Criticize By Creating.

It’s easy to criticize from the stands.

What’s more difficult is stepping into the game.

When you take yourself from spectator to player, you open yourself to vulnerability. To criticism. To the opinion of every casual passerby.

Playing the game allows you to approach problems differently. It grants you a newer, more intimate perspective on the game play.

You don’t have access to the 360 degree view of the guy in the nosebleed section yelling directions at you.

When you’re in the game, you must approach things head on. You must adapt quickly. You must perform and respond according to the limitations of your line of vision and periphery.

You don’t have time to evaluate what happened in other areas of the game. You don’t have time to banter about plays that happened in an earlier quarter.

You must be present in the game as it’s played.

I think this metaphor opens up an interesting thought experiment for life, for business, and for relationships, too.

For the things I’m participating in, what’s my default orientation?

Am I offering up opinions as a spectator? Or am I present, giving the game a competitor’s dedication?

I’ve noticed an interesting observation from my own experience.

It may seem counterintuitive, but spectating exhausts me far more than participating fully in the game of life. Having skin in the game makes it more invigorating.

Both take energy. Actively participating produces positive energy. Criticizing as a spectator yields negative energy.

If you want to live a better life, I say play the game. Don’t shout from the stands how to do it better.

Enter the game. Criticize by creating.

 

The Story You Tell Shapes Your Customer Expectations

You make silent agreements with your customers the day they encounter your brand.

Some brands don’t offer much. They don’t ask for much in return.

But every brand offers something. Beside the products and services they sell, every brand tells a story.

The story manufactures the frame your customers view you in.

Customers flock to good stories. They treat poor stories with indifference.

When you tell a good story, you set the bar high for yourself. Customers bond with this.

People enjoy businesses that enhance their own views of themselves. In a way, your company values help make your customers better people, too.

Think about yourself as a customer. Think of a company you identify with and why.

I think of companies like Apple, Amazon, and Nike.

The stories that introduced me to these companies stuck. The companies helped me see something in myself. Their story resonated with my identity. They also unlocked an aspirational view of myself.

When companies get this right their brand strengthens and they earn enduring customer relationships.

People want to identify with brands that get them. They abandon companies that get them wrong.

As a company, you’re responsible for telling your story. You’re also responsible for holding yourself to the story.

The story you tell also influences people to expect certain kinds of behaviors. When you behave inconsistently with the story you tell, your customers feel it.

Consider two examples:

Whole Foods

When I’m in a hurry and looking for healthy food fast, there are not a ton of options. But Whole Foods has been my go-to for nearly three years. I eat there a lot. It’s quick. Reliable. Delicious. And the people are nice.

But tonight I found out they replaced their entire menu with burgers only. It outraged me.

I asked several employees what they thought. Most seemed upset about the change.

To me, the move felt entirely out of character for Whole Foods.

Chick-Fil-A

A few months ago I swang through Chick-Fil-A for breakfast.

The street adjacent to the store looked like a garbage truck had lost a few bags and raccoons had found them.

It covered most of the road. But none of it was in Chick-Fil-A’s lot.

The trash was not their problem.

I remember immediately thinking, “I bet they send someone out to pick up that trash.”

Sure enough. When I made it around the drive-thru, I saw a girl in a bright red shirt and black pants picking up garbage.

To me, the move perfectly captured my view of Chick-Fil-A’s brand: be good stewards in everything.

Bringing It All Home

Your brand tells a story. Your brand as a person. As a company.

Everything you do becomes part of your brand.

When you behave in ways that align with people’s vision of you, you strengthen your message with them. When you behave in ways that violates their vision of you, it conflicts with their expectations.

Behave however you want. But beware, if your behavior contradicts the story you tell, people feel it.

The world wants an authentic you. Give it to them.

Solve for X

If you want something, go get it.

Don’t get caught up worrying about what other people think. Or what doubts they have.

Whatever you want in this life can be yours. It’s a simple formula, really.

But first you must decide: what do you want?

Priorities change. Circumstances change. You change.

Each change brings new features of the world to life around you.

Getting lost chasing any number of the options around you is easy. Choosing one thing to fixate on is difficult.

Once you choose, the rest becomes easy.

It allows you to remove the distractions of optionality and commit to the experiment.

One experiment. To dedicate your heart and soul to the mission of acquiring that one thing.

Other people pretend to do this. They will nonchalantly dismiss your efforts to obtain whatever you’re after. They’ll casually talk about how they tried and failed in their own half-assed pursuits.

Not you. If you want something, you go get it.

Don’t listen to anyone else. Tune out the doubts.

Focus on your own personal mission. And go get it.

Commit To The Experiment

What if you couldn’t change your mind until you allowed things to run their proper course?

I call it committing to the experiment.

If you want to test for something, construct a hypothesis and establish a window for testing. Consider taking a new job, for example.

