Seth Godin's Blog, page 39

Throwing and catching

Seven years ago, I shared a secret about juggling:

Throwing is more important than catching. If you’re good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. Emergency response is overrated compared to emergency avoidance.

It’s as true as it ever was, and it’s not just about juggling. In fact, it’s hardly about juggling.

We spend most of our time in catching mode. In dealing with the incoming. Putting out fires. Going to meetings that were called by other people. Reacting to whoever is shouting the loudest.

But if we learn a lesson from jugglers, we realize that the hard part isn’t catching, it’s throwing. Learn to throw, to initiate, to do with care and you’ll need to spend far less time worrying about catching in the first place.

[Out this week, the latest episode of Akimbo. You can subscribe for free.]

            

Responsibility Day

Often mis-characterized as a day of independence.

What actually matters is what you’re going to do with it.

It turns out that if you have the power to make rules, the rules are your responsibility.

If you have the freedom to make choices, the choices are your responsibility.

And if you have the ability to change the culture, to connect with others, to make a ruckus, then yes, what you do with that is your responsibility as well.

Doing nothing is a choice. The thing you didn’t say, the project you didn’t launch, the hand you didn’t lend…

But whatever we do, if we have the independence to do it (or not) it’s our responsibility.

            

The perils of the discard pile

If you’ve got a big bowl of pistachios, it’s worth avoiding the costly error of putting the shells back into the serving bowl. The more you do that, the harder it is to actually find a useful pistachio going forward. Better to have a discard pile, which means that the chances you’ll get a good one from the big bowl are 100%.

On the other hand, if you and your team are in the habit of putting ideas, “that will never work,” in a permanent pile of discards, you’re almost certainly missing great opportunities. There’s a difference between, “that didn’t work once, under certain conditions,” and, “that will never work.”

Alas, we do the same thing with people. Errors in both directions.

Be careful with your discards.

            

Do-ability

When we were in fifth grade, our options were severely limited. Not so much now.

In a world without tests and lowered boundaries (i.e. the world adults like you that read this are living in) we have far more degrees of freedom than we realize.

And yet we drift toward convenience.

Ease and convenience.

Ease, convenience and the freedom from the fear of failure.

We were taught compliance from an early age. The opposite of compliance, we’re told, is failure. In order to amplify compliance, people in authority have instilled in us not just a fear of failure, but worse, a fear of fear.

The reason it’s hard to push ourselves, even when there’s no external downside of doing so, is our fear of fear of failure. That feeling, the feeling of insufficiency and doom, pushes us to seek the comfort of compliance instead.

Wikipedia is the result of a billion edits. Each edit is fairly trivial, and the articles that are the most edited are often on trivial topics, like the more than 5,000 words written about Don Draper. It’s easy and safe and fun to write endlessly about a fictional character, while we avoid speaking up about the real things.

At the same time, WikiTribune, a news-focused site built on the same principles, has very little activity. The reason is that it’s not trying to solve a finite problem (adding a paragraph about Don Draper’s affair) but an infinite one, because there is too much news to keep up with. WikiTribune doesn’t need people to fix typos, they’re asking for contributions that are almost certainly going to be challenged. It’s not a do-able problem, so contributing feels like a brush with failure.

We see the same thing happen with books (short ones are easier to sell than long ones, even at the same price) or online education (a short course on calligraphy will do far better than a six-month deep dive into the Stoics.)

It’s essential that we differentiate between things that remind us of fear and those that are actually risky. In our adult world, the most valuable activities are actually inconvenient, fraught with the fear of failure and apparently un-do-able.

Without someone telling us what to do, without a test to prove that we did it, it’s easy to slip into the dumb lane. Dumb, simple, easy, do-able.

But what if we committed to the other path. To find a way to allocate our time to things that might not work?

 

[The altMBA is inconvenient. It’s not designed to protect you from the fear of fear. It’s do-able but there are days it won’t feel that way. Perhaps that’s why it works. Today is the first priority deadline.]

            

The thing about propellant

The paint in the can almost always lasts longer than the aerosol does.

