While it’s tempting to compare suffering, inconvenience, unfairness or general no-goodness, it’s not helpful.
Someone else’s trauma doesn’t diminish yours. In fact, when we can find the space to see that others have their own mess to deal with, it opens the door for forward motion. The past happened, but all that’s available to us now is the choice of what to do about it.
And doing it together is more nurturing, resilient and effective.
This is difficult.
Care requires time and effort, and we can’t care about everything, all the way, all the time.
If you’re prepared to care about every element of your work, then you also have to decide to not care about something else. Because caring equally about everything means that someone else cares more than you do about something.
If a non-customer doesn’t like your product, perhaps it pays to not let that bother you.
If there are features in your service that don’t matter to your key customers, perhaps you can let them go.
Deciding to care also requires you do the hard work of not caring.
It’s one thing to say that 7,000,000 people will die next year from smoking cigarettes.
It’s a totally different thing to list those folks by name.
When we confront risk, two things make it seem less real: We’re not sure who, and we’re not sure when.
If you want to clarify our understanding, it helps to be specific.
The first impression is vitally important. It positions us, establishes the tone of our relationship and earns trust.
But we’re human, and it’s unlikely that every first impression will be as useful as we’d like. Fortunately, people can speak up and let us know, particularly if we make it easy for them to do so.
When a customer or partner lets us know that we made a lousy first impression, it’s time to lean in. You’re not going to get a third chance to make a second impression.
If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.
What an opportunity to make things right. If your team isn’t empowered to escalate support at the first hint of a problem, you’re letting them down.
might also be a good idea.
The hard part isn’t finding proof before you begin.
The hard part is beginning, knowing you might not succeed.
Media theory pioneer Harold Innis saw it 70 years ago:
Some cultures and ideas are built to spread across SPACE.
And some spread across TIME.
It’s the tension between space and time that lead to the rise and fall of societies and cultures, and they’re worth understanding.
Clay tablets, household traditions and local governments persist over time. But they don’t travel widely.
On the other hand, newspapers, radio broadcasts and memes are ephemeral. They’re fast, they go wide, and then they often fade away.
The Greeks were an early culture that used both, which Innis argues is part of their longevity. And the Bible and Quran are books (time based) that were propelled by cultural forces to also be space based.
As you’ve probably guessed, TikTok is the speedball of moving ideas across space. The ideas are often as long-lasting as a hot pizza, but they can reach millions.
Innis would argue that many of the dislocations and painful collisions of modern culture are being caused by the abrupt shift to space-focused ideas. We’re starting on a second generation of people, worldwide, who are day trading their emotions and confronting ideas that have no past and little future.
Systems under stress expose themselves, and when you feel the stress, it’s worth looking for the juxtapositions that are causing it. In this case, it’s worth asking whether the idea that’s changing things was built to last or built to spread.
And what about the biggest shift of our lifetime–how does AI fit into this? Does a platform like Claude deal in time or space?
Claude and I discussed it, and my theory (Claude is giving me full credit) is an LLM of this sort is not a communications medium at all. There’s no way for a human to put a new idea directly into it and no way to send that message to another human. Instead, my take is that Claude brings us everything it knows, and that its function is to help us go within, not across.
This gives people a different sort of agency than the manipulative algorithms at TikTok or the manipulated ones on social media platforms.
Innis (like Doctorow) was very clear about the perils of media monopoly. If a communications medium has a middleman, that middleman will seek to create short-term profit, often at the expense of the users of the system. The phone company doesn’t care what you say on the phone, but modern media platforms are optimized to push the ideas that will spread to spread, regardless of their cost to the rest of us.
We’ve been indoctrinated from a young age to avoid agency, even in our media consumption. To wait and accept the next idea when it arrives. To not change the channel, to go to the big movie of the moment, to listen to the top 40, to parrot the talking points of the boss.
And now, perhaps for just a brief moment, there’s a chance to take back agency and go within.
The self-publishing revolution gave everyone a chance to write a blog, publish a book or record a song. A few took advantage of this to build ideas optimized to go across space or time. Most people, though, sank back into long-trained rhythms and simply became consumers instead, sheep with more grass.
I’m not sure how many more moments of maximum agency will present themselves, but right now we have a rare chance to go within, to discover and connect and lead, and then to publish. To publish not just across space for the quick hit of a like or a view, but for the long-haul benefit of changing our culture over time.
[Thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for introducing me to Harold Innis. All errors are mine.]
Our instincts might not be as good as we hope.
Going with your gut is thrilling. It’s personal, vulnerable and brave. And if it’s getting you what you seek, keep at it.
But often, our instincts are a way of hiding, undermined by a lack of knowledge. If you haven’t done the reading and can’t see what the alternatives might be, instincts might be all you have left. And if you know the best way and persist in going with a hunch, it might be Resistance, a trap put in place by the part of you that feels like an imposter and is hesitant to do too well.
If ‘my way’ isn’t helping you get to where you’re going, it could be that the highway is a more direct route.
This is how we learn.
An apple is a lot like an orange, but you can eat the skin and it’s not as sweet. If you know what an orange is, you’re most of the way to understanding an apple.
But the indoctrination of school pushes us to be literal. When people talk about apples and oranges, good students imagine that they’re talking about apples and oranges.
Even when something is labeled as a metaphor, it’s a common instinct to simply focus on the details, not the ideas. If you can make a point with three very different examples, you’ll begin to see how powerful metaphor can be.
The hard work is to shift our default. To imagine that every incident, story or example is actually a metaphor, and only eventually coming to the conclusion that the specific details are what’s on offer.
Logic is symbolic. Learning requires handholds to help us understand the symbols, but it’s the logic that remains.
January feels like the start of the year, but there’s always a hangover from the holidays. In the northern Hemisphere, February is dark and dreary and we’re mostly hunkering down waiting for the short month to end.
But March? Around the world, March can be a chance to get down to the work we committed to do.
Invest 31 days into outlining, discussing and fleshing out the strategy you want to bring to your career or your project. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Here are two resources to consider:
Purple.space is a worldwide community of more than 1,000 people supporting each other as they seek to do the work. It’s not a social network, it’s a community of practice, worth more than it costs. It also includes access to many of my video workshops, best done as a team. Find the others.
This is Strategy, my latest book, is available in print, audio and as a deck of cards that make it easy to dig ever deeper into what needs to be done and what’s holding you back.
Better is possible.
