Seth Godin's Blog, page 148

Rearranging our prejudices

Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.

Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.

It's also the only place to start.

It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it's urgent.

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices..." William James

            

No one knows

No one knows the right answer, no one knows precisely what will happen, no one can produce the desired future, on demand.

Some people are better at guessing than others, but not by much.

The people who are supposed to know rejected Harry Potter, Tracy Chapman and the Beatles. The people who are supposed to know sell stocks just before they go up, and give us rules of thumb that don't pan out.

If you mistakenly believe that there's someone who knows, you're likely to decide that whoever that person it is, it's not you.

And if it's not you, what a great reason to hesitate.

In fact, the gap isn't between the people who know and those that don't. It's between the people who show up with their best work, and those that hold back. 

            

"Don't touch it, you might break it."

This is, of course, the opposite of,

"Touch it, you can make it better."

What's the default where you work?

            

Failing, again

Pema Chodron's new book is out this month. I was rendered speechless by her invitation to write the short foreword for the book, the first time I've ever agreed to do this. She's a caring, generous, magical person, a teacher with a special voice, one worth listening to.

Why buy a book about failing? Because success is easier to deal with and you're probably doing fine with that. Because your narrative about failing is keeping you from succeeding. And because you will have far more chances to fail than you know what to do with...

PS if you sign up this week, at this link, Sounds True will give you a seven-hour audio from Pema as well.

Also, Brene Brown's new book is out.  Which is always a special occasion.

            

Day traders rarely make history

The short-term stuff is pretty easy to do well. Respond to incoming. Check it off your list. Next!

The long-term stuff, on the other hand, is so easy to postpone, because tomorrow always sounds promising. And so we might hesitate to define the next project, or look for a new job, or visualize something that breaks what we're already used to.

Two thoughts:

a. Keep them separate. The best way to avoid long-term work is to be exposed to juicy short-term urgencies.

b. Hesitate before spending your most alert and dedicated work time on the short-term tasks. 

Day trading might be fun, but we can do better.

            

Contempt is contagious

The only emotion that spreads more reliably is panic.

Contempt is caused by fear and by shame and it looks like disgust. It's very hard to recover once you receive contempt from someone else, and often, our response is to dump it on someone else.

If you want to be respected by your customers/peers/partners/competitors/constituents, the best way is to begin by respecting them and the opportunity they are giving you.

And the best way to avoid contempt is to look for your fear.

            

The average

Everything you do is either going to raise your average or lower it.

The next hire.

The quality of the chickpeas you serve.

The service experience on register 4.

Each interaction is a choice. A choice to raise your average or lower it.

Progress is almost always a series of choices, an inexorable move toward mediocrity, or its opposite.

            

Scientific Management 2.0

130 years ago, Frederick Taylor changed the world forever.

Scientific Management is the now-obvious idea that factories would measure precisely what their workers were doing. Use a stopwatch. Watch every movement. Adjust the movements until productivity goes up. Re-organize the assembly line for more efficiency. Pay people by the piece. Cull the workforce and get rid of the people who can't keep up. Make the assembly line go faster.

Once Scientific Management goes beyond system setup and starts to focus on the individual, it amplifies the gulf between management and labor. No one wants to do their work under the stopwatch (except, perhaps, Usain Bolt).

And now, here comes SM2.0. 

White collar workers, the people who get to sit down at a desk, the folks with a keyboard not a hammer, can now be measured more than ever. And in competitive environments, what can be measured, often is.

Badge in, badge out.

How many keystrokes per hour?

How many incoming customer service calls handled per day?

What's the close rate, the change in user satisfaction, the clickthroughs, the likes?

You can see where this is heading, and it's heading there fast:

You will either be seen as a cog, or as a linchpin. You will either be measured in a relentless race to the bottom of the cost barrel, or encouraged in a supportive race to doing work that matters, that only you can do in your unique way.

It's not easy to be the person who does unmeasurable work, but is there any doubt that it's worth it?

            

The strawberry conundrum

Every grocer has to decide: when packing a quart of strawberries, should your people put the best ones on top?

If you do, you'll sell more and disappoint people when they get to the moldy ones on the bottom.

Or, perhaps you could put the moldy ones on top, and pleasantly surprise the few that buy.

Or, you could rationalize that everyone expects a little hype, and they'll get over it.

A local grocer turned the problem upside down: He got rid of the boxes and just put out a pile of strawberries. People picked their own. He charged more, sold more and made everyone happier.

Hype might not be your best option.

            

Embarrassed

It’s a tool or a curse, and it comes down to the sentence, “I’d be embarrassed to do that.”

If you’re using it to mean, “I would feel the emotion of embarrassment,” you’re recognizing one of the most powerful forces of our culture, a basic human emotion, the fear of which allows groups to control outliers, and those in power to shame those that aren’t.

The stress that comes from merely anticipating the feeling of embarrassment is enough to cause many people to hold back, to sit quietly, to go along.

And this anticipation rarely leads to much of anything positive.

On the other hand, if you’re saying, “doing that will cause other people to be embarrassed for me, it will change the way they treat me in the future,” then indeed, your cultural awareness is paying off. There’s a reason we don’t wear a clown suit to a funeral--and it’s not precisely because of how it would make us feel to do that. It’s because insensitive, unaware, selfish acts change our ability to work with people in the future.

Most of the time, then, "I would be embarrassed to do that," doesn't mean you would actually be embarrassed, it means you would feel embarrassed.

In most settings, the embarrassment people fear isn’t in the actions of others. It’s in our internal narrative. Culture has amplified the lizard brain, and used it to, in too many cases, create a lifetime of negative thinking and self-censorship.

So, yes, by all means, don’t make us feel humiliated for you, don’t push us to avert our eyes. But when you feel the unmistakable feeling of possible embarrassment, get straight about what your amygdala is telling you.