What if, starting Monday, you…
Of course, it is hard to make change on all fronts.
But, and here’s a final question, what if we picked one and ran with it?
Over the years, I’ve observed an unbelievable amount of human angst in organizations caused by meetings that are currently out-of-reach.
Everyone would love to be part of “that” important meeting.
The only issue is that there is no end to meetings you aren’t invited to. After all, there’s always that more important meeting that you aren’t invited to that “those folk” go to. When you are a Director, it is the Senior Directors meeting. When you are a Senior Director, it is the Vice Presidents meeting and so on.
It never ends.
And, besides, like most meetings, most of the meetings you weren’t invited to are just time sinks anyway. Meetings don’t necessarily get better as you move up the hierarchy.
Defining your satisfaction at work by the meetings you are invited to isn’t a winning strategy. So much better to focus on shipping great work and learning to run whatever meetings you are involved in well.
In the long run, you will be part of all the meetings you need to be.
The benefit of having 9 years of archives is that, every once a while, someone reminds you of an old post that resonated with them. And, today, I thought I’d share one of them. I wrote about Path-Sharers nearly 2 years ago. It continues to be a very relevant idea and one I hope to internalize completely as I grow as a person.
How many of your kindergarten classmates are currently your colleagues? What about secondary school or high school classmates?
If you are in your 30s, the chances are that the answer is 0.
We are wired to compete. Our schools exacerbate this instinct. The truth, however, is that we’ve got this completely wrong. Just because someone is on the same path as us doesn’t mean they’re heading to the same destination. And, just because someone is further along the path doesn’t mean they’re at the same point in their journey.
We’re always going to have people like us – fellow executives, fellow entrepreneurs, and so on. It is tempting to compare notes – salaries, funding rounds, education, grades, and so on. It is, however, useless.
We’re all on journeys to unknown destinations. Every once a while, we have others join us on that path for a little while. Instead of competing with them, trying to push them out of the path or looking at them with envy, what we must really do is be happy for their presence and continue working on making progress on our path. The more we focus on them, the more we detract from asking the important questions – “am I on the right path in the first place?”, “am I doing the best I can?”
There’s a secret that all incredible companies share – they don’t make decisions based on their competition. They keep doing things that build off their strengths and they always end up doing better than the rest. It is the same idea at play in our lives. We are on our own unique journey. Let’s celebrate and help the occasional “path-sharer” – they make the journey meaningful and fulfilling.
Often, when we interact with other human beings, we expect them to be at their best. The customer service agent, the other drivers on the road, the shoppers in the mall and the many others we interact with every week in our lives.
As a result, we’re inevitably disappointed.
Couldn’t they be more competent, constructive or sympathetic?
These folks make us feel worse on a bad day. After all, we’re already kicking ourselves for a dumb mistake. Then, they swoop in with a sarcastic comment or some unreasonable behavior and make our day worse.
But, what if we changed our assumptions and, instead, assumed that the human beings we meet are having their worst day
What if the customer agent just got off a call where a customer berated him? What if the other driver just learnt that her kid had misbehaved? What if one of the shoppers recently got fired?
Maybe we’d behave better to others and, maybe, just maybe, we’d begin to expect less in our lives.
Our happiness is generally a function of our reality relative to our expectations. Of course, we can work away on making our reality better.
But, as with all fractions, working away on the denominator is a sure-fire way to improve the outcome as well.
Commitment is easy. All it takes is a few works and, on occasion, a signature. But, commitments rarely do much on their own. Every great thing we are capable of building – relationships, organizations, trust among others – are built on the foundation of re-commitment.
Thus, what a person commits to says little about them.
How often they re-commit to what they commit to, on the other hand, says plenty about their character.
How do you choose the 4 (or more) dock / easy-to-launch apps on your phone?
My guess is that the most common way of choosing these apps is by frequency of use. What if, instead, we chose the apps based on what we’d like to be the highest frequency apps?
For example, my default list used to be – Phone, Settings (primarily to switch on and off cellular data), Notes, Audible.
My new default list is – Phone, Notes, Kindle and Audible. I’d love to use more of the Kindle app during my down time and I’m curious to see if this will help me make the shift.
Defaults are powerful. Let’s choose them wisely.
Every 12-18 months, I work through a process that I call “What got you here won’t get you there” or WGYHWGYT. That’s not the most helpful abbreviation – so, I prefer the longer version of the name. :-)
The guiding principle is the idea that what got you here won’t get you there. It is a call to myself to pause, press the refresh button and change how I do things.
