No, with buts…
Or
Yes, with ifs…
Maybe you’re more cautious. Maybe you’re fine with the status-quo and want to stay the course.
Or maybe the challenge is you’ve been too cautious. You haven’t been willing to take a chance on something worth reaching for.
Study after study shows that willpower is like a muscle. As the day wears on, our ability to make difficult decisions declines.
Agency, on the other hand, is the ability of an actor to act in a given environment.
Tired of making decisions in not the same as someone who is unable to make one. And too often, we label these groups as indolent.
People say lots of things–out loud and internally.
Yet, most of the things we say are not actually true.
They are true because we believe they are true.
And once we believe in something, we turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Because human beings are story tellers.
We internalize and simplify what we see to make sense of a complicated world.
Saying the right things, telling a story that enrolls the people around is a valuable skill.
Far easier to enroll the people around us once our body of work shows we can get things done.
Turn a house into a home.
Volunteer to make a community.
Write words to make a story.
String notes together to make a song.
Place paint on a canvas to make a picture.
Make a difference to create change.
When the sum is greater than all the parts, its art.
Most people focus on bad drivers. But no one ever notices good drivers.
Why?
Because people choose what they want to see.
It’s a story, a narrative we tell ourselves.
If you believe the we didn’t land on the moon, you are going to zero in on the evidence that supports it.
The problem with most conspiracy theories is they are often the shortest connection between what we see and what we believe.
It’s far easier to tell ourselves a story that we don’t ever win anything than doing the math to understand how probability works.
No one looks at a new-born baby and says, “She’s a great writer.”
That would be silly.
No one is born a great writer, you become one with the choices you make along the way.
[Note: That doesn’t mean with enough practice you are going to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling. Not everyone is going to write something that is popular. But I think each of us have the words to write something important.]
There is a difference between figuring out which tactics are the right ones to use and using the right tactic long enough in order for them to work.
Too often, we are too quick to abandon something before our efforts pay off.
Hard skills make it straight forward for a hiring manager to say No.
Candidate A speaks a foreign language and Candidate B doesn’t.
Sorry, you didn’t get the job, you don’t meet our minimum requirements.
It’s that simple. And because it’s simple, it’s easy to measure.
Hard skills like programming, digging, solving a math problem, these skills are easy to teach. You can write them down into a simple set of instruction and replicate the behavior quickly.
Let’s be clear, being competent at your job is no longer good enough. Competence is no longer scarce. The easier it is to write down what it is you do, the easier (and cheaper) it is to replace you.
Soft skills, on the other hand, are hard to teach. Soft skills like connecting, listening, empathizing, persuading, storytelling, are more valuable now than ever before.
If it’s hard to measure then it’s even harder to recreate.
You can always teach someone to type faster but you can’t teach someone to be more likable.
So let’s quit calling them soft skills and instead call them what they actually are–essential.
100 blog posts that will never see the light of day.
100 blog posts that won’t resonate with anyone.
And the cost of this failure?
Almost zero.
We live in a truly remarkable period, where the cost of creating something, for shipping something into the world is practically free.
So why not try something?
When we get it wrong, we can try it again.
(Writing isn’t about producing words, it’s figuring out which ones to hold onto and which ones to let go.)
There is a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance at predicting a perfect March Madness bracket. (In case you were wondering that is 18 zeros.)
The odds are overwhelmingly stacked against our favor.
Yet, every year, millions of people decide to play, relying on expert analysis or gut feelings. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we study hard enough, we can somehow steer chance our way.
It turns out that even the smartest basketball guru can only reduce his odds to 1 in 128 billion. Significantly better but not enough to make an impact.
Some games are simply not worth playing.
Don’t leave important things to chance, chance seems to hate us–at least that is what we tell ourselves.
