Alexandersmap

    Category: Career

    • Living Atypically

      “We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to ‘be yourself.’ What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.” – Jeff Bezos, from his final letter to shareholders as CEO

      That pulling at you bit is the trick, isn’t it? We all want to be integral in the lives of those who mean so much to us. We all want to be the glue that holds it all together. We all want to belong, somewhere deep down. And it feels like for that to happen you must be… consistent. Predictable. Who you’re supposed to be.

      I don’t know what atypical means to Jeff Bezos. What’s the ask here? To work relentlessly for the company objectives and scratch and claw your way to the top, or something entirely different? The Amazon culture received plenty of bad press along the way. But doesn’t everything atypical? And Amazon is atypical, and in being so, culturally transformative. Bezos also said this in his letter:

      “If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with.”

      I can’t argue with this, can you? So what of us? As the world slowly opens up again, what are we to do with the freedom of movement? Will we return to what we once were, or gently alter course towards what we’ve always wanted to be? How are we creating value? For we’re more than individuals living our “best life”, we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.

      “You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.”

      We have this wee bit of time, and then the dance is done. The challenge is to keep thinking bigger, adding more value and meaning in your life and for those around you. This in itself is atypical in a way, isn’t it? So many bury themselves in distraction and pettiness and mock outrage. Where’s the value in that? Get outside of yourself and go build something of substance from that burning vision you have.

      I encourage you to read that shareholder letter. There’s a lot of boldness in there, and it’s clear that Bezos isn’t done yet. And neither should we be done. For there’s so much more to do. In our own unique way.

    • Worthy of Good

      “Isn’t it more appropriate for us humans to endure and be strong? We understand, after all, that we suffer for the sake of something good, either to help our friends, to aid our city, to fight on behalf of women or children, or for the most important and weighty reason of all, to be good and just and self-controlled. No one achieves this without pain. And so I conclude that because we humans acquire all good things by pain, the person who is himself unwilling to endure pain all but condemns himself to being worthy of nothing good.” – Musonius Rufus

      Looking back on the last year I wonder at the person I was a year ago, optimistic yet unsure about the pandemic. Working from home all the time was new; different and unfamiliar. A year later, the work is once again taking over. But we’re different, aren’t we? And so is the nature of the work.

      Ultimately, we either do the work or become masters at hiding from it. In general, and over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for us. Do the work that matters, harden the softness that threatens your effectiveness and eventually good things will come your way.

      The days fly by when you’re deep in productive and rewarding work. Over the last year there were plenty of days that felt both unproductive and unrewarding. Sometimes you feel that things will never get back to normal. But the rewards are there for those who push through the pain and frustration and loss. Which makes me wonder, have I done enough to be worthy of those rewards? Are we doing enough now?

      If we know we can do more, shouldn’t we?

    • Present

      “No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them, we may forget altogether to live them.” – Alan Watts

      “For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.” – Alan Watts

      There’s no moment to reflect on the present quite like a Monday morning. It informs where you are in meeting the expectations you have for yourself. Looking ahead at the work that must be done, and looking back at where you’ve just been. So how does that symphony sound?

      The last two days flew right by as I worked on my garage doors. If spending your entire weekend in your garage sounds off-putting, I understand. It’s not Paris or a beach in the Caribbean, but mix the focused work of crafting something of lasting value with a greatest hits playlist and suddenly the garage wasn’t such a bad place to linger after all.

      A weekend of accomplishment meets the quiet reset of another week. When you come off the glow of building something of substance, what do you do the next morning? Hidden in that Monday morning to-do list is our purpose and direction (sometimes its really well-hidden).

      Weekends are great, but 72% of our lives is lived between Monday morning and Friday night. Life presents us with a succession of Monday mornings, all asking the same question: How do you like me now? Love the tune or not, it’s your move.

    • Reach

      Momentum is about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance.

      Luck is a function of surface area.

