Then everyone else would find it easy as well. Which would make it awfully difficult to do important work, work that stands out, work that people would go out of their way to find.
When difficulties arise, it might very well be good news. Because those difficulties may dissuade all the people who aren’t as dedicated as you are.
It pays to seek out the hard parts.
We all have them.
“If ____ happens, then I’ll do ____.”
If this emergency passes, then I’ll take a break.
If this customer closes, then I’ll invest in my education.
If we get this finished, then we’ll focus on that.
Too often, the ifthen is nothing but a stall. As a result, we burn trust, and worse, postpone a future we’d like to spend time living in.
Take your ifthen’s seriously. The future always happens sooner than we expect.
Standing at my desk this summer, it had just turned 10 am, and I realized that I’d already:
Heard from an old friend, engaged with three team members on two continents, read 28 blogs across the spectrum AND found out about the weather and the news around the world.
Half my life ago, in a similar morning spent in a similar office, not one of those things would have been true.
The incoming (and our ability to create more outgoing) is probably the single biggest shift that computers have created in our work lives. Sometimes, we subscribe or go and fetch the information, and sometimes it comes to us, unbidden and unfiltered. But it’s there and it’s compounding.
One option is to simply cope with the deluge, to be a victim of the firehose.
Another is to make the problem worse by adding more noise and spam to the open networks that we depend on.
A third might be, just for an hour, to turn it off. All of it. To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.
When Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered statistics in order to save countless women from dying in childbirth, his fellow doctors refused to believe him. They ignored his work, didn’t wash their hands and it was another twenty years before his insights on the spread of disease were adopted.
We live in a faster, more competitive world than he did.
When Jethro Tull wrote about the rotation of crops, many farmers continued to do things in the old way. Over time, though, the yields don’t lie. You don’t have to like the idea, but you can see that it works.
Results show up. They’re easy to see, easy to measure and they persist.
The bridge falls down or it doesn’t. Market share goes up or it doesn’t.
We can view results as a threat, or see them as an opportunity. It depends on whether we’re defending a little-understood status quo or seeking to make things work better.
Results don’t care about our explanation. We need a useful explanation if we’re going to improve, but denying the results doesn’t change them.
As the world has become ever more filled with results, it has crowded out each individual’s personal narrative of how the world works. Particularly in times of change and negative outcomes, this can cause a lot of distress.
Our narrative is ours, and it informs who we are and the story we tell ourselves.
Beliefs are powerful. They’re personal. They can have a significant impact on the way we engage with ourselves and others. But results are universal and concrete, and no matter how much we’d like them to go away, there they are.
When people talk about how modernity has changed humanity, they often overlook the fundamental impact that results have had. Competitive environments create more results, at greater speed, and those results compound over time.
We still need a narrative and we still need our individual outlook. But over the last century, we’ve had to make more and more room for the systems that create results. Our shared reality demands it.
Being smart often has little to do with being persuasive.
And yet we often assume that one leads to the other.
We spend years and years educating people to do well on tests in the belief that this will make them smart.
And we assume that they’ll figure out the persuasive stuff on their own.
We conflate the two on a regular basis, assuming that charisma or followers or influence is somehow aligned with insight, foresight, and learning.
The good news is that being persuasive is a skill. If you’re smart, we’ll all benefit if you’ll also invest the effort to find a way to lead.
Organized sports often turn into a play about status roles and dominance. Bullfighting, pro wrestling, even hockey, are about who’s winning, who’s losing and who’s in charge.
But they are also theatres of affiliation. The fans celebrate their unity as well as their divisions. The pomp and circumstance are a form of culture. There are insiders and outsiders, and the right way and the wrong way.
When a sumo champ breaks protocol, the crowd isn’t happy. When the people next to you are wearing the same jersey as you, neither of you is headed onto the ice, but both of you feel like you belong.
