Category: Everything else

There’s a lot to be gained by comparing our processes versus those of others.

For instance, how does someone you consider successful approach their life? What do they do well? What could you learn from how they approach life?

The main danger here is that we might only be viewing some processes in isolation. Someone’s approach to work, for example, may not translate to healthy personal relationships. But, still, if we keep an open mind, there’s plenty we can learn from folks who’re different from us. Some of these lessons will translate to us living our lives better. Many, on the other hand, will just involve us getting to know ourselves much better. For example, once you realize the process behind how someone built their wealth, you may decide that it’s not for you.

Comparing results without understanding processes, as a result, is a guaranteed source of unhappiness. It is akin to surfing your Facebook feed and finding yourself envious of the exotic vacations your friends are enjoying. Results never tell us the full story. They don’t tell us what went in what worked. And, they almost always leave out vital strokes of luck that accompany every accomplishment.

A large proportion of human unhappiness comes from people comparing their kitchens with everyone else’s Instagrammed meals. It is an unfair and useless comparison.

And, most importantly, at least from the point of view of this blog, we learn nothing from it.

I met someone recently who had strong opinions on a few topics. We were part of a group where two folks worked on digital ads and where the other was a start-up founder who had just received some seed funding. It turns out he (and it generally is a he) hated ads and believed there should be no advertising on the planet. He also believed that getting funding early was the wrong thing to do. So, he launched into multiple tirades during the conversation. This also happened to be the first time we were all meeting each other – so, let’s just say it was an interesting conversation.

I have a simple principle when it comes to the strength of opinions – the stronger your opinions, the more it is your responsibility to be curious.

People who combine strong opinions with high levels of curiosity lead with questions and take the time to understand the other person’s point of view. They, then, debate and discuss with the objective of learning something. People who have strong opinions and no curiosity just launch into their point of view. There’s no listening or learning – it is only about “teaching” and moralizing.

It isn’t just that curiosity is the difference between being interesting or annoying when you have strong opinions. It is that, without curiosity, you lose all the learning in the conversation. So, all the attempts to teach and moralize are a waste of energy. Learning only happens everyone around the table are willing to be vulnerable, listen and learn themselves.

And, that can only happen if you lead with curiosity.

Would the iPhone have been as successful if Apple shipped it without that presentation from Steve Jobs?

Given how exceptional the device turned out to be, it just might have. But, that presentation sure helped.  A lot. In fact, years of doing those phenomenal presentations meant the iPhone was already set up for success.

There are many of us who separate doing the work and presenting the work. And, I’ve heard many talk about how they feel they’re good at doing the work but not as good as presenting it. I’m definitely one of them. I’ve moaned about it in the past. And, even if I moan about it less, I often slip on giving enough thought to the presentation and narrative.

But, as in the case of the iPhone, presenting that piece of genius in a way that befit it was an important part of doing the work. It is hard to separate the effect of the making and the sharing. Sure, it would be impossible to present something that isn’t built. But, once it is built, the presentation is a key part.

The presentation isn’t always a presentation of course. It is about building and sharing a story that resonates with the folks who’d like to buy it. We also call this marketing.

Companies that succeed do a phenomenal job marrying great R&D (research and development) and marketing. We need to do so in our work as well.

Do the work first. But, don’t forget to take a step back afterward and share a story that resonates. Give your work the story it deserves.

In every part of your life, you get to pull two levers today.

• In your business, you can choose to juice up revenue or take a hit to improve customer value.
• At work, you can choose to put in extra effort that’ll help your next promotion or raise or invest time into learning a skill that matters.
• At home, you can choose to spend more time answering email to fight the fire of the day or engage with your family.
• On the dinner table, you’ll can choose to eat that pastry or get an extra serving of broccoli.
• On the exercise mat… well, you’ll first need to choose to go to the gym or to open the exercise mat over everything that’ll help in the short term.

The answer is not to ignore the short term. We need all that stuff – revenues, promotions, raises, fire fighting, etc. But, to what end?

Nearly every indicator and incentive we see is short term focused because the short term is easy to measure. Those levers are the brightly colored ones in front of us.

