The usual marathons are done in a group.
They have a start time.
A finish line. A way to qualify.
A route.
A crowd.
And a date announced a year in advance.
Mostly, they have excitement, energy and peer pressure.
We can’t be all wrong, which means we can’t be all right, either.
Culture, by its very definition, isn’t the work of being right. It’s the work of being in sync.
Culture is the people like us doing things like this.
The mob fears the truth. Being part of a mob is a good way to hide from that fear.
When we care, it’s amazing how much we can get done. One way to choose to care is to be clear about your priorities, which means being clear in your language.
And so we can say to ourselves, “I’d love to do that, but it’s not a priority.”
Remarkable work is usually accomplished by people who have non-typical priorities.
What if you pretended, just for a little while…
What if you pretended that you were glad to see me, happy to deliver this service, eager for it to be well received?
What if you acted as though you were more charismatic than you feel - more confident, more competent?
What if you demonstrated optimism about what’s about to happen next, even if you’re not sure?
It’s not difficult to maintain a grey cloud and a sullen outlook. The event is long over, but the story remains.
On the other hand, forgotten stories have little power.
What happens to us matters a great deal, but even more powerful are the stories we repeat about what happened.
Today is the best day. And now is the best time.
You don’t need more time, you simply need to decide.
Throat clearing isn’t necessary.
Say all that stuff in your head, but, we’d really like to hear the best part first.
You’ll pay a lot, but you’ll get more than you pay for.
That’s as useful a freelancer marketing strategy as you can fit in a single sentence.
To have an imagination is simply to have the ability to make images that are not directly in front of you. When I hear people describe depression, it often sounds like the imagination shuts down - the brain just can’t make a picture of tomorrow that’s worth living for. That’s certainly what my own mild bouts of melancholy feel like: There’s just no image to hang on to, no picture I can make in my head of how life could be better.
Of course, the imagination needs to be fed. To make better images, you need to see better images.
Images matter. The images we hold in our mind are often the images that come true for us. When some warmongering asshole gets put in a position of power and power tweet things like “we’re all going to die” we’re making bad images. So if we are to survive, we need to create and capture and share better images.
Getting paid what you deserve.
You never do.
Instead, you get paid what other people think you’re worth.
That’s an empathic flip that makes it all make sense.
Instead of feeling undervalued or disrespected, you can focus on creating a reputation and a work product that others believe is worth more.
Because people don’t make buying decisions based on what’s good for you - they act based on what they see, need and believe.
Most people don’t day trade bitcoin, but all of us day trade something. We’re hooked into something volatile, easily measured and emotional. We overdo our response to news, good or bad, and let it distract us from the long-term job of living a useful life. Your SEO results, your Facebook likes, the look on you boss’s face when she gets back from a meeting - all these things are rife with opportunities for day trading.
Being a manager feels different than being an employee. And, it feels very different than working by yourself.
Your words carry more weight than before. Your actions are watched more closely. You aren’t accountable just for your own results, but also the results of others. How you handle tough decisions sets the tone for “This is How We Do Things.”
I believe the best managers focus on doing one thing: they try to understand what intrinsically motivates people, and create an environment that allows people to tap into that intrinsic motivation themselves. You’re not telling anyone what to do. You’re not controlling anyone or exerting influence on anyone.
Instead you assume that people already have innate talents, gifts, and capabilities within them. Your job as a leader is merely to provide an environment for those inherent qualities to come to light.
How to create such an environment?
Create clarity.
Provide context.
Ensure psychological safety.
Ask meaningful questions.
Respond within 24 hours.
Emotional labor.
That’s the labor most of us do now. The work of doing what we don’t necessarily feel like doing, the work of being a professional, the work of engaging with others in a way that leads to the best long-term outcome.
The emotional labor of listening when we’d rather yell.
The emotional labor of working with someone instead of firing them.
The emotional labor of seeking out facts and insights that we don’t (yet) agree with.
The emotional labor of being prepared.
Of course it’s difficult. That’s precisely why it’s valuable. Sometimes, knowing that it’s our job - the way we create value - helps us pause a second and decide to do the difficult work.
Almost no one gets hired to eat a slice of chocolate cake.
You go first.
That’s the key insight of the peer-to-peer connection economy.
