“When we talk about “hustle,” perhaps what we’re really referring to is one’s level of persistent tolerance and determination to do a lot of frustrating and tedious work that feels immaterial day-by-day but ultimately matters.” | Scott Belsky
This remains the best definition of hustle I’ve come across.
Our homes and workplaces demand plenty of it.
It doesn’t seem to lead to much for the longest time.
Until, of course, it does.
There’s a great folk story about an exasperated mom who was running out of ways to convince her son to eat fewer sweets. She finally decided she’d ask a village elder/”guru” her son respected for her.
The elder listened to her, sympathized, and asked her to come back in four weeks.
Four weeks later, she went back to him with her son. This time, he took the boy aside and advised him to eat fewer sweets for his own sake. The boy had tremendous respect for the elder and, thus, promised to listen.
The mother found the whole episode curious. So, she asked the elder why he didn’t just give her son this talk four weeks ago. He explained to her that he was guilty of eating too many sweets himself. So, he spent the past four weeks fixing his habits before having the talk with her son.
Many associate teaching to be all about passing on knowledge. In reality, the great gift of attempting to teach is to grow into a place where we earn the right to be worthy of doing so.
The Shape of Us is a beautiful song by Ian Britt, a yet-to-be-discovered British guitarist and singer. While Ian does a great job with the lyrics and the singing, the star of the song is a gorgeous acoustic guitar riff that plays in the background the whole time.
Now, if you listen carefully however, you’ll notice imperfections. As guitarists move their fingers on the strings for riffs like this, they make a scraping sound (listen to ~1:04 for example). If you listen for it, you’ll hear that sound through the song. And, if you haven’t listened for that scraping sound before, it is likely you’ll now hear it in most of your favorite acoustic guitar riffs.
That scraping sound is a natural side effect of playing gorgeous riffs on an acoustic guitar. Attempting to hide that imperfection or engineer that out would ruin the experience of listening to the acoustic guitar.
It turns out that playing to the guitar’s strengths by focusing on simple, melodious, music and accepting that a few imperfections come with the package is a recipe for creating magical music.
Somewhere in there is a learning for all of us.
Tools like slack and email on the phone have made it easier for us to go back-and-forth with colleagues on questions. I’ve been paying attention to the many times I’ve been guilty of initiating these sorts of conversations.
These start with an unassuming “Hey, quick question -” and soon spiral into – “Oh, does that mean….?”
Every once a while, these back-and-forths exist because of the complexity of the problem. It is hard to ask that next question if you know little about the problem. But, more often than not, a little bit of upfront thought could help us lay out the 4-5 questions we actually do want to ask.
Giving that extra bit of thought upfront and batching our questions can make a big difference to the productivity of the person on the receiving end.
Here’s to doing that.
The best source of feedback that will help you get better is you. No one understands that combination of context, the natural impulse, and the internal decision making process that led to the final action better than you. Giving ourselves feedback is a skill worth developing and a principle I’ve found particularly helpful is “Doing the opposite.”
The most challenging kind of feedback is the one that involves finding the right balance between a great strength and its corresponding weakness. This is where doing the opposite helps a lot. For example, here a few experiment ideas –
(1) If you have trouble being assertive during meetings, walk into every meeting reminding yourself to be assertive for a few months.
(2) On the other hand, if you, like me, default to being loud and provocative, again, do the opposite.
(3) If you default to being pushy and impatient when you want to get something, work on relying on “pull” in every instance.
By pushing us to stretch and do something that isn’t natural, doing the opposite helps us develop a range of styles. This, in turn, helps us develop the ability to apply the right behavior in the right context. There are times when being provocative or pushy is helpful. But, it isn’t all the time.
A wonderful other side effect of doing the opposite is that it makes us realize we are all more malleable than we think. Once we get started down the path, experimenting on changing our style becomes a lot more fun. And, given we’re going to be doing plenty of it in our lifetime, it helps if we’re having fun.
PS: I’m actively working on challenge (2) as of the last more recent (~18 months), I’ve made a lot more headway on (3) over the last 5 years or so. For folks who know me now and still think I’m pushy, I’m glad you didn’t meet me 5 years ago. :-)
There’s all this noise. The news, the chatter about others we know, the chatter from others we know, the plaudits about the movers and shakers of the day, and everything else that we think we need to keep up with.
The default setting for the noise in our lives at this time is “on.” And, it is easy to forget that none of it matters unless we earn our livelihood by writing about the noise.
For most of the rest of us, all that counts is just what we do with what we control and how thoughtfully we do it.
The more time we can spend with the noise turned off, the more we’ll ship, the better we’ll get at shipping what we want to ship, and, if we’re thoughtful about it, we might learn a thing or two about living these days better.
So, let’s put those proverbial headphones and get to work.
Most of us know flossing is good for us. Getting to the area between our teeth is impossible with toothbrushes. Floss helps us with that. It makes sense. And, yet, I hated the idea of flossing. The traditional approach to flossing involved an elaborate dance with my fingers and I ended up finding excuses on most nights.
Then, I read about Listerine’s flosser and decided to give it a spin. Listerine ensured the product was designed with a handle and replaceable heads. It sounded great. And, it was.
One of the top reviews on the Amazon page of this product was “Habit forming.” I couldn’t agree more – that is what this did for me too.
This flosser, thus, has become a daily reminder of what great product design looks like. By virtue of thoughtful product design, it makes it easy for users to form a habit to do something that they both want to do and is good for them. It is exactly what the best products do.
Learn from the flosser, we can.
I’ve been mulling one of Nassim Taleb’s notes over the past couple of days – the difference between being resilient vs. antifragile. In his words –
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love, adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”
This distinction between resilient and antifragility has broad applications – in systems, businesses, teams, and even in our lives. It gets to the heart of the “why” behind being obsessive about reflecting about our own experiences and ensuring we are learning from them (as painful as that process might be in the short term).
The goal of all learning is to change what and how we do things. And, while our mental strength may ensure we are resilient, our ability to continuously learn and adapt is what enables us to go from resilient to antifragile.
PS: I am a relatively late entrant to the Nassim Taleb fan club. But, as I get to half way mark of his book “Skin in the Game,” I find myself committed to make up for all the lost time.
I hung out with my daughter for about an hour today while she happily ran up and down carpeted stairs. We conversed a bit, sang a bit, and mostly just went up and down those stairs. Times like this are a great reminder that there’s so much entertainment available on the cheap.
As we journey through life, we get exposed to many forms of expensive entertainment – fancy gadgets, expensive sports, and so on. And, while many of these are great, it is easy to forget how little it actually takes for us to have a good time.
As I was taught this morning, a combination of some physical activity, outdoors or a bit of novelty in the location (in this case, carpeted stairs), and folks you like hanging out with is all it takes for a good time.
I wish you plenty of that over the weekend. :-)
Here are 5 questions I’ve been thinking about a lot as I seek to explain problems better (no shortage of ongoing issues :-))-
1. What is the problem?
2. Where does it lie?
3. Why does it exist?
4. What could we do about it?
5. What should we do about it?
I’ve been finding it helpful to just write out my answers to these questions and then rearrange them in some version of “Situation-Complication-Solution.”
The principle here is to do a better job separating the thinking process from the writing process. And, the first step to separating the thinking process is ensuring the thinking is done in the first place.
(H/T Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle for recommending these questions when approaching problem solving)
A Learning a Day 