“I don’t want to send this pitch to a list of every single podcaster in the world, but we have to get the word out.”
“I don’t want to send an email to every one of our previous donors every three days until they unsubscribe, but our work is so important, it has to be done.”
“I don’t want to robocall every person in the district, but if I don’t, our campaign has no chance… the other guy is even more aggressive than we are.”
Except there’s an “except.”
Except that all the organizations before you that have reluctantly raced to the bottom aren’t happy that they did. They’re not thriving and they might not even be around any more.
The reason that our attention has been strip-mined is that the system that evolved seems to reward short-term players that take the direct, easy, and lazy way out. While it seems like we have no choice, in fact, we have a very obvious one.
It turns out that finding, connecting and respecting a small group of supporters and customers always outperforms the hustle for more. And that if you can create a remarkable story that’s worth spreading, it’ll spread. Not because you need it to, but because your customers do.
Reluctant or not, spam is still spam. If you can’t imagine wanting to receive it, don’t send it.
Many moths are attracted to light. That works fine when it’s a bright moon and an open field, but not so well for the moths if the light was set up as a bug trap.
Processionary caterpillars follow the one in front until their destination, even if they’re arranged in a circle, leading them to march until exhaustion.
It might be that you have built a system for your success that works much of the time, but there’s a glitch in it that lets you down. Or it might be that we live in a culture that creates wealth and possibility, but glitches when it fails to provide opportunity to others or leaves a mess in our front yards.
The thrill-seeking behavior that allows someone to become a rock star might not be the method they need to keep their career going and to live a resilient and generative life…
Humans can do something moths can’t: when we find the glitch, we can work to do something about it.
Amateur as in the passionate individual, untrained but with something to say.
If you’re called on to give a talk or presentation, the biggest trap to avoid is the most common: Decide that you need to be just like a professional presenter, but not quite as good. Being a 7 out of 10 at professional presenting is a mistake. Better to stay home and send a memo.
Don’t set yourself up for a ‘fail.’ Instead, here’s a chance to actually share your light and your vision.
No, the opportunity is to refuse to become a slightly prepared wannabe professional presenter. Just like it doesn’t pay to slightly practice the violin or sort of get ready to play in the NHL.
Sure, you might land a few well-timed punchlines or have a clever slide design. And sure, your violin might be in tune or your slap shot might work… But it probably won’t.
The alternative is to eagerly become an amateur presenter. Here are some thoughts to get you started:
Do you have something to say? If you don’t, stay home and send a memo. But if there’s a story you want to tell, a change you want to make, an impact you want to have, be really clear about what it might be. Simply getting through your presentation relatively unscathed probably isn’t a worthy goal.
Don’t apologize. Don’t apologize for being nervous, for caring, for not having 200 practice runs under your belt. The audience is offering you a tiny slice of time and attention. You cared enough to show up, here we go.
Find just one person. This is repeated often enough to be hackneyed, but it’s still ignored. I mean it. You have a microphone. There’s a room with some people in it. One of them, just one, is the sort of person you can tell your story to. So tell it to them. Ignore every other person. Don’t project your voice to fill the room, don’t pace around like Zig Ziglar or choreograph your slides, or tell jokes. You don’t do that in real life. Well, this is real life. Find one person and tell them your story. If other folks want to listen in, that’s fine.
Don’t memorize and don’t read. Very talented actors, recently returned from their strike, can read and make it sound like they’re not reading. A few podcasters I know can do this as well. Almost no one else can. Instead, amateurs understand that they’ve been telling stories their whole lives, and given the chance, they can tell a story again. Without reading it.
This isn’t a performance. Professionals perform. It’s their job. This is you sharing the change you’d like to make with one person sitting a few feet away from you.
Think about the most important interactions you’ve had. The ones with partners, doctors, strangers and friends. None of them were professional speeches. Not one. Instead, a human interacted with you and made a change happen. Not because they had a script and a director, but because they cared.
The challenge isn’t in becoming a sort of pretty good professional presenter. The challenge is becoming you.
Of course, it’s scary. But the response to the fear isn’t to soothe ourselves with memorization and insulation. It’s to simply show up.
Paradigm shifts are appealing but rarely well executed.
A paradigm is our mental model of the world. We’re surrounded by people who share a similar model, and as long as the model is working, we live our lives without thinking much about it. If you lived in a space station, the absence of gravity would be something you’d notice at all times… until one day, you didn’t.
Technology and culture conspire to change the rules. When that happens, there are huge opportunities for those bold enough to imagine a different system, a mental model that isn’t simply adjusted, but rebuilt.
Network TV was based on the paradigm of mass markets and the battle for the last few percentage points of share.
Cable TV shifted that (a bit) because niche networks could find plenty of viewers to make a profit, and suddenly, the smallest viable audience was a useful new way to build a media asset. MTV and ESPN couldn’t have worked in a three-channel world, but did fine in one with forty channels.
