Is that you think you can make yourself happy.
That with more money, less weight, better title, more status…that somehow we will finally be happy.
It’s the lie that marketers sell and one we are so desperate to believe.
The good news is the opposite is true.
The truth is, you can make other people happy.
Happiness when shared.
Within the first few seconds of your presentation, the audience has already decided whether or not this is something they need to tune into.
The rest of your presentation is spent, confirming everything they already believe.
When we squander the first few moments by saying, “Hi, my name is Josh Allred. I’m here to tell you how to do presentations better.” You are sending the wrong signal to your audience.
And now…
You’ve lost your chance to connect with the ones that could have been persuaded.
Presentations are meant to change the world. Otherwise, why are you doing them?
Act. With more care.
Most of us hold an ideal of what we think tomorrow’s world should look like. We create expectations around these ideals and begin to set up goals to help them manifest.
The problem is that we set the bar so high, we construct a utopia with no mistakes, no blemishes; we forget you can’t create a perfect world.
It’s a destination that can never actually be reached.
Instead of spending our time making something perfect, what if instead we used our time to make things better? What if we could use our ideal as a compass to help set our goals?
Goals have a beginning and an end. They are fixed and measurable, which means they are attainable.
Dan Sullivan has an interesting take on this, called the gap and the gain:
The gap is simply measuring your goals to the ideal rather than focusing on the gains you’ve made from the start to your goal.
When we measure progress to the ideal, it’s easy to become discouraged. It never feels like progress is ever made. But when we can see that we have taken a step forward, by measuring the gain, it gives us the motivation to take another.
It is why so many of us fail to diet. We measure what our bodies should ideally look like and forget to look at the progress we have made. It’s just as easy to do this as a parent or as a writer…
We often measure ourselves by how we are moving forward. But what we should be doing is measuring progress by looking backwards.
Destroy the perfect, the perfect world we have constructed in our heads, and enable the impossible.
HT Dan Sullivan. Worth watching his theory of measuring success over and over again.
How does a cheap, unorganized and powerless workforce come together and challenge the giant agriculture corporations?
You build a narrative that requires action.
That is how the United Workers Union in 1965, lead by César Chávez, took on the Delano grape farmers and sparked a movement.
As Marshall Ganz has spoken about, you need three things to organize and create a movement of action:
If this sounds familiar it is because Simon Sinek confirms this work with his theory of The Golden Circle:
Whether we are talking about Apple, the computer company, or migrant workers, it’s the why—not the what or how—that compels a group of people to leap into uncertainty and hope for a better future.
The answer, sometimes, isn’t to just point to the injustice or to what is wrong with the world but, instead, substitute a simple slogan of what could be.
“Yes, we can.”
“It’s time.”
“He’s finished.”
“Enough.”
Narration over compliance.
In 1995, Chicago suffered one of its worst heatwaves in history that led to over 700 hundred deaths over a five-day span.
Most of the victims were elderly. People who couldn’t necessarily afford air conditioning or it quit working on them.
What’s interesting to point out, according to Eric Klinenberg, is that some neighborhoods even with similar social-economic status were more prone to have heat-related deaths than others.
The difference?
One neighborhood had a library and the other didn’t.
The library was a place that the elderly would be seen and be missed when they were gone. And so, the staff would check on their neighbors to make sure they were okay.
Of course, it wasn’t just the library but community centers, movie theaters, grocery stores…places where people come to make a connection.
We are made to connect. Yet, we have built so many layers in our system to avoid each other.
Just look at cubicles and email. All built to hide. To avoid contact.
We crave connection but we don’t want to bump into each other.
Additional food for thought: According to the Surgeon General, loneliness and weak social connections are similar to smoking a pack a day (one cigarette takes 11 minutes off your life).
“I’ve been busy.”
“I don’t have time.”
How is it that we have more resources to be the most productive civilization this world has ever seen, and yet…
Yet, we are still starving for more time.
More time for what exactly?
What can’t you do now that more time would allow?
The problem isn’t time.
If we had more time, we would just waste it.
Everyone has the same amount. (In fact, one can argue it is the most equally distributed resource we get each day.)
We don’t have a time problem, we have a priority problem.
With better priorities, comes more time. Not the other way around.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate.
With better priorities, comes the feeling of more time.
A deadline compels us to start.
A budget means this can’t last forever.
The medium defines the mode of travel.
A genre sets up guardrails.
Too much of anything and we are asking ourselves, “What should I do?”
Constraints open doors, not close them.
We have more choices than ever before in human history.
Narrowing those choices is a good place to start.
In 1854, cholera was becoming a massive problem around the world. One of the areas most affected was the Soho district in London. The prevailing theory at the time that was causing this infection to rapidly spread was miasmata (breathing in foul air).
John Snow, a physician, didn’t buy it. So, he began to investigate by looking at the water supply. Specifically, water companies. During his research, he would go on to discover that the 1854 Broad Street Outbreaks were an effect rather than a cause of the epidemic. That, in fact, the waste that London was dumping into the Thames River was the cause of making everyone sick.
What is remarkable is that Snow made this discovery before germ theory was ever established.
Jonathan Zittrain has brilliantly coined this term of discovery as intellectual debt. “Answers first, explanations later.”
We trust the system that has been built once we have seen how it works and ignore why it works.
Sometimes the price to pay back this debt is small and insignificant. Not understanding how a car works has little consequence until it breaks down. Even then, we will shift this responsibility to someone with the know-how to get us back on the road.
Yet, the consequences continue to increase when we don’t understand how carbon outputs have caused the atmosphere to develop cancer. And what about AI? What happens when machine learning begins to identify patterns of how things work without ever understanding why? What happens when we blindly adopt whatever the machine pops out?
A fascinating read, you won’t want to skip.
Neither does music or your job or even the noble cause of curing cancer.
Your passionate AND you write blogs.
Not the other way around.
It doesn’t matter what the medium is.
Because…
You won’t find passion in your work but you will always find work in your passion.
[Of course, “Finding my passion” is the great lie we tell ourselves (and others) so that we can continue to hide.]
HT Gabe the Base Player
This job, it pays the bills, but it isn’t bringing me closer to the change I seek to make.
This remodel, it helps pass the time, but it isn’t fulfilling it.
Satisfying a demand is not enough to classify something as working.
And just because it functioning doesn’t mean it’s working either.
The best time to break things is during smooth sailing—when things are working just fine.
Before things become too stagnant. Before things become obsolete.
If it’s not broke then break it.
If you seek to make a change, you have to break something.
(If someone doesn’t hate it, then you are not doing enough.)
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