Look around the rooftops of many cities and you’ll see wooden water towers. New York has thousands of them.
The reason is simple and often overlooked:
In the morning, when every resident of the building is preparing for the day, there’s a need for thousands of gallons of water under high pressure. Providing that much power via a pump is expensive, noisy and difficult to maintain.
The system in use, on the other hand, takes two or three hours to refill the tank, using reliable, quiet and cheap small pumps. After that, gravity is all that’s needed.
Adding a reservoir to a high-demand system creates slack, resilience and efficiency.
Too often, foolish short-term profit seekers forget this, and use up what’s in the reservoir without keeping future reserves in mind.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not the Super Bowl or the World Cup. For this twelve-year old, tomorrow’s game is the big game, the biggest ever, and the emotional stakes are just as high.
It doesn’t matter that this illness isn’t going to be life or death in the next few days. For this patient, it feels that way.
Most of what we encounter is driven by emotions, and our emotions are always relative. When we’re shopping for a car or an avocado, we’re buying the way it makes us feel, not how it would make someone else feel.
In countries throughout the world, even in countries where there are no snakes, the most common dream is one based on our (it must be) genetic fear of snakes.
But in Bhutan, they dream of rainbows.
The dreams might be consistent, but the way we talk about them clearly isn’t. Perhaps the dreams we remember and talk about have something to do with culture.
When we sing in the shower, we hardly expect applause. In fact, that would be awfully weird.
But online, when just about anyone might be clicking, watching or sharing, it’s disappointing to put your work into the world and hear nothing.
Nothing but a black hole that absorbs your best work and reflects nothing back.
And if that happens again and again, it can become overwhelming.
It’s tempting to dumb down your work, or go for a shortcut or a quick hit.
Worst of all, to simply give up.
Please don’t.
The body of work you’re creating adds up over time. The consistency and empathy of your vision will seep through. Drip by drip, you’ll create something worth noticing.
The key word is empathy. While of course, you’re welcome to make work for just yourself, the path forward lies in figuring who it’s for and the change you seek to make. To go where others are instead of requiring them to put in the effort to figure out what you’re up to.
So many choices. So many sorts of metrics, critics and measures.
Perhaps it makes sense to count things where the counting tells us how to do better next time.
And to count things that let us know how much risk we can take next time.
Or to calibrate our judgment about the market.
But it makes no sense at all to count things over which we have no control, and which teach us nothing about the future.
Counting our luck (good or bad) doesn’t make us luckier.
[PS I’ll be doing a free online seminar at the New York Public Library on Monday as part of Carbon Almanac Week there. You’ll need to pre-register to get an invite.]
Also! This is the last best chance to take some of your favorite cohort-based workshops with my friends at Akimbo. These action-based workshops are the single most effective form of learning at scale that I’ve ever seen. The early bird discount now applies:
The Creatives Workshop is for anyone who was influenced by my book The Practice and is seeking a way to put their creative instincts to work.
The Marketing Seminar is the cohort-based course for This is Marketing and is the foundation you’ll need to understand how to bring your ideas to the people you serve.
Every year, tens of thousands of people get into a famous college of their choice. It’s not unlikely that someone will get in, it’s simply not certain that you will.
But someone will, so getting isn’t a miracle, it’s simply a long shot.
If you add a pound a day to the leg press machine at the gym, it’s possible to have the ability to press 250 pounds within a year.
It’s difficult and grueling, but not a long shot.
Neither of these outcomes requires a miracle. The first might have low odds, and the second requires persistence.
But a miracle is something that’s never happened before, and is not to be counted on.
Sooner or later, they’re all finite. And the way we allocate our time and emotional energy determines what gets done.
If we audited your day in six-minute increments, what would we find?
By the clock, how did you actually spend the time given to you (we each get the same 24 hours). How much was spent on work? And the work time, how is it correlated with what creates the value you seek?
A question that’s harder to measure, but with far more impact, of the time you allocated, what was your focus and emotional drive spent on? What were the crises and highlights of the last day or week?
There’s generally a gulf between what we say we did all day and what we actually did. And there’s an even bigger chasm between the urgencies and emotional moments and the ones we know actually pay off.
When we give away our day, we give away our future.
