“But what if it works?”
Fear of success is at least as big a challenge as fear of failure.
Because if it works, things are going to change.
Are you ready for that?
Living in dissatisfaction
For the creator who seeks to make something new, something better, something important, everywhere you look is something unsatisfying.
The dissatisfaction is fuel. Knowing you can improve it, realizing that you can and will make things better—the side effect is that today isn't what it could be.
You can't ignore the dissatisfaction, can't pretend the situation doesn't exist, not if you want to improve things.
Living in dissatisfaction today is the price we pay for the obligation to improve things tomorrow.
The long, slow, deliberate, all hands on deck method is the best we’ve got
Worth a try.
When a problem isn't easily solved, it might just be that we have to resort to the other method of solving it. Difficult but worth it.
No way out
That's why we burn the boats when we land on the beach.
Because the only way out is through.
It's pretty easy to bail out of a course (especially a free online course that no one even knows you signed up for). Easy to quit your job, fire a client or give up on a relationship.
In the moment, walking out is precisely the best short-term strategy. Sometimes this place is too hard, too unpleasant, too much…
The thing is, though, that the long-term strategy might be the opposite. The best long-term approach might be to learn something, to tough it out, to engage with the challenge. Because once you get through this, you'll be different. Better.
We always have a choice, but often, it's a good idea to act as if we don't.
Off the hook with Milton Friedman
Nearly fifty years ago, Milton Friedman published a polemic, an article that altered the way many people think about corporations and their role in society. Countless writers have explained why it’s poorly reasoned, dangerous and wrong. (Including business school deans, Harvard Business Review and Fortune).
The simple message of the simple article was: “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…”
Friedman does add a parenthetical, “so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud,” but it’s clear that his emphasis is on the first part.
Businesses, he argues, should show no corporate responsibility, do nothing to further the goals of an ethical society, do nothing to improve the lives of customers, employees or bystanders—unless these actions coincidentally maximize profits.
An interesting question that most people haven’t focused on: why did this dangerous idea catch on and stick around so long?
Here it is 2017, and the Chairman of one of the largest pharma companies in the country is gleefully telling patients and the FDA to live with the costs of his profit seeking, at the same time he pays his CEO more than $95 million a year. Because he can, and, like many who lucked into top jobs at big companies, because his excuse is simple: He’s just doing his job.
If the idea is so wrong, if it leads to an erosion of the social contract and the deaths of innocent kids, why are we still discussing it?
Because it’s simple, because it diminishes responsibility, and because it comes with prizes and warm chocolate cookies for those in charge.
The simplicity of the argument matches up with its mendacity. There’s no need to worry about nuance, no need to lose sleep over choices, no endless laundry list of social ills to worry about. Just make more profit.
Do this, get that.
A simple compass, a north star, a direction to go that absolves the employee/boss of responsibility for anything complicated or nuanced.
People love mechanical simplicity, especially when it benefits them.
The official rules of baseball are more than 250 pages long. Why? Because working the system, cutting corners and winning at all costs long ago replaced playing by the spirit of the game. Since the league can’t count on people to act like people acting on behalf of the community, they have to create ever more rules to keep the system in check.
The problem is far worse in a supposed free market. When humans stop acting like humans and instead indicate that they have no choice but to seek every short-term benefit and cut every possible corner, we can no longer trust each other to act responsibly.
Off the hook feels like a simple way out. “I’m just doing my job, and not thinking hard about the side effects (or to be more accurate, the effects) of my actions. Not only that, but one of the things that’s part of my job is lobbying to have fewer rules. Because working the refs is good business. And because everyone is doing it, I have no choice but to do it too.”
Of course, it’s difficult for us to solely blame poor Milton. Lots of us have bad ideas, I’ve certainly had plenty. No, we need to blame ourselves for letting selfish corporate officers get away with this reasoning. When we go to work, or partner with, or buy stock in a company that signs up for Milton reasoning, we’re rewarding people who have long ago stopped acting like people.
Profits are fine, they enable the investment we need to produce value. But almost nothing benefits from being the only thing we seek, and the pursuit of profit at the expense of our humanity is too high a price to pay.
Here’s a different version: A business is a construct, an association of human beings combining capital and labor to make something. That business has precisely the same social responsibilities as the people that it consists of. The responsibility to play fairly, to see the long-term impacts of its actions and to create value for all those it engages with.
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Your instincts are better than you think they are
Data is essential. Data lets us incrementally improve just about anything. That keyboard in front of you, the sink in the bathroom down the hall, the supply chain for the food you eat—they were all improved 100,000 times over the years, data-driven evolution toward efficiency.
It's not enough.
We also need you to leap. To leap without sufficient data. To go with your humanity and your instincts and your hunches.
The insightful Bernadette Jiwa's new book is on sale today. I highly recommend all of the books she's written.
Go first, without being sure. I think you'll find something special.
The critic, the mimic and the clown all have one thing in common
They're not doing the work.
Pitching in requires a different kind of focus, and the generosity and humility to actually get something done.
If they stop hiding, they might even produce something significant.
The right effort of generosity
Don’t expect much from a drowning man. He’s not going to offer you a candy bar or ask how your day was.
He’s too busy not drowning.
Generosity takes effort.
It requires the space to take your mind off your own problems long enough to see someone else’s.
It requires the confidence to share when a big part of you wants to hoard.
And it requires the emotional labor of empathy.
Generosity begins by trusting ourselves enough to know that we’re not actually drowning.
Greatest hits are exhausting
If all you consume is the most-read list, if all you listen to are the hits, if all you eat is the most popular item on the menu—you're missing out.
The web has pushed us to read what everyone else is reading, the hit of the day. But popular isn't the same as important. Popular isn't the same as profound. Popular isn't even the same as useful.
To make something popular, the creator leaves out the hard parts and amps up the crowd-pleasing riffs. To make something popular, the creator knows that she's dumbing things down in exchange for attention.
The songs you love the most, the soundtrack of your life–almost none of them were #1 on the Billboard charts. And the same goes for the books that changed the way you see the world or the lessons that have transformed your life.
Popularity doesn't mean 'best'. It merely means popular.
Thinking clearly about quality
There are at least three ways we use the word ‘quality’ at work:
Quality as defined by Deming and Crosby: Meeting spec.
If you can reliably, and without drama, deliver precisely what you have promised, this is quality. This is what happens when a car, regardless of price, has doors that don’t squeak. Or when a website doesn’t go down. Or when your dry cleaning is ready on the day it’s promised, and your clothes are clean.
When six sigma professionals talk about quality, this is what they mean. Meeting spec.
Quality as defined by Ralph Lauren or Tiffany: The quality of deluxeness.
This is when the clarity of the diamond or the nap of the leather or the speed of the jet is something that most others can’t match. This is not just, “you get what you pay for,” but also, “you paid a lot.”
And finally, there’s the quality of right effort, of “I did my best,” of the sweat and vulnerability that happens when a human has given it her all.
That TV show or that software that you love: what do you love about it? What about the calculus you put into shopping for a car or a school for your kids?
A $100 million-dollar movie might have more spectacular special effects or be more carefully edited, but it might not have the quality that you find in an indie film.
When you’re doing your work, when you’re creating an offering, there’s no more important question to answer than, “what sort of quality are we seeking here?”