Alexandersmap

    Category: Career

    • Productive Change

      “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” ― Warren Buffett

      Some of us are inclined towards change, and force ourselves to stick with things longer than we might otherwise to see them through. Sometimes (as with a great marriage) the journey is worth the ebb and flow of a life together. Other times, as with a job or a house or an acquaintance, you find that the return on investment isn’t working out. Change can be the most productive energy we can spend in such moments.

      It’s possible to stay in a house too long. Neighborhoods change as the neighbors do. The stairs and furniture we’ve easily navigated our whole lives can become impossible obstacles when we grow old and frail. My own neighborhood is full of the same people that were here when I built this house years ago, and I’m seeing it all play out as it did for my in-laws, where they all grew too old to navigate the familiar but did it for too long anyway.

      I recently left a job I’d been in for years when flat year-over-year growth turned into a down year. There was no exit interview, which indicates they feel they have it all figured out. So their chronic leaks will probably continue. My own energy can be put into a better vessel. It turns out my timing was good with a receptive market ready for my skillset. It was never the company brand I was bringing to the market, but my own.

      A sound vessel with a good crew can weather almost any storm. It remains sound through maintenance and awareness of the forces bringing change. The same can be said for the crew. Together they can travel through time and place, picking up tales of adventure along the way. But time conquers all, and eventually the vessel or the crew need to change. Houses can be homes for generations of owners. Companies can grow with a new crew. And people can find a better way though this world on a different vessel.

      Change for its own sake is frivolous and wasteful. Change must be strategic and ultimately productive. But the same can be said for sticking with something instead of changing. It does us no good to forever bail a ship that is clearly sinking. Our habits, systems and routines, alliances with others, organizations we join, companies we represent in the market, the places we live and the vehicles that carry us to them—are all vessels that are either carrying us somewhere or sinking into the abyss. The question we ought to be asking ourselves is, is our energy being put into the right place or is it time for a change?

    • Crossing Bridges

      “When one door closes, fortune will usually open another.” — Fernando de Rojas

      We may navigate the world either closed within ourselves or open to all the possibilities it offers. If I’ve found any truth in my own winding road of a career (let alone life), it’s that opportunities always open up if we ourselves are open to opportunity. We ought to remember that we’re all connected, and by nurturing our connections we may build a bridge to many potential versions of our next self. The trick isn’t to cross the right bridge, the trick is to not burn the one we just crossed.

      When is a bridge too far to cross? Is it switching industries? Jumping to a competitor? Moving to another country or across the one we’re in? Putting up a sign for a political candidate the polar opposite of the one the neighbors have in their yard? In this connected world, I don’t believe we ever really reach a bridge too far so long as we live with character and purpose.

      When a bridge collapses it’s usually a case of one or both sides skimping on maintenance. Never let a bridge rust away from neglect. It doesn’t take much to maintain a connection, and one day we may wish to cross that bridge again. We’re all connected, aren’t we? At least when we want to be.

    • Nice, With Nerve

      “It’s not enough to be nice in life. One must have nerve.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

      “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

      The old expression that nice guys finish last isn’t completely accurate, but it ought to include the disclaimer that for nice guys not to finish last they have to show some courage and go after what they want in life. We all see the assholes who ascend to positions of power. They wouldn’t have it any other way, really. Nice people don’t have to be assholes to do consequential things in their lifetime, but they must have courage to push through the walls the world wants to box us in with. We must learn to fight for what we want in our lives.

      We can be nice but still have nerve. Nice people rise too. They just don’t leave as many bruised egos in their wake. Remember this when encountering walls and ceilings placed by assholes, but also by other nice people who meant the best for us. It’s not enough to persist, we also must insist and, just do what calls to us.

      Consequential things don’t just manifest themselves. Those climbs to summits, manuscripts and realizations of dreams require action and the nerve to start. We mustn’t wait another moment! It’s not a departure from identity to be bold, for being nice with nerve is how great things happen in this world.

    • Rerouting

      The more people I talk to, the more I understand that we’re all living a similar version of the story: Trying to make it all work, dealing with challenges as they come up, celebrating small wins and trying to recover from the setbacks and gut punches life throws at us. Nobody said this would be easy. Then again, nobody said we couldn’t change the rules or play a different game altogether.

      Talking to a work acquaintance who I thought had a pretty defined career lane right in front of him, he revealed that he’s taking a left turn onto a completely different route. My only response was encouragement to follow the route the internal GPS recommends. Our way is our way, not someone else’s. Who am I to tell someone which way to go with their life? All we can do is help them hear the call and support them when they find the courage to make a change.

