“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” | Marcus Aurelius
I was pondering this today – at what point does it become worse to worry about a worst case outcome vs. simply experiencing that outcome?
More often than not, better is faster in the long run.
Not always.
But more often than not.
In a world where information is just a click or scroll away, it is just as important to be clear about what we want to be stupid about as it is to be clear about what we want to be smart about.
Claire Hughes Johnson, in her book Scaling People, said something interesting about good managers “say the things you think you cannot say.”
It is a fascinating way to describe communication as a manager.
It got me thinking about a story from venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s post titled “Leading from the Heart.”
One of my favorite stories about this comes from a particularly difficult moment in my career where I had to transition a founder out of the company they started. It was the night before the all-hands where the CEO transition was going to be announced. I asked the founder if they were going to attend the all-hands and the founder said no. I then asked the founder what I should tell the team. The founder said, “tell them you fired me because that is what happened”.
The next day I stood up in front of the entire company and told the team the Board had asked the founder to leave the company they started and that the Board had asked a member of the team to step into the CEO role.
After the all-hands ended, there was a line of about twenty or thirty people long to talk to me. And every single one of them waited in line to tell me the same thing which was “thank you for telling us the truth.”
It was a powerful lesson for me. And like most of the lessons I’ve learned in business, I learned it from a founder and their team.
If you are struggling to build the level of trust you want with the team in your company, try a little more transparency, vulnerability, and honesty in your communication style. It will pay dividends.
As a recipient of many messages from leadership over the years, I’ve learnt that I prefer the truth. Plain and simple. No dressing required.
It is often there to see anyway. The camouflage just gets frustrating after a point.
It is why Claire’s idea and Fred’s story resonate deeply with me. I love the idea of saying things that people don’t normally say. And I think Fred is spot on about communicating with more transparency, vulnerability, and honesty.
It doesn’t mean it always works. There are many instances when it has backfired for me.
But, in the long run, I think it creates better cultures and higher trust environments. And that makes the juice worth the squeeze.
I’ll start the week tomorrow morning with a priority list for the week. But it is highly unlikely that the priorities in the list will survive the week. I think of this as the tension between deliberate priorities and emergent priorities.
Emergent priorities are priorities that show up because of some new stimulus in the system. New information came up, something broke, someone decided to do something different, and so on.
There are 2 challenges with emergent priorities –
(1) It is tempting to resist them. That’s futile. Circumstances change. It is best to accept this reality and move on.
(2) It is equally tempting to just throw away our deliberate priorities and deal with the emergent priorities instead. That extreme also is rarely the right answer. Some emergent priorities do demand our attention. Others require a bit of attention to better understand the problem so they can find their spot on the list or perhaps be ignored entirely.
The key with dealing with emergent priorities as we plan for our weeks is to know that they’ll show up. And when they show up, our first reaction will often be one of frustration.
That knowledge helps us welcome them with equanimity and deal with them.
In the final analysis, that’s all we can hope to do. Keep calm and keep plugging away.
If enough people use a system, they’ll find a way to exploit it.
Therein lies the challenge for a system designer. As a system scales, you’ll have to keep modifying your system to account for incentives instead of relying on good intent.
Incentives eat intent for breakfast.
One of the biggest side effects of attempting to build good technology products over the years is developing significantly more empathy for people attempting to build something useful.
I used to have more scathing/sarcastic remarks in the past. Today, I get many of those from frustrated users – and I understand. I’ve been there.
It all looks so simple from the outside. Why can’t people get what feels like basic things right?
But when you’re in the thick of it, you’re fighting all kinds of odd constraints and broken systems. And, perhaps, most of all, you’re navigating a sea of humans with different agendas and interests.
That isn’t to say every person building is making the right calls. There’s a lot of judgment involved and some people definitely do it a lot better than others.
But things always look easier from the outside. And it’s just so much easier to comment than build.
“If you stop whatever you are doing and ask yourself, Am I happy? odds are, you won’t be as happy as you just were. The worst way to be happy is to ask yourself if you are happy.
The same goes for all kinds of desirable experiences.
The more you wonder if your relationship is the right one, the less likely you’ll find it is. When you’re at your best and everything is clicking, the moment you ask yourself, Am I in the zone? you are no longer in the zone, or at least not as much as you were. This is true in public speaking, athletic performance, the practice of medicine, and the bedroom.
Perhaps the most striking way to realize the experience-changing nature of judgement is via meditation. Any veteran meditator will have faced a situation that goes like this: you are settling deeply into a contemplative groove; your being begins to merge with your breath, or maybe even the universe; and then you wonder, Holy cow! Is this really happening? Am I really shedding my sense of self? Is this a transcendent moment? Yet the second you ask that question, it no longer is.”
This note from Brad Stulberg’s newsletter both made me pause and chuckle.
It reminded me of an Eckhart Tolle refrain – “Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”
You never know if a good day is a good day anyway. Best to keep our focus on plugging away on things that matter vs. overthinking it.
Is a workout a workout if we don’t experience discomfort?
Anyone who works out regularly knows to expect this. We need to get our heart rate up, stretch those muscles, and feel the discomfort for it to count as exercise.
So it works in our day to day lives too. It’s no different than a daily workout. The goal isn’t to have perfect days. Instead, it is to experience the discomfort and stretch.
And learn to enjoy the process.
After my first set of reflections from my time at Disneyland, I’ve found myself going back to that experience as I think about experience design. And, as part of that process, I’ve been learning a few interesting lessons about the Disneyland approach to user experience design.
One such anecdote is about the 30 feet rule about trash cans. Walt Disney was obsessed about park cleanliness in the 1950s. So the team studied how long people walk with trash in their hands before they try to get rid of it. The answer to that, it turns out, is ~30 feet.
Ergo – the 30 feet rule – you won’t need to travel more than 30 feet at Disneyland without seeing a trash can.
While this is an impressive and even inspiring story on the attention to detail in crafting a great user experience, what’s telling is what Walt Disney didn’t do. He didn’t –
I know some of these are outlandish – and I’m exaggerating to make a point. But it is telling that he simply observed user behavior and crafted an experience around it vs. attempting to change it.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us.
A Learning a Day 