But, how do you know what to change?
I have a simple rule to get started- look for dissatisfaction. Over the past few months, for example, I’ve observed dissatisfaction at multiple moments. Here are a few examples –
(there’s plenty more)
Once I’m satisfied with my dissatisfaction list (ha. there’s an idea), the next step is to think about what the next 12-18 months would ideally look like – what are the kinds of things I’d like to be doing differently? What should I be learning? How would I like to spend my time?
More often than not, the dissatisfaction list is nearly identical to the “future self” list. I think that’s because we are most dissatisfied by behaviors and processes that we believe aren’t consistent to who we want to be. This process is just about listening carefully to ourselves.
This list, then, is ready to be prioritized and acted upon. Some items require thought while some others require action. But, the plan exists. And, ideally, I’ll walk out at the other end of the process feeling refreshed and reinvented.
Life has a way of pushing us to refresh and reinvent ourselves from time to time. I’ve found it to be much better to own the process.
Born a Crime is South African stand-up comedian (and The Daily Show host) Trevor Noah’s autobiography. Trevor Noah manages to be fascinating, funny, poignant and insightful all at once. The book resonated very deeply as he touched so many topics I think about all at once – poverty, crime, opportunity, race, relationships, and so more.
I thought I’d share my favorite quotes sorted by topic.
On advice to poor people
“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
“People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”
On racism
“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
“Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked.”
“In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: “There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.” It was the same for us. “Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let’s move on.”
On poverty, and crime and the law
“The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.”
“It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it. But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in. If a crackhead comes through and he’s got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he’s stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking, ‘I’m aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes.’ No. She’s thinking, ‘My family needs food and this guy has Corn Flakes’, and she buys the Corn Flakes.”
“The more time I spent in jail, I realized law is a lottery. What color is your skin? How much money do you have? Who’s your lawyer?”
On observations about our pro-white biases :)
“If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.”
“The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.”
“What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. “
On relationships
“Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.”
“Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that’s not how people are.”
“People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.”
“It taught me that it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider. If a white guy chooses to immerse himself in hip-hop culture and only hang out with black people, black people will say, “Cool, white guy. Do what you need to do.” If a black guy chooses to button up his blackness to live among white people and play lots of golf, white people will say, “Fine. I like Brian. He’s safe.” But try being a black person who immerses himself in white culture while still living in the black community. Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community.”
On being human
“Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, ‘I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”
“We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”
“When you shit, as you first sit down, you’re not fully in the experience yet. You are not yet a shitting person. You’re transitioning from a person about to shit to a person who is shitting. You don’t whip out your smartphone or a newspaper right away. It takes a minute to get the first shit out of the way and get in the zone and get comfortable. Once you reach that moment, that’s when it gets really nice. It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don’t care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away.”
On life
“Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.”
“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
“We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.”
On advice from his mom
“Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be a man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.”
“People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu — the things of white people. So many people had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom: ‘Why do this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?’
‘Because,’ she would say, ‘even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”
It is a wonderful book – one that reminded me how lucky I was at so many important points in my life. I’d highly recommend it.
Thanks for sharing your story, Trevor.
As you get older, you spend a fair bit of time with your partner and a large amount with yourself. We know this thanks to data scientist Henrik Lindberg
who combed through results from an annual census from the US bureau of statistics. 
The Quartz article also points out the difference between a small circle of quality relationships and a non-existent one as crucial. That makes sense, of course.
But, for me, the big takeaways are two-fold. First, your partner is likely going to be the single biggest influence on your life and personality.
And, second, it is worth developing a sense of self worth which, in turn, helps us love ourselves. Life can get very difficult if you are stuck spending all your time with someone you don’t love very much.
My favorite excerpts from a fascinating article on The Atlantic – “Power causes brain damage.”
Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.
Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.
The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.
No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier—from time to time, at least—is to stop feeling powerful.
Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.
This is a fascinating article for a bunch of reasons.
First, it explains a ton of behavior from powerful leaders that would make little sense otherwise. :-)
Second, while it is easy to brush this off as just relevant for people who are in obvious places of power, I think it is very relevant for all of us. Every one of us experiences power in small ways – leading an initiative, parenting a family, directing a side project, etc. And, in many cases, we are (or at least I have been) guilty of exhibiting behavior that this article describes.
The only solution found so far is to find ways to be grounded or “to stop feeling powerful.” That isn’t easy to do.
But, as with many good things, the first step is being aware of the issue and why it matters.
A Learning a Day 