I hypothesize one year’s time working at Company XYZ will enhance my career mobility, quality of life, and earning potential.

Focus on specific outcomes.

  • How will running this experiment impact my life?
  • What is the expected value or return of a successful experiment?
  • How will I measure success?
  • What am I willing to invest in completing this experiment?

Committing becomes easy when the end goal is both near and under constraints.

The constraints set a clear window of opportunity to satisfy the question you needed answered. These also establish an expiration date to let yourself off the hook.

More importantly, it allows you to quash optionality.

Experiments encounter turbulence. Unaccounted for variables will attempt to trip you up. The fewer you allow to derail you, the better.

Optionality can kill progress.

It’s the voice in your head telling you to turn back. It’s that silent killer asking you, “What’s in this for me?”

By committing to the experiment at the onset, you free yourself from this bondage. Experiments eliminate the cognitive overheard of wondering what else you could be doing.

Give yourself the freedom to run tests uninhibited. Commit to the experiment.

The Enemy of Progress

Someone reminded me this morning of a Harriet Tubman quote:

“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

It made me think.

What if the greatest barrier to our own personal freedom is the belief we’re already free?

It’s almost as if once the idea of freedom is acquired, we stop yearning for it. We accept the status quo as the trappings of a free world.

In other words, we don’t go looking for things that aren’t lost. Just like we don’t try to learn things you think you’ve already mastered.

I’m reminded of an alleged quote from Socrates:

“All I know is I know nothing.”

Perhaps it was the intellectual humility with which he approached knowledge that led him to develop such profound ideas during his lifetime.

By refusing to coronate himself king of any particular subject, his admission of still being a learner allowed him to continue yearning for more.

I wonder how radically different our lives could be if we approached everything with the same brazen awareness.

No matter how much progress we make, there will always be mountains left to climb.

Help People Get Closer to What They Want

Ask people what they think about sales.

They usually conjure up some image of a greasy used car salesman or insurance broker shilling crap.

This image paints sales as the act of persuading someone to buy shit they don’t need. Of a self-serving shark slinging stuff for his own benefit.

I don’t see that as real sales. Predatory sales, maybe. But it misses the mark.

Real sales involves helping people get closer to what they want.

It’s consultative. Like a doctor prescribing a solution to make your pain go away. Or like a librarian recommending a good book.

One of my favorite economists once wrote a great tome called Human Action. In it he describes the necessary conditions for someone to take action. These apply directly to buying decisions:

  1. Unease or Dissatisfaction with their present state of affairs
  2. Vision of a better state
  3. Belief they can reach the better state

Sales isn’t about lubricating the process to move someone to a different state. Sales is about understanding the nature of someone’s unease or dissatisfaction. It’s quantifying their vision of a better state – not your vision of a better state. And it’s helping them reach the conclusion that they have what it takes to reach the better state.

Great salespeople know a secret. Sales is not about the sales person.

It’s about another human being. It’s about that human being’s current state of affairs. It’s about that human being’s vision for a better state. It’s about that human being believing him or herself capable of reaching that better state.

The best sales experiences aren’t transactional or one-sided. They’re relational and mutually beneficial.

Sales enables the transformation of lives.

Sales works best when one human being helps another human being remove friction, unease and dissatisfaction from his or her life.

Sales is about making people more free. Not burdening them with more shit they don’t want.

That’s what I imagine when I think about sales. Sales enables other people to live fuller, richer, more meaningful lives.

Simplicity. Iteration. And Systems.

I like to build systems.

For everything. All the time.

Managing my time? I have a system.

Managing my to-do list? I have a system.

Managing my reading list? I have a system.

Managing the way clothes are arranged in my closet? I have a system.

Part of this is driven by the fact I hate doing things over and over again. Anytime I can replace that or minimize the pain with a system, I do it.

Often this kind of thinking comes at the expense of simplicity.

Sometimes simple is the right solution. Not always. But it’s certainly best when you’re first starting anything out.

Simplicity allows you to increase your rate of iteration. It allows you to test things. It allows you to improve things on your way to perfection.

If you start out trying to think about the perfect way of doing things, the perfect way of optimizing things, or the perfect way to systematize something…before you ever start doing something, it leads to inaction.

You get lost in the analysis – like I often do. And as they say, you can reach the paralysis by analysis state. Where you get so lost deep thinking about how something will or will not work that it prevents you altogether from just doing the damn thing.

Sometimes it’s a real hurdle. Other times it’s a huge time saver later on.

There’s a beautiful happy medium that takes form in process iteration.

Iteration in and of itself can be approached systematically.

It allows you to start small. To start simple. To take action swiftly.

Then run tests. Evaluate. Course correct. Adapt.

Before you go roll out some major new system, try to strike the root of the underlying problem you’re solving for.

