your job is giving people good news, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing a good job.
And the opposite is also true.
Often, we conflate the situation with the people involved, but that’s a trap. Our job isn’t to make people happy, it’s to create the promised change with care and professionalism.
Going to the dentist hurts less if you have a dentist who cares about you and the process.
That’s what makes it a model. The map is not the territory, and a model is nothing but a stripped-down approximation of what might be happening. By definition, the model for your problem, your organization, your opportunity–it’s not actually the thing being studied, it’s a simplified version of it.
At higher magnification, your model is wrong. It has to be in order for it to be a model.
And yet we need models.
We need a model because if the elegant, pure, refined model doesn’t work, it’s harder to understand why your messy, real-world situation is going to work.
Not all logical and structurally sound models turn into successes in the real world, but better to begin with something that makes sense.
It’s possible that your job is to make decisions.
If that’s what you do, what would it mean to do it more productively? With less hassle or drama?
If we make decisions all day, how can we do it better? Because that’s the question every other professional asks about her work.
If we make decisions for a living, it might be worth figuring out what would happen if we made better ones.
There’s rarely a straight line from here to better.
But there’s usually an arc.
The slog won’t last forever.
And winning streaks aren’t endless either.
As we move through time, we’re often presented with opportunities that are carefully disguised as problems. And every day we’re forced to make a choice. The default might be to hold back, but it’s not the only option.
The chance to move toward better can become a habit.
[It’s time to find the others, others on a journey like yours, who want to do things the right way. Coming soon, an antidote for the entrepreneur who feels isolated. The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is coming back. Sign up on the site for updates and a discount code. We’re doing it again because it works.]
Some of the shift to digital is unwanted, fraught with risk and lonely.
But in some areas, organizations and leaders are realizing that it’s actually more powerful and efficient.
So why didn’t you do it before?
Because it’s easier to follow.
Because it’s more comfortable to stay where we are.
Waiting to do something because you’re forced to is rarely a positive approach to growth or leadership. Abrupt shifts against our will may cause change, but they’re inefficient and destabilizing.
Next time, take the lead. Not because you have to, but because you can.
We all are.
Throughout a lifetime, everyone has their troubles–someone might have stubbed a toe, or missed a car payment or be studying for an upcoming exam. Big problems and small. We each have our fear, our grief, our hassle.
The thing is, the troubles were local and unique. It was easy to walk away from our drama, at least for a moment, because someone else, everyone else, had something else they were dealing with.
For the last month, that hasn’t been true. For anyone.
You can’t avoid it, can’t walk away from it and have to work to put it in perspective, because every interaction comes with someone else amplifying the story.
But…
At the same time the echo chamber around us magnifies our story, we also have the solace of knowing that truly, it’s us.
Us together.
The boat is really, really big and we’re all in it.
This is a slog, and there will be another side. It is unevenly distributed, it’s a tragedy and it’s a challenge. But we’re in it together and with care and generosity, we can find perspective, possibility and hope.
Media culture and crisis collide in amplifying the voices of doom, anger and the short-run. Or perhaps empty reassurance and day-trading of emotions.
But the other voices, they matter too.
The marginalized ones who might not be invited to have a seat at the table.
The people who have a long-term view.
Folks who see and act on possibility and connection.
We hear what we focus on, and what we hear changes how we experience the world.
Megaphones don’t automatically create wisdom or even utility. They simply make some people louder.
Old-fashioned monopolies rely on some sort of coercion.
Perhaps you need to bribe FCC commissioners to avoid net neutrality, or simply influence a local board to permit you to, by law, be the only provider of cable.
Or perhaps you set up interlocking trusts that put a stranglehold on any competitors.
It’s not pretty, and left unchecked, it eliminates all of the benefits of free markets.
Modern monopolies, though, rely on the network effect. People want to join a social network because everyone else is already there.
When we see a monopoly that’s driven by network effects, it’s easy to be conflicted. Because, after all, network effects create real value. If there were ten different phone systems in 1962, calling someone else would have been almost impossible. AT&T seemed like a dream come true in comparison to that sort of chaos.
What’s missing from this analysis is that interoperability is more possible than ever. Companies that provide a conduit to the network can compete with one another fairly if none of them are the network.
