Author: alearningaday

Curators sift through a lot of what’s written or shared about a particular topic or topics and put them together in one place. Synthesizers, on the other hand, attempt to make sense of what happened.

Curators, thus, focus on breadth while synthesizers focus on depth. Excellent news outlets mix both curation and synthesis. They send you a “daily brief” that brings together the news you need to know. In addition, they also share links to deeper insights and analysis.

It helps to have a nice balance between curators and synthesizers. For example, if you love reading about technology, Benedict Evans’ or Azeem Azhar’s weekly newsletters are examples of curation. They put together a collection of links they think you should read. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery or Ben Evans’ blog posts (or The Notes by Ada project :-)), on the other hand, are examples of synthesis.

On average, more folks default to curation over synthesis. This is partly why Facebook is the media superpower that it is. It is easier to skim through a few links and a one line description than it is to commit oneself to reading analysis.

But, the more synthesis we read and understand, the better we learn and retain.

So, that then brings us to some interesting questions. For starters, is it worth revisiting what the goal of your information diet is? For example, if you only read the news to stay informed, can you reduce the amount of news you read by half and still be okay? And, if you read about your industry to learn, can you invest in reading more synthesis and, maybe, over time do some synthesis yourself by writing and sharing?

We all have fairly heavy information diets in this day and age and, on average, take in far more information than we need.

Time to cut those carbs, then.

As I open up the “post” collection of links these days, I open up 3 tabs – one with a WordPress “Add New Post,” one with the Hemingway Editor and one with Unsplash. I use Unsplash for images when I share the post on Twitter, on the ALearningaDay Facebook page and on LinkedIn.

Thanks to Unsplash, however, I frequently find myself admiring some of the photos. Below are 3 photos I admired today.

I’ve looked at this photo multiple times. I’d love to know where this is. But, there’s something both beautiful and haunting. How did the aircraft end up there? What’s the story?

This is a cloudy Macchu Picchu. I’ve always found Macchu Picchu intriguing and I hope to hike up this peak sometime.

This photo in Canmore, Canada, is just stunning.

Great photographs are such wonderful reminders of the power of still images to tell stories and ask important questions. These photos inspired awe while reminding me that there’s a lot more to life than simply driving “shareholder value.” :-)

Unsplash is special thanks to the many generous photographers who share their photos for free. Thank you to all of you. Generosity is a beautiful thing.

There are a few ways to deal with conflict. The most common approach is to avoid it and the next is tackle it head on. My natural propensity is to do the latter.

Both of these can be useful in some situations. Not every conflict is worth dealing with and many lose their edge with time. Then again, a few deserve to be dealt with head on. Some issues and differences in opinion require difficult conversations.

An underrated approach to dealing with conflict is to approach it with humor. I was in a meeting recently where we were looking for a way to get a commitment from everyone to engage with everyone in the meeting instead of their laptops. My natural approach to this would have been to have had a difficult conversation – being engaged is important and so on.

At best, this message might have been received as preachy. And, at worst, it would have been really annoying.

Someone then came up with another idea – every time we saw someone disengage, we’d ask them for a fun fact.

That changed the dynamic in the room almost instantly. A serious discussion had been transformed into a game.

This idea could be just as easily applied in other meetings and even on family dinner tables.

I don’t naturally jump to humor as a way of dealing with conflict. But, it is incredibly effective and I hope to use it more often.

When in doubt –

• focus on what you control
• be thankful for what you have

This is post #4316 on this blog. I think more than a hundred of these (at minimum) expresses this learning in different ways.

Simple rules of thumb like this take years to appreciate and synthesize… and decades to implement.

Every once a while, I think of a wonderful passage from Eric Weiner’s “Geography of Bliss” on attention.

“Attention’ is an underrated word. It doesn’t get the… well, the attention it deserves. We pay homage to love, and happiness, and, God knows, productivity, but rarely do we have anything good to say about attention. We’re too busy, I suspect. Yet our lives are empty and meaningless without attention.

My two-year-old daughter fusses at my feet as I type these words. What does she want? My love? Yes, in a way, but what she really wants is my attention. Pure, undiluted attention. Children are expert at recognizing counterfeit attention. Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other.”

We have a finite amount of attention in our lives. It is akin to wealth that we get to spend. Except, unlike wealth, we don’t get to save it in the bank.

It turns out that the simplest way to build a meaningful life is to spend our attention on things that have meaning. It requires us to be attentive to where we spend our attention.

This weekend, like every other, we have many forces that demand our attention.

It is on us to spend it well.

Legendary coach John Wooden was famous for reminding his players – “You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game, and you can win when you’re outscored.”

The difference between losing and being outscored lies in the effort you put in. If you’ve given it your very best shot, you can never lose.

