Archive of posts from December 2018

It’s the day after Christmas. Feeling guilty yet?

• Feeling guilty before an event is a sign we might be missing out on something great. This is “good guilt” and can motivate us to say “yes” to great new opportunities.
• Feeling guilty after an event is a sign we might have made a mistake. This “bad guilt” means we either made a bad decision or that the person (or company) we trusted took us for granted.

Companies should leverage...

Today is all about gifts. What makes a good gift? Care:

• A signed golfball that costs only a few dollars is worth far more than an expensive gift… to a golf enthusiast.
• A gift card is only a nice gift for the brand fanatic. For everyone else, it just says, “I don’t know you at all.”
• The time of someone who has no time is worth more than their dollars to those who really wish to see them.

They say we overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in a decade.

This is the tension on the horizon.

• Distance: We‘re no good at predicting the future. We can’t clearly imagine what life in another country would be like (but another state is easy enough). Or what it’d be like if our teams grew tenfold (but 2X isn’t so hard).
• Balance: Tension lives in the balance of looking far enough ahead...

…is that we are then held to a higher standard, including in our spending and investing:

• Quality claims are a lie if we don’t invest enough in our work. The dissonance between what we claim and what we do will only confuse our audience. E.g. having a cheap website with bad copy, when you sell “high quality” products or services.
• Mission claims are a lie if we invest too much in the wrong areas, or too little in the...

Our relationship with discomfort says a lot about our growth potential:

• Following discomfort: Identifying the thing your team or company would really benefit from that you feel scared or embarrassed to do. Then doing it anyway because the discomfort is an indicator of growth.
• Resisting discomfort: Identifying that very same thing. Then making excuses to delay or postpone that activity indefinitely. Or worse, creating ‘strategies’ to avoid doing that thing altogether.

When it comes to our relationship with...

Entrepreneurs, team members, clients, partners. You might be insecure:

• Insecure means needing to prove yourself to others, rather than to just yourself. Does it matter what the world thinks, or could you just do you?
• Insecure means needing to be better than others, rather than being the one with most to learn. Which helps you grow more vs feeding the problem?
• Insecure means critiquing those who are insecure, rather than helping them find their identity in things they can...

…is that nobody dies.

• We often agonize over arbitrary dates rather than using them as attainable goals designed to make progress.
• Yet we don’t stress over our goals, despite being things we equally want to manifest in the world.
• Perhaps we’ve looked at deadlines wrong. Perhaps they’re merely what separate goals from dreams.

Remember why we set deadlines. We can befriend them if we choose.

Vegas may be Sin City, but it still has some lessons for teams doing meaningful work:

• Over the top experience: It doesn’t do things half-way. Neither should we.
• Anything feels possible: For a price, boundaries are broken. Similarly, market boundaries shouldn’t hold us back.
• Addictive: It’s designed to keep you coming back. Similarly, we should keep those we serve eager to stay in our care.

We all get to have our own Bellagio fountains by doing business–in part–like...

Automation. Delegation. Abstraction. Don’t overdo it:

• Delegate what should no longer be yours. It may be perfect for someone else on your team.
• Automate what won’t benefit from a human touch. It may free you up to invest in more emotional labor.
• Master your toil for twice the results in half the time. Love your work and keep that fire burning.

In the pursuit of streamlining your team’s contribution to the marketplace, don’t forget what a difference mastery...

Muscle memory requires regular ‘muscle workouts’. Is there an alternative?

• Muscle memory: This is what you earn when you practice something much that you can’t not know it.
• Energy memory: This is what you earn when you care about something so much that you soak up every bit of it.

Raising our energy raises our memory. How can you care more?

What threatens the success of your team?

Most threats are entirely self-inflicted. Consider these two mindsets:

• Protecting your job from John, “because he’s better at it than you are. If he gets it, the team will have better work, but you’re out of a job. Time to defend yourself and put John back in his place.”
• Handing your job to John, “if he’s better at it than you are, or collaborate if he wants to learn. The team grows,...

Strategies have temperatures. There are two kinds:

• Cold strategies: Abstracting humans to reach more people in a slightly less personal way. Sometimes very effective, but often overdone and premature.
• Warm strategies: Adding humans to reach fewer people but in a more personal way. Often very effective, providing it’s sustainable for the team.

Perhaps teams should think less about how to abstract themselves, and more about how to leverage what makes them so valuable?

Most of us take vacations. Why?

• Vacation to get away: This is why most people go on vacation. To escape their job, their environment, and the people they see every day.
• Vacation to get closer: This is rare. The team getaway. The family reunion. The co-working “just because”. Few live in an environment they love and don’t want to escape from. We call that ‘success’.

This morning while exiting a plane, the speaker announced support for “our selected charity”. So close:

• Businesses are the change: It’s up to businesses to take ownership of problems, directly or directly. So far so good.
• Impersonal breeds inattention: The title’s phrasing suggests a disconnection – commoditizing the charity to just “a charity”.
• Business must get personal: If buyers are to care, the sellers need to care enough to integrate more intimately with the causes they exist to solve.
...

It may be unpopular advice, but there comes a point where we should stop trying new things.

“Do the external things that fall upon you distract you?” – Marcus Aurelius

• Master your craft, and apply it to your cause. Don’t be like the wind, ever-changing, unable to truly contribute to any one vision.
• Passion for life beats passion for passion. Honoring your disciplined pursuit leaves you with less regret at the end than fleeting fancies will.
• You don’t have...