Month: June 2018

We choose between the six presets on our radio.

What’s today special.

We click on what Google finds.

Yet, there are far more options, far more possibility awaiting us.

But we have to be willing to dig past the presets.

There are plenty of roads waiting to be traveled.

When Johannes Gutenberg launched the Printing Press, 90% of Europe was illiterate. What a terrible time to start a book publishing business. At first glance, it appears Gutenberg showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It turns out, having the seed is not enough to get your ideas to grow. You need the right conditions. But conditions will always appear too bleak too soon when trying to change the masses.

Not everyone is ready to hear what you have to say. Much easier to talk to someone who is eager to change.

It’s hard to see when a revolution is taking place. It’s only after the fact, after you’re finished will you know if you were at the right place at the right time.

It’s not the work of digging a ditch or putting pieces together on the assembly line.

It’s the work of caring.

The scary work of trying things that might fail.

It is the work of seeing someone for who they are and who it is they can become.

Hard skills are not that difficult to teach anymore.

What’s difficult is operating without a map.

You are not going to fix everything.

But you can fix something.

We need empathy to understand the pain points of those we seek to serve.

A change maker also understands that the hard work of empathy is a sprint. It can’t continue forever without suffering burn out.

When we switch from empathy to compassion, we learn to endure, we learn to relieve suffering without the fatigue.

The long haul is where actual change begins to happen.

Someone I know started taking medication to help cope with the stress of her job.

What’s heartbreaking is that she chose to take medication to cope with the stress of her environment rather than change the environment so that she wouldn’t be so stressed.

Medication doesn’t change the environment. Soul crushing jobs are still soul crushing.

She deserves better. And so do you.

Ice cream taste sweeter when you haven’t had it in a while.

Success is the same way.

So much better after you work through failure after failure—testing, measuring, improving—until you find a product that works.

Strategy is an overall plan of action to get to where it is you want to go.

Tactics, on the other hand, is the means to achieve the goal.

Too often, we scratch our heads wondering why something doesn’t work. We blame the tactics: someone didn’t implement this right, timing was off, the weather/economy was awful…

But really, we need a better strategy.

There are lots of ways to skin a cat, the question is why are we skinning it in the first place?

Before I left my city government job, I was told that all of the employees needed to return their used staff shirts.

The reason?

If someone were to ever commit a crime while wearing a staff shirt, the city could be held liable.

Really?

Is Fruit of the Loom sued every time someone gets pulled over for a DUI?

Of course not.

Never underestimate the lengths managers will go to appear correct.

Hence the difference between managers and leaders:

Managers pretend to know all of the answers. Leaders, on the other hand, operate under ambiguity.

It’s a tactic, a poor one at that, to sell the people who work under you a story of irrational fear. By doing so, you never have to explain yourself or your actions.

My guess is that no one actually knows why we collect staff shirts after someone leaves (I hope it isn’t to reuse them) but it’s something that has been done for the last 30 years so we keep doing it.

Far easier to treat people like future “bank robbers” than it is to change.

Are people fit because they go to the gym or do people go to the gym because they are fit?

No one is surprised to hear when someone announces that they are starting a diet. However, everyone is surprised when someone actually sticks with it.

Because sticking through dips is not something we are used to seeing in our culture. We are used to quitting when things get difficult.

I recently quit my day job to focus on helping teenagers level up. The reactions ranged from fear to jealously.

Again, no one is surprised when people around the office whine, complain and stick with a soul crushing job but everyone is surprised when someone actually leaves to pursue their dreams.

The thing is, people like us do stuff like this:

Success doesn’t affirm happiness. Happiness affirms success.