      In the early days, effective people increase their luck by exposing themselves to more opportunities and more people.

      There’s a reason why successful people tend to be proactive: they’re expanding their reach.

      Reach is a serendipity engine.
      – @Julian

      Anyone who sells anything has stumbled upon the truth of what Julian Shapiro is saying here. It’s profoundly obvious that the more people you reach out to the more you’ll expose yourself to opportunities. The trick has always been finding the right people, and the right opportunities, at the right time. And until you’ve built a network up around yourself and located the 20% of people who will help you the most in life, the more you’ve got to just get out there and play the numbers game.

      Momentum through our rate of iteration and persistence applies to everything we do in life.

      Want to be fit? Do the work, push yourself to do more, be consistent. Repeat.

      Want to speak a different language? Learn the basics and then push your limits. Immerse yourself in a culture where you must stretch yourself to be understood.

      Want to be a great writer? Read more to know what great writing is. Live more to have something to say. Write more to get good at it. Publish more to gain a following. Connect with more people to find the 20% who will help you the most in your career.

      Do more. Expand your reach. Reach is a serendipity engine. Simple. And simply true.

      For people starting their careers, I’d point to these simple @Julian tweets as the core lesson. No need to buy the books, attend the success summits, or watch hours of video. Just do the work, intelligently and persistently, that moves you towards your goal.

      Reach involves a level of discomfort. The very act of reaching implies going beyond your current place. Going beyond your comfort zone. To places of uncertainty and rejection and the unfamiliar. We’ve all felt that when walking into a room where we don’t know anyone. What we forget is that most of the people in that room feel the same way.

      Reach leads to connection.

      So go out on a limb.

      When you continue reaching, the uncomfortable becomes comfortable. Opportunities come up. Friendships and alliances are formed. And you grow in new and unexpected directions.

      So by all means, reach.

    • Quicksand and Tasks of Consequence

      “Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Toby Litt

      “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

      The time we spend, these moments slipping through the hourglass, are either consequential or quicksand. And so the tasks filling those moments are loaded with questions – is this the right use of this brief moment in time or might there be a better place to spend the grains of sand? Is this a task of consequence, or is it a love poem to the self, mere folly?

      You know when you’ve stepped in quicksand. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough you recognize the stickiness of a habit and the sinking feeling that you’re not making any forward progress. Quicksand is tricky stuff. The one thing you don’t want to do when you’re in it is flail in place.

      Writing a blog every day might not be a masterpiece, but is it folly? The act of writing is pouring your grains of sand into a jumble of words and placing them just so. With a picture in your mind of what they might be if you could just get it right.

      The ultimate measure of tasks is whether you’re flailing in place or going somewhere consequential. What might you otherwise be doing with those grains of sand? The answer isn’t what are you doing now. Not really. It’s what are you becoming? That is what really matters. For what will your masterpiece be, in the end?

      Work towards that.

    • Reaching Beyond Yourself

      Just beyond
      yourself.

      It’s where
      you need
      to be.

      Half a step
      into
      self-forgetting
      and the rest
      restored
      by what
      you’ll meet.
      – David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself

      Reaching beyond yourself can be frustrating, humbling and sometimes humiliating. The ego wants to be in a happier place, warmly wrapped up in comfortable self-talk and stretching just far enough… but not too far. But that’s not where the growth is. That’s not where you’ll find your limits.

      If there’s a phrase that seems to be common amongst the overachieving set in this world, it’s “leaning in”. You don’t lean in when you’re just standing there – you’ll fall right over. You lean in when you encounter some resistance. Resistance appears when we challenge other people’s ideas about what is far enough beyond themselves, but more often than not it’s our own ideas on the matter. Why challenge the status quo? Where you are is pretty good, right?

      This will be posted on a Monday morning. Monday’s serve as a threshold of sorts – an entry into another work week. And another day we’re all blessed with the gift of living on the planet. Leaning in to the work ahead, the task at hand, will soon fill us with plenty of resistance to lean in on. But are you leaning in the right direction or simply being pushed a certain way? Just where do you need to be anyway?

