A few weeks ago Dave Martin told me about Dharmesh Shah’s unique way of providing context to communication with hashtags. Shah cofounded Hubspot with Brian Halligan at MIT in 2006. At some point in the history of Hubspot he found himself struggling with conveying how strongly he felt about information he shared.
He could share something that he “just thought was interesting” and teams would run with it as if it was something to act on.
He could share an opinion and because of his position his opinion might end up overruling that of someone closer to the work leading to poor outcomes.
Occasionally he would have a very strong opinion and it could get lost without a response.
To counter this he started adding hashtags to his communication that gave more context. He calls these Flashtags.
#fyi: “I don’t feel strongly at all.” For when you’re just passing along information that you find interesting and think others may as well.
#suggestion: No offense taken if someone goes another way. Something to consider along with whatever you’re considering. Assumes the recipient has the most information and can evaluate the suggestion.
#recommendation or #strongrecommendation: Something that you’ve thought a lot about. You thought about it all night, did the research, and understand the tradeoffs. The recipient should be free to ignore the recommendation but a response (either way) is politely requested and expected. If it’s a strong recommendation a response explaining why you went the other way is probably a good idea.
#plea: “I really, really feel strongly.” This is “please just do this.” If you feel compelled to go a different direction, let’s chat, and figure out what the issue is.
I’m not a fan of the word “plea.” Please is better but it still doesn’t feel right. I’m also not a fan of adding hashtags as they might require other people deciphering my private code. Additionally, where I work, it could get mixed up with how we use tags in our communication software. (It’s P2.)
It’s probably better to just note what you think.
This is just an FYI; no action needed.
This is just a suggestion; no action needed.
This is a recommendation / strong recommendation; please let me know what you think.
I think this is the direction we should go in; please proceed.
A statement like this can easily be prepended or appended to thoughts and direction. Plus, if you use a tool like TextExpander or Alfred you could just expand to those statements from the hashtag.
Recently, I started using “no action needed” and find it’s helpful. Having a better understanding of other levels, and more importantly, how to communicate them, is a great tool for the communication toolbox.
If you’re interested in becoming a better coach, manager, or leader — or you just want to start asking better questions at work — check out The Coaching Habit from Michael Bungay Stanier. You get practical advice on what coaching is, why you’d want to do it, and how to immediately improve. It’s centred around seven essential questions that seem carefully crafted to help you help your colleagues, teammates, and reports focus in on solving problems through coaching. Each question is finely honed, specific, and easy to ask. The first three, and the last, form a script you can immediately apply to any 1:1 meeting you’re in.
Like a lot of business and self development books there’s some padding but what fluff is in there is all great advice and ultimately minimal. It’s an extremely practical and to the point book. That’s because the core of the book, the seven essential questions, are so practical and so usable. These are the questions you should have in your toolbox when your reports and colleagues come to you with questions like, “What do you think I should do about…?”. They’ll help you avoid giving the bad advice that throws projects, people, and processes off the rails. And they’ll help you instead get to the heart of actual challenges while encouraging real learning and self-development. It’s pretty easy to recommend.
What are the seven essential questions?
“What’s on your mind?”
This is the opening question that kickstarts a coaching session. For example: “Hi there, what’s on you mind today that you’d like to talk about?”
Asking “What’s on your mind?” is an almost guaranteed way to turn any conversation into a real conversation.
“And what else?”
This question pairs with “What’s on your mind?” The idea is that you can use it after asking someone “What’s on your mind?” like, for example, with “And what else is on your mind?”.
It should also be used to investigate the items revealed by “What’s on your mind?”. For example, “So, you mentioned that you’re feeling overwhelmed with your workload. And what else?”
The author calls “And what else?” the “world’s best coaching question.”
The first answer someone gives you is never the only answer and it’s rarely the best answer.
You’ll get more options and often better options for what’s really challenging someone by asking this question.
This lets you stay curious longer and curb your urge to give advice. If you give advice too soon, without knowing what’s really challenging someone or why, you’re going to give advice on the wrong problem in the wrong way.
It can also just buy you time to figure out what’s going on in a situation and put your won thoughts in order.
You’ll ask this question at least three times and rarely more than five in a session.
“What’s the real challenge here for you?”
This is the “focus” question. For example, “Can you help me understand what the real challenge is for you in this situation?”
This questions is the first step in your colleague working out the problem.
Asking someone “What’s the real challenge here for you” encourages the person you’re coaching to very concretely explain what problem they have to work out for themselves.