Networks, whenever possible, should be peer-to-peer, autonomous and not for profit. The network that delivered you this blog post is all three. There are sections along the way that people and organizations choose to pay for and that definitely make a profit, but the resilient internet, the thing that’s managed to stick around for decades, that has dealt with a huge surge in the last three weeks, outlasts each of them.
The community where we live works the same way. While there are businesses at various points along the path, our support and connection and the magic of the people who see us and care about us is inherently peer-to-peer, autonomous and not for profit. And it’s worth celebrating.
The other day, I was talking to a friend in college. He was complaining about a lousy class he was taking, one that was now significantly worse because it was online. I asked why he was even taking it, and he looked at me like I was nuts.
He’s in it for the education, not the learning.
A colleague, recently graduated from a famous college, told me about the regime of clickers, used to make sure that students actually come to class and don’t fall asleep while they’re there.
The degree is what’s on offer, not fundamental change.
For a semester, I taught at the esteemed Stern business school at NYU, regularly ranked in the top twenty of all business schools. In every class, students angled for a way to do less work and have less engagement. One skill they had mastered was relentlessly narrowing the scope of their responsibility.
Compare this to the courses I taught at Mercy College, a local community college where most of the students had day jobs or small businesses. In every single session, they demanded more from me. More insight, more learning and yes, more homework. They made me stay late after every class. The difference was stunning—they were there to learn something.
None of this is surprising once you see how we got here.
Labor struggles with management. Management wants people to put in more effort, and never has enough to be satisfied—because productivity goes up if there’s more output for less money. In response, labor goes on defense and pushes to do less, because if they don’t, management will simply use them up and toss them out.
Organized education was built on this same model. There is a regular regime of measurement and testing. There are promotions, demotions and the risk of failing out. And at the end, the prize is a certificate that proves to management that you’re a suitable candidate for labor.
Contrast this with the joy of creativity. Of making something magical. Of art.
The artist rarely says, “I’d like to do less.” Instead, she wonders how to contribute more, because the very act of creativity is the point of the work.
You can learn just about anything now. Thirty years ago, that statement was ridiculous. In just one generation, we put everything you need to know about anything you want to know just a click away. The hard part isn’t access to it, the hard part is finding a cohort and a system that helps you do it. Because learning comes from doing.
We talk about ‘learning’ as though it’s as easy and natural as shopping or watching or doing errands. But it’s not. It’s a commitment, one that we regularly make up excuses to avoid. This simple idea from John Smith, for example. Easy to imagine, not that easy to do. Because you’ll have to get good at it as you go. Learning doesn’t have to be expensive to work.
Learning takes effort, and it’s hard to find the effort when the world is in flux, when we’re feeling uncertain and when we’re being inundated with bad news. But that’s the moment when learning is more important than ever.
[This week, we’re launching the 40th session of the altMBA. And for the people who signed up for it a few months ago, it will be a chance to actually learn something. Not to grind it out in search of a certificate, not to find a chance to do less, but to use the shift in our culture and the rhythm of our ideas to actually learn something.
Seeing the nearly 5,000 people around the world who have chosen to go on this journey together is thrilling. Year after year, we see the transformations, the shift in posture and possibility that happens after just a month. We’re looking for a few people to join us in July, I hope you’ll check it out.]
This shift is difficult to commit to, because unlike education, learning demands change. Learning makes us incompetent just before it enables us to grasp mastery. Learning opens our eyes and changes the way we see, communicate and act.
“What did you learn today,” is a fine question to ask. Particularly right this minute, when we have more time and less peace of mind than is usually the norm.
It’s way easier to get someone to watch–a YouTube comic, a Netflix show, a movie–than it is to encourage them to do something. But it’s the doing that allows us to become our best selves, and it’s the doing that creates our future.
It turns out that learning isn’t in nearly as much demand as it could be. Our culture and our systems don’t push us to learn. They push us to conform and to consume instead.
The good news is that each of us, without permission from anyone else, can change that.
There are three ways to tell if people are hard at work in an office:
It seems as though only the third one is a useful, long-term way to allow us to do our best work together. The first two can help along the way, but if a meeting or an open office exists as a convoluted way to do surveillance, you’re probably wasting precious energy and trust.
And while transferring our work to home makes #1 even easier and #2 irrelevant, I’m still lobbying for #3.
