This excellent Seth Godin post ‘Living on the delta‘ was a great inspiration. The first topic is about how to deal with status-quo, with those little inadequacies and wrinkles we can’t really get to deal with, because they don’t seem so important.
Status-quo can be invasive. I sometimes meet people who have been managing their small company or organisations for decades in the same way and are desperately outdated in the way they do things. While it is obvious for an outsider it is not for them, and that’s because they have just been managing it, not looking at it from the point of view of a leader.
Leadership – doing the right things – is different from management because it takes a step back to ask whether what is being done is really the right thing to do. Leaders challenge the status quo, managers don’t. And that makes a world of difference. And in today’s world we obviously need more leadership than management!
Seth Godin in this post ‘A simple missing word‘ reminds us how ‘yet’ is such an essential word. Adding ‘yet’ to simple sentences reminds us that we can learn and do stuff we can’t do yet, and that we can eventually finish projects we are struggling with.
“I have not managed to learn how to do this” is terribly changed when ‘yet’ is added in the end.
““Yet” turns “can’t” into “haven’t.” Yet isn’t the result of brazen persistence. It’s what we earn with learning, insight and generosity.“
Yet is a key word for hope and transformation. Let’s put some more ‘yet’ in our negative sentences!
I like this quote from Muhammad Ali: “Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it’s not the deer that is crossing the road, rather it’s the road that is crossing the forest.”
I find it is quite a striking example of how to look at things differently, or at least how much distance we need to take to be able to look at things differently.
I find that taking a systemic view of complex situations is extremely helpful. This is an extremely important way to reach the root cause of issues.
One further step, once we have a good systemic view, is to try to go one dimension up so that we take a really all-encompassing view of the situation. This is where we can attain such viewpoints like the one of Muhammad Ali about the deer crossing the road.
Exercising about changing viewpoint and going up in terms of observation level is quite an important skill to better understand our world. Are you practicing?
I like this Seth Godin post about having principles: ‘Principle is inconvenient‘. It reminds us that principles is helping us keeping a longer term and navigating short term temptations. It is all about the short-term vs the long-term.
“A principle is an approach you stick with even if you know it might lead to a short-term outcome you don’t prefer. Especially then. It’s this gap between the short-term and the long-term that makes a principle valuable.”
I also find that principles are a significant help against decision-making fatigue. Strong principles avoid having to use significant resources for taking certain decisions, and this keeps us the right energy to navigate through daily issues.
Be clear on your principles. They are key to the protection of your long-term impetus.
In this interesting post ‘Early Work‘, Paul Graham examines what is holding back people from doing great work. And he identifies that it is mainly “the fear of making something lame“, unremarkable, mediocre.
“Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don’t seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don’t. Most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They’re too frightened even to start.”
As Paul Graham mentions there is an increasing institutional support to people starting new things (business angels, incubators…) and this is going in the right direction.
He points out interestingly however that there is another social effect that needs to be overcome: “If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you’ll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.”
The key is thus as always to surround yourself with the right people to instill the right level of confidence and get the right support to go through the ‘lame’ phase.
Based on research, the authors have found that “workers in occupations that rank higher in IT intensity earn more than demographically similar peers in other occupations – and that this earnings gap has been growing.” – and that the wage gap is more related to IT intensity than actual study level. Also, the authors have found that “jobs that require greater interaction with technology tended to score higher in quality, particularly in terms of measures like career advancement.”
This paper seems to me quite biased and carry actually the inverse conclusion of its title. One can expect that of course, people will advanced IT skills will be quite well compensated and will have high job satisfaction in a more automated future. But this only serves to prove that the gap between this new elite and the rest of the population will increase. It does not address the fate of the employees which job can be easily automated and delegated to robots, or who do not have the right IT proficiency.
Increasing the IT proficiency across the young generation is certainly a priority. Making sure IA does not upend our society is another that needs to be deeply understood.
Seth Godin in this blog post – that is straight to the point – ‘We like what we choose’ explains how most of us and most personal development gurus have it backwards. We don’t choose what we like, we like what we choose.
The post refers to scientific research on toddlers quoted in Science daily ‘Babies’ random choices become their preferences‘: “People assume they choose things that they like. But research suggests that’s sometimes backwards: We like things because we choose them. And, we dislike things that we don’t choose.”
In general, we may or may not have much choice in where we grow up, live or what we do. The thing is, it may not be worthwhile exhausting ourselves to find what we’d like to do. It is much better and apparently much more satisfying to just make sure we like what we do.
And anyway, at some stage, even if that was between two sub-optimal alternatives, we have made choices and this should make us prefer what we have chosen.
So, let’s focus on liking, developing and making the best of what we do, because at some stage we have chosen to do it.
I like this quote I noted from Gapingvoid: “Collaboration is a competition — of us against ourselves“. Collaboration is an absolute requirement nowadays to achieve the best results, and if it works properly, it should stretch ourselves.
Here’s the full quote: “Competition, against ourselves or against others, is what gets the best results from us. But so does collaboration. How does that work? Let’s reframe the discussion. Collaboration is a competition — of us against ourselves. To get the best results, we need to push ourselves past the point of ourselves“.
