It’s entirely possible to believe that your ideas come from the muse, and your job is to simply amplify them. And that successful people are lucky because the muse keeps giving them useful and powerful ideas.
I’m not sure that’s what successful people do. All of us get an endless supply of ideas, notions and inklings. Successful people, often without realizing it, ignore the ones that are less likely to ‘work’, and instead focus on the projects that are more likely to advance the mission.
It’s possible to get better at this pre-filtering. By doing it out loud. By writing out the factors that you’re seeking, by explaining to someone else how your part of the world works.
Instinct is great. It’s even better when you work on it.
You can find more on this in The Practice, my new bestselling book.
I’m blogging about it weekly on Medium. And talking about it on some extraordinary podcasts around the world.
And we just started the eighth season of my podcast, Akimbo.
It’s been 2,702 days since they shut down Google Reader and people still remember.
Or consider that Google can shut you out of all their services with no recourse or appeal possible. All your data, photos, calendars, emails… gone.
But yes, you can back up your data. Do it today…
Visit this page to start the process. It’s free. Hopefully, you’ll never need it. Press a few buttons and back up your data to a cloud service so that it’s in two places–This should happen automatically, but since it doesn’t, it’s worth doing.
The internet was originally designed as a resilience machine, designed to heal itself and work around interruptions. And the essence of it was a distributed, peer-to-peer network that worked precisely because it was open. As data is hoarded, manipulated and monetized, that original intent has been turned upside down.
Resilient systems don’t have to trend toward monopoly. In fact, it’s better when they don’t. And don’t forget to backup your data.
[PS the post from earlier today was skewed by homonyms. Thanks to alert readers for pointing it out… sorry about missing it, but the metaphor is still worth thinking about.]
The Ngram tracks words used in books over the last 200 years. Here’s what a million authors and a billion readers think:
Kindness matters.
[Update: I’m realizing that kind has more homonyms than the other two words, and yet the idea still resonates… Pelayo in Spain recommends this alternative which makes it even more clear!]
I have a little wooden plaque with those three words on it.
And of course, the answer is often “yes.”
If you’re waiting on an unavoidable delay, then you’re not stalling. If you’re making things better in a way that the customer will notice, then you’re not stalling. If you’re finding that the spaces in between are giving you joy and sustaining you, then you’re not stalling.
But…
If you’re holding back and looking for a reason why, and that reason is replaced by another reason, then… you might be stalling.
Belief happens when we combine community with emotion. It’s a way for us to see and understand the world, at the same time that we engage with some of the people around us. Belief is a symptom of shared connection, and community makes us human.
Reality, on the other hand, is widely experienced and consistent. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not, it’s still here. And that jar of jelly beans has the same number of beans in it, no matter how many times we count them.
When belief doesn’t match our experience of reality, stress occurs.
This stress can surprisingly make community stronger. There’s very little community among people who believe that the Earth is a sphere, no meetings or conventions of the round Earth people. That’s because you don’t need belief to know that the Earth is round.
There is a long history of building community cohesion by encouraging members to ignore the facts of the world around them.
The disconnect between what’s out there and the emotions that lead us to believe something that isn’t real can actually make a community tighter. Sometimes, the disconnect between belief and reality is precisely the point. When the disconnect gets really large and the community becomes more insulated, cults arise.
But in our modern age, this stressful disconnect between belief and reality also makes it difficult to spread the word. The outsider may be hesitant to sign up for the stress that belief in non-real things can cause.
As more and more information is just a click away, and as our culture fractures into a long-tail of filter bubbles, the chasms between belief and reality become more profound. But beliefs change, and reality persists, and so the cycles continue.
Of course, every rule, every announcement and every policy is in place until further notice.
We say it as a form of throat clearing. A way to make the announcement seem more official and specific. We repeat the redundant as a form of gift wrap, a way to be sure that it feels both urgent and impersonal.
“May I have your attention please” is another wasted phrase that is actually self-cancelling on inspection. In this case, it acknowledges that attention is being taken, whether you want to loan it out or not.
This patina of bureaucratic civility exists to let the bureaucrat off the hook. But it also is a signal to the listener that an official is speaking up. We should use it (or not use it) with full knowledge of the signal we’re sending.
It’s the seat belt training video, the do not remove tag on our mattress, the ‘your call is important’ filler on hold and the ritual of singing a not-very-good song to people we care about every single year.
If you look around the built world, you’ll find these tropes and filigrees just about everywhere. As media changes, we strip away the old ones and invent new ones to fill their spot. Use them (or not) as a way of sending a message of awareness and authority.
Which is better: Feeling like you were right the first time or actually being correct now?
When we double down on our original estimate, defend our sunk costs and rally behind the home team, we’re doing this because it’s satisfying to feel as though we were right all along.
On the other hand, if the outcome is important and we’re brave enough to learn, we can say, “based on what we know now, we should change course, because the other path is actually a better way to go forward.”
More often than not, there are moments when we’re wrong. We can either acknowledge that we were wrong yesterday, or we can curse ourselves by choosing to be wrong going forward.
Flexibility in the face of change is where resilience comes from.
November 16, 2020
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