Maybe you don’t need some robust solution. Maybe a simple fix will solve your pain. But if you do need a system, you’ll at least be closer to understanding which system.

A Key To Better Feedback & Relationships

Everything get easier when you care about other people.

That’s it. That’s the secret.

There’s a lot of cliche-sounding advice in the world about how you should show compassion when you give feedback. And about how managing people is easier when you take an interest in others.

It’s not wrong. But it’s a lesson easier won through experience.

If you want to improve the way you interact with other people, you actually have to care about them. You can’t just pretend.

It’s extremely difficult to construct a thought experiment of “What would someone who cares about this person say?” It’s also easy to see through. Contrast that with actually caring about another human being. You don’t have to play games or wonder what someone would say. You’re already equipped to do it.

This may all sound pretty obvious. But it’s not in practice.

Compassion takes practice.

It takes practice because there are appropriate limits. You can’t just be compassionate. You also need to understand when and how to show restraint.

Kim Scott in her book Radical Candor describes this as ruinous empathy. It’s when you’re too nice to someone. Beyond the point of being honest or helpful. She discusses a better alternative, the namesake, radical candor. Which is about…

Another great book on the topic is Kristen Hadeed’s Permission to Screw Up. She institutes a great approach in her business call FBIs. FBI stands for Feeling, Behavior, and Impact. If you want to practice compassion and get your point across with acting like a complete asshole, communicate the specific behavior, how its makes you feel, and the impact is has on your business or relationship.

But like I said, there’s no better teacher than personal experience.

I think to my own experiences. In romantic relationships. In friendships. In professional relationships. As an employee. As a boss.

There were several times in my life when I was much younger where someone I thought was a friend achieved some small amount of success. It made me jealous. I asked myself why and realized we didn’t have much more than a surface level friendship. A little self honestly told me I kept this person around more as someone who motivated me. I didn’t care about the person though. That was a hard truth to swallow.

Contrast that with another friend. Someone who is more like a brother. He had a great job offer on the table and asked me advice. It was easy to give him honest advice, whether it was what he wanted to hear or not. When he landed the job, it was easy to be genuinely excited for him. I valued our friendship. I cared about his success.

I share both examples to show an important contrast.

In the first relationship, everything was transactional. I cared about what that person could offer me. Wrong or not, I didn’t care about the person. In the second, the basis of our friendship was not self-serving. It was about a mutual benefit and enjoyment of being friends. Compassion flowed naturally from it.

The same thing happens in professional relationships, too.

When you’re a manager, it’s easy to get caught up in making sure people “below you” are doing their jobs. But it’s also easy to dehumanize other people when you’re only weighing them by their inputs and outputs. But here’s a secret I’ve learned from observing both great and terrible managers: if you invest in people, they’ll consistently surprise you.

Yes. It sounds cliche. It sounds obvious. But it’s not always.

Sometimes it takes concentrated effort to get past the surface level details. It may mean intentionally being friendlier or trying to become more personable. It may mean you have to become vulnerable and open up.

It’s not always easy. But it’s worth it.

If You Want It, Behave Like It

You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?

Almost every time I’ve started something new I came face to face with imposter syndrome. When you first start out it’s easy to believe you’re not good enough.

It’s easy to get distracted by the people in your life who inevitably believe you’re going through a phase and the new thing won’t last. But worse yet, is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing that you’re not good enough or not worthy enough to succeed at your new thing.

It happens to the best of us. But only rookies let the doubts erode their self-confidence and conviction.

The more times you start new things and see them through – even the small things – you’re incrementally practicing self-discipline. Over time it adds up. It’s not exactly easy to start and gain momentum with something new, but a secret is that it gets easier the more you practice it.

In small and big things in your life, your behaviors over time are a better predictor of your outcomes than anything else.

Take writing as an example.

If you say you want to be a writer, for instance, but you’re not regularly writing, chances are there’s a low likelihood you’ll ever actually do it.

On the flip side, if you write every day – even if you don’t have some big idea for publishing yet – the sheer act of exercising your writing muscle will set you up for success.

When you first start out you may not know the proper behaviors to move you closer toward your goal (even if you can’t yet define it). Don’t stress. Just focus on doing one thing each day to move you closer. Anything.

The best way to become something is to start behaving like it.

How Did You Set People Free Today?

How did you set people free today?

It’s a small, but powerful daily challenge.

I spend a ton of time thinking about careers. How people discover their careers. How they launch them. The pain points and struggles they face as part of them.

Sometimes it’s easy to get sucked into the fray. It’s easy to get mad about “the system.” But it’s all just a distraction.

When I find myself losing focus, getting outraged by the things outside of my control, or bothered by what other people are doing, I go back to this question.

How did you set people free today?

It centers me. It reminds me of a higher calling. Of the purpose I’m striving for with what we’re building at Crash. It reminds me that this is about people. It refocuses me.

And it sets me free.