The thing is that facts almost never get in the way of a good story.
Because a good story feels true.
A good story resonates.
A good story is based on our feelings, long-held and hard-earned.
A good story sticks with us, regardless of the facts.
If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail… unless the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story, a story about doing something smart, based on evidence or simply more effective.
But facts alone have little chance in a battle with a good story.
Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts.
If a customer, a colleague or a friend is generous enough to share their feelings, those feelings are what they are.
We might disagree with the assumptions that led to those feelings. But acknowledging that the feelings are real is a great place to begin a conversation.
“You feel this way” is not the same as “Everyone who experienced what you experienced would feel the same way.”
For thousands of years, eggplants have had ‘features’ like this. But once we learned what they resemble, we can’t unsee it. It used to be a weird shape for a vegetable, but now it looks eerily like a former President.
Once we find a hook, we can’t forget it.
Our job as story tellers is to find one of those hooks.
PS a fabulous holiday gift box from Megan Giller (ethical, delicious chocolate) is right here.
Put this one next to Dunning Kruger, which shows that people of low ability traditionally overrate how talented they are.
The Massie Effect is the tendency of people who support good causes to believe they are in the minority.
A study at Princeton showed that almost 80% of Americans believe we should take action on the climate, but those people believe that only 37% of their fellow Americans agree with them.
Feeling like an overlooked minority can let us off the hook. It can give us a chance to embrace our imagined position as leaders. But mostly, it undermines the confidence we need to actually take action.
In a competition between someone who knows the most and someone who is willing to learn the most, the edge usually goes to the curious and empathic professional, not the one who is simply protecting what’s already known.
The person we see when we look in the mirror is the person we become, the person we fight to defend and persist with.
If you see someone who doesn’t have a lot of friends, then every time a potential friend comes along, you will find a way to distance yourself from the heartache of being rejected, and you’ll continue to not have a lot of friends.
If you see someone who isn’t happy with inputs you can’t control, then when new inputs come along, you’ll find something wrong with them and seek more control not less.
If you see someone who thrives on challenges, challenges will become a chance to thrive.
Each day gives us the best chance in the world to see a different person in the mirror.
A chance to change the stories we tell ourselves.
Airplanes rarely crash. It doesn’t matter. Turbulence isn’t fatal. It doesn’t matter. If you want to tell yourself a story about air travel, that’s your story and as far as you can take it, it’s true. It’s your story and no one can take it away from you.
Perhaps you’re homesick. Home is great. Home is wonderful. Missing home is a sign that you have a home worth missing. Being homesick is a story we tell ourselves about who we are.
But who will you become? Who can you become?
It turns out that when you’re surrounded by people who care about you, when you have freedom and a chance to lead, you can become a different, more generous, happier, more powerful, more friended version of yourself.
If you want to become the kind of person who can teach an 8-year-old how to play basketball, you can start doing that right now.
If you want to be the kind of person who leads, you can begin to lead.
If you want to.
Because you’re smart, you care, you have something to say. Because there are people who love you and care about you.
And the best way to honor those people, and honor yourself, is to become the person you were born to be.
If you want to.
Today is the best day to begin that journey. If you wait, it gets harder.
Who do you want to be when you look in the mirror?
It doesn’t matter how sure you are that this is a winning ticket, the ticket doesn’t care.
And there are lots of lotteries in our lives.
I was talking to a fifteen-year old the other day. He’s decided to devote the next decade of his life to getting drafted to play in the NBA.
Without a doubt, effort and skill make a huge impact on whether you’ll even make the final 5,000 people who have a shot at making the NBA. But after that, it looks a lot more like a lottery than a meritocracy.
The resilient approach is to bring discipline and effort to the work, but to know, deep down, that you better have a plan B. That’s not a lack of faith. That’s simply smart.
Every small business needs a bookkeeper, but few take appropriate advantage of accounting.
Accounting is a way to turn organized books into insight. Particularly:
It can help us make decisions. Any data that isn’t going to help you make a decision is worth ignoring. More granularity isn’t better granularity.
It can help us understand our cash flows. In any given moment, we know very little about a business. But over time, we can see how assets and expenses flow–and that flow is insight about what we own, what it’s worth and what could improve (see #1.)
It can implement systems that build trust. When we know who is spending what and when and why, it’s easier stop micromanaging and focus on #1 instead.
We can get better at predicting the future. Budgets based on past experiences are more likely to be accurate than those we simply make up in the moment.
Even with the powerful Ecosia engine, but especially with Google and Amazon, it’s getting rarer and rarer that a search feels as though it finds just the right site or product or information on the very first try. There are a few reasons for this:
Our expectations are higher. Even a good search doesn’t feel the way it used to. Amaze us a few times and we get hooked on being amazed. It’s tough to top the extraordinary results that we became used to. In the last two years, I’ve done 10,000+ searches on Ecosia, so it’s easy to get jaded.
The search engines are selling us out. They’ve discovered that selling ads to entities who lose at a given search is pretty profitable, so the non-organic results that are crowding out our searches are of course not as good as the ones we would have found for ‘free’.
The manufacturers of products and the creators of sites are getting better and better at gaming the search engines. Not just fake books on Amazon that pretend to be what you were after, but entire product lines and industries built with winning at search as their core competency. You see it in any media ecosystem where search is profitable. Organizations built on more, want more.
Lack of competition. Once a big organization wins at something, they shift their focus and work to profit from it, not improve it. Instead of fighting #3 and walking away from #2, the leaders at search are becoming complacent.
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