The phrase “for you” is very specific here. It focuses someone in on how they themselves will work on improving what is really blocking or challenging them — and not focusing on problems that they can’t fix or the problems of others.
“What do you want?”
This is the “Foundation” question. For example, “What is it that you want to achieve in this situation?”
Ask “What do you want?” and they begin to problem solve by working backwards from an ideal outcome. Asking someone what do you want encourages them to imagine the outcome and avoid focusing on obstacles that are in their way.
This frees themselves up to work backwards rather than struggle with figuring out what to do.
“How can I help?”
This is the (Clever) Lazy Question. For example, “I’d love to support you. How can I help?”
They’ll help you help them by telling you what they need.
Asking “How can I help?” encourages someone to make a clear request and helps you avoid offering advice too soon.
It also (and this is maybe even better) stops you from thinking you know how to help and jumping in to offer advice before you know the real problem.
“What is your next step?”
This is the Strategic Question. For example, “With what we’ve discussed, what do you see as your next step?”
It immediately turns conversations on a dime towards next actions.
“What was most useful for you?
This is the Learning Question. For example, “As we wrap things up, what was most useful for you today?”
People only learn when they reflect on something and your job as a coach is to make spaces for that to happen. This question makes that space.
It has other benefits like its assumption that the conversation was useful, creating a moment to figure out why and how when you ask it.
It asks people to come up with just one thing to learn from and avoids overwhelm.
The “for you” always makes it specific and personal and increases the chance for learning to happen.
It gives you feedback.
It forces people to extract value vs a binary was anything useful.
It reminds people that you’re useful: when they look back over your conversations they’ll remember that every one had something useful.
When they’re done sharing you can share what you found most useful. This exchange will also deepen your social bond.
I’ve been impressed with how easy its been to put some of the items into action.
One piece of advice the Bungay Stanier has is stop asking “fake questions” that are ideas you have disguised as a question. Instead you should ask, “And what else have you considered?” Or a variation. Or one of the other seven essential questions. Otherwise you should just share your idea like, “I have an idea.” I’ve started doing this much more regularly and it’s helped me be more succinct as well as more real.
Additionally, I’ve incorporated the seven essential questions into my 1:1s with my reports. While building a habit of incorporating this into my routine I have my notes up in a document that I keep open on zoom calls. This keeps them literally right in front of me when I’m most often pulled into coaching scenarios. I’ve been most surprised by asking “What was most useful?”. It’s pretty clear that wrapping up coaching in that way will create a great feedback loop.
Like with any business or self-development book, the real challenge with applying any lessons learned is going to be not over-applying the lessons learned. Everything has to be adapted to your circumstances. But the Coaching Habit is light, practical, and laser-focused on asking better questions in order to support self-development, problem-solving, and learning. It’s pretty easy to adapt and apply with that focus.
It might sound like a lot. Seven questions for every coaching conversation! But one of the key ideas from the book is that coaching is not a special, formal, activity — despite the framework. At the end of the day, these seven questions (and you aren’t asking them all in every session) are pretty light. And one of the main points of the book is that coaching is a daily activity that can happen in as little as 10 minutes. Great to keep in mind: there’s always time to learn.
This is a long one! In this post we’ve got all my short reviews of the books I read in 2018, some very brief notes on the books I put down in 2018 without completing, notes on coming back to Twitter, and finally some notes on leaving Facebook. (The last one made my life much better, I think.)
Here’s what I read and didn’t read in 2018. (All book title links are affiliate-free links to Goodreads.)
Recommended for anyone interested in the continual design of the life or organization they find themselves in. Best seen as Dalio seems to suggest as a catalyst for abstracting out your own principles by facing down the hard truths of reality and demanding feedback on the truths you might be blinded to. In other words, chew the book up, digest as much as you can, and use it as fuel to create your own version of this book. It’s got me tweaking some items in my own routines so it seems to have clicked with me. I would have given the book five stars if the back half wasn’t such a slog. It’s more like an open reference manual for Bridgewater employees and Dalio claims it was not intended to be read straight through.
Things go downhill fast for Macbeth and the play moves just as quickly. The world comes undone alongside his actions and reactions to them. Reality can’t stand a king that won’t act kingly and Macbeth finally curses life itself. Also, there are gory-locked ghosts. It’s not exactly a fun read but that’s not exactly why you read it, and you should read it, it’s great — but not the Amazon Classics Edition I read. I was surprised at the lack of footnotes. Pay some money for a decent edition.
