A Learning a Day

A friend shared a story about a conversation with someone who was many steps ahead of him in his career. He’d gone to this person with a career decision where he was deciding between two very different paths.

It was late on a Friday evening but this person committed to figuring this out. As their conversation progressed, his wife called as he was supposed to be at a party. He explained he had to skip it.

Then his boss called, and he again said he was in the middle of something and he’d call back tomorrow.

Then his biggest client called, and, once again, he shared he was in the middle of something important.

This friend was stunned. He was leaving the company after all. At the end of their conversation, he asked him why he upset a bunch of important people just to help him?

His answer was: “You are important to me. And for you, this is a life-changing decision, which makes it important to you. When you are important to me, what is important to you is important to me.”

It is an idea that Stephen Covey shares in the “7 Habits.” But there’s nothing like a good story to make it memorable.

What we consider normal is a function of the norms of the culture we grew up in. Behavior encouraged in one culture can be entirely unacceptable in another.

That’s why it’s easy to label something as weird: it simply doesn’t match the norms of whatever subculture shaped us – a combination of our family, our neighborhood, and our institutions.

It’s also why diverse teams are so hard to build. Different points of view mean different assumptions, and different assumptions look like weird behavior, at least at first.

But those weird behaviors are often exactly what break through groupthink. The assumptions worth questioning are usually the ones nobody in the room thought to question, because everybody in the room grew up with the same “normal.”

A group of us play a pickup soccer game together every weekend, with plenty of banter along the way.

Recently, after one game, a casual conversation about the result spiraled into talk of tracking stats: who’s on which team, goals scored, win rates. That escalated further quickly, all the way to using an app for team assignments and stat tracking.

Then the following weekend, we played with all of it in place. Everyone was excited going in. But the game itself was far more competitive than usual. People played tighter, more aggressive, more conscious of every touch.

Which defeats the entire point of a Sunday pickup game: work out, have fun, don’t get hurt.

My takeaway afterward was that the game became a lot more competitive and a lot less joyful the moment people knew they were being tracked.

It is a good reminder that many things in this life are best left un-optimized.

If you play a sport with a lot of dynamic movement, quick starts, stops, direction changes, buy shoes that fit almost perfectly, even if they feel slightly tight in the store.

A looser shoe feels more comfortable walking around the aisle. On the court or field, however, that same looseness costs blisters, chafed skins, and worse.

I’ve learned this one painfully, more than once.

It has a decent analogy for life too. The option that feels more uncomfortable up front can often be the one that serves you best over time.

Sometimes it’s worth sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to resolve it.

It builds tolerance. And it gives your mind time to patiently work through a gnarly problem, instead of grabbing the first simple solve that won’t hold up over time.

Nearly twenty years ago, I listened to one of my first self-improvement audiobooks, called Boundaries by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend. I don’t remember much of what’s actually written in it anymore (I did remember not loving the narrator).

But the book left me with one idea that’s stuck ever since. In every relationship, you have to set boundaries. If you don’t, you lose the right to complain about being taken for granted. Setting the line is on you, and in relationships, as in most of life, you get what you tolerate.

That idea has shaped how I operate since, both in setting my own boundaries and in noticing when others don’t set theirs.

Good books tend to leave you at least one idea that changes how you operate. This was that idea from Boundaries.

If you want to take a risk, you have to make peace with the volatility that comes with it. Riskier bets have more volatility with bigger highs and bigger lows.

Safer bets stay flatter, and the returns stay flatter too.

This holds for all kinds of bets – from bets on investments to careers to relationships. There’s no guarantee high risk pays off, but, at the same time, it’s typically the only way to give yourself a shot at a high return.

And that road isn’t for the faint of heart.

When you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other too.

There are stretches when, for a mix of reasons, I notice myself operating from a place of confidence. And there are stretches when I’m walking around with a knot in my stomach, tuned into everything that could go wrong.

Over time I’ve noticed these states are never caused by one thing. It’s always a confluence, some of it in my control, most of it not. An unexpected argument, a couple of customers having a bad week, and suddenly I’m in a more nervous place.

I used to think the useful move was figuring out the cause and trying to shift the state. I don’t think that anymore. What’s actually useful is noticing the state I’m in and using it for what it’s naturally good at.

Confidence is a good window for taking on something new, something that feels a little risky.

Nervousness is a good window for exactly the opposite: running premortems, getting paranoid about the right things, going after the projects that are quietly worrying me.

I can’t always line up my work with the state I’m in. But when I can, it’s worth doing.

I’ve started thinking of these as internal weather. They don’t last as long as real seasons, but the same logic applies. There’s no point complaining about a heat wave, or wishing summer becomes winter. You just do the things that make sense for the season you’re in.

I’ve been slowly working through Rafa, the Netflix documentary on Nadal. As a casual tennis fan, I’ve always admired his fighting spirit, but the documentary brings home just how much he suffered to get there.

He played almost his entire career with Müller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative condition in his left foot, since being diagnosed in 2005. It’s the kind of chronic injury that would have ended most careers early. He played through it anyway, for two decades, and became one of the greatest players the sport has ever seen.

I’ve written before about how Nadal’s fight makes him a remarkable role model, and this documentary only deepens that view.

But the other learning it left me with is this: cultivating a high threshold for pain, in whatever we do, is a serious and durable competitive advantage.

The simplest way to improve our performance is by improving our attitude.