Anyone can reach out, anyone can lead, anyone can pick someone else.
But if you wait for anyone, it’s unlikely to happen.
It begins with you.
Who are we seeking to become?
We get what we invest in. The time we spend comes back, with interest.
If you practice five minutes of new, difficult banjo music every day, you’ll become a better banjo player. If you spend a little bit more time each day whining or feeling ashamed, that behavior will become part of you. The words you type, the people you hang with, the media you consume…
Other people have it better, way better. And it’s going to get worse. Add to that the idea that marketers want us to believe that what we have now isn’t that good, but if we merely choose to go into a bit of debt, we can buy our way to a better outcome…
Comparison leads to frustration which sometimes leads to innovation.
More often than not, though, frustration doesn’t make us happy. It only makes us frustrated.
If a comparison isn’t helping you get to where you’re going, it’s okay to ignore it.
Just because it’s easy, it doesn’t mean it’s as useful as it appears.
It’s lazy for the consumer. If you can’t take the time to learn about your options, about quality, about side effects, then it seems like buying the cheapest is the way to go - they’re all the same anyway, we think.
‘Worth it’ is a fine goal.
What if, before we rushed to sort at all, we decided what was worth sorting for?
This is all the pie I received, but that’s okay.
I have a small piece of pie, but others have an even smaller piece, so I’m sharing mine.
I want all the pie.
I don’t want all the pie, just your piece.
The pie isn’t big enough for all of us, I’m going to work to make it bigger.
I have the biggest piece of pie, want to see?
I have the biggest piece of pie, but that’s not enough, so I’m going to work hard to take some of yours.
If I can’t have a big enough piece of pie, I’m going to put my fist through the entire thing and no one gets any pie.
If I delay gratification and wait a bit, my piece of pie will be bigger.
Bob has a bigger piece of pie than I do, so I’m going to go deep into debt so I can buy more pie.
If we eats less pie now and invest it, we can have more pie later.
The only fair thing to do is give everyone an equally sized piece of pie.
I can’t possibly eat all the pie I’ve got, but I refuse on principle to share the rest.
I’m able to skirt the rules and end up with two pieces of pie when everyone is supposed to get one.
No matter how much the pie there is, it’s not enough, and we should risk the pie to make more pie.
Whoever is responsible for allocating pie is a crook, destroy the pie allocators!
More pie now is way better than the promise of some pie later.
Nickels and dimes are worth less than that.
The real asset you’re building is trust.
Considerate software doesn’t second-guess.
Software should behave like a considerate human being.
Maybe your customer isn’t trying to save money.
Perhaps she wants to be heard instead.
Or find something better, or unique.
Or perhaps customer service, flexibility and speed are more important.
That’s because we rarely have an interaction only once, and we often engage with people we know, where reputation and connection are at stake.
Culture, it turns out, is built on people losing in the short run on behalf of the long-term win. Connection and trust and reputation are worth more than any single inning.
Not to mention that a tantrum not only ruins the relationship, it can ruin your day as well.
If you’re trying to persuade someone to make an investment, buy some insurance or support a new plan, please consider that human beings are terrible at buying these things.
What we’re good at is ‘now’.
Right now.
When we buy a stake in the future, what we’re actually buying is how it makes us feel today.
If you want people to be smarter or more active or more generous about their future, you’ll need to figure out how to make the transaction about how it feels right now.
The marketplace disruption puts huge pressure on any merchant who merely created a commodity. This means vineyards, graphic designers, photographers…
When you see it coming, there are only two choices:
Run like hell to a new market, or,
Move up, faster and more boldly than anyone thinks is rational.
Imagine that throughout your career you were paid as little as possible, the last to be hired and the first to be laid off. Imagine that your boss gets more vacation days, doesn’t have to clock in and out, and is actually given control over how he spends his time.
Why is it surprising to bosses, then, that some workers respond to this arrangement by doing as little work as possible?
Here’s the thing: people actually want to do a good job. They want to be proud of their work, they appreciate being engaged, they thrive when they have some measure of control over their day.
Too often, though, the optimistic leader meets the pessimistic front line and distrust undermines all the good intent. The boss loses patience and reverts to the test-and-measure, trust-no-one, scientific-management tradition of dehumanizing the very humans who make the whole project work.
