If you are reading this, take a moment to say hello to the next person you interact with. When I say good morning, I don’t mean the program “hello” that comes with our trained “social graces,” I mean an actual hello.
Listen to the other person. Take a breath. Respond.
You’ll often find surprised look on the other side.
Every interaction we have with someone can make their day better simply by letting someone know they are “seen.”
So, put down the cell phone, and say hello. The other person might need “to be seen.”
This whole month has revolved around Jeopardy Knowledge.
I don’t think Jeopardy Knowledge is a “bad” thing.
Much like a hammer or a piece of paper, it is a tool capable of many things. It’s the consequence of the device, both subconscious and conscious, that interest me.
One of the traps of Jeopardy Knowledge is the trap of “sounding smart.” The consequence of this, both consciously and subconsciously, is that you lose your edge.
Sometimes, the person who “sounds dumb” gets the most context out of the moment. “sounding smart” sacrifices growth in the name of fitting in.
The problem is, when a crisis occurs, no one cares about people fitting in. They want the prepared. They need people on edge.
The edge is where you achieve the freedom to exercise who you are.
When I had my first startup, I would bark orders at people. This method didn’t work. I didn’t follow up. I just punished people when it didn’t happen.
When I worked at my corporate job, I would type friendly emails to people as requests.This method didn’t work. I didn’t follow up. I just resented people when it didn’t happen.
Now, when I talk to people I work with, I make a request with a story. This method works for me. When it doesn’t, I follow-up and learn about the situation. I don’t punish, I don’t get resentful, I try to understand.
Three takeaways:
Include a piece of yourself, along with the why connects people to your ask.
Ask, instead of punishing or become resentful, opens up the insight that allows a connection. People start to like working for and with you. They give more.
You calibrate for the future. You know a bit more, so you know when to ask for more or less.
Those takeaways are indispensable when you delegate.
Every event is a practice. Practice makes perfect.
Our brains are pattern recognizing machines.
I remember when I learned how to drive.
When I got my license at 18, I thought I became a driving machine. I didn’t realize that driving is a skill. The license didn’t mean good, it meant that I knew enough to stay alive. After I realized that, my confidence went to zero. The confidence didn’t come after I got my license.I went to college with no car, so I didn’t get to exercise the skill.
That changed when I went for an internship in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I went from not driving much at all in a familiar place to learning how to navigate and drive in an unfamiliar place.
Scary.
Soon, I started to understand the patterns. At first, I thought a lot about how to drive and where to go. After the patterns came into play, I thought about everything else. It took a few days, and the fear went away.
All this happened seamlessly. I didn’t have to do anything but show up.
The key was to keep swinging and let my brain do the rest.
There is a difference between lucky and good. Usually, the difference between the two is consistency, meaning that once you do something, you can repeat it, given the same environment.
Another point, which is often missed, is the ability to understand* why something worked while accounting for the other side.
Let’s take football:
If you are playing wide receiver , the ball is coming at you, and someone is covering you, simply catching the ball once can skew towards luck in the future.
o Working on routes with the QB and understanding where the cornerback is going due to how he comes off the ball lead you to catch more often, which is good.
The latter accounts for the work done on the practice field; the former has no strategy. If you were looking for a coach on how to catch the ball, which person would you feel more comfortable going to?
*I first wrote explain at this asterisk, and I recognized that you didn’t need to explain to understand. Keeping it on a sports level, Moses Malone couldn’t “explain” rebounding to you, but he was amazing at it because he understood it.
No one is better at criticizing yourself than you are.
Who else knows where all the buried bodies are? You are the only person that knows every secret you’ve held, every person you’ve wronged, and all the mistakes you’ve made. All those phony apologies, well, you know those too.
When it comes to all the mistakes you’ve made you are a bona fide expert. It holds you back, because you can’t get better without giving yourself permission first.
That is where it starts. Punishment comes from all sides, even from our own head. We have to decide to turn off the valve of self-destruction and decide to stop adding on to the pain. Only then can the process of healing begin.
There is a concept in money management where when you get your paycheck you stop and pay yourself first. You do this because often with money, we forget to take the time to think about ourselves. You take the time to worry about the urgent and not the future.
We treat ourselves that way. In self management, you have to start with forgiving yourself first, because we don’t think about the future, we think about the urgent.
When I was a kid, I was very shy. I spent most of my life being scared to express my ideas unless I thought it was absolutely necessary.I only talked if I had to and knew the answer. Silence was the easy way out, because it allowed me to hide. That shyness came from fear, and an assumption that everyone I met knew as much or more than I did. I thought I wouldn’t add anything to the conversation. My insecurity kept me from investing everything I had.
I didn’t realize it when, but I did myself a severe disservice. I didn’t understand that talking through ideas is one of the best ways of understanding if I knew them. I had to talk to see if I had it, and I had to trust the people around me would help if I didn’t get it right.
The talk principle
You have to have trust to start real dialogue.
If you know something, you know how to say it, and to borrow from Richard Feynman, say it in your own words. What better way to do that then through talking to people?
This is pretty tough because in most situations we are in, it is easy to shrink and hide. If we soak it up, sit in the back, and avoid the discussion, we get to walk out unscathed and fight another day. This is a double-edged sword, because since it is so effective, it gets easier to hide in future meetings. You create a cycle of comfort, hiding until you are absolutely certain you can’t lose. By waiting until we get it right, we miss opportunities to get to the point of understanding.
It is difficult, too because to feel comfortable, you have to trust people enough that they won’t leave you hanging out there.
Talking out ideas makes us stronger
The difference between understanding and ‘thinking you understand’ is huge. That gap remains large if you don’t talk about what you know to other people. Through talking, you get a chance to build understanding and catch up on ideas you thought you knew.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 