Alexandersmap

    Tag: Simon Sinek

    • More and Less

      “By doing less, you might accomplish more.” — Simon Sinek

      Not that long ago, I decided I hadn’t read enough books this year. It wasn’t a matter of not reading, it’s just that the books I was reading were pretty weighty affairs that took a lot to get through. Serious books, if you will. I still have some of those serious books awaiting my attention, but I’ve mixed in some more fiction recently to make reading more enjoyable again. Reading isn’t a chore, after all, it’s a privilege available to all of us who follow the light.

      We measure our lives through the lens of more and less. I’ve been reading plenty, but not plenty of books. A shift to more pleasurable reading is meant to kindle the fire, if one needs intention at all, but it’s also more fun than slogging through more academic reads. We only have so many hours in the day for someone’s thesis. We must enjoy the pages as we must enjoy our days.

      We can’t expect more than the 24 hours in the day, but we can use those 24 hours better with less: Less distraction, less overindulgence in habits that slow our body and mind, less of the habits we’ve carved out time for that aren’t offering the return on investment we once thought they would. Our reward is more: more productive creativity in our chosen path, more engagement with people who matter most, more energy to tackle the bold pursuits we aspire to add to our days.

      We’re running out of days in the year. It’s a wonder how time flies so quickly. Tempus fugit. We don’t know how many more days we’ll have, just that it’s less than what we had yesterday. Given that, we ought to take seriously these questions of more and less, and work to optimize our time, well, more.

    • Stable Centers

      “Continue to progress, do not stagnate. Consider a spinning top. It moves around a stable center. It spins and spins until it finally falls over, exhausted” — Awa Kenzo, Zen Bow, Zen Arrow

      In this blog I refer a lot to Stephen Covey’s concept of pushing the flywheel, and having momentum in our lives through rigid positive habits. The thing about momentum we sometimes forget is that it’s not about the spinning, though surely action is essential, but about the stable center. We may spin like a whirling dervish, but without a stable center we quickly spiral out of control. Like centrifugal force, positive momentum abhors instability.

      We see this in people, companies and political parties that have lost the thing that made them stable. Sports teams may peak at the level of their superstars, but unravel over the course of a season without strong leadership from the role players that are the true foundation of a team. We call them the glue that holds a team together, or lifts it up when things go poorly. It’s those people in an organization who exemplify how things ought to be done and lead by example.

      That stable center in an individual is our morality and sense of purpose. It’s our why, to borrow from Simon Sinek. When we have this in our lives, we do the work that must be done, we don’t skip over the little things that mean a lot, we are proactive in our days, and we have agency over our lives. Why do we get up every day to start anew? It’s often the people in our lives we hold most dear, isn’t it? Family and friends offer community and a sense of place. Teams, congregations and great company cultures do this as well. We need something bigger than ourselves to make our lives larger and more meaningful. When we have it we feel complete, when we don’t we crave it and desperately seek it out.

      Stable centers are usually obvious to us when we have them in our lives. We know what centers us, because our life revolves around these why’s. We are capable of spinning ourselves into greater and greater orbits when our footing is solid. Finding stable centers thus becomes as essential to our growth as establishing good habits and surrounding ourselves with the right people. In fact, when we do these things, we find that we ourselves become a stable center for others. And isn’t that a magical feeling?

    • The Truth of the Work

      Work is a funny thing, for it represents so much of our identity, yet, if we live well, it’s only a small part of who we are. For if this life is about the accumulation of experiences, relationships, knowledge and self-understanding, work adds to each of these things but isn’t all of any of them. We want to believe that our work has purpose, and so chafe at the jobs that seem trivial, menial, unfulfilling and generally dead ends in a climb up the career ladder. But this outlook misses so much of what makes work meaningful.

      When I look at the accumulation of contributions I’ve made in my work, it’s easy to see where I made a difference and where my contribution felt insignificant to the overall progress of the companies I worked for at the time. Ultimately, what mattered was showing up and being present for the work at hand. The value derived isn’t always up to us to determine, only that we do our part.

      “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” ― Thomas Merton

      We derive the most fulfillment from engagement with others, not from the accumulation of more wealth than the next corporate climber. Don’t get me wrong, financial security solves problems that linger in poverty, but at some point the pursuit of wealth and status is nothing but a distraction from the pursuit of meaning. Perhaps this is why those stories of people leaving the corporate ladder to run the country store or work in a non-profit are so fascinating. Deep down most of us just want to contribute and be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

      “Consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture—the strong sense of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEP to the receptionist, all share.” — Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

      As Walt Whitman reminded us, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. All the meetings and the key performance indicators lumped together are nothing but a means to an end. We’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves in our time, and showing up for work is a demonstrated commitment to that mission. What we realize in the end is that the work we choose to do is an expression of who we want to become.

