Why yes, that’s on purpose.
Did you know that children often need to be exposed to new foods 10-15 times before they’re happy to eat them?
Same thing with ideas and action, it turns out.
Category: Change
Starting something
“OK get ready New York!!!” shouts an older African American gentleman on the uptown 1 subway in New York City. He’s dressed in perfectly-pressed ivory linen pants and a neat white collared shirt.
And then he bursts into song, belting out, “This little light of mine…” in a voice that could only be described as angelic. It deserves a full Gospel Choir behind it. Barring that, his partner singing harmony was pretty incredible.
Along with just a few of my fellow-passengers, I smile, I enjoy, I give him a dollar. I get a nod and a nice fist bump in return.
On my next subway ride, a white guy in a suit looks at me quizzically and says, “I thought you were part of the group…on that last train, I mean.”
I told him I wasn’t, that I just liked the music and thought it was gutsy to perform in that way and put yourself on the line. I couldn’t tell if he was satisfied or confused by my answer.
But I did think it was interesting that just by smiling and enjoying myself, I might be confused for the third member of the group. Because, of course, being the first, second or third person to stand up and follow enthusiastically can have just as much impact as being the guy standing up and singing.
Leading courageously and following with conviction are both needed to make change.
A week
It hasn’t been a great winter for running for me. Between the cold snowy weather, late sunrises and general busyness, I’ve just not gotten out there that often.
That didn’t stop me from deciding, this past weekend, to take my one free daylight hour and head out for a 7 mile, very hilly run in 25°F weather. Brilliant, I know. Usually I feel like most of the effort is in just getting out there, and after I start things get easier. This time, between the cold and the brutal hills (I think there was maybe 1 mile of true flat road on this run), I spent the better part of an entire run talking myself into finishing the run.
Even in that context, one moment stood out. The last mile of this run is practically straight uphill, and steep, and I was at the base of the steepest part of that incline. I had psyched myself up by convincing myself that this section of the last hill was short and steep, and the strategy had been working as I trudged along with my head down. Then, reflexively, I looked up to discover that the hill was about three times as long as I’d pretended it was.
At that moment I had an overwhelming urge to stop.
The interesting part is that being out of breath or feeling a huge burn in my legs didn’t demotivate me, but seeing how far I still had to go did.
And so, switching gears, I wonder: how do we really go about making changes in our lives? (Alternately: why do New Years resolutions fail?).
I’d propose that the thing that holds us back is that “looking up” moment, when you see how big the hill you want to scale is and decide that it’s just too darn big, too hard, too much, so you don’t start.
Despite being a believer in big audacious goals, when it comes to the hard work of personal transformation, I’m most successful when I start small. If I want to cut out eating sugar, if I want to meditate daily or be more generous or ignore my inbox for an hour a day or give myself more whitespace for reflection, I’d much rather set myself a clear one-week goal and start on it today.
You can do anything for a week, easily. And by committing to just a week, you don’t have to engage in the meaningless anticipation of what this undertaking will mean for you – because, let’s be honest, until you do it (whatever IT is) you really don’t know what IT feels like. The powerful part is that a week is long enough to start getting used to a new habit: it’s long enough to change how salty your think food should taste (try it, it’s true). It’s long enough to discover whether mornings or evenings work better for you for _______ [YOUR NEW ACTIVITY]; long enough to discover why, really, it’s hard not to check your smartphone right when you wake up or right when you go to bed or every time you step into an elevator.
Just one week.
Don’t allow the sight of the big hill keep you from starting to run. Give it a week, start today, and see how you actually feel when you behave differently. Then decide how big this is going to be for you.
Full and hopeful conviction
One of the great nuggets – that I’d otherwise have lost had it not been for the visual notes I took – from the Adaptive Leadership piece in HBR that I talked about yesterday is about how to run experiments in adaptive settings.
Since adaptive challenges have unknown solutions, by definition we must make adaptive leadership decisions with incomplete information. Even better, often the biggest breakthroughs come from holding two seemingly opposable ideas, goals, even values at the same time and trying to meet two seemingly incompatible needs.
In these adaptive situations, our only choice is to run experiments – to make a decision based on the information we have, with a clear statement of our hypothesis and an articulation of what data we will use to determine if the experiment is working. (Very Lean Startup-y, in a very different context, which is always nice to see).
The soft underbelly of these situations isn’t WHETHER to run experiments (we have no choice) it’s HOW we run these experiments.
It’s all too tempting to view these tough calls at 51-49 situations, to continue to see all sides of the argument even after you’ve started running the experiment. This is even more tempting in situations in which you disagreed with a decision – it’s so alluring to talk about the path not taken, to keep on hedging your bets just in case this path doesn’t work out. Think how smart you’ll look if you have an “I told you so” moment three months from now.