And so, back to being mediocre. Back to high turnover, low trust, no care. Back to workers who don’t believe and bosses who are now cynics.
Mostly, back to an ordinary organization that’s like so many others.
People are watching you. They’re not listening to your words as much as they’re seeking to understand where the boundaries and the guard rails lie, because they’ve learned from experience that people who do what gets rewarded, get rewarded.
We can’t be on our toes all the time. It’s too exhausting, and we can’t keep it up.
But what happens if we decide, everyone in this room, right here and right now, at least for a little while, that we’ll act as if it’s the first time, or the last time, or our best shot?
Narrating our lives, the little play-by-play we can’t help carrying around, that’s a survival mechanism. But it also hot-wires our feelings, changes our posture, limit our possibilities.
What does this human feel right now? What opportunities to make a connection, to grow, to impact exist that we’ve ignored because of the story we are telling ourselves about them?
The narrative is useful as long as it’s useful, helping you solve problems and move forward. But when it reinforces bad habits or make things smaller, we can drop it and merely be present, right here, right now.
In medical school, an ongoing lesson is that there will be ongoing lessons. You’re never done. Surgeons and internists are expected to keep studying for their entire career - in fact, it’s required to keep a license valid. Show me your bookshelf, or the courses you take, or the questions you ask, and I’ll have a hint as to how much you care about leveling up.
What it says on your wedding invitation doesn’t matter a whole lot in the long run.
It turns out that this insignificance and the ephemeral nature of sporting events is the heart of their appeal.
But how much does it cost?
I know what the price tag says. But what does it cost?
Does it need dry cleaning? What does it eat? How long does the training take?
What happens when it breaks? Where will I store it? What’s the productivity increase that justifies the ongoing expense?
Make something great
Not because it will sell.
Not because it’s on the test.
Not because it’s your job.
Merely because you can.
The last step is so often overlooked: The part where you show up, regularly, consistently and generously, for years and years, to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.
Enough small moments.
Shortcuts taken, corners cut, compromises made.
By degrees, inch by inch, each justifiable (or justified) moment adds up to become a brand, a reputation, a life.
Just because you’re right…
You may be right, but that doesn’t mean that people will care. Or pay attention. Or take action.
Just because you’re right, doesn’t mean they’re going to listen.
It takes more than being right to earn attention and action.
Every day, we change. We move (slowly) toward the person we’ll end up being.
A race is a competition in which the point is to win. You’re not supposed to enjoy the ride, learn anything or make your community better. You’re supposed to win.
But if you put in a folder marked “later”, it may never happen.
In the short run, you can fool anyone.
In the long run, trust wins.
In the short run, we’ve got a vacancy, hire the next person you find.
In the long run, we spend most of our time with the people we’ve chosen in the short run.
In the short run, decisions feel more urgent and less important at the same time.
In the long run, most decisions are obvious and easy to make.
In the short run, burn it down, someone else will clean up the problem.
In the long run, the environment in which we live is what we need to live.
Will this be on the test?
I’ve got this.
A useful lesson for President’s day: some people care enough to take responsibility.
Not shifting the blame, or seeking power or stealing credit. Not finding a sinecure or pointing fingers.
What happens when we merely do what needs to be done?
The work of a professional isn’t to create thrills. It’s to show up and do the work. To continue the journey you set out on a while ago. To make the change you seek to make in the universe. Thrilling is fine. Mattering is more important.
What are you doing that’s difficult?
What are you doing that people believe only you can do?
Who are you connecting?
What do people say when they talk about you?
What are you afraid of?
What’s the scarce resource?
Who are you trying to change?
Would we miss your work if you stopped making it?
What do you stand for?
What contribution are you making?
Can you show me a history of generous, talented, extraordinary side projects?
Have you ever been so passionate about your work that you’ve gone in through the side door?
Are you an expert at something that actually generates value?
Have you connected with leaders in the field in moments when you weren’t actually looking for a job?
Does your reputation speak for itself?
For each person who say, “here, I made this…”
There are ten people who say, “I could have done it better.”
A hundred people who say, “Who are you to do this?”
A thousand people who say, “I was just about to do that,”
and ten thousand people who don’t care at all.
