What I've Learned So Far

My buddy Chris Brogan said this on Facebook:

Oh formletters. I do love you. Thanks, “friends” who use form letters. I love you all. (And any time my company’s done it on my behalf, forget me, too.) We’re all putting on robot pants.

To my ear, it echoes a line of thought he just espoused on his blog:

So why jump [from an airplane]?

Because I’m afraid. Afraid enough.

I’m afraid of lots of minor things in life: confrontation, my own faults, not working hard enough, things like that. You know what tackling a big fear is going to do to those small fears?

Either way, it’s about freeing yourself from your mental habits. The robot-pants thing we could file under the headings of “Shake It Up” or “Think for Yourself.” But combined with the skydiving thing, I’d put it under a rubric I call . . .

Counter-Aversion

If you have aversions to drinking yourself into a stupor or cheating on your spouse or running your car off the road, keep those.

But your aversion to taking the necessary risks to build your career? Or to pursue your dreams? Or to make yourself vulnerable to someone you love? Or to admit that you’re wrong? Or to make the phone call you’ve been dreading?

Chuck ‘em.

In fact, go out of your way to chuck ‘em. Violate your sacred boundaries. Rush to do the thing you know you need to do, before your defenses can kick in . . . and before you’re ready.

“Ready” may never come. So just launch ahead without it.

~

(Image by GogDog, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

I appeared this morning on the Fox Business webcast to talk about the IPO market, as you can see here.

But I wasn’t wearing pants.

(I was wearing shorts — you just can’t see them here.)

It’ll be here within 48 hours. I’m not ready.

More to the point for this blog, it remains to be seen if I can survive SXSW, use it for business purposes, and still keep up the pace of posts here. I’m dubious, but we’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, are YOU going to be at SXSW? If so, won’t you please attend the session I’ll be running? The official SXSW listing is here, and our Facebook event page is here. I’d love to see you there!

By the by, for all the writing I’ve been doing here, I’ve been doing even more over the past nine months at my professional blog — to the tune of 450 posts. I just wrote #450, a somber bit about the death of a prominent entrepreneur. In general, though, I try to keep the tone of that blog light but pointed.

If you’re interested in the business world, or in reading more of my thoughts on themes like excellence and self-management, I invite you to add the Hoover’s Business Insight Zone to your reading diet.

In his inimitable (i.e. sometimes irritating, often effective) style, Tom Peters asks a lot of (im)pertinent questions for anybody involved in business any organization:

Have you in the last 30 days examined in detail (hour by hour) your calendar to evaluate the degree “time actually spent” mirrors your “espoused priorities”?

Worth reading.

My initial post on “workiness” the other day drew some good comments, especially offering suggestions on where workiness comes from. Here’s Mark:

I suspect a couple sources for this. Among them, keeping up appearances, misplaced urgency, failure to triage, and reluctance to delegate.

And here’s Dan:

Part of the root cause, I think, is a lack of focus on daily/weekly goals. [...]

I think there’s a psychological component as well. Being busy — and more importantly, feeling busy — feeds our sense of being needed. No one likes to find that the organization can survive just fine without him. Workiness helps keep this dark fear at bay.

Amen to all of these reasons, which I sense are interconnected. When you’re afraid to look into the Deep Truths* of your work, you’ll continue to keep yourself distracted and preserve appearances — to yourself and to others — with un-delegated, un-triaged, un-focused workiness. You keep the motor revving high enough to drown out the Little Voice underneath that would tell you that you’re wasting your time, or in other words . . . that you’re wasting your life.

It’s much harder to slow down**, turn down the noise, and figure out what’s really important underneath it all. That means shunning workiness and focusing on the real stuff instead.

Often, we need to do less but do it better — and we especially need to focus on doing the right things, the needful things, to the absolute exclusion of wasted efforts. (This is the root of the “subtraction” posts I made yesterday.) Many of us will be much better served if we work half as much, but make sure that each bit of work builds toward the reality we most want to see.

I’ll have more to say on this subject in particular contexts, but for now . . . Down with workiness!

~

* Imagine that intoned with a big, deep narrator’s voice.

** Depending on your mindset, substitute “slow the hell down” or even “slow the f*** down” if that will get your own attention better.

In the past week I’ve received several attractive pieces of direct-marketing mail (see how polite I am, calling it by your preferred term?) that offered me a better look at some goods, services, and charities that might be of interest to me. Among other things, these attrative pieces of mail have extended offers of free trial issues of magazines, 0% credit card interest for a number of months, or the chance to to help a charity hit a challenge-grant fundraising target. Now, none of these offers led me to say “Yes, thank you, where do I sign?” — but at least they held my attention in a positive way. Nothing about these offers made me think less of The Economist, American Express, SmileTrain, or the other outfits extending the offers.

So much for the good news. I’ve also received many pieces of junk mail (see how I stopped being polite?) that tried to snow me into paying attention by printing obvious bull***t on the envelopes, e.g. “Second Notice” or “Final Notice” or “Immediate Response required”. This is especially charming when the come-on is made to look like a bill. And, even worse, I’ve received charity appeals that include a nickel in the envelope. The idea that you would send me a nickel rather than spending it on your worthy cause is repellent. I keep the nickel and recycle the rest; that way I can be sure that it funds my philanthropic efforts — since obviously you can’t be trusted to know what to do with a spare nickel.