      Setting your course implies moving beyond your current location – moving beyond yourself. Moving beyond implies self-forgetting who you once were and meeting your new self as you progress towards this new place. How many successful people tackle imposter syndrome? All but the most narcissistic and delusional. It’s normal to question where you’re going.

      Most of us rarely think in terms of self-forgetting, but we encounter it all the time. How many jobs seem to dead-end because your coworkers thought of you as whatever you were when you began working with them instead of what you would become? Sometimes you have to leave a company or an industry to get beyond the stalled beliefs others have of who you are to grow. But what of our own self-beliefs?

      Becoming whatever you’ll be, just beyond yourself, begins with leaning in to the resistance inside yourself and moving in that direction you know in your gut you ought to be moving in. The wonder lies in the transformation of who you believe you are as you move beyond that resistance. A move into something entirely different. Towards your new self.

    • Effort and Flow

      “Fatigue can teach us where effort is being misplaced.”- John Jerome, The Elements of Effort

      “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”
      ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

      Becoming immediately overwhelmed with the list of things that must be done is no way to start a Monday. When it bleeds over into Monday night and Tuesday morning, well, you find yourself confronting misplaced effort. We all have those weeks that start off way tougher than a week ought to start out, but the irony of it happening when I’d teed up the Jerome quote above isn’t lost on me. When things seem overwhelming, find your way towards back to the center.

      You don’t reach mastery and flow without slogging through the tough days. You don’t grow without challenge. If you’re feeling challenged, that’s a good thing. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, well, that’s something else entirely. Fatigue is a teacher, pointing us towards a better way that we might not see in the moment.

      Effort and flow each inform. There’s a balance between the two that we intuitively understand. Yin and Yang. Surfing the edge between order and chaos. Flow requires effort, and yet it seems effortless. This is the desired state for the meaningful work we seek out.

      Momentarily forgetting everything else in the pursuit of something of importance is where flow happens. You can reach this state when you focus to such a degree on the task at hand that you literally forget time is slipping by. We’ve all had those moments where everything is clicking, we are in our element, and things flow. It’s a desired state on the path to mastery, where skills and passion and focus are channeled into the task at hand.

      When things seem overwhelming, take a deep breath, reset, and look for another path towards the goal. Place your effort in a place that brings you where you need to be instead of fighting forces that bring you nowhere. Gain strength from adversity, and apply it to insight and direction. This too shall pass. What will we create in the interim?

    • The Intersection of Passion and Talent

      “Our visions are the world we imagine, the tangible results of what the world would look like if we spent every day in pursuit of our why.” – Simon Sinek, Start With Why

      Sinek’s talk is one of the most watched YouTube videos of all time, largely focused on business’s asking this critical question, “Why are we in business?” My own company is focused on this very question at the moment, prompting me to finally read Sinek’s book a few weeks ago. But you can’t ask why of your work without asking the same question of yourself. What is our purpose in our work, and in our lives? Why are you doing this? Think carefully, for it means more than a paycheck and a Netflix subscription when you get home.

      Every now and then we find ourselves stumbling upon a place where ideas converge, and where the path ahead divides into any number of directions. Which way do we go? If we all agree that life is shorter than most of us want it to be, doesn’t it make sense take the path that offers the greatest opportunity to fulfill that personal mission? Defining that mission is the tricky part. A mission that requires deep thinking.

      “What are you chasing? Why? Is the chase aligned with your deepest values and Ultimate Mission?” – Dr. Jim Loehr, The Personal Credo Journal

      We all have talents. But we can be pretty good at something and not be all that passionate about it. And you never really master something that you’re subconsciously going through the motions with. Whether career, art, relationships or athletic pursuits, if it doesn’t whisper to our soul we simply aren’t going to thrive in it.

