If you sell your time as the measure of the work you do, the work is over when the shift ends. Clock in, clock out.
If you sell your output as the measure of the work, your work is over when the inbox is empty. Once you’ve made all the pizzas that were ordered, you’re done.
But more and more, our work can be endless. One more sales call might lead to one more sale. One more cycle of innovation might lead to the breakthrough we’ve been looking for. One more post might get you the traffic you’re on the hook for.
In a competitive marketplace, self-regulating the length of our shift is a lot to ask. Given that the list of things to do is intentionally endless, it’s on each of us to decide what ‘enough’ looks like. Because more time isn’t always the answer.
December 16, 2021
“If it were only nicer out, I’d be happier.”
That’s just a step away from, “If the current world crisis would abate, then I’d be able to concentrate.”
Which is not that far from, “If you would simply behave, I wouldn’t be upset.”
When we focus on external forces and tie them directly to our state of mind, we’re giving up agency.
The hard-won privilege of being in control of our own status and peace of mind.
Without a doubt, there are situations that are unfair, abusive or dangerous. And we should work to fix them or walk away if we possibly can. However, we don’t have to link these external forces to the way we choose to talk to ourselves. We can decide to claim possibility and take action instead.
Roz Zander teaches us to avoid, “I’m on vacation but it’s raining.” It’s far more powerful and useful to think, “I’m on vacation and it’s raining… what should I do with this moment?”
The story we tell ourselves belongs to us and only us. It’s entirely possible that someone selfishly or thoughtlessly put a story there. It’s possible that there isn’t enough empathy or fairness or opportunity. But once we see that we’re able to own our story, we gain a huge amount of power. And we retain that power for as long as we refuse to hand it over to someone else.
If the blame and the anger isn’t going to change the situation, better to reclaim our agency instead.
December 15, 2021
Alert readers know that about a year ago, the Akimbo Workshops became an independent B corp, owned and run by the team that I worked with for years. They’ve been doing great work, and tens of thousands of people have benefited from the extraordinary learning that happens when you’re part of a committed cohort.
I’m thrilled that Bernadette Jiwa, Alex DiPalma, Ramon Ray, Kristin Hatcher and Margo Aaron run workshops with them as well.
I’ll be joining the other teachers for an online free-for-all and jamboree on January 11th. Hosted by Ramon Ray, I’m looking forward to joining my friends online. I hope you can come. It’s free and you can sign up for it here.
All of the workshops Akimbo offers will launch at the same time next month. If you’re interested in beginning the new year with more energy and insight, I hope you’ll check them out. You can see the details and choose the one that works for you right here.
And of course, the altMBA, flagship of Akimbo, continues to establish the foundation for a new crop of leaders. Their first session begins soon, the next application deadline is January 4, and you can find the details here as well.
In addition, I’ll be doing a live event with Chip Conley, bestselling author, impresario and big thinker (and my first co-author, from 1986!) in a live chat (with QA) about the Modern Elder Academy on January 8th. I’ll post the details here in a few weeks.
(And, to confuse things, my podcast is also called Akimbo, and we just passed 200 episodes. You can find show notes and subscribe here.)
December 14, 2021
If you’re asking someone to work for you, help you or advise you, it turns out that being specific about what success looks like is an obvious way to get better results.
If everyone can agree on what success looks like, you’re more likely to achieve it.
And yet…
And yet we prefer to say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” We’re vague, murky or even contradictory about what we want.
The reason is simple: If you write a great spec, we get to blame you if it doesn’t work out.
The vagueness is a way to hide.
If you don’t know what you want now, what makes you think you’ll know what you want later?
On the hook. That’s the most effective place to be.
“If I could just find someone to handle all the sales, I could get back to work.”
“Do you know someone who can do all of the investments, accounting, taxes and strategies around money?”
“Why do I have to spend time managing people, I want to get back to creating.”
I hear this from busy creative entrepreneurs, soloists and creators often.
If someone who cared as much as they did, but was focused and good at something like accounting or sales or management could just join in, life would be so much better.
A consigliere!
A proven partner who is not only trustworthy and skilled, but works cheap and is available to work at the scale of a small team’s operations. Someone able to work full time, or at least focus their full energy, the way you do.
Well, when you put it that way, it’s pretty clear why this is a tough role to fill.
If that superstar salesperson is so good, why on Earth would they want to drop everything and work to build your fledgling operation? Part of being a superstar salesperson is being smart about what you sell–and most of the time, that means picking things that are easier, more obvious and at a larger scale.