Brandon Sanderson is probably my favourite “page turner” author but this book really pales in comparison next to his first Mistborn trilogy and the Stormlight series. I only really read it because characters in this book appear in the Stormlight books and it was that alone that pushed me on to the end. It really dragged for me until the middle of the book but then the pace picked up and it was at least diverting.
An extended business-oriented parable on what happens when you ignore the instinctual feeling to help those around you. You either honor that feeling or you betray it. What happens when you betray it? It isn’t good according to the book. It’s self-betrayal that sets off a chain of events that leaves you feeling justified and others looking contemptible. You wind up calling that your character and living in a warped version of reality with warped results in all your actions. Worse still you’re probably doing this all the time. It has a dated Sunday School feel to it for a book published in 2002 but I won’t knock points for that. It all rang true. Highly recommended.
A sequel (and narrative prequel) to Leadership and Self-Deception again written in the style of a “Church Movie Night” drama. You’ll know it if you’ve seen one: It’s teachable moment after teachable moment piled on in dialogue after dialogue. Again excellent despite that. Mostly a reiteration and expansion of the previous book though this one draws out more of the stoicism implicit in the ideas here. The key idea is again something like: “You and everyone on the planet are going to feel a desire to treat people as persons and help them when they’re in need. You’re either going to honor that desire in your behaviors towards them — which may or may not help them — or betray that desire and dehumanize yourself and them. That won’t work out well for either of you.” There’s no real argument or proof for the inciting incident (the instant and unconscious, or maybe even biological, desire to help) but it feels right enough. Well worth anyone’s time. (It’s very short.)
A pleasant introduction to a wide variety of psychological and storytelling ideas that can be and are successfully applied to the thinking and problem solving involved in the practice of designing things. Again, it’s just “pleasant” or a good primer.
Definitely worth reading if the title is what you’d like. I feel like Jung and the origins of analysis are less of a mystery now. I was surprised to find out that there is some scientific evidence now for some of Jung’s conjecture about consciousness, how much actually was conjecture, and how against the grain it was when he was developing it.
Something like an introduction to psychologist Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud and Jung who I, and apparently many other people, had previously known little about. If you’ve read any Dale Carnegie or Stephen Covey you’ve already had your own little introduction. It seems Adler was an influence on them.
With my own background reading I was reminded of Stoicism’s rejection of “things you can’t change” in understanding the world and Adlerian Psychology often felt to my mind like a more systematic and expansive restating of that idea. It often sounded pretty radical. Which is why the format of the book is so great. Presented as a dialogue between a philosopher steeped in Adler and a youth who thinks Adler sounds nuts you can come alongside the youth.
Recommended if you’re interested in practical life philosophies or how one might live better type stuff.
Given that I read this over one 24 hour period that must be a sure sign I think it’s good. It’s wizards and witches fighting back a corrupt and evil Wood with a capital W in a fantasy world that draws on Eastern Europe for inspiration. It’s also an emotionally real story about friendship, loss, honesty, and finding home. With cool action scenes, awesome magic, and gross monsters. I really liked it. It reminded me a lot of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel.
I’m super-excited to see that Novik has another fantasy book out. It’s near the top of my to-read list.
On my required reading list for people who are a “boss”. (The other being Managing Humans.) Do people report to you in any way? You’re a “boss”. I really appreciated the fundamental core first step to starting on the path of being a “kickass boss”: ask for people to provide you with radical candor and work to make sure they provide you with it. Everything starts there and you work out from that virtue and individual oriented position. Don’t think you’ve got this Radical Candor thing down with the medium post summary version. There’s good advice here on running a team and communicating effectively. As in, communicating in order to get things done.
Pretty decent summary on what it feels like to take risks, how to lean into that anxiety, making space for creative thinking, and protecting it. A little too surface level for me. I was looking for a deep dive and not something as broad. The best parts were the stories and anecdotes but I didn’t find enough of that either. Still pretty decent though.
Do you lead or manage teams of people who make things? This belongs on your shelf next to Managing Humans and Radical Candor. It’s written in a conversational style that focuses on where the theory of getting things done breaks down in real life — and then it tells you how to push through. Highly recommended. This book was a 10x confidence booster, corrective, and guide for me. Might have been the best book I read all year.
A great reference book on forming a product strategy, getting it into a roadmap, and implementing it milestone by milestone. My limited experience with full-blown “official” Agile development made some parts a little cloudier for me but if I made it through anyone can.
