Author: Sasha

Once

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The other day, I was waiting for my dogs to finish their Very Important Search for Squirrels in the woods by our elementary school. I was passing the time by watching two kids being pushed on the swing by two dads.

For those of you not familiar with this activity, swing-pushing is a relentless job. Any kid under the age of 6 will happily be pushed on a swing 60 minutes or more, rain or shine, without any need to stop.

If you’re the parent, and if it’s cold or windy or sunny or hot, or if you just find 60 minutes of pushing to be a long time, it can be easy to get impatient, or even frustrated.

“I can’t believe I’m stuck doing this [repetitive, boring, whatever] thing again!”

It helps to remember that nearly everything only happens once.

Once in this context.

Once at this stage of my life.

Once with this set of people.

And so it goes outside the playground as well.

Having a hard time at work? Once.

Having challenges in a relationship? Once.

Having some great things happening in your life mixed in with things that are stressful, or distracting? Once.

One day, you stop going to the swings and never look back.

One day, a decade has passed—for you, for them—and you can hardly imagine what it would be like to be a dad who spent most of his free time pushing swings (or solving this particular problem, or working with this group of people on this hard but interesting thing…).

It’s so easy to forget that the here and now whips by us, that we can never step in the same river twice.

The reminder is to shift our perception from “I have to do this thing [seemingly] forever” to “I get to do this thing with these people in this way once and only once.”

Explain it Simply

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

All thorny problems are difficult to solve. That’s what makes them thorny, after all.

But all good solutions can be explained simply.

That’s because all good solutions are hypotheses and nothing more.

Hence the simple 3-part explanation.

  1. “Here’s what I believe lies at the heart of this problem.”
  2. “Here’s what I propose that will address that issue.”
  3. “Here’s why I think it will address that issue.”

Your goal is not to be right—in fact, the quest for rightness in the face of  complexity can be paralyzing, and inaction has its own costs.

Rather, your goal is to state these three points with utmost clarity.

This way, even if you don’t figure out the perfect solution (yet), you will at least know which of your three statements was right and which was wrong. Then you can iterate.

And if you can’t (yet) explain your problem and solution this simply, keep at it. Without this kind of clarity, it’s too soon to jump to implementation.

The Space for Joy

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

It’s natural, when things get hectic, to let joy fall off the list. After all, there’s so much to do!

As the saying goes: when the going gets tough…

So we focus in on what appears to be essential, pouring all our energy into today’s crisis.

While that can be a good place to start, our heroics are often accompanied by two things that might not help us:

  • Cycling through worries, fears, and worst-case stories about what might result from this crisis (aka anticipation of failure)
  • Mind-numbing distraction because we “need a break” (aka doom scrolling)

I visualize the concentric circles like this. And I can’t imagine that the outer two rings are helping me or helping those around me.

We might, then, ask ourselves: what are the minimum conditions that need to be in place for us to experience joy?

And if we really, truly, cannot experience joy today, because of all that is going on, can we at least allow ourselves the space to quiet the outer two circles for a moment?

What would help us to do that?

What helps us pause, breath, smile, laugh, and drop our shoulders, even if just for a second?

Worry and distraction do not have to be out constant companions in a crisis.

If they are, then when does the moment arrive where things are “calm enough” for joy to creep back in?

And when will those near-perfect conditions be met?

What Motivates You?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Our professional lives are increasingly defined by how much we dare to care.

Whatever filled us with energy and motivation at the outset must be constantly refilled. The “wow” of the first 100 days doesn’t replenish itself, and waiting for someone or something else is not the answer—we could be waiting forever, and that denies our agency.

So, here’s a starter list that I wrote without AI, because the value to me was the thinking—about what’s motivated me in the past, how I get through ups and downs, and what I’ve seen work for others.

I’m sure you could make the list much longer, as an interesting intellectual exercise.

But it would be even more valuable if find the 3-5 reasons that resonate with you, the things that, honestly, are what make you care about your work.