The same goes for the money folks. Money is money, and if you’re good at managing it, managing more of it is probably on your agenda.
There are two takeaways from these sobering truths:
- It probably doesn’t pay to spend a lot of your day wishing someone magical will take over for you. If it’s important, you might need to get good at it.
- The person you eventually find to work on these tasks is most likely to be like you, someone who is learning and growing as they go. They’re on their way to being a superstar, but they’re not there yet. You can get there together.
December 13, 2021
It’s tempting to believe that powerful people and organizations are conspiring in secret to cause mysterious or unfair events to occur. The conspiracies supposedly involve dozens of people working across many time zones in complete secrecy.
That’s unlikely. Unlikely because cooperation of this sort is hard to find, especially among the powerful, and because it’s essentially impossible to keep it a secret.
What’s actually happening, right in front of us, all the time, is that systems are causing uncoordinated actions to occur. When banks, for example, create a cycle of more debt and higher interest rates for students, they didn’t need to have a secret meeting to pull that off. All they did was act within the system that they’ve built for themselves. When companies race offshore to pay ever less in taxes, no one coordinated that. It was a ratchet, a system that rewarded a race to the bottom. And even though the NCAA is an organized entity, it’s the system that has driven up the pay of college head coaches, not a secret conspiracy.
If we’d like the world to work better, more fairly and with more of a long-term view, we have to identify the systems that push participants to do the opposite. And then we need to consistently and persistently work to change the incentives that cause the entities in those systems to act the way they do.
December 12, 2021
Things decay.
We know precisely how many yoctoseconds it takes for half of a given amount of Hydrogen-7 to transform into ordinary hydrogen. And we know how old old things are because Carbon-14 loses half its mass every 5,700 years.
But ideas and cultural impact have a half-life as well.
Einstein wrote a paper 120 years ago that is still being discussed. It certainly had more of a cultural/scientific impact when it first arrived, but it lasted.
To Kill a Mockingbird has more cultural relevance today than a bestseller like The Bridges of Madison County, even though both were bestsellers at their peak. There are ten-year-old posts on this blog that still get a lot of traffic, and ones from a few weeks ago that are unlikely to be seen much in the future.
When marketers or leaders or artists show up to the culture with an idea, the immediate goal is to find traction and to change things. But the choice of medium, message and persistence have a lot to do with how long that impact will last.
Of the half a billion tweets that are tweeted every day on Twitter, perhaps a handful have a half-life of a year or more. Most fade away in a few yoctoseconds.
On the other hand, a peer-reviewed scientific paper probably has a higher average half-life. Darwin is still going strong.
Over the last few decades, there’s been a relentless move toward the yoctosecond–more ideas, lasting a shorter and shorter amount of time.
I’m not sure that we benefit from that, and if there’s a mismatch between how much work and focus an idea requires and its half-life, you’re likely to be disappointed.
Plan accordingly.
December 11, 2021
This is my book of the year.
It delivers on so many things that we want a book to do–it could never be replicated by a website or even a film.
The audiobook is even better… It’s engaging, powerful and resonates really deeply.
Mann has given us a deeply researched narrative, a book that will change the way you see just about everything in the natural world and its relationship with humanity. It’s about an epic struggle and mostly, about our future.
It seems to be about two obscure characters of the 20th century, but it’s not. It’s about each of us and the tools we can choose to bring with us to the future. I found myself switching camps every few minutes.
I am taking notes on every page, and I mention the book in most of the conversations I have.
Definitely a fine use of your time and attention. I’m glad books like this persist in a world that’s in too much of a hurry to get the tldr.
December 10, 2021
Piano tuners have a vital job… and very few pianists do that work themselves.
Who maintains your tools?
Perhaps it’s a computer with all the software that goes with it. Do you have a world-class pro, someone who is up-to-date, skilled, innovative and empathic making sure that they’re working well? Or are you doing it yourself, muddling through?
If we have mediocre tools, why should we expect great work?
Or perhaps it’s not the software or the hardware that needs tuning. Perhaps it’s our attitude, our approach to work, the way we deal with possibility…
A self-representing lawyer might have a fool for a client, but the rest of us are probably suffering from tools that aren’t what they could be.
December 9, 2021
They’re not the same.
Precision brings granularity to measurement. You can drive around 50 miles an hour, or you can drive 54.7 miles an hour with precision.
But accuracy is how we describe doing what we intended to do. Driving in the wrong direction with precision isn’t much help, when accuracy in describing the goal would have been a better plan.
Most organizations spend their time on meetings about precision, instead of taking a few cycles to choose to be accurate instead.
December 8, 2021
