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February 11 - February 14, 2020
At the heart of social contracting is spending time up front talking about the How—the relationship and how we’ll work together—rather than being seduced by the What, the excitement and urgency of the content, what needs to be sorted out and solved.
What do you want? (Here’s what I want.) This is a question that almost always stops people in their tracks. It’s deceptively difficult to answer and incredibly powerful when you can define clearly what exactly it is you want from this relationship.
Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.) This turns the “What do you want?” question over and comes at it from a different angle. You might want to specify where you’ll trip yourself up (bold), how you might fall short in the relationship (bolder), or even how you might get in the way of success (boldest).
When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what happened for me.) Tell a story of a time when you were in a working relationship similar to this one, and it was good, really good. What did they do? What did you do? What else happened? What were the key moments when the path divided and you took one road and not the other? What else contributed to its success?
like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how I behave.) Tell another story, this time of when a working relationship like this one failed to soar. It might be when it all went hellishly wrong or it might be when it disintegrated into mediocrity. What did you do and what did they do? Where were the missed opportunities? Where were the moments when things got broken?
When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that? The power in this is twofold. First, you’re acknowledging reality: Things will go wrong. Honeymoons end. Promises get broken. Expectations don’t get met. By putting that on the table, you’re able now to discuss what the plan will be when it does go wrong.
the underlying network science says that it’s all about weak links. Those people who are the friend of a friend of a friend. That’s a much more likely place for something important to happen to you than your inner circle of close friends and colleagues.
If you don’t ask, you’ll never get. Sure, you may only get a little bit at a time. But if you don’t ask, 100 percent of the time you won’t get. You’ve just got to get over yourself. We live in a connection economy. If you can’t connect with people for them to understand what you have to offer, you’re working in a vacuum and you’re going to lose out. You end up getting bitter in that situation, because you see your peers are moving up and doing things, and you say, “I could be doing those things. Why not me?”
Building a network is like cultivating a botanical garden: You don’t want everyone in your network to be one color or one species. You want a variety of ages and stages and professions and passions, and to tend them carefully.
And just reach out. If you decided to contact one person a week, that would be fifty-two new people in a year. And it starts with that, just reaching out to someone because you admire their work, or are inspired by it. I’ve never met a person, no matter how well-known, who hasn’t been flattered by an authentic compliment. Professional love letters work.
How would you feel if somebody approached you and asked this exact same thing? If you feel okay with it, then go ahead and do it. If you feel a little uncomfortable, then try to tweak it in a way that makes you feel okay about it.
Dunbar noted that as the researchers developed analogies, and as other researchers built on the ideas around those analogies, the solutions to their problems seemed to simply emerge. Sometimes, a researcher would spend a week vexed by a problem, and the solution would seem to present itself in just ten minutes of discussion with peers. Dunbar also found that the labs with more diverse teams of individuals—people with different areas of expertise who were working on very different types of projects—generated more creative insights and produced more significant research.
the most successful creative projects are generated by teams that include a healthy mix of pre-existing connections, shared experiences, and totally new perspectives. If you’re looking to enhance your creative potential, then being on a team helps. But it’s not enough to be on any old team. You have to be on a team with the right blend of old and new collaborators.
So hone your communication skills just as keenly as your craft. Learn to write clear e-mails and compelling copy; to deliver persuasive presentations; to chair a productive meeting; to make those “difficult” conversations go more smoothly. Invest time in networking and building strong working relationships (not the same as friendships). When someone on your team needs help, offer it—what goes around comes around.
CREATE SOCIAL CONTRACTS Address what could go wrong in a creative relationship up front. Then, when a conflict does arise, you’ve created a comfortable space for talking about it.
TRUST IN GENEROSITY Focus on how you can help others, and lasting connections will come. The true spirit of networking should be generosity, not obligation.
Of the many regrets people describe, regrets of inaction outnumber those of action by nearly two to one. Some of the most common include not pursuing more education, not being more assertive, and failing to seize the moment.
We are left with a paradox of inaction. On one hand we instinctively tend to stick with the default, or go with the herd. Researchers call it the status quo bias.23 We feel safe in our comfort zones, where we can avoid the sting of regret. And yet, at the same time, we regret most those actions and risks we did not take.
There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. I often ask people to map their own risk profile. With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They realize pretty quickly that risk-taking isn’t uniform.
Success, it turns out, has far less to do with figuring out exactly what the right next move is and far more to do with serendipity and randomness.
If it is difficult to predict just what exactly is going to be successful, it follows that you have to keep trying. The more times you try, the more likely that you will create successful designs, start-ups, or pieces of art. If we look at the most successful innovators throughout history, we find that they have all been stunningly productive. They keep trying over and over again. Pablo Picasso created somewhere between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand works of art in his lifetime. He did not have the ability to simply decide that any given piece of art was going to become a
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Be aware that when you fail, you will adapt to the new situation much more quickly than you expect. Setbacks often have a silver lining.
Fear a failure to act more than you fear failure itself. Most people’s biggest regrets are the opportunities they did not act on, not those they did.
Try to make small bets for the initial test-runs of your project or idea. It’s hard to predict what will take off, and this limits your exposure to risk.
Mine your “failures” for valuable data about what works and what doesn’t. As long as you learn from the process, it’s not a mistake.
Embrace your power to make the outcome of any risk a success. Almost any situation can be turned around with persistence and ingenuity.