The propellant is more difficult to engineer and work with than the stuff it’s propelling.

It’s volatile, elusive and doesn’t last long.

The metaphor is a useful way to think about your situation. You might not need more time. You might not need more connections. You might not need to move to a new city, find new friends or catch a lucky break.

It may be that all you need is to use your propellant more wisely.

[There’s a significant exception to this rule: The rare person who is all propellant. No useful substance, no long-term strategy, simply short-term success based on an abundance of forward motion. If you work with someone like that, try to help them find their way… they’re not going to stop moving, but perhaps you can help them move in the right direction.]

            

Looking for validation

or perhaps, you're looking to improve.

You can't do both at the same time.

If it's perfect, you can't make it better. But if you don't make it better, you're getting no closer to what you set out to accomplish.

            

Where’s the king of the ants?

Of course there isn’t one. Ants organize locally. They develop a culture, and that culture gives them the resilience to make them one of the world’s most numerous creatures. Deborah Gordon of Stanford has the fascinating details.

It turns out that culture is the most powerful force available to us. Culture comes from each of us, from the connections between. Culture isn’t created by presidents, Popes or kings.

Hollywood has a culture, not a king. Silicon Valley too. Change the culture (slowly and persistently) and you can change everything.

            

Bad sorts (and the useful ones)

We sort people all the time. Society prefers easy, useless ones. Sorts like: Skin color. Gender. Disability status. Nationality. Religious background. Height.

While these are easy to do and the result of long, long traditions, they’re useless.

The alternatives? Kindness. Expertise. Attitude. Skill. Emotional intelligence. Honesty. Generous persistence. Willingness to take risks. Loyalty. Perceptivity. Attention span. Care. Self awareness…

It’s a daily battle, an uphill climb to intentionally ignore the bad sorts we were likely taught as kids. This might be the most important work we do today, and every day. The people we care about deserve it…

            

The shortcut crowd

There is no market. There are markets.

And markets have segments. There are people who enjoy buying expensive wine. There are people who will save up their money to have a big wedding. There are people who pay to have a personal trainer…

And within segments, there are careful consumers, traditional consumers, consumers who seek out the cutting edge. There are bargain hunters, luxury snobs and people who measure the way Consumer Reports does.

Often overlooked, though, is the fact that in many markets, particularly involving personal finance, small business and relationships, there are people who are obsessed with the shortcut.

They want something that’s too good to be true.

They respond to big promises that offer magical, nearly instant results.

They want a squeeze page, a tripwire offer, a hard sell.

They respond to these messages because they’re a signal that a shortcut is on offer.

My grandmother, who never exercised a day in her life, bought an exercise machine from a late night TV commercial. When it sat gathering dust, she explained that she thought it would do the exercise for her, and was disappointed that it didn’t magically make her fit for $99.

Or consider the victims of ‘plastic surgeons to the stars’ who pay for radical surgery only to discover that it doesn’t change their social life.

Or the hardworking people who fork over money for a get rich internet ICO, based on technology that they (and the promoter) don’t understand.

There are complicated reasons for wanting this sort of engagement. It might be that the promise and the pressure of these pitches create endorphins that are pleasing. And it might be that deep down, this market segment knows that things that are too good to be true can’t possibly work, and that’s fine with them, because they don’t actually want to change–they simply want to be able to tell themselves that they tried. That the organization they paid their money to failed, of course it wasn’t their failure.

Once you see that this short-cut market segment exists, you can choose to serve them or to ignore them. And you can be among them or refuse to buy in. But you do have to choose.

            

If you need deadlines to do your best work…

Make some up.

There’s no shame in that. In fact, it’s a brilliant hack.

Set up a method of reward or punishment with a third party. Money in escrow that goes to a cause you abhor. Public congratulations. Whatever the method, the point is the same: You’ve been trained since childhood to respond to external deadlines. For many people, that’s the only way to feel the magic of accomplishment.

If you need the last minute to be your best self, first go manufacture some last minutes.

[David points us to beeminder.]