Then share that list with your boss, your colleagues, with other people that matter in your personal and professional life.

  • I believe that our work helps clients succeed in creating meaningful change
  • I believe that my work is the difference between something being unclear and it being clear
  • I believe that when I do my best work I serve as a model to others within the team
  • I love teaching people
  • I love learning new things
  • I love solving problems
  • I love checking things off my list
  • I am motivated to keep my promises
  • I am professionally ambitious, and I want to impress my boss
  • If I get this work done well, it will get noticed, and I’ll get to broaden my suite of work to encompass more things that I find interesting
  • I am working towards a raise / promotion / bigger paycheck
  • I am a person who keeps my commitments—that’s just who I am
  • I take a lot of pride in a job well done
  • I really like my client, and I want to make them happy
  • I really like the company we’re working for, and I want to make them happy
  • I find it fun to work with numbers / words / analysis / etc. and I get to do that in my job
  • I’m curious what it takes to really wow someone, and I’m going to keep at it until I can hit that bar
  • My boss believes in me, and I want to justify that belief
  • My team believes in me, and I want to justify that belief
  • My client believes in me, and I want to justify that belief
  • I want to make my mom/dad/brother/sister/kids/dog/cat proud

We can’t tap into our motivation if we don’t know where it comes from.

My AI Physical Therapist

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My Instagram feed is basically:

  • The 10 people I follow (including my son’s ceramics account)
  • Dogs / puppies / rescues
  • Tennis / squash tips and highlights
  • Injury prevention / cures for middle-aged athletes

On the last point, my last few years have been marked by a series of minor but chronic injuries. I seem to be in the stage of life of small ligament and tendon strains, injuries that respond well to physical therapy if you can make the time.

The worst has been tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis). It’s lasted for more than a year, and I’m just now getting better. But I’m finding PT too time-consuming (90-120 minutes so I can do 20 minutes of exercises??) and too much of an insurance hassle.

In a continuation of this trend, a month ago, I got a sharp pain in my hip after a run. After a few dead-end YouTube attempts, I realized I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

Rather than go to the doctor and then back to PT, I turned to ChatGPT. I was amazed with how helpful it was. If you, like me, are still under-using these tools, perhaps this can be an inspiration.

Here’s the original prompt I wrote:

I need you to be an expert physical therapist who can help me diagnose and treat injuries at home. Be thorough in your diagnosis and assume that I am a sophisticated lifetime athlete who can do complex exercises at home as needed. I’m 51 years old. I need to diagnose a pain I have in my right outer hip, just below my hip pointer.

I got the injury after a fast (for me) hilly run after having taken off a few months. This was my 10th run after having taken 3 months off. I had done the same run, 4.3 miles, twice earlier in the week, but my pace in those was 9:30/mile and in this run was 8:20/mile. I felt no pain during the run but after the run it hurt some to stride / step with my right leg, and to go up hills. The pain is greatest when I get up after sitting down for a bit. After a little while it decreases. The pain is sharp and localized to the area just below and above the hip pointer.

From this prompt and a few follow ups, ChatGPT gave me:

  • Its first diagnosis (either a tendinopathy in my gluteus medius / minimus or a TFL overuse injury)
  • A series of diagnostic tests I could do to narrow down the potential injury
  • A full 30 day PT plan that I now have in a Google Sheet that I’m following daily
  • This plan includes descriptions of all the exercises with references.

Since this went so well, I’ve kept talking to ChatGPT about how it’s going: how the exercises, felt; how one of them hurt more than expected and could it give me an alternative; how I feel first thing in the morning and over the course of my day. It’s the conversation I would have with my PT every day if he were available.

With this feedback, ChatGPT both modified the exercise regime to better suit how I’m feeling and has modified the diagnosis.