Read on the suggestion of an executive coach and surprised myself by liking this as much as I did. I think if you went into it with the attitude that the book is much like a coach in written form you might like it too. Another book about the power of habit and routine but with its own flavor of attitude, inspirational anecdata, and good advice. The book comes with a set of templates for analyzing ones life as well. Which I used, and to my surprise, also enjoyed. Almost perfect but for a hard sell that surrounds the book and the get-rich quick dressing that surrounds it all. It’s a hard-work over time with the right direction produces compound investment curves type book.
I love giving people books on how to form good habits and I wound up giving this one as a Christmas gift to someone.
Another recommendation from an executive coach. I was pretty skeptical of this one — just shorten the year and you’re done! — but it’s really good. The branding of the title is a bit much but think of it as a total system for approaching rapid advancement of goals in the short term towards a longer term vision while eliminating distractions through practical management of your time and, well, that’s the book in a nutshell from my point of view. Lots to learn here.
Almost too much to read. A compendium of literally everything one would want to know about leading a UX team from hiring, to building a lab, including finding room in a budget, to leadership skills, and evangelizing work internally/externally. It’s peppered with real stories from real managers and leaders through the UX field. Kind of an incredible effort though a slog at many points. I might have hit a record number of highlights here. There’s just so much practical and useful stuff in here.
I mined this book for insight into leadership skills and management anecdotes but what I especially enjoyed in the end was a newfound respect for military life. And most especially the sense of multi-generational teamwork along with the sense of dedicating ones life to something bigger than themselves. But back to leadership skills: I wound up highlighting almost an entire chapter on what it means to have a vision, develop it, share it, and drive towards it. Probably the best no nonsense explanation of that task out there.
Great series of essays on what makes Design Thinking. Most interesting for me turned out to be the essays on Service Design and Brand Design. A little dry at times so don’t go in expecting an easy read. But this is the book on Design Thinking.
What a great book. It’s more like a collection of short interviews all following the same short set of questions posed to a diverse group of accomplished people. And it’s fascinating. Interesting routine ideas, battle-tested advice, inspirational quotes, and a resulting shot of empathy when you realize how “the same” everyone is. I even loved the experience of reading it and talking about the people I was learning about or learning new things about.
6 stars out of 5. This page-turner business novel about identifying constraints in manufacturing, really in systems, and removing them was incredible. Highly recommended. I want posters in my office with the five focusing steps, and three key questions, and “what is the goal?” question from this book. I wish I read this decades ago.
Like a rotting, slimy, nightmare about sin, confession, and maybe responsibility. Does that sound like a good time? If so, read this poem. I recommend reading it out loud.
What I didn’t read
Notable books I started and put down for various reasons, skimmed and read at only a surface-level, or where I only read select parts …
High Output Management by Andy Grove. I think this was the second time I tried to read this classic. One day.
The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Started reading after watching an amazing Netflix documentary on the Romanovs but there was just too much in here for me to connect with the narrative.
Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner. There are large sections in here I think I’ve re-read more than a dozen times this year.
I started using Twitter again this year after a two-year absence that is really more like four or five years if you count me being really engaged with it. I wanted to make a note here about the three types of thing I avoided reading.
Negative tweets in general from people I follow. How? I did a mass unfollowing of accounts that were generally negative. I’m super-suspicious of what I like to call “black box algorithmic media”. That’s content delivered to me by an algorithm I have no insight into highly likely to be trained on prioritizing “it’s a train wreck and I can’t look away” content that will make me angry or upset. I don’t need that in my life in general and I especially don’t need to train a bot to make it worse so I don’t follow people who are likely to deliver that content to me.
Negative content from the people I do follow that I don’t really want to read. For the first time in about ten years of using Twitter I’m muting select terms to clean up my feed. It’s mostly political and current events type things that tend to skew towards polarization and general negativity. Things that an algorithm is going to love to surface to me in the worst kind of feedback loop.
Replies from people who don’t really want to have a conversation but instead want to have an argument. I just ignore these types of tweets now. This is the type of content that made me stop using Twitter in the first place. I recommend just avoiding it.
A note on Facebook
In a few weeks my Facebook account will have been deactivated for about a year. I think I’m better off for not having read anything on Facebook in that time. See my thoughts above on “black box algorithmic media” and consider that it wasn’t until about a month ago that I finally realized that I’d lost the compulsion to want to check in on Facebook. So, about nine or ten months to break that habit.
Some thoughts on how to push back against the gravity of “going it alone” when working remote or in an all-distributed company.