The best way to fight this is to unabashedly optimize for the long term. When in doubt, pick customer value, long term learning, engagement with the people that matter and more time on the exercise mat. And, oh, you won’t go wrong with picking the broccoli more often than not.

Err on optimizing for the long run. The short run becomes the long run before you know it.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

This quote from Martin Luther King Jr., makes a profound point – we get to decide how much our work and life matters. We know this deep in our hearts but, often, choose to bury it amidst the busy-ness of day-to-day living.

But, whenever we stop and decide to do a small thing with extraordinary care, it matters.

And, when we decide to demonstrate extraordinary care in what we say and do consistently, we make a difference.

If you’ve ever gone on long hikes, you know that heavy bags don’t work. Every extra bit of weight on your bag weighs heavily on your shoulder in the long run.

It turns out life works the same way. On this hike, the longest of them all, every bit of mental or emotional baggage weighs us down.

So, if you’re finding yourself taking baggage into the weekend – annoyances, frustrations, grudges and the like – this is a great time to reset and drop them off.

The lighter we travel, the easier it is to enjoy this journey.

We have all done business with small company teams. We know everyone working on the team and hope they succeed and grow.

Over time, they do succeed and grow bigger. Now, they’ve become an organization as they’ve got people in specialized roles working to serve us well. Along the way, they’ve added a few extra policies and procedures – some of which don’t really improve the experience. But, for the most part, we still care about them. As a customer, we know we matter to them.

Then, one day, they make a decision – sometimes implicit – to stop treating us as people and start treating as numbers. We always had a customer number or ID. But, now, that ID is central. It doesn’t matter if we come or go. We’re just a statistic. Writing to them doesn’t matter because employees don’t have to time to waste with the average customer.

The same corporations, if successful, continue to grow so big that they also begin to treat their employees the same way. And, over time, that results in their inevitable decline. They might still be large behemoths for an extra few decades given their sheer size. But, their obituary has already been written.

Teams and organizations become corporations the day everyone in their organizations is taught to treat customers as numbers. As a result, the relevant question for most successful teams and organization that are doing well is not – “Can we scale?”

It is – “Can we scale while still treating our customers and employees as people?”

That’s the question great organizations are built on.

There’s a good chance that you’re faced with one of the following today –

• An opportunity to be annoyed about something trivial
• A realization that someone upset you
• Awareness about someone you don’t like who seems to have gotten ahead in their careers or gotten rich
• Frustration at something that didn’t go your way
• A desire for a quick fix to a problem that requires thought

When any of this happens, just ask – “Will this matter in 10 years?”

It is amazing what happens when we react to short term emotions by thinking about the long term. Most things that annoy, upset, or worry us don’t matter in the long term. We realize that, in the long term, we’ll likely only care about having learnt and grown through our journey, done our best to do work that matters and built a few strong, trusting, relationships.

The rest is gravy.

When in doubt, optimize for the long term.

As we grow, the proportion of our learning that is self taught increases. There are a few reasons for this.

First, completing formal education removes formal teachers and cohorts who’re going through what we go through. Second, work doesn’t lend itself naturally to coaching. So, it is on us to teach ourselves the skills we need. And, finally, we hopefully understand ourselves more and our able to absorb what we need from the world and tailor our curriculum to suit our needs.

The good news is that, with a bit of practice, we can become pretty good teachers. But, the bad news is that it requires us to master the art of good self talk.

We’ve all experienced this with our teachers. We’ve had great teachers who have so much wisdom to dispense that we hang on to every word they say. But, we’ve also had teachers who’ve played havoc with our self esteem.

Well, we can have the same effect on ourselves except ours is multiplied by a million given the amount of time we spend with ourselves.

There’s a lot that can be written about self talk. But, it boils down to one question – how do you respond to going through something disappointing? 

There tend to be three responses – running away from the situation, accepting the facts and beating ourselves up or focusing on the learning and moving on. The most important first step is understanding which of these is your default response. Not too long ago, mine involved beating myself up. And, as you might imagine, the consequences of understanding it and, over time, fixing it, are immense.