Here’s the latest that I got back this morning, based on my updated symptoms:

Differential Diagnosis Recap

Condition Why It Fits Why It Doesn’t
Gluteus med/min tendinopathy Pain with heel strike, long stride, compression from sleep, improves with warm-up —
TFL overuse Could be involved, but unlikely primary now; less direct heel-strike involvement Less pain with bridge, more lateral than anterior
Trochanteric bursitis Possible secondary irritant But no diffuse swelling or tenderness reported yet
Labral or joint issues No locking, groin pain, or deep ache Very unlikely
Femoral stress reaction No deep bone pain or night pain Very unlikely

And here’s a visual representation of what I’ve told my AI physical therapist and what that means for my diagnosis—this pretty much blew me away:

I know that for many people, AI is an idea—perhaps even a scary one—and not something that’s part of daily life. And I can understand why many of us might be happier either using none of these tools or waiting for someone to build a “Virtual Physical Therapist” app rather than playing around with ChatGPT or the many other tools available to us today.

I’d encourage you to think about this another way: for $20 / month, an expert in literally any topic you can accurately describe is available to you and to your team.

It’s a shame not to take advantage of that.

Fill in the Blanks

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Any job worth having has blanks. Lots of them.

There may be a set of steps to follow, a standard that’s been written out, a sequence that’s been proven to work.

But life, and people, are far too complex to fit neatly inside the rubric.

Surprises happen.

Someone goes on holiday, and you need to sub in.

An assumption got made in step 3 and that led to a seemingly-right-but-wrong decision in step 6 and, all of a sudden, we’re in step 8 and we need to decide what to do.

That’s a blank.

 

What Do You Do With a Blank?

The question is: what are we going to do with it? And, more broadly, what is our team going to do with it?

Because blanks appear all the time.

We can’t plan our way around them.

We can’t write a script to deal with all of them.

We can’t wish them away.

A starting point is our organizational values—real ones, that are reinforced every day in both actions and communication, that reinforce the right action. They say,

“Here are the principles and priorities we live by. When all else fails [read: when you come across a blank] behave in this way.”

But, even with great values in place—values that are reinforced regularly and are tangible enough to guide action—they will be insufficient if the people being asked to implement don’t care.

Because when you find yourself saying, “This is a situation I’ve never encountered before. What am I going to do?” you are encountering a situation that requires emotional effort, and emotional effort is neither cheap nor easy.

Every blank is defined by uncertainty, the chance that we might get this wrong. That translates to exposure. And, when faced with exposure, a person who doesn’t care much is more likley to hide or turn their heads the other way. This ultimately leaves the blank as a blank, but it feels safer.

 

Why does caring make all the difference?

Partially because you’ll try harder: you’ll be willing to put in that emotional effort despite the uncertainty and fear.

More because people around you will see you trying harder, and they will be more inclined to pitch in.

And, last but not least, because whoever you are trying to make happy—the person on whose behalf you are filling in this blank— will see how much you care. They will respect that intention and effort even if the outcome isn’t perfect.

This means we’re left with three questions:

  1. Do I understand that the most important parts of my jobs are the ones where I come across a ‘blank’?
  2. Has my organization articulated, and do we daily reinforce, an orientation that will support the best kind of actions we are going to take in these situations?
  3. How do we create and scale ‘giving a damn’ across multiple people in multiple places over long(er) periods of time?

The last one is, in my opinion, the real secret. Because even great values reinforced regularly mean nothing if they land on indifferent ears.

That means that, if you are part of an organization that faces a lots of blanks (and you do), the first question to answer is:

How do I make sure that everyone else cares as much as I do?

 

The Purple Tree

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

This spring, on my daily morning dog walk, there was a purple tree in the woods. I think it’s been there every year, but this was the first time I really noticed it.

Each morning when the sun was out, I’d try to capture it: the blooms, its contrast with the trees around it, how the light filtered in and around it. None of my photos did it justice.

I’d look forward to seeing it every morning. Perhaps today was the day when the light would hit it just so.

And then, a few weeks of rainy mornings.

When I finally made my way back to the woods, it was gone.

