What if you could love what you get paid for?
Really tempting to spend time trying to get paid for what you love.
It's probably easier and certainly more direct to talk to yourself about loving what you do.
Krypton Community College
Looking back on the Krypton project
More than 15,000 of you are still subscribed to this blog/newsletter, and I wanted to take a minute to update you on what I learned and what I've heard.
We launched four courses over the course of this project, and I'm really proud of each of them. I've been contacted by people around the world who invested the time to organize and participate in peer-to-peer learning sessions based on our curricula.
The challenge for me is that many people were hesitant to stand up and say, "I'm leading." We are indoctrinated from an early age to believe that we need a permit, a degree, some sort of authority to host and to assign and to connect. As a result, there were many people who asked me to lead, who wanted a centralized school experience, who wanted to video lectures and organized assistance.
Which is why I did my two Skillshare courses (entrepreneurship and marketing)…
But that wasn't why we built Krypton. It was designed to open doors, not to give instructions. It became clear that while we knew how to make a curriculum, we didn't have the resources to do the groundwork to create a cadre of teachers, to authorize them, support them and create a long line that would get us to a thriving peer-to-peer community.
For those of you that engaged in the courses and got something out of them, don't stop! Write your own. Find a thought leader you respect and seek out her best work online and in print. Why not?
Thanks to each of you for checking in on this project and for participating at whatever level worked for you. I think peer-to-peer learning is in its very first stages, and you'll be able to say you were there at the beginning.
"Go learn something," is a good thing to say during graduation season. Even better, "go teach something!"
It’s not about you
Right in the front row, not four feet from Christian McBride, was every performer's bête noire. I don't know why she came to the Blue Note, maybe it was to make her date happy. But she was yawning, checking her watch, looking around the room, fiddling with this and that, doing everything except being engaged in the music.
McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here's what he knew: It wasn't about him, it wasn't about the music, it wasn't a response to what he was creating.
Haters gonna hate.
Shun the non-believers.
Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, "hey, it's not for you." That's okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you've made yourself miserable for no reason.
It's sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.
Two kinds of busy
When I'm giving a speech, I don't have the ability to squeeze in a phone call, think about what's for dinner or plan tomorrow's meeting. I'm doing one thing, and it's taking everything I've got. So yes, I'm busy, all in.
On the other hand, we all are familiar with the other kind of busy, the busy of feeding one kid while listening to see if the other is still napping, while emptying the groceries, checking email and generally keeping the world on its axis.
I have two suggestions:
a. if you're used to being one kind of busy, try the other one out for a change. You might find it suits you.
and
b. if what you're doing isn't working, if you're not excelling at what you set out to do or not getting the results you seek, it might be because you're confused about what sort of busy is going to get you there…
Embracing boundaries
One of the most popular home computers ever made was the Commodore 64. The "64" was the amount of memory it had–not 64 gigs, or 64 megs, but 64k. If it were available today, it would be a little like being a toothpick vendor at a lumberjack convention.
The thing is, the amount of available memory was right there, in the name of the machine. All the people who developed for the machine knew exactly how much memory it had. Any time a developer whined or made excuses about how little memory there was, he was telling us something we already knew, making excuses where no excuses were needed or welcome.
With unlimited time, unlimited money and unlimited resources, of course you might do something differently. But your project is defined by the limitations and boundaries that are in place when you set out to accomplish something.
You build something remarkable because of the boundaries, not without them.
“You can buy this from anyone, and we’re anyone”
That's not going to get you very far when you sell stuff, raise money, look for a job…
What if instead, you created a reputation as the person or organization that can honestly say, "you can't get this from anyone but me?"
The number #1 reason to focus
You will care more about the things that aren't working yet, you'll push through the dip, you'll expend effort and expose yourself to fear.
When you have a lot of balls in the air, it's easy to just ignore the ones that make you uncomfortable or that might fall.
Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you've got, you're more likely to do it.
And this is precisely why it's difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part.
Clarity vs. impact
Sometimes you can have both, sure, but often, being crystal clear about categorization, topic sentences and the deliverable get in the way of actually making an impact.
If you can make change with a memo containing three bullet points, then by all means, do so.
The rest of the time, you might have to sacrifice the easy ride of clarity for the dense fog of telling stories, using inferences, understanding worldviews and most of all, engaging in action, not outlining the details. of a hypothetical interaction.
It turns out, humans don't use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it.
Shame is a brand killer
When your public sees you choosing a path that's shameful, that they don't approve of, that offends their sensibilities, it creates a dissonance that might never be erased.
Brands work not because they have clever logos or taglines, not because they run a lot of ads, but because something about their story and their promise resonates with deeply held cultural beliefs. "People like us do things like this/buy things like this/like things like this," is the mark of a brand (a comedian, a clothing line, a store) that has become part of the zeitgeist, at least for a portion of the population. Most of all, it's, "people like us treat others like this."
When the brand stops resonating and starts undermining the way their audience thinks of themselves, it feels wrong, uncomfortable. When it crosses the line to behavior seen as shameful, the brand fades. Perhaps forever.
Organizations ought to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Failing that, they ought to do the right thing because their public doesn't belong to them, they belong to their public, and when they fail to understand that, value disappears.
[Shame between individuals is corrosive, an ongoing toll on many relationships. We don't like to talk about shame because the very idea of it is so overwhelming. But shame in the public sphere is fuel for the media, and it's a significant contributor to maintaining or changing the cultural status quo. It's also become an ever increasing part of political discourse, and as a result, virtually all political brands are permanently tarnished.]
More people saying less (and a few more people saying more)
"Ditto!"
Opening the doors for the masses to speak, giving everyone who cares to have one a microphone–it has led to an explosion in people speaking. And most people, most of the time, are saying virtually nothing. Nothing worth reading, nothing worth repeating, certainly nothing worth remembering.
They're speaking, not speaking up.
But a few people…
A few people, people who would never have been chosen by those in power, are saying more. Writing more deeply, connecting more viscerally, changing the things around them.
That's each of us, at our best.
There's a cost of speaking up, of course. The cost of being wrong, or rubbing someone the wrong way, or merely in living with the uncertainty of what will happen next.
There's a cost to being banal, though. That cost isn't as easily felt, but it's real. It's the cost of boring your audience, of dumping 'me too' on people who have something better to do with their time. And especially, the cost of living in hiding, giving in to our fear.
Every day we can wonder and worry about whether a blog post is worth it. Not whether or not the microphone is working, but whether it's worth using at all.
It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling…
The path of chiming in is safe and easy and carries little apparent risk and less reward (for you and for your readers). Choosing to dig deep and say more, though, is where both risk and reward live.