A Learning a Day

I met a doctor who specializes in sports injury say “motion is lotion.”

He was trying to make a simple point – unless you’re dealing with a severe injury, most other issues are best solved by a focus on mobility.

Moving our body helps it heal.

Motion is lotion – catchy and useful.

One of the fascinating things about this life is that we often talk about ideas like “quick wins” that imply we can quickly get going on the easy stuff.

In reality, we typically need to get to the hard stuff first to then get to the easy stuff. At least the easy stuff that counts anyway.

I think of this every time I think about the act of building a team and getting the team going. It takes a good 6 months of consistently choosing the hard stuff – tough conversations, tough decisions, and so on – before things settle and the team begins moving in the direction we want.

And, for what it’s worth, I’m not even sure the easy stuff exists. I think we just get so good at dealing with the hard stuff as a team that we take on the next thing and the thing after with relative ease.

Perhaps that’s the secret. Getting to the hard stuff first makes the hard stuff that follows… easy.

I’ve been thinking of all of these ideas a lot recently – fitness, resilience, constructiveness, and perspective.

Fitness is the starting point. If we don’t feel good, we won’t get much done.

Resilience comes next. When we attempt to do things, we will inevitably face setbacks. The bigger the attempts, the bigger the setbacks. Resilience is what sees us through.

Constructiveness is what moves us from surviving something with resilience to thriving. It inspires us to build from the bricks we have around us – some of which may even have been thrown in our direction. :-)

And perspective helps us remain aware of and grateful for all our blessings – many of which we frequently take for granted.

The powerful thing about all 4 of these ideas is they cannot be taught. Lectures on perspective or fitness don’t help. It is why kids make fun of stories about their parent’s struggles.

They are learnt and earned from experience and self-reflection.

A good friend who is an amateur marathon runner shared an insight about running.

If you’re feeling the pain during a long run, there’s no point thinking about it. Thinking about it only adds more stress into the system. And the higher the stress, the more likely we’ll experience a drop in performance.

Instead, if you manage to relax and focus on other things, it is likely you’ll find reservoirs of speed and energy you didn’t know you had.

As in running, so in life.

One of the highest leverage skills we can pick up is knowing when to sit with a problem vs. attempt to resolve it.

Knotty problems take time to solve and typically don’t lend themselves to attempts at resolving them quickly.

The hard part is making peace with that tension – for there is plenty of tension – and letting it push us and transform our thinking enough to be able to find the right solution.

We installed this 3D world map on one of our walls recently.

Source: Hyperiwood.com

It has since been a daily reminder of just how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe it’s time to put up a 3D rendering of our galaxy next.

#Perspective.

2 years ago, Seth shared a post titled “Finding your voice.” I took two things away from that post –

(1) Given how often we use our voice, we need to make sure we pay attention to it. And I hadn’t spend any time thinking about how I could take care of my voice.

(2) I found this video with two simple exercises to strengthen our voice. I committed to doing them every morning.

Up until then, I had a habit of clearing my throat during meetings as I felt my voice fail me over the course of a day or week. I did this a few times every hour on some days.

Since I started doing these exercises in Jan 2022, I think I’ve reduced how often I do that by over 95%. It has become so minimal now that it stands out on days I do it. For instance, I missed my vocal exercises on a day this week and I found myself clearing my throat a few times in a meeting in the morning.

Game changing.

I’m amazed I didn’t pay attention to this habit of clearing the throat. Maybe it felt small enough to be inconsequential? I’m amazed by the transformative power of a small change in my morning routine.

The small things are the big things.

PS: Thanks, Seth!

When working to align groups of people, I’ve found one idea to be true in over 95% of instance- a group of people with the same incentives converge to the same (right) answer when they share the same context.

The key is the shared context.

The cost of being great at something is being mediocre or below average at things you’d love to be good at.

“Culture can’t be taught, it has to be caught.”

The culture of a team or an organization isn’t the list of words on the wall that is shared as part of the onboarding.

It is absorbed – by reading into people decisions (who is promoted, fired, and hired) and by understanding how decisions are made.

Culture can’t be taught, it has to be caught – indeed.