Month: January 2019

You’re right.

You’re right to feel the way you feel, for how you see the world, for the stance you take…

Your assertions from your perspective, from your point-of-view are absolutely correct.

The problem is that everyone else’s point-of-view is correct too.

It’s clear that people don’t believe what you believe, they haven’t been taught what you have taught.

So, if you are going to enroll others with your movement it helps to turn the lights on.

“Knowing what I know now, I can change my position.”

That is the shortest bridge to get people to cross, to align them with your view, to get someone to change their mind.

Difficult but worth it.

If you watched car commercials recently, you’ll notice something:

Car companies rarely post the prices of vehicles in a 60 second spot.

An Econ understands that cars are a terrible investment. Cars lose 70% of their value over the first four years.

So why should they post the price?

They are not trying to sell you the car today, instead they’re trying to get you to buy into the story of why you should by this car tomorrow.

It the way the car makes us feel.

It’s safe.

It’s reliable.

It makes me feel younger.

It’s luxurious.

As a result, we talk ourselves into what payment we can afford.

If you want a cheat code that is going to help you open more doors, improve your relationship with your spouse, improve your quality of life, help you start a business…Quit buying stuff with payments.

Live like no one else, so later on you can live (and give) like no one else.

It’s extremely easy to walk into debt and 100x harder to get out of.

HT Dave Ramsey

The idea of a stereogram is that if you stare at it long enough, you will begin to see things that others can’t see.

That’s a useful metaphor.

At first, it probably doesn’t make much sense. This is the stage where most people give up. But if you’re persistent enough and care enough, you’ll begin to see.

Only the trained eye can see ways to solve complex problems.

You have to see a world that others can only imagine. 

Is that most people don’t like to be managed.

The reason why most managers are terrible managers?

I’ll give you 32:

1. You are raising your status while lowering others.
2. You’ve grown attached to certain outcomes and ignore other possibilities.
3. The person you are managing doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t believe what you believe and is not (likely) going to choose what you would choose.
4. You think you know how to manage someone else’s life better.
5. You’ve latched on to a title. Crowning yourself with responsibility and authority.
6. You focus on hard skills instead of investing in the soft ones.
7. You’re part of the bourgeoisie—who works less and gets paid more and brings little value.
8. You spend most of your time hiding (meetings, TPS reports, emails, performance reviews…).
9. You’re trying to make things better but don’t know how to make better things.
10. You’re trying to make things better but your team wants the environment to be safer (safe from being fired or hurt).
11. You let your ego get in the way.
12. You make things personal instead of accepting external conditions for what they are.
13. You’re playing a finite game instead of an infinite one.
14. You let the voice in your head get carried away, assume the worst and make a wrong assumption.
15. Your worldview (biases, prejudices, internal narrative) is wrong (always is from how you look at things).
16. You insist others to follow the map, to follow the step-by-step set of instructions instead of encouraging others to use/build a compass.
17. You think about what you’re going to say instead of listening to what others have to say.
18. You don’t ask Why? (At least five times.)
19. You blame people instead of the system.
20. Coaching isn’t a habit.
21. Nudging is foreign.
22. Thank you isn’t in your vocabulary.
23. You make decisions to keep yourself from being fired instead of making decisions that will help the people around you.
24. You are suffering from the Peter Principle. And like most managers, you’re not good at it.
25. You think that money is enough of a motivator.
26. You have 30 years of experience of doing the same things you have always done.
27. You don’t listen to the wisdom that the crowd has to offer.
28. You don’t know how to hire people who are better than you.
29. You don’t give people the space to make mistakes. As a result, people only take projects or assignments they know they won’t fail at.
30. You don’t understand that people like us do stuff like this.
31. You spend too much time trying to make fear go away instead of learning how to dance with it.
32. You watched one TED Talk on Knowing Your Why and think you have the missing puzzle piece.

And there are a million more.

The problem with managers is that they are trying to get people to do what they did yesterday except a little better.

Leaders, on the other hand, figure out where it is they want to go, get out-of-the-way and let people do what they do best.

Most managers think they are good leaders. They’re not.

Good leaders can be good managers. Good managers rarely ever make good leaders.

The new WordPress update is complete trash.

It certainly looks better but it’s no where near as intuitive. (It’s a problem when someone who uses the site every day can’t even find the spellcheck button.)

Luckily, it will allow me (for now) to revert back to the old format.

Here’s the thing, most people wait to update their software not because they’re lazy but for two reasons:

1. They want to know it works. So, they wait for someone else to test it.
2. They’re locked in to how it’s been running and don’t want to learn the new way.

The first rule of design is to do no harm. If the user can’t work the device correctly, that is the designers fault, not the user.

The trail doesn’t change just because you’re tired or cold or scared.

The hiker is the one that needs to adapt in the environment they’re in.

We spend far too much time wishing the path looked differently when adversity hits.

The reality is, you have the choice to move forward or turn around and find a different mountain to climb.

The bigger the stage, the more difficult it is to fill.

What’s tempting, and where most stage designers fall short, is to fill all the gaps with stuff.

Stuff that brings no extra value. Just placeholders. 

Filling the stage then is more than just props, actors, set pieces…it takes guts.

Guts and bravado, the stomach to say This is me.

We feel most exposed when we are on center stage. It’s tempting to chase that feeling away, to fill it with more cruft that creates nothing for the audience. 

We don’t need anything else. Just you. You are enough for the big stage.

(Hint: The more talent one possess, the less need for props.)

We spend far too much time on cruft. Cruft like:

• Meetings
• Emails
• Phone calls
• Conferences
• Trainings
• Performance reviews
• TPS reports

This is all another form of hiding. If we spent less time hiding and more time producing, we wouldn’t have to work so hard to convince the boss how “busy” we are.

The truth is, most of us work just enough not to get fired. We work just hard enough to not be noticed. We look just busy enough so that extra projects don’t get dumped on.

This type of strategy has two problems:

1. Delaying difficult work only makes difficult work delayed.
2. While this path may help keep your job (for a while), this isn’t the path of Linchpins. This isn’t the path of someone we miss when you’re gone.

Chances are, you deserve better. Starting working like it.

This chair that I’m sitting on has no agency. None. Zip. Zero. It has no ability to act, only to be acted upon.

Human beings, on the other hand, have agency. Tons of it. We have the capacity to act upon things, not just simply be acted upon.

Choices are all around us. We live in the perfect environment for agency to thrive.

The world is in no short supply of opportunities and choices. It’s people who are insufficient in taking them.

Weltschmerz is the sadness one gets from thinking about how the world ought to be—to be weighed down by the evils and injustices of the world.

And yet, we can still choose amongst all this chaos to be agents of change.

The only cure to weltschmerz is to do something about it.

To lift where we stand.

One step at a time.

Together.