Scarity isn’t the only reason. It turns out that perfection is sort of boring.
When a product or service benchmarks quality and can honestly say, “we’re reliably boring,” it might grow in sales, but it will eventually fade in interest, because the people at the edges, the people who care, are drawn to idiosyncrasy, to the unpredictable, the tweakable, the things that might not work.
Bravery is for other people.
The one thing that will change everything.
Have you noticed that as soon as you get that one thing, everything doesn’t change? In fact, the only thing that changes is that you realize that you don’t need that one thing as much as you thought you did.
It turns out that nothing will change everything for the better. It works better to focus on each step instead of being distracted by a promised secret exit.
Please don’t tell us it’s complicated.
Organizations, scientists and individuals always do better in solving problems that are clearly stated. The solution might be complicated, the system might be complex, but if we don’t agree on the problem, it’s hard to find the resources and the will to seek out a solution.
Often, the reason people don’t want to agree on a problem is that it’s frightening to acknowledge a problem if we don’t know that there’s a solution, as if saying the problem out loud makes it more real, more likely to undermine our lives.
It’s always easier to order off the menu. Is easier the goal?
I didn’t do anything.
That’s the first and best defense every toddler learns. If you don’t do anything, you don’t get in trouble.
Somewhere along the way, it flips. “I didn’t do anything when I had the chance,” becomes a regrets. The lost opportunity, the hand not extended, the skill not learned…
Wouldn’t it be great if we knew what our regrets were when we still had time to do something about them?
Just about everyone can imagine what it would be like to add 10% more to their output, to be 10% better or faster.
Many people can envision what their world would be like if they were twice as good, if the work was twice as insightful or useful or urgent.
But ten times?
It’s really difficult to imagine what you would do with ten times as many employees, or ten times the assets or ten times the audience.
And yet imagining is often the first step to getting there.
The opposite of creativity is fear.
And fear’s enemy is creativity.
The opposite of yes is maybe.
Us is not the enemy of them. Us the opposite of alone.
Self-belief is more than just common advice. It’s at the heart of selling, of creating, of shipping, of leadership…
Telling someone, “believe in yourself,” is often worthless, though, because it’s easier said than done.
Not believing that one day you’ll do worthwhile work. Instead, do worthwhile work, look at it, then believe that you can do it again.
If you think about it, there’s generally no correlation between how much something cost to make and how interesting it is.
So, if money isn’t related to interestingness, why do we worry so much about spending more on the media we create?
Over the top production values are sometimes a place to hide. It’s tempting to cover up boring with polish, but it rarely works.
Stories and relevance are far more important than budgets.
As soon as we can afford it, as soon as we care, we pay extra for beauty.
I totally understand our focus on putting on a perfect show, on delighting people, on shipping an experience that’s wonderful.
But how do you and your organization respond/react when something doesn’t go right?
Because that’s when everyone is paying attention.
Help and insight about getting to the core of fear is holding us back.
This is the cause of the unfinished novel, of the self-sabotaging aggressive marketing campaign and the speech that goes on too long. It’s at the heart of too much, too little, and too boring as well.
You might need confidence in your ‘how’ to deal with fear. You might have found your ‘why’ overwhelmed by your fear. But all the how and all the why aren’t going to help much if we can’t acknowledge that essential driver is, “where is the fear?”
Are we so afraid of it that we can’t discuss it?
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.
To overcome an irrational fear…
Replace it with a habit.
If you’re afraid to write, write a little, every day. Start with an anonymous blog, start with a sentence. Everyday, drip, drip, a habit.
If you’re afraid to speak up, speak up a little, everyday.
Habits are more powerful than fears.
Being really good is merely the first step. In order to earn word of mouth, you need to make it safe, fun and worthwhile to overcome the social hurdles to spread the word.
Productivity is a measure of output over time. All other things being equal, the more you produce per minute, the more productive you are.
The simplest way to boost productivity is get better at the task that has been assigned to you. To work harder, and with more skill.
The next step up is to find people who are cheaper than you to do those assigned tasks.
The next step up is to invest in existing technology that can boost your team’s output.
Invent a new technology.
The final step: figure out better things to work on. Make your own list, don’t merely react to someone else’s.