      I’ve had similar conversations lately with others. Rerouting is never easy. Sometimes it’s forced upon us, sometimes we force it upon ourselves, but the change can be disorienting and a little terrifying when we don’t feel fully in control. But we ought to remember that we’re more resilient than we give ourselves credit for, and when we find ourselves turning onto another route it’s usually better to accelerate and see how far we can go than it is to do a U-turn.

    • What Are We Ready For?

      “Conquer yourself rather than the world.” ― René Descartes

      Yesterday wasn’t particularly productive. I mean in some ways it was very productive, but in the trading work for money way it wasn’t a stellar day. Blame it on Wednesday, but really it was my own inclination to do other things that felt more essential in the hour at hand. We ought to follow our gut more than the demands of the world. We know what we must do.

      Looking at it a completely different way, yesterday was very productive. I knocked out a blog post before breakfast, brought my favorite pup to play with her friends, spent a few hours doing some research work that mattered a great deal to me and had a good conversation with my bride after cooking her dinner. I also bought groceries, but hey, I don’t like to brag.

      The thing is, each day we move in the direction we want to go in with our lives is a good day. The ebb and flow of productivity in any particular activity isn’t as essential to our value as simply moving the chains from one hash line to the next. Get through this day largely intact and with some semblance of forward momentum, and survive to fight another day tomorrow. Insane productivity will have its time, or it won’t, but either way it’s telling us something about the direction we’re going with our life.

      Descartes popped up in my media feed this morning, just when I was telling myself roughly the same thing. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, as the expression goes. We ought to ask ourselves each morning when we face this gift of being alive, what are we ready for?

    • Trade Value

      “I do not believe making money in order to consume goods is mankind’s sole purpose on this planet.” —Bill Hicks

      A proper career should be built on helping as many people solve problems, in the most efficient way, as possible. Making money is simply keeping score of the life we’re trading for others. When we add high value, we should make more money…. in theory. Alas, the system is gamed towards the wealth accumulators. I believe philosophers, teachers and healthcare workers ought to make more than stockbrokers, but I don’t get to set the rules.

      To then take all that life traded for money and exchange it for frivolous stuff is the biggest waste of our time. What is arguably more valuable is an exchange of greater experiences in a lifetime for that money earned helping others. It’s the best of both worlds when you think about it.

      The game of consumerism is often fatal to a great life. Life is measured in time, but also how in how we spend that time. Magical moments sprinkled throughout a lifetime, or better, spilling over from abundance, add to a life well-lived. That’s what I call a great trade.

    • What’s Good For You

      James, do you like your life?
      Can you find release?
      And will you ever change?
      Will you ever write your masterpiece?
      Are you still in school
      Living up to expectations, James?
      You were so relied upon
      Everybody knows how hard you tried
      Hey, just look at what a job you’ve done
      Carrying the weight of family pride
      James, you’ve been well behaved
      You’ve been working hard
      But will you always stay
      Someone else’s dream of who you are?
      Do what’s good for you
      Or you’re not good for anybody, James
      — Billy Joel, James

      Following the dream someone else established for you is the surest path to the quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau wrote about in Walden. We must eventually break free of those expectations and follow our own path to find ourselves. For some of us, it comes years after school and many rungs up a few too many ladders in a career of figuring out why this thing or that didn’t quite resonate for us the way we thought it would when we stepped onto it. For me, the writing was always the thing I should have done but for the things I thought I had to do.

      Billy Joel has been on a heavy rotation on the playlist lately, and his question to old school friends seems to pop up frequently. Will you ever write your masterpiece? Will you always stay someone else’s dream of who you are? Tough questions, but the thing is, the answer reveals itself over time.

      Most of us grow out of other people’s expectations eventually. Most of us work to master something important to us, even if it’s a hobby. I speak to people who light up when they talk about their garden or hiking the same mountains over and over again or playing pickleball—whatever—and the joyfulness of the pursuit to mastery is obvious.

      Will I ever write my masterpiece? Who knows? But we find the things that work for us and pursue them with a focus that only love of the pursuit derives. At some point, it doesn’t matter what other people’s expectations are, only that we are doing what we love to do in the time that we have. That’s how to live a life.

    • Finding So Good

      “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” — Steve Martin

      We’re into graduation season once again, so Steve Martin’s advice seems to come up more frequently now than at other times of the year. It’s great advice: get exceptionally good at anything and people will naturally be drawn to you to do the thing you’re really good at. Be average and swim in the pool of mediocrity hoping to stay afloat. The choice seems obvious!

      The trick is to get really good at something that enough people want. If you make the world’s best grilled cheese sandwich, people will line up to try it and post pictures to prove they were there to savor it. If you’re the best in the world at selling wooden pencils, you may scrape out a modest living but every day is a struggle to make the pencil relevant again to people who long ago moved on to typing and signing with a pen. We must surf the edge of relevancy in our choice for so good.

