Seth Godin's Blog, page 155

A corollary to 'Too big to fail'

"Too big to listen."

Great organizations listen to our frustrations, our hopes and our dreams.

Alas, when a company gets big enough, it starts to listen to the requirements of its shareholders and its best-paid executives instead.

Too big to listen is just a nanometer away from "Too big to care."

            

Pugilists

Fighters and pugilists are different.

The fighter fights when she has to, when she's cornered, when someone or something she truly believes in is threatened. It's urgent and it's personal.

The pugilist, on the other hand, skirmishes for fun. The pugilist has a hobby, and the hobby is being oppositional.

The pugilist can turn any statement, quote or event into an opportunity to have an urgent argument, one that pins you to the ground and makes you question just about anything.

Instead of playing chess, the pugilist is playing you.

Pugilists make great TV commentators. And they even seem like engaged participants in meetings, for a while. Over time, we realize that they are more interested in seeing what reactions they can get, rather than in actually making positive change happen.

A committed pugilist has a long list of clever ways to bait you into an argument. You'll never win, of course, because the argument itself is what the pugilist seeks. Call it out, give it a name, share this post and then walk away. Back to work actually making things better.

            

Pulling a hat out of a rabbit

It's tempting to do what's been done before, certain in the belief that if you do it, it'll be a little better and a little more popular, merely because you're the one doing it.

In fact, though, that's unlikely. You'll care more, but it's unlikely the market will.

Consider the alternative, which is choosing to turn the question upside down, to do it backwards, sideways, or in a significantly more generous or risky way.

Remarkable often starts with the problem you set out to solve and the way you choose to solve it.

            

The tragedy of small expectations (and the trap of false dreams)

Ask a hundred students at Harvard Business School if they expect to be up for a good job when they graduate, and all of them will say "yes."

Ask a bright ten-year old girl if she expects to have a chance at a career as a mathematician, and the odds are she's already been brainwashed into saying "no."

Expectations aren't guarantees, but expectations give us the chance to act as if, to trade now for later, to invest in hard work and productive dreaming on our way to making an impact.

Expectations work for two reasons. First, they give us the enthusiasm and confidence to do hard work. Second, like a placebo, they subtly change our attitude, and give us the resilience to make it through the rough spots. "Eventually" gives us the energy to persist.

When our culture (our media, our power structures, our society) says, "people who look like you shouldn't expect to have a life like that," we're stealing. Stealing from people capable of achieving more, and stealing from our community as well. How can our society (that's us) say, "we don't expect you to graduate, we don't expect you to lead, we don't expect you to be trusted to make a difference?"

When people are pushed to exchange their passion and their effort for the false solace of giving up and lowering their expectations, we all lose. And (almost as bad, in the other direction) when they substitute the reality of expectations for the quixotic quest of impossibly large, unrealistic dreams, we lose as well. Disneyesque dreams are a form of hiding, because Prince Charming isn't coming any time soon.

Expectations are not guarantees. Positive thinking doesn't guarantee results, all it offers is something better than negative thinking.

Expectations that don't match what's possible are merely false dreams. And expectations that are too small are a waste. We need teachers and leaders and peers who will help us dig in deeper and discover what's possible, so we can push to make it likely.

Expectations aren't wishes, they're part of a straightforward equation: This work plus that effort plus these bridges lead to a likelihood of that outcome. It's a clear-eyed awareness of what's possible combined with a community that shares your vision.

It's easy to manipulate the language of expectations and turn it into a bootstrapping, you're-on-your-own sort of abandonment. But expectation is contagious. Expectation comes from our culture. And most of all, expectation depends on support—persistent, generous support to create a place where leaping can occur.

There are limits all around us, stereotypes, unlevel playing fields, systemic challenges where there should be support instead. A quiet but intensely corrosive impact these injustices create is in the minds of the disenfranchised, in their perception of what is possible.

The mirror we hold up to the person next to us is one of the most important pictures she will ever see.

If we can help just one person refuse to accept false limits, we've made a contribution. If we can give people the education, the tools and the access they need to reach their goals, we've made a difference. And if we can help erase the systemic stories, traditions and policies that push entire groups of people to insist on less, we've changed the world. 

            

"Did you win?"

A far better question to ask (the student, the athlete, the salesperson, the programmer...) is, "what did you learn?"

Learning compounds. Usually more reliably than winning does.

            

New times call for new decisions

Those critical choices you made then, they were based on what you knew about the world as it was.

But now, you know more and the world is different.

So why spend so much time defending those choices?

We don't re-decide very often, which means that most of our time is spent doing, not choosing. And if the world isn't changing (if you're not changing) that doing makes a lot of sense.

The pain comes from falling in love with your status quo and living in fear of making another choice, a choice that might not work.

You might have been right then, but now isn't then, it's now.

If the world isn't different, no need to make a new decision. 

The question is, "is the world different now?"

            

The problem with holding a grudge

...is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else.

It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge.

            

You will rarely guess/create/cause #1

The breakthrough pop hit is so unpredictable that it's basically random.

You will always do better with a rational portfolio of second and third place reliable staples than you will in chasing whatever you guess that pop culture will want tomorrow.

Of course, it means giving up hoping for a miracle and instead doing the hard work of being there for the people who count on you.

[Update: It turns out the key word here is rarely. Just because I'm incapable of predicting the hits doesn't mean everyone is. I just heard from Scott Borchetta at Big Machine. He's had a #1 hit on the pop music charts every year for the last thirty. At some point, it's not luck, it's your profession.]

            

Kneejerks

Just about all the ranting we hear is tribal. "He's not one of us, he's wrong." Or, the flipside, "He's on our team, he's right, you're blowing this out of proportion."

The most powerful thing we can do to earn respect from those around us, though, is to call out one of our own when he crosses the line. "People like us, we don't do things like that." This is when real change starts to happen, and when others start to believe that we really care about something more than scoring points.

Calling out our own jerks is the best kind of kneejerk.

            

How, why and the other thing

Almost all the inputs, advice and resources available are about how. How to write better copy, how to code, how to manage, how to get people to do what you want, how to lose weight, how to get ahead...

Far more scarce is help in understanding why. Why bother? Why move forward? Why care?

And rarest of all, yet ironically the most important, is help and insight about getting to the core of the fear that is holding us back.

This is the cause of the unfinished novel, of the self-sabotaging aggressive marketing campaign and the speech that goes on too long. It's at the heart of too much, too little, and too boring as well.

You might need confidence in your 'how' to deal with your fear. You might have found your 'why' overwhelmed by your fear. But all the how and all the why aren't going to help much if we can't acknowledge that essential driver is, "where is the fear?"

Are we so afraid of it that we can't even discuss it?