You may still be outscored – but that’s very different from losing.

En-route to success, organizations, teams and people tend to be rigid on principles and flexible on process. You find resourceful people and teams who work with a first principles approach to solve problems. Once they align on the principles, they experiment with various approaches to get things done and, generally, find a way against all odds.

Disruptors are great at this. They don’t get caught up in the process that incumbents are constrained by. The focus on first principles such as an obsession with what the customer needs and work through approaches that helps them address them – usually at lower cost. The only principle that defines their process is experimentation.

But, once success arrives, something often changes. The same organizations and people become fixated on the processes that led to their success. Suddenly, they become rigid on process and flexible on principles.

Hiring and customer service tend to be the first to take the hit. When organizations are small, they focus on a few key principles and focus on a scrappy approach to hiring. But, once they’re successful, the executives involved often convince themselves that a certain archetype (that looks a lot like them) works best for their teams. Similarly, customer service employees are asked to focus on their manual versus actually attempting to solve the customer’s problem and care for them.

This may also be why most successful players make poor coaches and why ultra-successful folks struggle with being parents.

If we had to bring this all down to mindset, the simplest way to describe this would be that successful organizations and people start with a growth mindset. But, over time, they drink their own kool aid and begin managing themselves and others around them with a fixed mindset. They become more focused with keeping and expanding territory and convincing themselves that they’re right over actually testing and experimenting with a willingness to fail.

Of course, in the long run, the moment they become flexible on the principles that made them successful is the moment that marks the beginning of the end of their success.

There comes a moment when you trust your mindset and your ability to follow through enough to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, say to yourself “I can change myself to fix this”… and actually believe it.

Things are never the same again.

If you’re unable to do that right now, you just need to pick a smaller change.

Over time, the small changes give way to the big ones.

There’s an interesting exchange in “The Dark Knight” movie rises about fear.

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Doctor: ‘You do not fear death. You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak.’

Bruce: ‘Why?’

Doctor: ‘How can you move faster then possible, fight longer then possible, without the most powerful impulse of the spirit? The fear of death.’

Bruce:’I do fear death. I fear dying in here while my city burns. And there’s no one there to save it.’

Doctor: ‘Then make the climb.’

Bruce: ‘How?’

Doctor: ‘As the child did – without the rope. Then fear will find you again.’

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I often think about the role fear plays in our lives. Too many of us fear things that really don’t matter in the long run – e.g., the fear of how others might perceive us if we did something. On the other hand, too few fear things that might actually matter in the final analysis – e.g., the fear of not making the most of the privilege we’ve been granted.

My learning, as a result, has been to question my irrational fears and understand their nature so I can distinguish between fear that matters and fear that doesn’t.

As long as we have insecurity within us (and every one of us does), we will always deal with fear. That’s a good thing. For courage is not the absence of fear; it is learning to act because we realize there are things more important than fear.

When we picture Isaac Newton, we picture him making mental breakthroughs with the apple falling on his head. That it likely never happened matters less at this point. Most great stories involve geniuses find opportunity out of nothing.

Except that’s rarely how opportunity shows up.

Instead, the best link I’ve found to opportunity is a combination of proximity and excellence. Get close to people or companies doing what you’d like to do, then get good, and the chances are high that you’ll find opportunity. Intel didn’t just spring up to create the Silicon Valley in the 1970s. Intel’s co-founders worked for Bill Shockley, one of the inventors of the semi-conductor, and then broke off to build their own companies.

Most of the famous management consulting firms, for example, grew out of each other. McKinsey & Co. split from the company that came to be known as A.T.Kearney. BCG was born out of Arthur D Little. And, Bain & Co. was born out of BCG.

Early PayPal employees founded a ridiculous number of great internet companies. And, most leading internet executives today likely learned their trade at an HP, a Netscape or a Yahoo.

Adidas and Puma, owned by brothers from the same village in Germany, dominated the global shoe industry for the longest time. And Nike, the upstart, was created thanks to a plucky track-and-field athlete and the influence of Bill Bowerman – one of the most innovative track coaches who ever lived.

All this is not to say that you couldn’t be someone who popped up with the idea for Nike having no interest in athletics. But, the chances are incredibly low that you’d do something about it even if it crossed your mind.

My learning from connecting these dots translates to simple career advice. First, set expectations – don’t expect opportunity to strike you on your couch. You’ll have to be out on the field getting good at something. Second, if you have a hypothesis for the kind of work you want to do, go to places where the best in the world train and perform. Third, get really good – it helps to recognize what is really opportunity and what isn’t.

And, then, if you’re both lucky and intentional, opportunity will show up dressed in overalls and looking like work.