The challenge is that the final step requires a short-term hit to your productivity. But, if you fail to invest the time and effort to find a better path, it’s unlikely you’ll find one.
The question worth pondering is: are you seeking out the imperfect to justify your habit of being unhappy? Does something have to happen in the outside world for you to be happy inside?
Or, to put it differently: Is there a narrative of your reality that supports your mood?
If you work in an organization, the underlying rule is simple: People are not afraid of failure, they’re afraid of blame.
Avoid looking in the mirror and saying no. More challenging: practice looking in the mirror and saying yes.
When things get dicey, we notice that some people are feeling the heat. Others are just fine, doing their work, unfazed by the situation.
The thing is, it’s not the heat that’s actually the issue. It’s the feeling.
How we process what’s happening is up to us, isn’t it?
The only rule in photography is to tell a story with a compelling subject - for you.
Belief is more powerful than proof.
In fact, the only use of proof is to have a shot at creating belief.
The first lie is that you’re going to need far more talent than you were born with.
The second lie is that the people who are leading got there because they have something that you don’t.
The third lie is that you have to be chosen.
The fourth lie is that we’re not afraid.
We’re afraid.
Afraid to lead, to make a ruckus, to convene. Afraid to be vulnerable, to be called out, to be seen as a fraud.
Obviously, one can carry a wallet and a few other essentials in bag that costs less than 1% of what this bag costs, and we can imagine making something just like a Birkin for a fraction of the price. But that would be a copy, not the real thing, and so the story, the narrative, the specialness and most of all, the social element would go out of the window. A Birkin bag is at its most valuable when your friends admire you for owning it, not when they admire its ability to carry your stuff. These are purchased as (perhaps perverse) testaments to the power/taste/wealth of the person buying or owning it.
Discount luxuy goods, then, are an oxymoron. The factory outlet or the job lot seller or the yoga studio that’s selling the “same thing but cheaper” isn’t selling the same thing at all. They don’t offer scarity, social proof or the self-narrative of a splurge. What they sell is, “you’re smarter and other people, but you know, you’re also a little bit of a fraud because this isn’t actually a luxury good, because it’s a better value”
It takes gut to invent a brand new luxury good from scratch. Shinola watches don’t tell time any better than a $16 Timex, but they do tell a better story. Their creation is part of that story, but so is the identity of the stores that sell them and the fact that they sell out regularly.
Something that flies in the face of the non-scarcity of the internet: social proof among the wealthy is based on beauty plus scarcity plus expense. The fact that others believe a good is overpriced is pricisely why a certain segment of the market chooses to purchase it.
If you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Maybe the problem these days is people are just trying too hard.
Just as a confident man doesn’t wonder if he’s confident, a happy man does not wonder if he’s happy.
It’s not much of a leap from the beautiful functional object to the one that has no function other than to be beautiful.
Art was born.
When art collided with royalty, religion and wealth, a match was made. Those in power could use art as a way to display their resources and to insist that they also were deserving of respect for their taste and their patronage of the artistic class.
Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and starting things. The resistance hates those things - they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.
On the other hand, it loves the notion of to-do list and favors and multi-tasking and yes, continual partial attention, because those are perfect hiding places, perfect places to avoid the scary work but still be able to point to a day’s work, well done.
But if you have nothing else due, nothing else to do, no other measurable output but that thing you’ve promised yourself, if all your mental bandwidth is focused on this one and this only, then yep, you can bet that you will get more brave. Plenty of places to run, plenty of places to hide. None of them are as important as shipping your best work today.
There goes another hour. An hour of responding to incoming from people I can’t help, looking at stats that don’t matter, thinking about problems that aren’t the ones I set out to solve, and waiting for a response when I should be creating instead. Choose wisely. It’s perhaps the most important decision we make, every day.
We love the memory we have of how that brand made us feel once. We love that it reminds us of our moms, or growing up, or our first kiss. We support a charity or a soccer team or a perfume because it gives us a chance to love something about ourselves.
We can’t easily explain this, even to ourselves. We can’t easily acknowledge the narcissism and the nostalgia that drives so many of the apparently rational decisions we make every day. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not at work.
More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of ourselves, reminders of who we are or would like to be.
Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.
Somewhere, right this very moment, someone is having more fun than you.
Making more money than you.
