Engineering is the powerful practice of being able to deliver artifacts that do what they’re supposed to. Bridges that don’t fall down, software that runs, IV lines that don’t get infected.
But if we want to create something, it helps to know what it’s for.
That simple question, “what’s it for?” is essential to ask and easy to avoid.
If you’re about to spend time and money and effort to create something, how will you know if it worked? What needs to happen to make it worth it?
And of course, not just bridges. Meetings. Memos. A family gathering.
Steve Pressfield defines Resistance as the inertia, stories and excuses we manage to create to avoid powerful or creative work.
Writer’s block, procrastination, overconfidence, or a belief in un-delivered talent are all symptoms of resistance.
Knowing that it has a name helps us dance with it. We can’t make it go away (the more important and useful our contribution, the more likely it is to appear) but we can learn to use it as a compass.
In the last few years, though, resistance has been spreading as a cultural norm. Ennui, eco-anxiety, marketplace exhaustion and justified frustration with systems of caste and injustice have all amplified resistance. It feels like culture and tech have both hit a cul de sac, and it’s easier to simply chill out.
This serves the defenders of the status quo, but distracts us from the journey.
If history is any guide, this is precisely the moment we need the urge to create. To imagine something better, to ship work that matters, and to lead.
I used to drive 200 miles to Boston once a week or so.
After a few trips on the highway, my subconscious figured out that getting behind a few trucks for the entire ride enabled me to spend four hours without using much conscious effort on driving.
Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, and there’s probably a finite amount of energy available for these focused choices.
That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.
For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique and original password every time you use a new service, you use a password manager, your load just got lighter.
If you adopt a file naming system (each version gets a number, from 1 to X, so the latest file always has the highest number before its name) then you won’t hassle with trying to figure out which is the most recent version.
If you use the sidebar in your file finder to put shortcuts to the folders you use often, you won’t burn energy finding your way through nests of folders, again and again.
When I worked at Yahoo, they were embarrassed to share the fact that the most clicked-on button on the entire site was the Yahoo logo (which did nothing on the home page) and the most searched-for term in their search box was also “Yahoo.” People hadn’t figured out what bookmarks were yet, or decided to simply keep clicking around until something worked.
Ten minutes today will save you from 30 decisions every day forever.
An echo chamber is created by a marketer to assemble a group of people who are insulated from conventional discourse.
It can happen to sports and music fans, to investors, to companies that have confidence in their view of the world, or to social or political gatherings.
We support an echo chamber when we can gain status or find tribal affiliation by adhering to its rules.
The resilience of the cultural norm happens as a result of insulation from reasoned discourse and is amplified by threats to status or affiliation.
The tooth fairy myth is a fairly benign myth, but, like Santa, it’s mostly reserved for kids. When leaders seek to gain power and profit by organizing and maintaining an echo chamber, it begins to have negative side effects.
You’ll know you’re in one when:
It’s considered unpopular, weak or even immoral to change your mind
Isolation from contrary facts or opinions is celebrated as an admirable trait
The rationale for the core beliefs of the echo chamber changes when insurmountable reality can’t be avoided
Calm conversations that touch a nerve often become heated debates
The reason Santa is a problem is that sooner or later, reality arrives.
My colleague Ava Morris is running her Song of Significance Workshop on Friday, October 6. It’s powerful, effective and personal. It runs worldwide, in Zoom, and it’s completely interactive–every participant participates.
This will be the third session… the first two got rave reviews, and some folks even returned to do it again. It’s two hours well spent, a chance to connect and learn and change our narrative about the work we do every day. Bring a team member if you can.
I’ve been working hard on my juggling (actual juggling, not metaphorical juggling).
The secret, as I wrote about in The Practice is the throwing, not the catching. If you get the throws right, the catches are easy.
The way to focus on the throws is simple but culturally difficult: Errant throws don’t earn a lunge.
Let them drop.
Simply stand there and watch them drop.
Realize that the problem isn’t that you didn’t lunge. The problem was that your throws were off.
It’s hard to do this at work (here’s the metaphor part). There are lots of rewards for heroic saves at work. But heroic saves undermine the desire to build better systems.
If it’s worth having a better system, it might be worth shutting down the entire plant when the system breaks.
We often develop slang or codewords to keep the others from understanding what we’re saying. Here’s an example (thanks BK) of the lengths that some are going to be able to talk about Chinese politics.
Of course, if you come up with a concealed enough code, the people you’re talking to won’t have a clue what you mean. If it’s in the language, it must be shared. This was the problem with the Cone of Silence, used by Maxwell Smart to have top secret conversations with the Chief. It worked so well, the Chief couldn’t hear him.
Language only works when other people know what you’re saying, but once they know, it’s likely that the others can figure it out.
So why bother?
It turns out that vernacular elevates those that are using it as much as it isolates the ones who don’t understand it.
When we speak as insiders, we become insiders.
A practical way to create tribal affiliation is to amplify insular language.
In computer science, Big-O notation is a way of talking about what happens to a solution method when the inputs start to increase.
For example, sorting numbers is an easy problem when there are only five or six, but when you have to sort 5,000, a totally different algorithm is needed.
Business models have this baked in. Running a podcast app doesn’t get more difficult if you list more podcasts or have more users. But running a food bank gets exponentially more difficult when your inputs and outputs increase.
If you’re running a conference where you expect one or two people to arrive every few minutes, hiring someone to check them in is a pretty obvious move.
But if you expect five or six people at a time, you’ll need to hire at least that many people or it all backs up.
But what about the big convention where thousands of people might arrive at once? In that case, your Big O problem requires you to do away with the check-in altogether and have people do their check-in online, in advance.
Mom-and-pop businesses work because there’s mom and there’s pop. But when the inputs start to go up, when the business begins to scale, it’s really hard to simply hire another mom. Pushing the old algorithm too far ends up with a crisis–we need to invest in process before we need it, not when the emergency strikes.
There are Big-O problems in marketing, in sales, in customer service, in finance, in production and in compliance. There’s nothing wrong with winging it–until there is.
For more than 130 years, we’ve celebrated Labor Day in the US and Canada. And May Day has been around about as long.
Around here, it’s become mostly a seasonal marker, but it was founded to devote just a day to something that deserves much more… to commemorate and celebrate the workers who sacrifice and toil to build.
Everyone needs to work, but now, more people than ever have the privilege to choose which sort of work they’re going to do. You have to work somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be here.
And I think it’s fair to say that just about every person reading this blog has a job that would be unrecognizable to someone working when Labor Day was first celebrated. In fact, many of these jobs are now unrecognizable to people from just 15 years ago.
Only 9% of the office workers in Manhattan go to their office five days a week now.
Add AI to the mix and we’re seeing another shift, one that’s happening faster than any that came before.
At the same time, many of the jobs that people get paid for have analogues where people do these jobs for fun. Amateur violin players, volunteer editors at Wikipedia, people who volunteer to help build houses or feed the hungry.
Is it labor if we get to choose?
Far too many people are being left behind as the market for our effort bifurcates. Too many people are indentured or stuck, under-appreciated and underpaid.
If we’re lucky enough to have a choice, perhaps we should choose wisely.
PS the significance bee mug sold out instantly the last time I posted about it. Amanda has made 90 more, they’re now available here.
September 4, 2023
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