Gratitude is a hard skill to learn and even more difficult to master. Once you decide to go down that road, don’t handicap yourself with the expectation you are owed something. That title or salary doesn’t mean anything when it comes to leadership.
The opposite of gratitude is entitlement
Seth Godin
Appreciation goes a long way in your journey to leadership.
Acting like “someone owes you” pushes against you. Even if you still advance you are handicapping yourself.
What problem did I solve?
Well, how do you know you are solving a problem? Easy – people want it.
Seth Godin wrote an excellent post on the subject, and in it, he gives a simple test: tell ten people.
If you tell ten people, and more people hear about it, well, I guess you are solving a problem.
If it dies on the vine, you have work to do either:
or
Either way, get back to work.
I hope your idea is too small and doesn’t “fit:” for example. Voltron obsessed,mohawk having, and dog loving hiker. This is hyperbole, but small is good.
The time for the big idea is over. Attracting people at scale for X is over. Making something that appeals to “Middle America” and New York is gone too.
So what does that leave us if you get hip now?
100 years ago you had access to only one way of thinking*. The internet has changed that.
“Diversity of thought” is the concept that there are people who know a lot, have some authority, and end up in a different intellectual place than others.
If you have access to this blog, chances are you have access to YouTube,Codecademy,Udemy, One Month, etc. All these places have courses (and in YouTube’s case, a lot more).
You can spend the day learning about Alan Watts, Seth Godin, and Martin Luther King Jr through a course, a lecture, or biography for free or slight cost.
These are free platforms where one can express her views, combine them, deconstruct them as often as you want, all for no cost.
When this is clear to those who want to pick up the tools, magic happens.
The best part? No Ph.D , magic wand, or gatekeeper required.
* Unless you traveled, which was a rarity before the airplane. Most people didn’t go further than 10 miles from home their entire life.
It’s human nature. We normally accept whatever is in front of us. Our brains can’t do the math, we work with too many stimuli per second to figure out every single decision. Our brains take the path of least resistance because we are on the lookout for things that could harm us.
This isn’t a bad thing, nor should you think of it as such. If we considered every option we would be paralyzed by choice. If you thought going through your closet in the morning on a stressful day is bad, considering every decision that presents itself to us is that feeling times 1000x.
So, we take the default, and we should, for most things. The hard part of life is determining of what defaults you don’t want to take and doing the hard work up from in changing them.
Don't accept the defaults you don't want
The old way isn’t enough. I had my awakening about the school system when I first read Weapons of Mass Instruction. It introduced me to the real world of New York City schools, and in effect, the school system as we know it. This video further informed me.
So what do we do when faced with the old – commit. Be vulnerable and take the first step. For anyone reading this post, that next step is clicking play above with an open mind.
I finally understood “The Dip” last night and realized I was a quitter.
The Dip, a term popularized by Seth Godin, is the point in any venture when it gets tough. When you get in the ocean, you feel “The Dip” where the water starts to creep past your chin, and you are too short to move without relying on swimming. It is decision time, are you going to move forward and trust your arms or move backwards back to the safety of the beach? Are your friends on the beach waving you back or they could be further in the ocean waving you forward – or vice versa telling you to go to the other place without them. There isn’t a right answer by the way, the only thing guiding you is context and intuition.
When it is a dip, you swim further. When it is a cul-de-sac – meaning there is no end, you should get back to the beach.
I felt it when I was sitting in my acting class last night.
Some background – I decided to go do an acting class at the beginning of this year to help aid me with any public engagement that I do – so if I speak, tell jokes, or have to present, I would love the tools that actors have to make the job a lot easier. I ended up settling on doing a class with the Meisner technique, an acting technique that relies on your internal feeling to make the enviroment feel real.
Recently we have done independent activities, which forces you to do some acting with a partner while doing a mentally harsh task. It is as frustrating as it sounds. Looking at my partner for the day I started to feel the water rise above my head. The Resistance started to dance in my head, giving me reasons to hate everyone around me.
Then I came to the realization that I am cul-de-sac minded. When I see something challenging, my first reaction is generally to get back to the beach. I gritted my teeth and doubled down. I don’t know how it is going to go, but I am going to see it through – then enjoy the beach.
In honor of Seth Godin's newly crafted "Ruckusmaker Day" I have to ask the following question – How often do we mistake "going along to get along"(GATGA) for hard work?
Hard work is difficult – for that, generally we have to buck against the system that keeps us in place, which takes courage.
To do great work we have to make a ruckus – so when you proceed with your acts of genius today, ask yourself if it is GATGA or are you doing the stuff that really matters?
I often wonder what is my place with social media.
It feels pretty silly to go ahead and do. It feels silly to jump into the water with my material and see where I float.
Is it good enough? Where do I land when I make these things happen? What if nothing happens?
These questions run through my mind, and maybe yours when ever you decide to put your art or your work out there.
There is no answer to that but to plow through.
Seth Godin often says the best day to start was yesterday, so start today.
But I am scared.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 