Doing something more important, with better friends, and a happier ending than you.
You’re missing out.
And somewhere, right now, something in your universe isn’t right.
A crisis is looming.
The lizard brain is on high alert to make sure that everything is okay. The lizard brain can’t rest until it knows that everyone likes us, that no one is offended, that all graphs are ticking up and to the right and the future is assured. But of course, the future (and the present) isn’t perfect. It can’t be.
The only place joy can be found is right here and right now. Everyone who is selling you dissatisfaction is working for their own selfish ends.
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
It’s easy to start a blog, but of course, starting a blog doesn’t really deliver a lot of value. Posting 4,100 blog posts in a row, though, isn’t easy. It’s do-able, clearly do-able, and might just be worth it.
Anyone who takes responsibility for getting something done is welcome to ask for the authority to do it.
Now you are a celebrity.
That means that… There are people in who don’t know you… and who don’t like you.
Specifically, there are people who don’t know your work, who haven’t taken the time to understand your point of view, who nonetheless have had to draw a conclusion about who you are and what you do.
It’s unreasonable to expect only the upside. There are now people in the world who don’t know you and who don’t like you. Sorry.
Just imagine how much you’d get done
… if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work.
We train employees to deal with bosses in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to do. Figure out how to do exactly what they want, with the least amount of effort, and the least risk of failure and you’re a ‘good worker.’
If your boss is seen as a librarian, she becomes a resource, not a limit. If you view the people you work with as coaches, and your job as a platform, it can transform what you do each day, starting right now. “My boss won’t let me,” doesn’t deserve to be in your vocabulary. Instead, it can become, “I don’t want to do that because it’s not worth the time/resources.” (Or better, it can become, “go!”)
The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss as teacher as taskmaster as limiter mindset. We need more from you than that.
When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.
You can already guess the problem with little lies. They blur the line, and they lead (pretty quickly) to big lies. The worst kind of little lies are the ones you make to yourself. Once you’re willing to lie to yourself, you’re also willing to cheat at golf, and after that, it’s all downhill.
Companies that refuse to break small promises have a much easier time keeping big promises. And they earn a reputation, one that makes their handshake worth more.
Given that expectation and trust are just about all we have left to sell, it seems to me that little lies and small promises are at the very heart of the matter. And they’re a simple choice, nothing requiring an MBA or a spreadsheet. It all depends on what you want to stand for.
Yes, we’re chicken. We’re afraid.
So, tell us. What are you afraid might happen that would destroy, disintegrate, or dissuade - that would take us down? And what are you afraid of that might work, thus changing everything and opening up entirely new areas of scariness?
When you talk to yourself, what do you say? Is anyone listening?
You’ve learned through experience that frequency works. That minds can be changed. That powerful stories have impact.
I guess, then, the challenge is to use those very same tools on yourself.
Compared to everything else we could be investing our time on, is this the scariest, most likely to pay off, most important or the best long-term endeavor?
Hardly worth the effort.
In most fields, there’s an awful lot of work put into the last ten percent of quality.
Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the messages is almost the same…
Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.
The last ten percent is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism. If all you’re doing is the standard amount, all you’re going to get is the standard compensation. The hard part is the last ten percent, sure, or even the last one percent, but it’s the hard part because everyone is busy doing the easy part already.
The secret is to seek out the work that most people believe isn’t worth the effort. That’s what you get paid for.
Live your values.
Compete with yourself.
Play to your strength.
Team up.
Model the best.
Productize yourself.
Balance your portfolio.
Follow the growth.
Find a way forward.
Flow value.
Arrogant.
This is a fear and a paradox of doing work that’s important.
A fear because so many of us are raised to avoid appearing arrogant. Being called arrogant is a terrible slur, it means that you’re not only a failure, but a poser as well.
It’s a paradox, though, because the confidence and attitude that goes with bringing a new idea into the world (“hey, listen to this”) is a hair’s breadth away, or at least sometimes it feels that way, from being arrogant.
And so we keep our head down. Better, they say, to be invisible and non-contributing than risk being arrogant.
That feels like a selfish, cowardly cop out to me. Better, I think, to make a difference and run the risk of failing sometimes, of being made fun of, and yes, appearing arrogant. It’s far better than the alternative.