I have several friends at work who love the Zelda game series from Nintendo. And I played the first few games growing up so the video-game-famous quote from the first game, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” has been stuck in my head for years now. So maybe it’s no surprise that the other day while thinking about what it’s like to work in an 800+ person fully-distributed company where everyone is working “remote” I realized that there’s a high chance that this sort of sums up what I think is one of the most important survival mechanisms or truisms for that kind of work.
Here’s the idea broke down into two principles.
1. Remember that it’s dangerous to go alone.
2. Gear up when you go it alone.
Be careful about letting people go it alone and make sure you’re armed to the teeth whenever it looks like you might be.
Remember that it’s dangerous to go alone
This first principle should be pretty obvious but I find it surprising how often we (as in humans in general) tend to forget it. Going it alone kind of sucks. You wind up bearing the burden of what will likely wind up being more and more increasingly complex decisions. It’s all on you. Sometimes it means you can move faster but remember, it’s dangerous.
Here’s an example from outside of the world of Zelda.
“… pairs of people working together can make better decisions than the better member of the pair working alone.”
— Neuroscientists Uta and Chris Frith
Let’s reverse that, let’s say you’re a pretty smart person and make great decisions on your own. You’re missing out on making even better decisions when you’re not pairing up with someone. (Also, there’s a high chance you’re not as smart as you think you are — or maybe you’re even smarter than you think! Self-awareness can be tricky and your smarts are situational.)
Recently at work we’ve been experimenting with pairing up design leads with tech leads, or business leads with tech leads, to run projects. And experimenting with small groups of three designers leading design teams for products. We’ve found this to work extremely well.
As I look back on the first fruits of these experiments it’s seemed like unusually rapid progress has been made on complex problems with work that stretches across multiple teams, divisions, and even products. I like to think that this pairing has helped with that.
Inside our distributed design team for WordPress.com we try and work similarly. We take advantage of video calls to bring people together in the same way. A weekly “show and tell”, bi-weekly “team times” where we talk about how we work or share knowledge, pairing during video-based “working sessions” (remote control with Zoom is especially cool), and in general, just trying not to let anyone get stuck out there on their own on important projects.
Gear up when you go it alone
Note that in the Zelda game the intrepid hero Link is going it alone. He’s getting that sword because it’s dangerous out there. What’s the sword you’re going to bring with you when you go it alone? Like Dr. Seuss says, “Whether you like it or not, alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.”
The short answer is, I don’t really know yet, but it’s something I’m always trying to figure out. I think it looks a lot like just taking care of yourself.
Journal
Meditate
Exercise
Eat right
Get outside
Take real breaks away from work
The truth is that we need partners, we need guides, and we need friends. Lean on your relationships and networks at work. Ask for some help once in a while. Take care of yourself.
And be creative. I love this tweet from my colleague Alison Rand.
Distributed work often means not being able to properly catchup with a colleague after a long week and exhale. Finding meaningful ways to include that into your rituals is key to reflection and constructive feedback.
Distributed work is a different kind of work. That means taking the time to think creatively about new rituals and new ways of communicating with people.
I know that things like this can seem obvious but it also seems like they’re surprisingly easy to forget. I see people forgetting it all the time. Working in an all-distributed team means I can sit in my home office in the middle of Canada and work with people from all around the world. It also means I have a responsibility to make that work as well as it can for myself and my colleagues.
In other words, it’s worthwhile to be conscious about it.
Also, I’d love to hear about how you make your situation work for you if you work remotely or in an all-distributed company! Send me an email or leave a comment below.
We’ve started using Design as “best supporting actor/actress” as a metaphorical goal for our centralized Design teams at Automattic. It’s an interesting metaphor, right? It’s got to feel good to be up on stage clutching a golden trophy. But why not nominate Design for the starring role? Here’s how I’ve started to think about it.
Imagine it’s Oscar night at your company. Best picture? Those are the projects and goals that led to success for the business and our users this past year. We went out to see that story come to life. Best actor or actress? The product and platform teams that drove those projects to completion. The teams that gave all they had to realize the stories we came to see.
But now it’s the envelope for best supporting actor or actress being opened. Who’s going to win? If we’re doing our job right that’s our Design team. We had a big role to fill. We were there supporting the organization, our business metrics, our teams, and the experience our users are trying to tell us they need.
Think of Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight or Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. They weren’t the stars of the film. But it was their roles that helped to make the picture a complete and memorable work. And so Design will be there helping to bring it all together.