The symphony has the same elements. The affiliation of players in tune, of familiar music from the canon, of an audience that knows not to clap between movements. But it’s also the dominance of the European-trained conductor, bringing his passion and will to bend the performance to his wishes.
One way to understand what’s happening in the office or on the news is to look at it through these lenses.
The theatre of affiliation happens when groupthink sets in, when we’re wondering what others will think of a new idea, when we go out of our way to play the long game and to be kind and thoughtful. “People like us do things like this.”
And this always dances with the theatre of dominance, when we see someone shortcutting to gain market share, or subjecting a co-worker to abuse in a meeting. It leads to a reinforcement of caste and stereotypes, and yet it persists. “I’m winning.”
Affiliation is the infinite game of culture building, sustainability, cooperation and resilience.
Dominance is an instinct as well, something we see in many successful species, and particularly when the game that’s being played is tweaked to reward dominators, it often returns.
When you’re in one mode, it’s tempting to believe that everyone else is too. But depending on which pocket of culture you’re in, which ticket you bought, what state your persona is in, it might be that you’re not seeing what others are seeing.
Getting in sync requires doing the emotional work of changing state long before we start using words and rational concepts. When in doubt, assume the people over there might be engaging in a different sort of theatre than you are.
The launch is fraught. It takes a lot of energy to get the thing started, and the orbit is the goal–there are still satellites up there, circling, decades after launching.
Even after twenty of them, a book launch feels uncertain. After all, you’re asking people to add one more thing to their reading list, something that no one has read yet. It’s an act of trust and kindness and support that I still don’t take for granted.
Thank you.
Launches are often characterized by a rush, a series of shortcuts and not enough patience. But it turns out that a successful launch often takes years, because the leaps we ask people to take require trust and confidence.
When I look down the list of people who pre-ordered, who supported the multi-pack, who read the blog, who spread the word, who took the workshop, who shared their ideas, who lent their voices, who asked good questions, who believed… I’m overwhelmed.
Thank you.
The Practice launched a week ago, (only a week? for many of us, it feels like months ago). It was one of my most successful book launches, hitting #1 in its categories and getting a great response from readers.
I appeared on some terrific podcasts (you can listen to some of them here) and even worked with thousands of you in a workshop setting.
The work you ship, the practice you engage in, your own cycle of launches and orbits–it creates our culture and makes things better. I’m grateful for your attention and for the ability to do this work with you.
Also! today at 3:30 EST (UTC-5) , I’ll be talking with my friend and colleague Bernadette Jiwa live on various social media channels (find us here). She’ll be talking about how the stories we tell change the world, taking your questions and inviting you to check out the latest iteration of the Story Skills Workshop.
If you can’t replicate the work and get the same outcome, then it’s not science.
If you can replicate the work and get the same outcome, it’s not art.
PS Tuesday is the First Priority deadline for the first altMBA sessions of 2021. I just attended commencement from the 43rd and 44th sessions, and it continues to be thrilling to watch what people who care are capable of producing. Akimbo is now an independent B corp, and with more than 5,000 altMBA alumni around the world, it’s making a difference.
I hope you can check it out.
A principle is an approach you stick with even if you know it might lead to a short-term outcome you don’t prefer. Especially then.
It’s this gap between the short-term and the long-term that makes a principle valuable. If your guiding principle is to do whatever benefits you right now, you don’t have principles of much value.
But it’s the valuable principles that pay off, because they enable forward motion, particularly when it feels like there are few alternatives. We embrace a culture based on principles because it’s that structure and momentum that enables connection and progress to happen in the first place.
Do you remember your first birthday party? That’s pretty unlikely, even if you have pictures to remind you.
So what’s all the hoopla for? Why the cake and the pony and the rest?
It’s pretty clear that it wasn’t for you. It was for your parents and their circle of supporters and friends. A rite of passage and thanks and relief, all in one.
Many of the interactions we have that are ostensibly for us are actually for other people. Once we can see who it’s for, it’s a lot easier to do it well.