Strangers, Friends, Listeners, Customers, Sneezers, Fans and True Fans. One true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger. And yet if you’re in search of strangers, odds are you’re going to mistreat a true fan in order to seduce yet another stranger who probably won’t reward you much.
How much time you invest in a project is spent preparing excuses, creating insurance, seeking deniability and covering your ass just in case things go poorly in the end?
At some point, that effort becomes so great you never actually ship anything, which of course is the very best protection against failure.
The number one emotion among wild animals isn’t vanity or happiness: it’s fear.
Fear is everywhere in the animal kingdom, because fear is a great way to stay alive. Fear is hard-wired into successful species… it doesn’t need to be taught.
If your success depends on sickening the poorest and least educated portion of your customer base (and the ones that buy the most from you), it’s time to redefine success.
The origins of the luxury goods industry lie in this desire to waste, in public.
Not that they’re better at performing the task at hand, merely that they are expensive and rare.
In every city there are expensive hotels that are noisy, with $56 breakfasts, no parking, blinds that don’t make the room dark and rooms that don’t have enough closets. But the very waste of paying extra to stay there ensures that you’ll be surrounded by others just as wealthy and just as interested in proving it.
All marketers tell a story. The “this is the best price and value” story is just one of those available, and in fact, it’s rarely the most effective for the audience you may be trying to reach.
Kodak created a billion dollar industry by giving people a tool to feed their nostalgia. We don’t take pictures because we want to know what we’re seeing right now… we already know that. We take pictures because it makes us feel good to know that years later, when nostalgia for that moment comes around, we’ll be ready.
The hierachy of success:
- Attitude
- Approach
- Goals
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Execution
How do you deal with failure?
When will you quit?
How do you treat your competitors?
What personality are you looking for in the people you hire?
What’s it like to work for you? Why? Is that a deliberate choice?
What sort of decision do you make when no one is looking?
As in high school, the winners are the ones who don’t take it too seriously and understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Get stuck in the never ending drama (worrying about what irrelevant people think) and you’ll never get anything done. The only thing worse than coming in second place in the race for student council president is… winning.
Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.
Why are you apologizing?
I don’t understand blog posts, emails and other messages that begin with an apology.
If you’re sorry to interrupt me with that spam, don’t send it.
On the other hand, if it’s important, if it needs to be said, if it benefits not just you but the recipient, then just send it. Instead of an apology, clearly label it so it’s easy to ignore or discard. Even better, don’t send everyone a message aimed at just a few people.
I don’t feel like it
What’s it?
Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.
Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.
Of course, your feelings are irrelevant to whether or not the market expects great work. Do the work. Ignore the feelings part and the work will follow.
The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn’t ship and most of all, busywork.
These represent safety, because if you don’t challenge the status quo, you can’t be made fun of, can’t fail, can’t be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything.
You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger the circle, the more connections are available.
Laziness in a white collar job has nothing todo with avoiding hard physical labor. Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.
I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?
Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.
I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.
Isn’t your work spiritual?
In fact, I don’t think there’s a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there’s a relationship between who you are and how important the work is.
Life’s too short to phone it in.
People are rarely willing to step up and stop you, and often just waiting to follow someone crazy enough to actually do something.
The goal shouldn’t be to have a lot of people to yell at, the goal probably should be to have a lot of people who choose to listen. Don’t need a bullhorn for that.
It’s the time to change the world. And like what MJ said - it all starts with the man in the mirror.
If your boss asks you to move a box from point A to point B, it’s probably not okay to say, “I don’t feel like it right now.”
And yet.
And yet when we ask you to look people in the eye, be creative, brainstorm, be generous, find a way to satisfy an angry customer, work with a bully, learn a new skill or bing joy to work, suddenly the excuses pile up. Is this a different sort of work? Is raising your hand in class too much to ask of you?
The jobs most of us would like to have are jobs like this. And yet we put up a fight when given the chance to do them well.
We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn’t our best look, or a job that doesn’t quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don’t give us joy, or a website that’s “good enough.”
The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.
You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make everyday.
In fact, everyone is always doing their best under the circumstances. There’s no such thing as irrational behavior. That’s because in this moment, given the perceptions someone is holding, the way they behave is in fact the only way they can behave.