      “Ikigai (pronounced “eye-ka-guy”) is, above all else, a lifestyle that strives to balance the spiritual with the practical. This balance is found at the intersection where your passions and talents converge with the things that the world needs and is willing to pay for.” – Chris Myers, Forbes, ‘How To Find Your Ikigai And Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business’

      Call it your “Ultimate Mission”, your “Why”, “Ikigai” or simply purpose. What you call it doesn’t matter so much as what it is, and what you do with it. These are powerful questions that demand deep thought. Determine where your passions and talents converge. Envision the world as you’d like it and set about making it. Align your chase with your deepest values. And perhaps the deepest question of all, determine what exactly you’re living for and do something about it.

      “It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.” – Dr. Leo Buscaglia

      I’ve re-written this particular blog post seven or eight times. Work is piling up in the in-box while I re-read it once again. Do I publish or just keep editing this indefinitely? Who really cares? Well, I do, and that’s as good a sign of where my passions meet my talents as anything. Who else would obsess over a bunch of words on a random Monday post? Maybe this is my something after all. At least a good chunk of it anyway.

      The things we do for love…

    • Coming to Light

      “If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work...

      ‘All the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours …’ A word grows to a thought — a thought to an idea — an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.”
      – Beryl Markham, West With The Night

      This coming to light through the sluggish Present, changing over years of work, is the tricky part. It’s the part you don’t always see in yourself and in the work you do. It’s the grind, the paying of dues, the 10,000 hours, the sweat equity of life. We gain experience in our work, and with a bit of luck, grow in prominence. But really we grow either way.

      Experience is a devilish word. We gain experience through doing the work, and we chase experiences outside of our work. Really, shouldn’t they be one and the same? Not to live for your job but to have your work be an integral part of your life. Writing a blog reminded me that the living part is every bit as important as the writing part. You don’t offer much in prose without experiencing the world a bit.

      The mistake most people make is in making the work their life, instead of an integral part of their life. “Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living Barely gettin’ by, it’s all taking and no giving” as Dolly Parton put it. That’s not meaningful work, that’s checking your soul at the door and inserting your self as a cog in a machine. Trading life for dollars.

      What Markham writes about is different from what Parton was writing about. Markham saw that spark of light, imagined something bigger and built it for herself. That’s the coming to light over a lifetime. Of course, Dolly Parton did the same thing, her life hasn’t been the character she played in a movie. And neither is ours.

      And here’s the thing, the dream isn’t about work at all, it’s about the vision you have for yourself and the world around you. The work is what you do to realize the dream – not a trade-off of hours away from living your dream at all, but the building of it one small step at a time. It all starts with a spark of light, your “why”, and then filling in the work necessary to reach for the vision.

      “Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.” – Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

      Duckworth jabs us in the ribs with that statement: what you could have done but didn’t. Don’t let your vision die on the vine. Whatever your vision – sailing around the world, hiking a summit or a list of summits, breaking a time in a marathon, building a company from scratch, writing a novel… it requires change and wading through the sluggish Present to get to that Tomorrow you want. Do the meaningful work that gets you there.

    • What Are You Waiting For?

      “Dare to be wise; begin! He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.” – Horace

      When you really think about it, what are we waiting for? The right time? That river keeps on flowing by and never runs out. We run out.

      Of time… opportunities lost watching it all run by. So then what of this hour? What shall it launch?

      Begin. Do you feel the urgency of time? Do what must be done.

      “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can” – Arthur Ashe

      Easy for me to say, right? Who am I to challenge you? Make no mistake, I’m dipping a toe in that water myself. For I have my own chasms to cross. The only way across is by putting action where words are and getting to it.

      I like a good challenge. Do you? What can you accomplish, see, or become in ten days? Focus on living rightly in each moment, getting across whatever your river is. From today to March 4th and written about right here on March 5th. Comment on that post if you’ve taken the challenge yourself. What are we waiting for? Hurry! For it’s already slipping away.