New times call for new decisions
Those critical choices you made then, they were based on what you knew about the world as it was.
But now, you know more and the world is different.
So why spend so much time defending those choices?
We don't re-decide very often, which means that most of our time is spent doing, not choosing. And if the world isn't changing (if you're not changing) that doing makes a lot of sense.
The problem with holding a grudge
...is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else.
It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge.
Abandoning perfection
It's possible you work in an industry built on perfect. That you're a scrub nurse in the OR, or an air traffic controller or even in charge of compliance at a nuclear power plant.
The rest of us, though, are rewarded for breaking things. Our job, the reason we have time to read blogs at work or go to conferences or write memos is that our organization believes that just maybe, we'll find and share a new idea, or maybe (continuing a run on sentence) we'll invent something important, find a resource or connect with a key customer in a way that matters.
So, if that's your job, why are you so focused on perfect?
Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield's Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important).
Kneejerks
Just about all the ranting we hear is tribal. "He's not one of us, he's wrong." Or, the flipside, "He's on our team, he's right, you're blowing this out of proportion."
The most powerful thing we can do to earn respect from those around us, though, is to call out one of our own when he crosses the line. "People like us, we don't do things like that." This is when real change starts to happen, and when others start to believe that we really care about something more than scoring points.
Calling out our own jerks is the best kind of kneejerk.
Pulling a hat out of a rabbit
It's tempting to do what's been done before, certain in the belief that if you do it, it'll be a little better and a little more popular, merely because you're the one doing it.
In fact, though, that's unlikely. You'll care more, but it's unlikely the market will.
Consider the alternative, which is choosing to turn the question upside down, to do it backwards, sideways, or in a significantly more generous or risky way.
Remarkable often starts with the problem you set out to solve and the way you choose to solve it.
The tragedy of small expectations (and the trap of false dreams)
Ask a hundred students at Harvard Business School if they expect to be up for a good job when they graduate, and all of them will say "yes."
Ask a bright ten-year old girl if she expects to have a chance at a career as a mathematician, and the odds are she's already been brainwashed into saying "no."
Expectations aren't guarantees, but expectations give us the chance to act as if, to trade now for later, to invest in hard work and productive dreaming on our way to making an impact.
Expectations work for two reasons. First, they give us the enthusiasm and confidence to do hard work. Second, like a placebo, they subtly change our attitude, and give us the resilience to make it through the rough spots. "Eventually" gives us the energy to persist.
A good bucket brigade
We can get more done, if we care enough. And trust enough.
From the brilliant Cory Doctorow's award-winning novella:
I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it.
In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.
Every marketing challenge revolves around these questions
WHO are you trying to reach? (If the answer is 'everyone', start over.)
HOW will they become aware of what you have to offer?
WHAT story are you telling/living/spreading?
DOES that story resonate with the worldview these people already have? (What do they believe? What do they want?)
Overcoming the extraction mindset
For generations, places with significant oil production have developed a different culture than other places. This extraction mindset occurs in environments where profits are taken from a captive resource. It doesn't matter if it's coal, tickets or tuition, the mindset is the same.
It's not about oil, it's about the expectation.
They're not making any more oil, of course, and the race is on to get it all. Get it now, or someone else will take it. Take it all, because there's no reason to leave it there. Make sure others don't take it, because what they take isn't something you can take. And when the reserve is exhausted, move on. To the next field, to the next market.
Not everyone in any given community has an extraction mindset, but the worldview is: Anything that slows down, impedes or interferes with more extraction is nothing but a challenge to be overcome.
Name calling
The best reason to brand someone with a pejorative label is to push them away, to forestall useful conversation, to turn them into the other.
Much more useful: Identify the behavior that's counter-productive. When we talk about the behavior, we have a chance to make change happen.
What would happen if the behavior stopped?
When we call someone misogynist or racist or sexist or a capitalist, a socialist or an abstract expressionist, what are we hoping for? Every one of us is on the 'ist' spectrum, so the label becomes meaningless. Meaningless labels are noise, noise that lasts.
Marketing to the organization
If you can't persuade your peers and your boss, then your project is never going to have a chance. I've learned this the hard way.
Here are some of the principles of marketing that impact how you can get the organization to understand and to take action, because, as in all marketing, perception matters:
Permission: Do you have the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages about your project to the people you work with? Would they miss your updates and your insights if you didn't send them? How do you earn the ability to be heard?
Ideavirus: Do your ideas spread within the organization? Do people talk about your projects when you're not the one initiating the conversation, when you're not in the room?
Pulling a hat out of a rabbit
It's tempting to do what's been done before, certain in the belief that if you do it, it'll be a little better and a little more popular, merely because you're the one doing it.
In fact, though, that's unlikely. You'll care more, but it's unlikely the market will.
Consider the alternative, which is choosing to turn the question upside down, to do it backwards, sideways, or in a significantly more generous or risky way.
Remarkable often starts with the problem you set out to solve and the way you choose to solve it.
The critic as an amateur hack
Criticism is difficult to do well.
Recently, we've made it super easy for unpaid, untrained, amateur critics to speak up loudly and often.
Just because you can hear them doesn't mean that they know what they're talking about.
Criticism is easy to do, but rarely worth listening to, mostly because it's so easy to do.
Blah, blah, blah
Writing and speaking (essays, non-fiction, copywriting, direct interactions, speeches) can be easily sorted into two groups:
The expected
The unexpected
We don't remember what most people say when they greet us (at a party, or even a funeral) because it's banal. Most college essays, tweets and advertising copy fit right into this category. The prose we consume every day gets instantly processed, filed away and ignored.
The tension of now
Later is the easiest way to relieve the tension that accompanies now.
But later rarely leads to the action we seek and the change we need.
When you encounter the tension of now, caused by the urgency of action, veer toward more tension, not less now.
Overpriced
Things that are going up in value almost always appear to be overpriced.
Real estate, fine art and start up investments have something in common: the good ones always seem too expensive when we have a chance to buy them. (And so do the lame ones, actually).
That New York condo that's going for $8 million? You didn't buy it when it was only a tenth that, when it was on a block where no one wanted to live. Of course, if everyone saw what was about to happen, it wouldn't have been for sale at the price being offered.
And you could have bought stock in (name company here) for just a dollar or two, but back then, no one thought they had a chance... which is precisely why the stock was so cheap.
Plenty more
One of the critical decisions of every career:
"Well, there's plenty more to do, I'll do the least I can here and then move on to the next one."
vs.
"I only get to do this one, once. So I'll do it as though it's the last chance I'll ever have to do this work, to please this customer, to ring this bell."
"Did you win?"
A far better question to ask (the student, the athlete, the salesperson, the programmer...) is, "what did you learn?"
Learning compounds. Usually more reliably than winning does.
High resolution is not the same as accurate
Should you visit a college before you decide to go there?
Well, a one-hour personal visit is certainly visceral and emotional and it feels real. But it's also based on the weather, on the route you took to school, on the few people you met or the one class you visited.
None of this is correlated to what the four-year experience is actually like, or what the degree or experience is worth over the lifetime of a career.
By analogy, everything from how angry that last customer was on the phone to precisely how many degrees it is outside right now are not nearly as accurate indicators as we make them out to be.
Holding the umbrella
Harry Truman talked about where the buck stops.
For every project, for every organization that lasts, someone is holding the umbrella.
She's the one on the hook if things don't go well. She's the one who doesn't walk away from a problem, even if the office is closed. Most important, the person holding the umbrella decides what to do next.
It's fun to work on a successful project, and thrilling to invent, create and connect. But the real work comes when it's your turn to hold the umbrella.