In productive collaboration we have the opportunity to show the best of ourselves in the areas we are the best. Collaboration allows to complement those skills and talents with different skills and talents of others to build something unique. Positive collaboration obliges us to give our best at what we are the best at.
The caveat of course is that we are addressing here the best situation of positive collaboration in an effective team, which do not happen so often. It does not prevent us to always give out the best we can of ourselves. But it requires a good dose of personal discipline.
Effective collaboration is an opportunity to provide our best from our talents and what we know to do best. That’s how we identify positive collaboration.
I like this quote from Valeria Maltoni post ‘Clear Thinking in an Age of Confusion‘, which covers a variety of sources for clarity: “Attention is a muscle you can exercise. People so often look but don’t see“
Attention is important because otherwise we tend to close ourselves into our own thoughts and frames. It requires open mind and being free from worries to notice those things that are outside our usual frames. I am always surprise at how much we can miss if we don’t pay attention.
And it is definitely worth it. “Strategic thinking is all in the doing… if you can think clearly enough to do the right things in the right context. Notice more, and you’ll find those things, because you’ll see them. Then you’ll know“
What type of exercise is meant here? Meditation, meditative walking, and all sorts of mindfulness exercises are good. But it is certainly also staying curious and open to new things through our relationships, reads, travels and other occasions to discover.
Consciously exercise your attention and discover new facets in your everyday life!
In this post ‘On quitting a freelance gig‘, Seth Godin tackles the issue of how to leave a current client because the relationship is not satisfying. For me, the principles of this post do not just apply for freelancers, they do also apply to all professional services firms.
The gist of the problem: “Freelancers need to worry about doing the right thing as well as maintaining their reputation. Leaving a project in midstream hurts your reputation, and your promise needs to mean something. But sometimes we express our fear of change by sticking around longer than we need to and longer than we promised to.”
It can happen that there is a client mismatch between what we can offer and our values, and how the client behaves or simply, how his needs evolve. This mismatch can be from the start and not have been identified in earlier business development stages; or it can develop over a longer intervention. In any case, it is important to be able to decide to stop the relationship if it can be damaging.
First, to avoid this situation, there needs to be a thorough assessment of the client culture before taking the job. This is not always easy, so we also generally start with a limited intervention which serves both for us and the client as a discovery. This gives the possibility to part ways without having to terminate a longer contract. Similarly it is important to make sure your contract has a regular meeting clause at each stage of the project, where it can be stopped by any party after having assessed the results so far. And finally should you decide to part ways, it is nice to provide the client with a contact or a reference of someone that can take over.
Leaving a client in the middle of a services project is not the best situation. It needs to be prepared and properly timed. Still sometimes this is unavoidable to escape destructive relationship, and we need to recognize the possibility.
In her book ‘What I know for sure‘, Oprah Winfrey makes the point that changing ourselves, overcoming our wounds and overcoming our internal program are things for which we need to take total responsibility.
“Like me , you might have experienced things that caused you to deem yourself unworthy . I know for sure that healing the wounds of the past is one of the biggest and most worthwhile challenges of life. It’s important to know when and how you were programmed, so you can change the program. And doing so is your responsibility, no one else’s. There is one irrefutable law of the universe: We are each responsible for our own life.”
This responsibility can be tough to carry and we may need some help with it, but it certainly remains ours. And, “If you’re holding anyone else accountable for your happiness, you’re wasting your time.“
What I like in this quote is that first, it presumes that all of us can change and even recover from deep wounds, if we are willing to do so. And it squarely puts the responsibility on us for our happiness. Stop looking for excuses outside and do the work!
Of course the article is written by a psychiatrist and therefore he complaints about the amateurish handling by coaches of exchanges that border on therapy (and tends to protect his profession, degree and the many years of associated suffering). Coaching is “intended for individuals without mental health problems. It’s also supposed to be more collaborative, brief, focused, future-oriented and informal than psychotherapy.” However, “it must be difficult for a coach to come across as anything other than a therapist. Common topics for leadership coaches – performance maximisation, workplace relationships and professional anxiety – are the bread and butter of many a therapy session. The confusion is even greater with coaching outside of the work environment, which can encompass, as the ‘life coach’ moniker makes clear, just about anything.”
The author also makes an excellent point on the issue of stigma getting into psychotherapy. “People who are concerned about stigma might think that coaching offers a creative workaround – a malleable means of offering therapy under a different guise and a different name. While the motivation might be noble and understandable, the reality is scary.“
From my own experience of coaching, I believe the point made can be sometimes valid. While coaches have a high-level training about the fact that there is a border beyond which they are not supposed to intervene, and require psychotherapy, this training is quite limited. Also, I have observed that many life coaches have entered into this activity following strong personal issues, questioning and sometimes difficult events, sometimes more as a way to discover themselves. They are not always extremely stable themselves, and they sometimes investigate areas that should be off-limits. They should probably be made more aware of their limits.
I am a strong supporter of coaching as a softer way to challenge people and enhance their underlying performance. Coaching training if done properly is quite thorough, but it is true that more exchange with psychotherapy professionals and more awareness of the limits of coaching versus therapy would probably be useful.