      I post this on a Monday—how many of us are excited about that thing we’re really good at? Does it move the chains forward in a world that is increasingly bickering about what the rules are? When we one day retire from the career we’ve built for ourselves, will our peers say there will never be another quite like us, or will the next person up quietly slip into our role and adjust our old chair to fit? Seen in that light, have we chosen the right thing to be so good at?

      The thing is, there’s still today to be exceptional and to try a different path. We may choose to be an exceptional parent or soccer coach or gardener or blogger first. We may choose to write our own rules about what so good means to us and those most important to us in our lives. That may not make us famous for our grilled cheese sandwiches, but perhaps locally famous within the circle of souls who complete our world. Fame and money can’t buy you the love of your family and friends, only transactional attention. Transactions are the opposite of engagement. Who get’s ignored in this world when the transaction is complete? Our aim ought to be more staying power than a family photo for the Christmas card.

      We are average at most things we do in life, and if we choose wisely and invest enough skill and attention to it, really good at a very short number of things. A guy like Steve Martin chose to be really good at comedy, acting, playing the banjo and writing. I’d bet that he’s got a great family life too. That requires a lot of focused energy on one thing at a time, but he’s done it. We can look at people in history with a similar track—Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo de Vinci both come to mind—who pull this off. These are exceptional lives that rise above the average.

      So what of us? We may not be graduating this month and posting pictures with proud parents, but we are beginning again in whatever path we’ve chosen. We ought to listen to the call to greatness and choose what will define this next stage of our own lives. To ignore it would be a waste.

    • Haven’t Found Right Yet

      “Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it’s safe. It is also out of date. It’s the opposite of originality… Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant… it’s wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There’s no talking to them.” — Paul Arden, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be

      It takes an advertising person to call it like it is, and Arden is certainly that. I read all sorts of books just to get a different perspective than my own. Arden sold me on his book with the subtitle: “The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden”, which is pretty clever (for who can argue the point?) and likely sold a few extra copies to people like me who appreciate a good spin of words. It’s not a heavy lift by any means, but there are a few insights like the one above that make it worth the quick read.

      The takeaway here is that holding on to our rightness is suffocating our potential to become something more than who we are now. If we aren’t currently masters of our craft, whatever that is, then we likely haven’t found right just yet (believing we have is simply keeping us from ever reaching it). Looking at the crafts we desire to master with a clear eye, which have we come closest to reaching mastery in? Put another way, if good is the enemy of great, what have we simply settled into good enough at? We owe it to ourselves to stop posturing right all the time and make more mistakes. Good enough is a trap.

      The truth of the matter is, we never quite master anything in our lifetimes, even as we aspire to excellence (Arete). Good enough is often all most people want for themselves, me included. But arete whispers in the quiet moments, challenging the status quo. We must stop dwelling on how right we believe we are to have arrived here and dare to make mistakes more often. Otherwise, we’ll remain in a rut that feels attractive for its familiarity but is simply a destination with no end. We’ll never find excellence in a rut, we must climb up to reach it.

      Carpe diem already.

    • Conducive to Brilliance

      “Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.” — Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

      There’s something brilliant hiding in there somewhere. We believe it because we feel it, even if it takes its sweet time meeting us halfway. Or more likely, brilliant is waiting for us to meet it halfway. The truth is, all things have their time and when the work is done we’ll all be delighted for having completed it. Yet we live in a world, and with a mind, that demands results today.

      Newport’s book isn’t revelatory, but it is an important reminder that our most important work takes time—and a little time off—to reach a higher pinnacle. Sure, we want results now, but we’re talking about the work of our lifetime, not some simple project we could push out in a week. The trick is to know the difference, and settle into the journey that takes us there.

      We reach a place in our lives where accomplishment isn’t the primary goal anymore, but contribution is. We want to do work that matters, not just check boxes on a meaningless career path. In moments of clarity, we might see the forest for the trees, but the grind of important work means there’s a whole lot of trees to navigate. It’s natural to wonder: does it matter in the end? Sometimes it’s only a means to an end. Which leads to other questions. And so it is that life is one riddle after another in this way.

      The answer is to set up a routine that is conducive to brilliance. This blog may be all over the place at times, but it’s about the process of writing and publishing something every day that matters most. There are days I curse myself for having begun the journey, but I’ll get that one random like on a post from six months ago or a text message of support from someone that inspires me to keep going. We can always quit tomorrow, right? Just not today.

      The question is whether we’ll run out of runway before that brilliant work can take off. Plenty of great ideas crash and burn in this way. Still, we can’t worry about the length of the runway, only that we’re gaining momentum and lift. So we set a sustainable timeline (runway) and work daily towards achieving liftoff. That we might one day soar.