Some people go to the gym for health and energy. Some go to lift more weight than they did yesterday (or more than the person next to them).
You can start a company to make an impact and surround yourself with people on a similar journey, or you can seek to maximize the stock price and profits.
You can write a post to express yourself, or you can try to get more followers…
There’s no such thing as work life balance. There’s simply life. And you spend part of your life at work.
One way to change the pressure of work is to expand or contract the size of the container that holds it. It’s a trap to embrace a productivity shortcut that isn’t a shortcut at all–simply more time spent.
Boyle’s law helps us realize the same thing about any gas in the physical world. The pressure is related to the volume…
If you’ve found a way to make a living, the challenge in making a life is to find the guts to think about the size of your work container.
That’s not easy.
It comes with trade offs.
We don’t always succeed.
But it’s not called Boyle’s guideline.
Questions people ask themselves when looking at a web page aimed at businesses (B2B). They are rhetorical, but should give you a place to begin:
Is it my job to deal with this?
Who sent me here?
Will this advance my project?
Will it help me get ahead if I take action?
If I ignore this, will I fall behind?
What are the promises being made?
Are they achievable–promises that break the laws of physics or contradict my experience are hard to believe.
Why should I trust this person?
What are the clues that lead me to want to believe this?
What are the clues that lead me to doubt it?
–These could include: Design, testimonials, page responsiveness, typos, clarity of language, urgency of presentation, credentials, domain knowledge…
How easy is it to take the next step? What will happen if I don’t?
And the biggest one, the one that is so easily ignored: What will I tell my boss?
If we’re going to come together and invest the time in conversation, in research or in analysis, we should begin by understanding what would be required for you or I to change our minds.
If you’re not willing to consider that you’re wrong, then, in the words of a Dan Dennett, you’re a spectator, not a participant.
Let’s agree on the standards of proof, and then begin.
PS unrelated tip: I just switched my browser to arc and it’s working out great. Recommended.
Michael Lopp helped coin an important term. When you’re a skilled craftsperson with high market value, there may be recruiters knocking on your door. An employee who has ‘shields up’ doesn’t even bother to answer the door. When shields are down, you’re open to at least hearing what’s on offer.
In a follow-up post where he offered silkscreened shirts with your shield status as a fundraiser, he said that it might not be a good idea to actually wear the shirt to work.
That’s almost as fascinating as the shields up phenomenon.
There are good reasons to go shields up. It saves you a lot of filtering time. It increases job satisfaction because you’re not always comparing the reality of today with the imagined perfection of tomorrow somewhere else. And it creates a better relationship with your colleagues, because mutual commitment leads to trust.
And there are good reasons to put your shields down. You owe a debt to tomorrow–to use it in the best way you can. Too often, we let Resistance hold us back, instead of taking a hard look at what’s possible.
Why not share your status?
Tom Peters used to write about leaders who ran resumé sessions for their employees. Skeptics asked why on earth you would encourage your team to understand and demonstrate their value in the job market. He pointed out that it was better to work with people who wanted to stay, when the alternative is working with people who believe they’re stuck where they are.
There’s a long-time tension between the factory owner and the worker. The factory owner wants to take the maximum amount of labor in exchange the lowest amount of compensation. The worker often responds by playing defense and not letting the boss disrespect them.
Bosses invented employee loyalty, not employees.
The fear, if you wear your shields up shirt, is that your boss will ask for more. And that if you wear your shields down shirt, your boss will stop trusting you and start scheming to replace you.
Perhaps there’s an alternative:
The boss should act as if everyone has shields down. Assume you need to re-earn engagement and loyalty every day by offering respect, significance and interesting opportunities.
And the employees could act as if they have shields up, simply because it’s a powerful way to spend your day in flow. You can always change your mind tomorrow.
As an organization grows in scale, the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness that was originally informed by the taste of the founders moves toward the mean.
Over time, things get more average.
That’s because each new customer, each new supplier and each new employee wants or needs something a little more normal, at least sometimes. The drift to normal can only be countered by persistent effort, usually at the cost of some element of short-term scale.
“It might not be for you,” always accompanies, “this is special.”
The only reason we need to go into detail about our resume, the details of our new idea or the features of a product is to cause action to happen.
And action is the result of tension, status or affiliation, and these are based on trust.
There are many ways to build that trust, and an instruction manual, a powerpoint deck and a set of bullets aren’t the only ones.
The art of project management includes the dance between velocity and possibility.
If you describe the outcome with specificity and remove as many variables as possible, you’ll get the work done with more speed, higher reliability and less cost.
That velocity, though, might encourage us to recognize that all sorts of options are available. There are countless chances to make the project better and to find new opportunities.
Exploring the possibilities in moments of high velocity almost certainly ensures that costs will increase, reliability will be impacted and you’ll miss deadlines.
That’s because possibility is the art of being willing to be wrong. It’s exploration. It’s far easier to explore on foot than it is on a high-speed train.
The best time to explore is before you scale your investments, your commitments and the size of the team.
We seek both velocity and possibility, but not at the same time.
Forty years ago, the royalty of rock spent the night in a studio to record one of the fastest-selling singles of all time. The documentary of the event is just okay, but it’s fascinating in how it shows us just how deep imposter syndrome lies.
Only a few stars seemed at all comfortable–Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. On the other hand, Waylon Jennings felt excluded and stormed out halfway through. Huey Lewis said his legs were shaking. Some notable stars were too afraid to come at all. And Bob Dylan, the same guy who won the Nobel Prize, seems profoundly insecure the entire time, and it’s only when Stevie and Quincy Jones give him some reassurance that he’s finally able to sing at all.
We’d like to believe that if we only had the adulation, market success, and fan support of superstars like these, then we’d finally be comfortable and able to do our best.
In fact, it seems the opposite is true. Imposter syndrome shows up because we are imposters, imposters acting ‘as if’ in search of making something better.
Perhaps the best plan is to show up and not walk out.
Who are you to make things better?
How dare you raise your hand to help, offer an idea, take responsibility…
Perhaps it might be helpful to reframe that feeling as the generosity of improvement instead.
If not you, who? If not now, when?
