Who’s responsible?
Freedom without consequences is a myth.
Our actions always have consequences.
The question is: who will bear them?
Harsh feedback
It often comes from one of two kinds of people:
People who give themselves feedback in the same heartless tone. They don’t hesitate to brutally lash out, because that’s the noise they often hear inside.
And folks who honestly believe that their work is flawless. They can’t understand how anyone else can fail to measure up, because they never seem to.
Of course, each group has a significant (though different) problem. In fact, now that they’re spreading their harshness with others, they have two problems.
When in doubt, look for the fear.
Portfolio thinking
When we’re not certain of the right answer, the best approach is to have a portfolio, a range of bets that reward us with resilience and significant upside.
An example can be something as simple as what to put on the buffet–if you’re not sure who’s coming to the meeting, it makes sense to have a variety of options, because the chances you’ll get it right go way up.
A more important example is in filling a job. If you only interview people from similar backgrounds and with similar skills, you’re eliminating a huge pool of talent that might in fact be a much better fit for the job.
The mistake we often make is in building a choice set (which we mistakenly call a ‘portfolio’) by trying again and again for one guaranteed ideal choice. That’s not a portfolio. Instead, we should focus on going to the edges, not trying to group everything at some imaginary ‘center’.
Back to the simple buffet example. If you have one spicy dish, one vegan dish, one dish without cilantro and one dish from a cuisine that’s out of the ordinary in this setting, your chances of “best lunch ever” are far higher than if you simply put out very slight variations of one theme.
When we can’t be sure of the future, a portfolio that acknowledges this by going to various edges will outperform one where we pretend we know the right answer.
Harder, easier and more convenient
Consider the windows on a car.
First, they were manually clipped into place.
And then they were hand-rolled into position. But that was too difficult.
So the electric window was born.
But holding your finger on the button for 10 seconds was onerous, so now, it’s automatic.
It’s easy to see the trend toward convenience in many areas of our lives. Tim Wu has pointed out that people will trade privacy, money or friendships in exchange for convenience.
But…
There’s a countertrend. Sourdough is far less convenient than buying a loaf of Wonder bread. Running a marathon is less convenient than driving to wherever it is you’d like to go. And the best programmers still code by hand, even though there are plenty of apps that would make it easier to create average user interactions.
The battle for most convenient is fierce. It might be easier to stake out your claim to interactions and products that are less convenient, but worth it.
CB radio
It was huge and kept growing by leaps and bounds.
Until it didn’t.
(My license was KFV2338, a number I haven’t said out loud in 40 years).
CB radio took off because human beings desperately want to connect with people they know and be heard by people they don’t.
And then it went away because it was noisy, unfiltered and sort of pointless.
We can’t imagine why people were so entranced.
Until the next one comes along.
Flow (and progress)
A flow state is priceless. It happens when we lose ourselves in the work, simply connecting with the task, without commentary or doubt. When we’re in flow, time slows down, satisfaction rises and we feel fully engaged.
An easy way to end a flow state is to see how well you’re doing. Are you ahead of the other runners? Are you progressing according to the milestones? Do you have more social metrics now?
The irony, of course, is that the best way to make progress is to find flow. But if you’re using progress as a yardstick, it won’t last long.
Dancing with status roles
First, we have to see them.
Some people, no matter how fast or slow their friends are walking, always walk a step behind.
Or perhaps you need to live in the nicest house on the block, or drive the fanciest car.
There are people who can’t rest until they know that they’re at the top of their class, or use up their available credit limit, whatever the limit is.
Maybe you need to finish everything on your plate, plus your friend’s. Or maybe you always leave something over.
The thing is that status roles are always local. We compare ourselves to the others in our circle, not everyone on the planet.
If your status narrative isn’t making you happy, you can try to change it–but it’s truly difficult to do so. The get-along person rarely shifts gears and becomes the dominating competitor, or vice versa.
An alternative is to do the hard work (but in a brief window) of choosing your circle and setting your limits.
If you need to live in the biggest, fanciest house, choose a neighborhood where doing that won’t break everything else in your personal life. If you overtrain to be sure you’re going to win, enter races where the overtraining won’t wipe you out.
If you need to avoid the front of the parade, don’t pick an industry or a cultural setting where only the people at the front are treated well.
We choose our boundaries rarely, but we have to live with them every day.
Speed limits
The school zone has a speed limit of 15 miles per hour. It’s hard to be opposed to this sort of restriction, because the consequences are so dire and the cost is so low.
The driver is making a choice, the kids, not so much. The driver is surrounded by steel and safety devices, the kids, not so much.
Living in community is about limits. That’s a foundational feature that permits it to work. They’re all around us, and we only notice them when they change.
Coming soon
The phone is ringing. Your ice cream is melting. Next month’s rent is due. There’s a useful workshop coming up in a few months. Your hard drive will fail before the end of the year. College tuition will need to start being paid in five years. Your back tooth is going to need a crown in 2030. New York City is going to be underwater in 2050.
When is soon?
Every one of these things is something we can choose to pay attention to right now. Each one is either urgent or important, it’s up to us. Paying attention to something when the problem is still small makes it far less of an issue later.
The ringer on a phone was designed to establish urgency. And social media has optimized for that itch as well.
But it’s not up to them.
[For your calendars, two updates:
I’ll be doing a live event with Chip Conley, bestselling author, impresario and big thinker (and my first co-author, from 1986!) in a live chat (with QA) about jobs, learning, wisdom and making a ruckus. Today! Just hours from now.
All the details are at this LinkedIn post.
In addition, I’ll be joining the other Akimbo teachers for an online free-for-all and jamboree on Tuesday, January 11th. Hosted by Ramon Ray, I’m looking forward to joining my friends online. I hope you can come. It’s free and you can sign up for it here.
Hope to see you there.]
Progress
Technology is not neutral. It can’t be, because by definition, advances in tech create change, and change always creates positives and negatives.
We now live in a time of rapid technological change, perhaps the biggest in 150 years. In the face of the overwhelming impact of tech, we might not be enjoying the ride.
Sometimes the problem is the tech itself, and sometimes it’s about our fear of change and unknown.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about which technology we’d rather live without–in other words, when was the golden age that we’re nostalgic for, the one that technology has tarnished in the name of progress?
They’re not in a perfect order, but if you had to draw the line, where and when would you put it?
Housing
Toilets
Money
Debt
Culverts and water supplies
Books
Libraries
Handwashing and germ theory
Eyeglasses
The scientific method
Clocks
Trains
The cotton gin
The loom
The origin of species
Electricity
Voting machines
The telephone
Gas-powered cars
Credit cards
Vaccines
Television
Antibiotics
Sunscreen
Birth control
Portable telephones
GPS
Electric cars
Solar panels and windmills
Email
Online bookstores
Search engines
Cochlear implants
Mapping DNA
Podcasts
Machine learning
Image recognition for reading x-rays
Wikipedia
Facial recognition
Augmented memory implants
GPT and AI writing and creation
Cloning
Gene repair
Quantum computing
The internet of things