The effect of this junk mail is to ensure that I won’t give my custom to the folks who send it.

Get smarter, direct marketers. I don’t want your mail at all, but if you must send it, at least make the appeal (a) attractive, (b) non-stupid, and (c) non-insulting. That shouldn’t be so hard.

Oh, and in case you think the world can’t do anything about it . . . think again.

I wrote about this brewing situation on my business blog last week (more than once), and probably I’ll address it again there in more detail, but for the record let me say that the Yankees have horribly mismanaged their treatment of manager (now ex-manager) Joe Torre.

Probably Torre is no longer the right man to direct the Yankee team on the field; one baseball writer I know said that he’s as close to a cipher as any manager in memory. Certainly Torre has his weaknesses, including:

• Over-reliance on a few favorite relievers, which tends to lead to overuse of those pitchers;
• Over-reliance on veteran hands at the expense of good young players (this has mitigated in the last couple of years); and
• Lack of tactical acumen for in-game moves, at least in relation to outstanding tactical managers like Mike Scioscia.

On the plus side, you have the second-highest total of wins (more than 1,100) by any Yankee manager ever, 12 straight trips to the postseason, and four World Series titles. Certainly Torre has earned a spot in the Hall of Fame.

But as Joe Buck just pointed out on the Fox broadcast of the Red Sox-Indians game, the Yankee brass were happy to let Torre twist in the wind after the Yankees lost their division series against the Indians. (This came after team owner George Steinbrenner made his ridiculous near-ultimatum that the Yankees would have to win that series for Torre to keep his job.) Today Torre turned down the Yankees’ new contract offer, which would have allowed him to manage the team in 2008, but which made the vesting of his contract for 2009 dependent on a Yankee appearance in the World Series.

Why not just go ahead and insist that the Yankees would have to win the 2008 series, or even sweep it? Short series in baseball are volatile enough; it’s easy to go through the results of any season and find a three-game sweep of a division winner by a cellar-dweller. When you get the playoffs — when all the teams are at least good and usually very good — short series are even more volatile. The idea that Torre’s job security should hinge on a World Series appearance is risible, and the Yankees are clowns for suggesting it.

Again: it’s possibly the right move to replace Torre with another manager. But so far the move has been played about as badly as could be imagined by the Yankees — and especially since they broke the news today, on the day of a potentially deciding game in the American League Championship Series.

I hope the Yankees lose 90 games next year.

This was the lesson I took away from this interview with Canadian sci-fi icon Robert J. Sawyer. My pal Redneck Mother took that and ran with it, and now she is echoed in the pages of Good magazine by Daniel Brook:

Freelancers Need Universal Health Care Too

. . . In other developed countries, where self-employment rates tend to be higher, taking the leap to working for yourself doesn’t affect your health care coverage or your family’s. In publicly funded health care systems, entrepreneurs pay less into the system during the few lean years that often accompany starting a business. Once you get off the ground, you pay more. That benefits the country’s health and its economy. But here, if you can even get coverage, you pay a flat fee regardless of whether your business had a good year or a bad one. And if you get seriously ill, your business makes less and you owe more. No surprise that half of American bankruptcies are the result of health-care bills. . . .

Amen. Universal health care is not just about poor folks — it’s about talented, hard-working people who could do more for the economy and society as freelancers or as entrepreneurs, rather than having to work for an employer so that they can insure the health of themselves and their families. Particularly good is Brook’s label for health insurance payments as we now know them: “ambition tax.”

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about how poor focus or lack of organization can tank an institution. This seems to be true whether we’re talking about a business, an individual, a charity, an athletic team, or anything else. The great appeal of scientific management theory, from Frederick Winslow Taylor to Peter Drucker on down, is that well-managed enterprises can harness the powers of their members to achieve great things. The appeal of self-management literature (like the work of David Allen referenced in the previous post) is that well-self-managed individuals can harness their own abilities to achieve great things.

Consider the converse: Surely you’ve worked in a company or played on a team or even sat in a classroom that was poorly organized. Maybe you live in a household that’s poorly organized. Take whatever example you like, the point is the same: disorganization tends to negate the abilities of individuals to achieve notable things, whether for themselves or as part of a larger group.

From day to day, we tend to spend a lot of time chasing down little things: this report has to go out, that test is coming up, the car needs new tires, and so on. And at some level, much of our life must revolve around little things because we have an endless string of little moments in which to achieve things. We can’t write a whole symphony in an instant: we have to get the notes down bar by bar.

But in the grander scheme, if we’re to achieve notable things — even great things — we must achieve some sort of sustainable progress in our personal and intstitutional operating systems. It’s not enough to make a tough effort on this or that task, one or the other project. No, we have to take at least some steps to ensure that our efforts, be they tough or lazy, tend to cooperate with one another and with the efforts of those around us to send us in the direction we want to go. As far as I can tell, this applies in the same ways whether we’re talking about your personal desires (to run marathons, to make a million dollars, etc.) or an institution’s desires (to turn a profit, win ball games, perform acts of charity, an so on).

One of Benjamin Franklin’s characters in Poor Richard voiced the opinion that we tax ourselves far harder than the government ever does by our sloth. Looking at my own life, including my experience as a member of various institutional units, that sloth comes once in a while via simple lazybones avoidance of work, but far more often in a deeper aversion to organization — to doing the hard work of balancing particular tasks within the context of a sophisticated operating system.