Here’s another way to look at it, from the Adaptive Leadership piece:
Holding incompatible ideas in your head at the same time is a little like deciding to get married. At the moment you decide that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you have to fully embrace your choice; you have to believe wholeheartedly that it is the right decision. But your practical self also knows that you probably would have fallen in love with someone else under different circumstances. So how can your intended be the only “right” one for you? If you treated the decision to marry this particular person at this particular moment as a 51–49 question rather than a 90–10 question, you would never take the leap. The same paradox applies to adaptive leadership interventions. You have to run the experiment with full and hopeful conviction.
I’m much more of a romantic than that, so the analytical approach to the decision to get married just doesn’t sit right with me. But that’s another conversation.
What I like is the memorable analogy and the great last sentence: “You have to run the experiment with full and hopeful conviction.”
Not doubt, not worry, not with side conversations about how this will never work or with hesitation or second guessing.
Full and hopeful conviction.
10 (percent)
I’ve been finding a lot of power lately in 10% shifts in how I spend my time. It’s an increment big enough to matter – an experiment big enough that you can learn something – but small enough that there’s no excuse but to start.
So, if you’re feeling stuck you could:
- Work 10% more, or less
- Sleep 10% more, or less
- Turn your email off for 10% of your workday
- Delete 10% of your emails, or reply to them with 10 words or less
- Eat differently (veg, vegan, cro-magnon, all liquids, whatever) 10% of the time (aka one day a week…which I know is more like 15% but you get the idea)
- Make 10% of your decisions in 10% of the time you normally take (and figure out if it makes a difference)
- Etc.
Or if 10% doesn’t work you can try 10 days, e.g.:
- 10 days of eating differently
- Exercise for 10 days in a row
- Sleep 8 hours a night for 10 straight days
- Work 16 hour days 10 days in a row to ship a product
- Write (and publish) a blog post for 10 days straight
- Each day for 10 days, write down one thing you’re grateful for
- Conduct a 10 day generosity experiment
- For 10 days, apologize first
- Etc.
Increasingly I’m feeling like long-term happiness results from our ability to evolve. If that’s true, then discovering how to change is even more important than discovering what to change.
At least for me, all the big changes start small. They start with an experiment that’s big enough to mean something but small enough that I can’t pretend it’s impossible.
What about you: do massive leaps work, or do you do better when you start small?
The thing they don’t tell you
…when you set out to change the world is that the bottom right part of the table is actually MORE frustrating than the bottom left.
If you’re stuck there, I hope you choose to keep looking for the top right (succeeding), rather than retreating to the bottom left (not trying).
The whole without a map thing is not (just) a metaphor
A couple of weeks ago, I was running a familiar four mile loop and decided I was feeling good enough that I’d extend the run. Rather than take the final right turn a half mile from the “end” of the run, I kept going. A half mile later, on an unfamiliar street not knowing exactly where I was or where I was going, I lost all my mojo. My stride shortened, I felt the spring go out of my step, everything started to tighten up.
Was I actually, all of a sudden, so much more tired?
No, I was just off my map: the calculus of where I was relative to where I had to go had stopped processing; I literally didn’t know if I was heading north or east; and I couldn’t tell if each step was taking me closer to or further from my destination.
I wasn’t tired, I was just disoriented. And once I realized that, realized that the simple act of feeling lost had gotten into my head, not my legs or lungs, I exhaled and things felt better (though not completely back to normal).
There’s a lot of great advice out there that we find so appealing but we stop short of actually taking the advice – because it would be silly, wouldn’t it, to actually go all the way. So we read and believe that success today comes the moment you recognize that there is no map, no path someone has charted out for you to follow. And we think that’s a nice idea but do we actually, literally, practice what it feels like to be somewhere without a map, do we observe how we react to this situation and learn how to apply that reflection to our lives?
We read about radical email strategies that could save us hours a day (whether Leo Babuta’s email ninja tricks which include limiting all responses to 5 sentences or less, or experiments like ‘no email Friday,’ recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal) and we nod but then we just tweak things around the edges.
Someone suggests that we could shorten our meetings and change our meeting culture by having all meetings standing up or only holding meetings to support a decision that’s already been made and we think it’s a nice idea that wouldn’t really work for us and our company culture.
Maybe, just maybe, these ideas aren’t metaphors. Maybe they are actual, real ideas. And maybe nothing would go wrong if we actually tried them, for real, for a little while before rejecting them out of hand.