    • My 12 Favorite Books of 2021

      I’ll finish the year having read somewhere between 34-36 books. That includes some heavy lifting non-fiction, some escapist pager turner fiction and a couple of books of poetry. All but one are older classics that I finally tackled in 2021. We ought to live a bit outside ourselves more often, and reading is an easy way to travel back in time, far into the future, or to places we thought we knew better. Here, in no particular order, are some favorites:

      The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods – A. G. Sertillanges
      “If you produce nothing you get a habit of passivity; timidity grows continually and the fear caused by pride; you hesitate, waste your powers in wasting, become as unproductive as a knotted tree-bud.”

      Referenced in Newport’s book (next), I immediately purchased a copy and placed it on the top of the pile. The book is a bit dated, certainly written through the lens of a French Catholic philosopher in the first half of the 20th century, but bits of brilliance shine through. I’ll return to this one now and then in the future.

      Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
      “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy.”

      Reading this book finally pushed me to delete Facebook from my phone, and to put the phone itself in another room when I want to get deep work done. The world is increasingly distracted, but we don’t have to be. The people capable of focusing and rising to the next level will fare well in a world where artificial intelligence and globalization threaten more and more jobs. Go deeper and differentiate from the shallow, distracted masses.

      The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey
      “When a team defines its lead measures they are making a strategic bet. In a sense, they are saying, “We’re betting that by driving these lead measures we are going to achieve our wildly important goal.” They believe that the lever is going to move the rock, and because of that belief, they engage.”

      A classic in business writing, this book outlines the steps needed to identify and execute on the most important goals for an organization. The secret is deep focus on no more than one or two wildly important goals. The magic is in drawing the entire organization in to help make the dream a reality. Most people want meaning in their careers. When they identify the actionable tasks that contribute to the overall win and execute on them, everybody wins.

      Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania – Erik Larson
      “In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25 P.M., [Kptlt. Walther] Schwieger wrote: It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire another torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.”
      Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the Lusitania, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.”

      Larson is one of the great historians of our time, and he unpacks moments like the Blitz and the sinking of the Lusitania with a style that few can match. We all sort of know the story of the Lusitania, but Larson unpacks the tragedy of it in a page-turner style. This book will fascinate you, and even as you know the inevitable ending you’ll be surprised by many of the details.

      Mastery – Robert Greene
      “Your true self does not speak in words or banal phrases. Its voice comes from deep within you, from the substrata of your psyche, from something embedded physically within you. It emanates from your uniqueness, and it communicates through sensations and powerful desires that seem to transcend you. You cannot ultimately understand why you are drawn to certain activities or forms of knowledge. This cannot really be verbalized or explained. It is simply a fact of nature. In following this voice you realize your own potential, and satisfy your deepest longings to create and express your uniqueness. It exists for a purpose, and it is your Life’s Task to bring it to fruition.”

      How do we reach mastery? Most don’t. Most settle for a life of unfocused and relative comfort, unwilling to spend the hours of apprenticeship to master their craft. For those who want to rise above the average, this is an excellent playbook. Greene walks the talk–few take the time to research and perfect a topic as he does.

      Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
      “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

      Enlightening book that reveals how humans got to be who we are. Harari makes a strong case for the rise of humanity being great for us but catastrophic for every other species. This is a foundational book that I’d delayed reading until 2021 despite consistent prompts from friends.

      Keep Sharp: Building a Better Brain at Any Age – Sanjay Gupta M.D.
      “We don’t usually think about dementia when we’re entering our prime, but we should, because it provides a remarkable opportunity. Data from longitudinal observational studies accumulated over the past few decades have shown that aside from age, most other risk factors for brain disease can be controlled. That means you indeed have a powerful voice in controlling your risk for decline. As you might guess, some of the most influential and modifiable factors related to that decline are linked to lifestyle: physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, smoking, social isolation, poor sleep, lack of mentally stimulating activities, and misuse of alcohol.”

      Brain health is top of mind for me, and this book proved a reassuring playbook for controlling some of what happens with my own brain health over the second half of my life. Not surprisingly, what’s good for the body is usually good for the brain. Good nutrition, restorative sleep, proper hydration and exercise all help the brain as much as the body. Knowing this, you can fold the right kind of lifestyle choices into your daily routine and put yourself in a better position to have a vibrant, healthy brain to our final days.