It wasn’t just that the purple blooms had fallen off. In the midst of the green lushness of early spring, I wasn’t even sure which tree it was.

How impossible that something that was the focal point of my mornings could disappear. It could fade and become just another tree.

Lately there have been things I’ve been carrying with me that I’ve deeply wanted—sentence after sentence that starts with “If only…”

And then some of them come to pass, in part or in full, and the joy I expected to feel fades as quickly as that purple tree.

I’m working on it, though.

Working on letting that thing that was special, that thing that would make all the difference—I’m working on experiencing the joy, or the relief, or ease, that I’d been looking forward to for so long.

Why I don’t have an Apple Watch

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

As the weather gets warmer, I start running and swimming more.

I’d love to track my runs and my swims, but I don’t have an Apple Watch or a Garmin.

Having more access to texts, news and Slack notifications—and even knowing more about everything outside my workouts—seems like it would be a bad thing, and I know if I owned the watch I’d wear it all the time.

More features = worse outcomes.

Similarly, I love my Kindle because it only does one thing well.

My favorite restaurants have small menus where everything is great.

Atoms shoes are incredible because they’re more comfortable than any other, and they reject design nonsense

In a world in which AI can do most things, being pretty good at a long feature set will be worse than saying “I will do fewer things exceptionally and reject all the rest.”

This requires two things:

  1. Knowing your clients so well that you truly know what matters most to them
  2. The bravery to leave everything but those features on the cutting room floor

Fabian has it right. What more do you really need to know?

6 Points

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My daughter played in a squash tournament last weekend.

In squash, each player has a computer-generated ranking that is reasonably accurate. It’s very easy to think that these numbers tell the whole story.

So, when my daughter lost her match (11-9, 12-10, 12-10 ) to a girl with a 0.10 lower rating, she was very upset.

The next morning, gearing up for day 2 of the tournament, I asked her a question: “If you had won 11-9, 12-10, 12-10 instead of lost, would you have been pretty happy with the result?”

“Yes,” she agreed, she would have.

We did the math together and noticed that the difference between what happened and what might have happened was 6 points.

6 points out of 64 were the difference between “existential crisis” (“Maybe I’m not really improving. Maybe I’ll never improve.”) and “I’m on the right track.”

There are situations in which the difference between winning and losing really matter: if your business runs out of cash but has a fundamentally sound business model, what matters is the cash. And if you “almost” hit your targets every time, then you might have a target-setting or an accountability problem.

But most of the time, we act like my daughter, allowing the space between our narrative of wins and losses to be much bigger than what actually happened.

Drawing the lucky last card feels like our just reward for playing the hand correctly. But the two events are, in fact, unrelated.

 

Trajectory

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We’ve all done compounding math.

Invest $100 today and compound it monthly at 1%, and it will be worth $3,595 (35x return) in 30 years. Compound it annually at 2% and it will be worth $137,740 (1,377x return) in 30 years. And, of course, compound it at 0% and you’ll have $100 forever.

Now, apply this thinking to something you’re working to improve—it can be in your personal life or your organization. And think about getting a tiny bit better each month, say 1% or 2%.

At those rates of improvement, you’d be 30% or 60% better at this thing in two years’ time.  And, let’s be honest, a 1-2% monthly improvement at anything we’re really putting our mind to feels like almost nothing.

So, what do we make of issues that we’re stuck on? Ones that feel like whack-a-mole, where we keep putting in effort and we seem to end up in the same place?

If any meaningful amount of time has passed since we started working on these problems, that means that all our efforts don’t add up to even a 1-2% monthly improvement.

There are only two reasons this could be the case, and they are two sides of the same coin:

  1. The things we’re doing are not effective at addressing the problem
  2. The thing we think is the problem is not really the problem

While this is conceptually easy to understand, coming to terms with it is hard.

If we know that slow progress compounded over time results in massive change, being “stuck” can only happen if all our effort is having almost no yield. When that happens, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Compounding math doesn’t leave space for any other conclusions.