Most of what we do at work all day is one of these three.
Fun: It's engaging, it gives us satisfaction, people smile.
Urgent: Someone else (or perhaps we) decided that this paper is on fire and it has to be extinguished before anything else happens.
Fear-based: Most common of all, the things we do to protect ourselves from the fear we'd have to sit with if we didn't do them.
Not on this list: important.
A day spent doing important work is rare indeed. Precious, too.
A car is totaled when the cost of fixing it is more than the cost of buying a similar used car in good condition.
The broken car is a sunk cost. It doesn't matter how much you paid for it. It's a gift from the you of yesterday to the you of today. And it arrived broken, so broken that it's cheaper to buy a different one than to fix this one. Reject the gift from your earlier self. It's no gift at all.
Sunk costs are all around us. Commitments and engagements and assets that were hard to get, but are now totaled. They're gifts from the you of yesterday, and it's okay to refuse them.
When the project is emotional, or urgent, or loaded with resonance, it's easy to dispense with rigor. It is, after all, an emergency. No time for the process, for doing the hard part first, seeking best practices, or reverse engineering toward the desired result…
Of course, the opposite is true. If it's worth getting into a swizzle about, it's worth doing properly.
Do the math, do the reading, do the budget. Do it right.
Will they notice that you've left?
There are lots of ways to be noticed. You can be loud. Argumentative. You can be sour, difficult, a bit of a diva. You can take umbrage at every opportunity, crack jokes at the expense of others, or merely scowl.
You can use hyperbole, drama and shame to get your way.
You can spam people, yell a lot, interrupt our day. You can create a scene, engage in a scandal and bully others. Your brand or your personality can be the one that we'd all prefer never to hear from again soon.
Or…
You could be the one we'd miss if you were gone.
It takes quite a bit of emotional labor to pull this off. Consistent effort to contribute, to see possibility and to be patient. If it were the easiest or most direct path to a short-term goal, everyone would do it.
Because we live in a world now based on connection and trust, because we work with our ideas and our emotions instead of our muscles, because our reputation is what we have to offer, the effort is probably worth it.
The monologue that runs in our brain is loud. It's heavy-metal loud compared to the quiet signals we get from the rest of the world.
All day, every day, that noise keeps going. It's the only voice that has seen everything we've seen, believes everything we believe. It's the noise that not only criticizes every action of every other person who disagrees with us, but it criticizes their motives as well. And, if we question it, it criticizes us as well.
Is it any wonder that projection is more powerful than empathy?
When we meet people, we either celebrate when they agree with us or plot to change or ignore them when they don't. There's not a lot of room for, "they might have a different experience of this moment than I do."
That noise in our head is selfish, afraid and angry. That noise is self-satisfied, self-important and certain. That noise pushes intimacy away and will do anything it can to degrade those that might challenge us.
But, against all odds, empathy is possible.
It's possible to amplify those too-quiet signals that others send us and to practice imagining, even for a moment, what it might be like to have their noise instead of our noise.
If we put in the effort and devote the time to practice this skill, we can get better at it. We merely have to begin.
"I don't have much, but I have more than you do…"
The second episode of my podcast is out today, and it's the result of perhaps fifty blog posts I wrote but didn't post, because the topic is too important and it's too nuanced for something as short as a blog post.
Status roles are at the core of who we are. They change how we spend our time, our money and most of all, our imaginations.
We define ourselves in relative terms, not absolute ones. More stuff, more power, less this or less that. Who's up and who's down?
It's about the Godfather and professional wrestling, about business cards and politics. It's about Baxter and Truman. And it's about how fiction works, and real life as well.
Everywhere we turn, we see status roles on display. Some people are moving on up, while others are moving down. This creates tension, drama and the need for resolution.
Here's a page with all the ways to listen and subscribe for free.
Ask a question and see the show notes about this episode on our show page.
Really?
That's the headline in the paper.
Of course, there's no such thing as a lucky lottery store. And rational, long-term citizens never buy lottery tickets, because it's a lousy bet.
But the idea of the lucky store is precisely what someone is paying for when they buy the ticket. That this time, just maybe, luck will turn out the way it's supposed to. That a hunch or a scratch or a slight change in habit will pay off. That's what people are buying, not the net present value of a series of transactions.
They're buying the thrill of possible luck.
Editor, publisher, instigator.
The instigator is the author, the dreamer, the writer. She creates a screenplay, founds a non-profit, says what needs to be said.
The editor curates. Picks and chooses. Amplifies the essential and deletes the rest.
And the publisher scales it. Turns it into a business or a success on some other metric.
Throughout the ages, there have been world-class editors. Sometimes they get the authors they deserve, sometimes not. And there have always been great publishers, turning worthy (and sometimes less than worthy) ideas into successes.
If you’re a maker of change, you might resort to being your own editor and your own publisher. After all, the ideas must be brought forward. If you can, though, see if you can find the editor and the publisher your work is worthy of.
We spend some of our time building things, from scratch. New ideas, new projects, new connections. Things that didn't exist before we arrived.
We spend some of our time breaking things, using them up, discovering the edges.
And we spend some of our time fixing things. Customer support, maintenance, bug fixes… And most of all, answering email and grooming social media. The world needs fixing, it always does.
You've already guessed the questions:
a. where do you personally add the most value?
b. how much of your time are you spending doing that?
[If you want to spend more time in building mode, I hope you'll take a look at the altMBA. It's designed to upgrade and recharge your commitment to building things. Final deadline for applications for our next session is tomorrow, Monday, the 19th.]
Last week, a small group of our worldwide coaching team got together. It reminded me of how much Kelli, Marie, Alex, Sam, Fraser, Anne, our extraordinary coaches and our thousands of alumni have contributed to evolving the altMBA. Thank you.
Your smartphone makes you quick, not smart.
Every time you pick up your quickphone, you stop inventing and begin transacting instead.
The flow of information and style of interaction rewards your quickness. It helps you make decisions in this moment. Which route to drive? Which restaurant to go to? Which email to respond to?
Transactions are important, no doubt. But when you spend your entire day doing them, what disappears?
We can’t day trade our way to the future we seek.
