Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2)

by Jocelyn K. Glei

This help has taken several different forms.

1. Seek fellow travelers.

2. Ask for help.

3. Build a structure for collaboration.

4. Consider yourselves “accountability partners.”

5. Highlight and discuss strengths.

One of the most powerful learnings I’ve had from twenty years of storytelling meetings spent shaping and helping others shape their stories is the realization of one’s own power as a creator—not of a story, or of any project, but of the narrative of one’s own creative life. The narratives of many creative people position their work as exclusively an individual pursuit. To ensure that you are optimizing your potential, consider recasting this narrative: Are you taking best advantage of the help that others can offer, and, more important, are you offering to others all the help you are capable of providing?

It always starts out so well. You’ve hired a new member of the team, you’ve joined a new project group, you’ve started working with a supplier. New people, new beginnings. And you’re both up for it. “This,” everyone’s sure, “is the start of something cool/big/fun/productive… and above all, successful.”

Whatever the situation, there are universal stumbling blocks: They misunderstand, you misunderstand They do too much or too little, you do too much or too little They overstep the boundaries, you overstep the boundaries

They fall into unproductive patterns, you fall into unproductive patterns They go crazy, you go crazy

This is actually not the problem. This is just life. Success for you lies in managing these dips when they occur. It’s not about having perfect relationships. That’s a fantasy. It’s about laying foundations for resilient relationships from the very start.

THE HOW VS. THE WHAT Your best chance of bouncing back, sorting it out, and getting things rocking again lies in the practice of social contracting, a discipline that management thinker Peter Block introduced in his terrific book Flawless Consulting.

What do you want? (Here’s what I want.)

Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.)

When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what happened for me.)

When things go wrong, what does that look like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how I behave.)

When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that?

QUESTIONS ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN ANSWERS What you hear and what you’ll share will be interesting, insightful, and useful. But the irony is, the

If you’re just beginning a new working relationship, then you’re in the perfect place to build in resilience through social contracting right now.

And if, as is more likely, you’ve already got a number of working relationships—with your boss, with your team, with your customer, with your suppliers—you’re also in the perfect place to build in resilience. Step back for a moment from the What you’re all absorbed with, and invite them to have a conversation with you about the How.

What would you say to people who think that networking is somehow disingenuous or too transactional? The underlying spirit of networking is generosity. If you engage with people in the spirit of generosity, as opposed to tit for tat—“I gave you three things, now you give me three things”—you’ll go so much farther. What’s more, the process can become joyful rather than an onerous task. 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.

In 1995, Kevin Dunbar set up a rather creative laboratory experiment. He wanted to study how scientific breakthroughs happened. Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, broke with the traditional methods of scientific inquiry used in psychology and opted instead to emulate the field studies of anthropology and ethnography. Instead of testing, he would use observation. He set up cameras inside four prominent microbiology laboratories in order to study when and how the scientists’ breakthrough insights occurred.

In any research laboratory, most experiments are failures or at best yield unexpected results.

The researchers even found a way to measure the level of repeat collaboration in any given production year, a value they called “small world quotient” or simply Q. The Q score was a measurement of how diverse or homogenous the Broadway production teams from that year were.

Given what we know about teams, it would be logical to assume that those production crews with a higher Q—those teams that had lots of experience working together in the past—would perform better and would produce shows that were more creative and successful.

Do you have a go-to roster of colleagues whom you collaborate with on every project? If so, you might benefit from building a broader network and rotating in collaborators with different perspectives and work experience. Conversely, if you regularly work alone or with a constantly rotating cast of new faces, see if you can introduce an element of stability. Are there one or two colleagues with whom you already have a kind of “creative shorthand”? If so, you might explore integrating them into your projects more regularly to introduce a level of consistency that might be beneficial.

As with anything, finding the right balance is key. Too much familiarity in your creative team can lead to stagnation, while too little can mean you’re constantly out of sync and spinning your wheels. The most important takeaway for you as an individual might well lie in understanding the paramount importance of collaboration.

If you really want your creative projects to take off, ...

Who was the architect of Chartres Cathedral? Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer. (And Wikipedia or Google won’t help.) It’s a trick question: there was no architect. These days, we take it for granted that large buildings are “designed” by a single person, the architect. The actual work of construction is delegated to builders whose job it is to follow the plans and execute the architect’s vision.

Realizing your full creative potential—and that of others—demands the skills of the Master Builder rather than the architect, the jazz impresario rather than the conductor. Not just dreaming up visions, but doing the work of execution; not just solo creation, but co-creation with others; not just issuing commands, but collaborating with expert partners.

LEAD BY EXAMPLE, NOT JUST AUTHORITY

EVERYTHING IS BUILT ON RELATIONSHIPS

IMPROVISE TOGETHER

BUILD ON OTHERS’ WORK

WORK FIRST, EGO SECOND

“Co-creation” sounds like a touchy-feely expression, but the reality is that it can be downright scary. Co-creation involves letting go of control, listening—really listening—to people around you, and delegating responsibility to them. Most of all, it means building trust: earning the trust of others, trusting them in return, and trusting that together you can build something bigger and more inspiring than any of you could achieve on your own.

DON’T GO IT ALONE Seek out fellow travelers—trusted colleagues and collaborators whom you can ask for help, who will tell you the truth, and who will hold you accountable.

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 sh...

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE Asking always precedes connecting, and if you do it regularly, your network will thrive. Make a weekly habit of ...

CROSS-POLLINATION BEGETS CREATIVITY Try to assemble creative teams that include both veteran collaborators and newbies. Diversity (in the right dos...

ACT LIKE A MASTER BUILDER, NOT A MASTER MIND Build on—and improvise with—others’ ideas and skill sets. If you let everyone shine in his or her area...

Nothing great has ever been achieved by sticking with the status quo. If you want to create something new and different, risk-taking needs to be part of your repertoire.

The upside of risk is that—no matter what the outcome—we act, we learn, and we grow. And when tomorrow comes, we’re better equipped to face it.

On the evening of June 28, 1976, after rehearsing in front of friends for weeks, a twenty-two year-old Jerry Seinfeld walked up onstage at the Catch a Rising Star comedy club in New York City to give his first public performance as a stand-up comic. Seinfeld took the microphone, looked out into audience, and froze. When he finally found his voice, all he could remember were the topics he had prepared to talk about. He rattled them off (“the beach… cars…”) without pausing and then hurried offstage. The entire performance lasted about ninety seconds. As Seinfeld later recounted his first moments in the spotlight, “I couldn’t even speak… I was so paralyzed in total fear.”

A recent study led by a team of neuroscientists at Caltech found that when competing in a high-stakes computer game, participants performed worse the more they were concerned about losing.13

But science is also revealing that these fears are not only counterproductive, they are overblown. It turns out that humans have a strong tendency to overestimate both the pain of failure and how negatively others perceive our mishaps. To explain why, let’s first take a look at why winning the lottery isn’t as amazing as you would think.

Humans quickly adapt to new situations. Novelty wears off faster than we expect. When we imagine becoming a lottery winner, we envision only the wondrous things we’d do with our winnings. We don’t anticipate the constant harassments of people wanting our money, the complexities of managing it, or the new strains it causes on our social networks and family (so much so that lottery winners actually set up support groups with one another).17 Nor do we expect, as a quadriplegic, that so much joy could come from things we previously took for granted. As we re-learn even the most basic tasks, we experience progress. And progress feels good. This is not to say our conditions in life don’t matter.

The first is immune neglect.

In short, we underestimate our resilience.