Go ahead, go for a walk or run this weekend without a map and see how it feels.
Says who?
I snapped this picture at the local U.S. Post Office. The question is: who exactly said that they are the “official shipper of the holidays?”
The answer, of course, is: they did
By deciding something and saying it out loud, you give yourself a shot at becoming that thing. There’s no consecration process. No one anoints your idea. No one adjudicates on making your dream official. There’s no judge and jury whose permission you need.
You just commit, and then you follow through like crazy.
That’s when it becomes real, not before.
* * * * * *
p.s. There’s also a way to do this on the back-end, by naming what you’ve done in a way that empowers your tribe. For example, I’d noticed a month ago that I had cell coverage inside my local subway station, but it was only today, when I saw the sign from AT&T telling me that this was one of 6 stations with in-station coverage, that I was handed a story I can share.
p.p.s. this isn’t a post about the US Postal Service, which is struggling mightily, or even about the strange sign which seems more like a plea than anything.
Why sweat the small stuff?
Yesterday I wrote a post about making sure to get the font right in emails you send out. The day before I reflected on responses to the simple question, “How are you doing?”
Why sweat such small stuff in a blog about generosity, philanthropy and social change?
It’s because from what I’ve seen, change happens – especially in the nonprofit sector – when the right people, ideas and resources come together to attack a particular issue. The driving force and the glue are relationships, the ability to bring together seemingly disparate people and organizations that form strong, lasting partnerships.
Successful relationship management is first and foremost about attitude. You have to care (or, potentially, you have to decide to care) about building strong and genuine relationships. You have to have honest-to-goodness respect for the people with whom you’re building these relationships. This goes in all directions (donor to nonprofit; nonprofit to donor; nonprofit to program beneficiary, program beneficiary to nonprofit; etc. etc. ), and it’s non-negotiable. Without this attitude in place, you’ll fall short.
Once you’ve got this right, though, relationship-building and relationship management is a skill that can be learned. Like any skill there are big pieces and small pieces; there are people who are born naturals and people who learn along the way. There are a million ways to get this right and probably even more ways to muck it up.
So posts about how to write emails, or posts about the first impression you make when someone asks “how are you?” are part of the mountain of little tweaks that I’ve found help me get better at this every day – things I’ve seen, things I’ve messed up, things I’ve learned from others. One by one they pile up, until one day, to your (or my) surprise, you’re in a totally different place.
Wild rice, onions and Brussel sprouts
Lots of reactions to yesterday’s post on The China Study. Some people sent along skeptical and detailed posts about the conclusions in the China Study – which I read along with some thoughtful rebuttals – and some asked if I really was going to give up cappuccinos.
The most helpful “some’s” sent along supportive stories. Here’s an example:
Hi Sasha,
A good friend recommended The China Study about 6 months ago. My girlfriend read it immediately and we set out to change our diet – not 100%, but just tilt the scales towards plants. Our 30 day trial has morphed into several months. We aim for a Vegan/Vegetarian work-week and then on the weekend we might enjoy fish or lamb on a dinner out. We’ve both lost weight – 15 pounds for me, 10 for her, and we feel great. I’m glad to hear you are giving it a try.
Of course it is so tempting to cling to the counter-arguments, the skeptics and the doubters that let me say to myself, “You’re doing everything right already, don’t change anything.”
Then again, radical change shouldn’t be taken lightly, and before making any leaps one has to get back to one’s own sense of what makes sense, informed by the data and analysis we can get our hands on.
The most sensible, pithy advice on diet I’ve ever found was in Michael Pollan’s Food Rules:
Eat food, mostly plants, not too much
Which translates as:
- Eat food: processed junk is not food. Food is food.
- Mostly plants: the majority of your calories should come from plants
- Not too much: eat in moderation
And when I’m honest with myself, I’m following “eat food” and “not too much,” and falling way short on the “mostly plants” bit. And I’m 100% sure if I shift to “mostly plants” I will:
- Increase the amount of fiber I eat (almost no one eats the required minimum of 30g / day, and we all should)
- Decrease my cholesterol
- Eat more nutrient-dense foods
- And probably decrease my overall calorie intake
So lunch today was wild rice, onions and Brussel sprouts, and it was delicious. And while I’m sure I’ve not consumed my last latte, my last yoghurt, or even my last piece of meat, I think that the time has come to “tilt the scales towards plants.”
And the thing is, you can always do this tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Today is the only time to act, to make change.
Thanks for coming along for this slight dietary detour…we’ll now get back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
(and here’s Graham Hill’s 4-minute TED talk on becoming a weekday vegetarian.)