The real flip, though, comes from YouTube. Now, it’s not about trying hard to add a few channels. It’s about embracing the idea that there’s an infinite number of channels. That a scarcity of spectrum isn’t normal or useful. And no one from the world of network or cable TV understood this or did anything about it. They were focused on shifting, not flipping.
Many of my colleagues and friends in the traditional publishing business are still wrestling with the print version of this. They have assets, reputation and a bit of momentum, but instead of flipping to a new system, they’re inching around a shift.
In medicine, millions of lives have been saved by flipping paradigms. Germ theory, for example, and hand washing. Or more recently, beta-blockers for heart disease, or seeing the role of bacteria in ulcers. In this video, my friend Jonathan Sackner Bernstein talks about his breakthrough work in reconsidering how Parkinson’s actually works:
Not all paradigms flip. Often, humanity is stuck with a culturally-entrenched system that’s difficult to change. But when we see an opportunity to contribute, the hard work is being willing to walk away from our reliance on how things were instead of simply trying to make a small shift happen.
When electricity came along, there was a swath of industries that were trapped in an old way of thinking. The only ones that thrived were able to walk away from what they used to do and eagerly embrace something new.
When the internet was young, the major book publishers had everything they needed to create a dominant search engine. After all, they were in the business of organizing the world’s information. With just one exception, they didn’t even consider it. That’s because they believed that their job was to sell books to bookstores.
This is even more urgent for individuals. What you were trained to do, what you did yesterday… that’s a gift from your past, not an obligation. Beginning the analysis with, “what I used to do was…” is a great way to open the door to what you’re going to do tomorrow.
In Steven Pressfield’s classic The War of Art, he introduces the idea of Resistance. It’s the internal force that keeps us from doing our most important creative work.
If an instinct, a habit or a feeling gets in the way of the work, it’s Pressfield’s Resistance. Things we would never choose to add to the flow of our days, but there they are.
It’s easy to imagine that Resistance is for screenwriters or novelists. Writer’s block and procrastination. But anyone leading a project of any kind–a business, a non-profit, a campaign–confronts it as well.
We could do something, we might do something, but we don’t. And so the work doesn’t ship, or it doesn’t meet its potential.
I’m not alone in facing Resistance. It happens everywhere we look.
Some of the symptoms of Resistance seem contradictory, but if we go back to the definition, that makes sense. Here are a few:
Procrastinating
Ignoring or avoiding the useful metrics
Focusing on vivid but non-useful metrics
Not shipping the project
Shipping junk
Asserting that it’s not Resistance
Being too busy to get to the hard part
Aiming too high
Aiming too low
Refusing to set a budget or deadlines
The tension of “this might not work” ends up feeling like stress instead
Not actively managing the project, letting the project manage us instead
Embracing sunk costs
Not asking useful questions
Refusing to find and use leverage or tools, focusing on the known fussy tasks instead
Blaming the system for our obstacles
Ignoring the system and acting as if we’re the first ones here
Being obsessed with new technology and opportunities, waiting for the next big thing
Refusing to learn about new tech or opportunities
Reacting instead of responding, responding instead of leading
Focusing on the urgent instead of the important
Obsessively documenting everything
Ennui
Irrational exuberance
Failing to delegate appropriate tasks
Taking too much credit
Ignoring useful feedback
Being reckless and assuming a net will appear
Looking for the shortcuts even when we know the long way is the only way
Sloppily leaving out details
Asking too many questions before making assertions
Our actual calendar of time spent doesn’t match the agenda for the work to be done
Making big promises we can’t keep
Refusing to make useful promises for fear of not keeping them
Taking it personally
Keeping our fears to ourselves
Using deadlines as fuel
Spending too much time focusing on our fear
Insisting on authenticity instead of consistency
Showing up late
Going over budget
Becoming a perfectionist
It’s tempting to imagine that Resistance is a moral failing, but it’s more like stubbing your toe or burning the toast. We don’t have to blame ourselves for where we are, but if we can see it and name it, we can learn to dance with it.
These behaviors may seem as though they happen to us, but ultimately, they’re a choice. A skill we can learn, a habit we can unlearn. We can be kind to ourselves, focus on the goal and get back to the project.
There are two confusions and one fear:
The first confusion is that we might not realize that these are choices.
The second confusion is that we might not have learned better tactics, tools and choices, but we can.
And the fear? It’s of change. The change of it might not work, or the chance that it will.
When Resistance arises, and it always does, we can see it, name it, and gently move on.
When we raise our expectations for a student, a friend or a co-worker, we open the door to possibility. We offer them dignity and a chance to grow. We are offering them trust.
But if we become attached to those expectations, if the expectation unmet leads us to distress or unhappiness, then that attachment undermines the very reason we created the expectation in the first place.
November 4, 2023
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