Recognizing a supporting role is really about recognizing teamwork. Recognizing the effort in supporting everyone’s effort and needs in order to make something greater than what any of us could do alone.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out awards in this category with their ninth go at the Oscars in 1936 they were recognizing that a motion picture is made up of many parts. A holistic enterprise where everyone supports a larger effort. That’s an award I look forward to our design teams winning.
An interesting analysis from John Cutler on Self-inflicted Chaos in organizations. What’s self-inflicted chaos?
Self-inflicted chaos
– Trying to do too much at once, and ending up doing nothing particularly well.
– Misjudging the blast radius of task or project, and the non-linear impacts that misjudgment will have on the whole organization.
Versus
– When a startup team is “killing it”, there tends to be an almost eery sense of focus.
– Fewer meetings, that produce “good ideas” or “wouldn’t it be cool ifs” and more “done, done, next thing on-deck, no blockers.”
Good to remember. Are you headed in the direction of eerie focus? And done, done, done? Or in the opposite direction in your work? And how can you make certain it’s the former day by day? Those are the questions I asked myself this morning. Workin’ on answering them in the processes I control.
We perceive information via three channels:
– Visual (60%)
– Audio (30%)
– and Semantic (10%).
When we share information via e-mail or any other sharing tool, it is perceived only via semantic channel which is usually not sufficient.
That is why it is wise to duplicate orally at least some data that have been shared in written form, and to provide visual support for audio information. Distant communication is less vivid than live, so we have to be more careful with jokes, avoid using slang, and so forth.
It is also more difficult to jump from one topic to another, therefore it is recommended to discuss issues and summarize after each of them.
(Passage lightly edited by me to up the visual support.)
Working in a 100% distributed organization I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a lack of duplication hurt communication. I’m come that conclusion because I’m pretty sure because I’ve seen it happen with myself in the past! It’s something I try and work on improving in my role as a leader.
What could this look like if we really pushed it? I tried to take this out a bit further when thinking about it with an extreme example of what that duplication could look like. A religious organization. Consider a church.
How many sermons or homilies are delivered every week around the world? Backed by how many books? Letters? Essays? Paintings and iconography? That level of duplication and variation on a theme is something you want in your toolkit if you’re going to maintain an idea and a community for millennia. (It sounds a bit like a science-fiction story when I think of it that way.)
Bringing that back to my day to day it makes me wonder: what could alignment look like for a year-level project if we applied a millennia-level alignment tool to it? If you made a practice of ensuring a concept or a plan was understood, example by example, week by week, month by month, channel by channel?
I’m not suggesting we go out and start practicing iconography and toiling at an illuminated manuscript. But consider the value in visual aids, support for ideas via a quick video demonstration, a regular review of important “whys” via a voice or video call, and, most importantly, a willingness to duplicate a message.
I like to think we all know of someone we admire. Someone who possesses a character or set of skills we’d like to see in ourselves. It’s certainly true of me and has been my whole life. What to do about it? We can’t go back in time and relive our lives and I’m sure we wouldn’t want to but there is something we can do.
We can close the gap.
We can start on something small pointed in the same direction as that person or persons. Starting small can really work. Starting with one push-up a day and growing from there led me into a 276-day streak of daily exercise. We can found new habits and move the biggest levers that we know of that will propel us on that journey of closing the gap between ourselves and the people we admire.
Here’s one lever: reach out to those people and talk to them. Send a friendly message along and ask for some advice. You might be surprised at who’s willing to help you. Think creatively of forcing functions like that. Look for things that will propel you along. Sometimes you have to trick yourself into doing what you know is right.
No matter how far away we are from where we want to be we can always work on closing the gap.
I came across the software design philosophy of “Worse is Better” via a post from John Maeda titled Perfection vs Just Ship It. The idea is that software which follows the “worse-is-better” approach has “better survival characteristics than the-right-thing.” You can read all about it in the original essay — The Rise of “Worse is Better” — but I made a table here for easier side-by-side comparison.
For a while now I’ve been using my iPhone wallpaper and lock screen to get some more art in my life. (I do the same thing on my Desktop with a rotating custom gallery in Momentum.) The current iPhone art is The Wave by 19th Century Russian artist, Ivan Aivazovsky. It’s apparently one of his most bleak works of sailors lost at sea but I just see people trying their hardest to work make the impossible work. Sometimes I think what I’m working on is impossible or at least extremely difficult. It’s nowhere near as difficult as that. It’s a good reminder.