      The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts – Shane Parrish
      “If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done.”

      A playbook for conceptual thinking, this is one of three books Parrish published on mental modelling. It’s a helpful guide for framing a problem or decision using proven methodology. Parrish has an excellent podcast called The Knowledge Project that builds on this framework by exploring just how the world’s great thinkers frame their own decisions and build great organizations.

      West With The Night – Beryl Markham
      “The air takes me into its realm. Night envelops me entirely, leaving me out of touch with the earth, leaving me within this small moving world of my own, living in space with the stars.”

      This is a breathtaking book that sparkles with magic. Markham writes with an elegance that Hemingway would strive to match, raising the bar for writing in the 20th century. If you want to travel back in time to the barnstorming days of early flight, elephant hunting when the elephants had the upper hand and a glimpse of the changing landscape of Africa between the two World Wars this book is for you.

      Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
      “Before it can gain any power or achieve any impact, an arrow must be pulled backward, 180 degrees away from the target. And that’s also where a WHY derives its power. The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.”

      Why do we align ourselves with brands, political parties or people? Because they speak to us on some level. We desire to belong to something. How we arrive at that feeling of belonging is the “why” that drives the “what” something is and “how” it’s done. Organizations that do this well, think Apple, create a compelling case to identify with the brand. The very best leaders create a compelling why.

      On the Road – Jack Kerouac
      “Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

      On the Road nagged me for years. For a few years in my early 20’s I chased the legend of Kerouac through the streets of Lowell, Massachusetts. I drank in some of the same bars that Kerouac drank in. Walked the same streets he grew up on. But I stubbornly kept his most famous book at arm’s length. I made a point of reading it in 2021 and saw the brilliance in his prose even as it betrayed the lifestyle that would eventually kill him.

      Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life – Richard Rohr
      “By the second half of life, you have been in regular unwelcome contact with your shadow self, which gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life. Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.”

      If we’re lucky, we all live two lives. We eventually transcend the character we are in the first part of our lives and “fall upward” into a higher self. I wouldn’t say I’ve arrived at that higher self, but I’m aware that it’s there should I stay on the path. Reading is a big part of that journey, and this and the other books finished in 2021 are stepping stones across the shallow stream to the other side.

    • 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…

    • The Ultimate Competition is With Ourselves

      “Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain...

      When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.“

      “If there were no trust, then no one would take risks. No risks would mean no exploration, no experimentation and no advancement of the society as a whole.” – Simon Sinek, Start With Why

      If there’s one aspect of my personality I work to change, it’s my inherent competitiveness in most aspects of my life. An underlying desire to get the upper hand in conversation. To come out on top in sports. To be atop the leader board in my career. That mindset limits you in what you can achieve, because as Sinek points out, if you’re perceived as pursuing self-gain, then you’re viewed as a competitor in a world of scarcity.

      The thing is, the world isn’t aligned against you at all. The world is doing the best it can to survive another day, put food on the table, to get through the awkwardness of an initial conversation and get back to what they were doing before they encountered you. Sure, some people are completely out for themselves, but they’re easy to spot after a few words or by reading body language. And what do we do when we read that? We recoil a bit and put up our defenses. Why would we expect others to treat us differently should we telegraph “ME” in everything they do?

      Competing with others distracts us from rising to personal excellence. It takes our focus off of our own improvement and onto others. We don’t achieve mastery without focusing on incremental improvement. Keeping up with the Joneses draws us away from our own inner voice and the things that must be done. But worse, it positions us against them.

      Competition has its place, of course. What would sports or chess or debate be without competition? A dull world of participation awards, that’s what it would be. Serena Williams or Tom Brady didn’t rise up to become the best in their individual sports chasing participation awards. They may have started with a personal chip on their shoulders that drove them to succeed at uncommon levels, but each is quick to pull up others around them too. You can be the very best without being an asshole. In reality, the assholes don’t quite reach the pinnacle anyway, because nobody wants to help them.

      Reaching mastery doesn’t mean standing atop the bodies of your conquered enemies, it means reaching deeper into ourselves and pulling out the brightest bits of our own possibility. And then turning around and lending a hand to those making the climb themselves. Trust and mutual respect are built in such moments. They, in turn, will turn to lend you a hand in your own moment of need. And together you can rise to greater heights than you might on your own.

      Trust in ourselves begins to emerge when we develop our own self-worth. And that comes in keeping promises to ourselves in the work we do. In the increments of effort that matter most, done with consistency and honesty. The ultimate competition is with ourselves, and once we begin to master that we view the rest of the world less as a threat than as a barometer of progress.