What do you want?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It’s actually very easy to communicate what you’d like someone to do.  The NY MTA does it simply, with a bigger box.

Metrocard

Of course this applies to web design, IRS tax forms, etc.  But it also applies to how you fundraise.

The most subtle, ever-elusive dance in fundraising is between relationship-building and “closing the sale.”  I find that, by and large, new fundraisers have to learn to invest more in building relationship, providing value to others, and being ambassadors within their organization for potential donors.

At the same time, you always have to be ready to answer the questions: “What’s most important to you?” or “If I’m ready to donate, what should it be for?”  There’s almost never any harm, even at the outset of a relationship, to be very clear about what your priorities are and how someone can be most helpful.   That’s not trying to close the sale too early, it’s knowing what your priorities are and giving someone clarity.  That’s never a bad thing.

If you don’t let them know (or worse, if you don’t know) what you hope they’ll do, how can you ever expect them to figure it out?

And if you’ve ever gone into a fundraising meeting without your top priority ask in mind, you’ve broken this rule.  I know I have.

Out loud

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

What if you committed, for a little while, to verbalize the great ideas that pop into your head?  The important, risky (-seeming) ideas that represent what’s really on your mind.  The ones that you don’t say because they’re a bit too real, too honest, too to the point.

There are few skills more important than being able to say the right thing at the right time in the right way to shift a whole conversation.

One-on-one conversations, group conversations, high-stakes and low-stakes conversations, all are susceptible to that kernel of truth and insight that breaks them wide open.

The entire business school case method is geared, ultimately, towards teaching this skill.   For two years you sit with 85 incredibly bright people, and the class is orchestrated by a Professor who, if she’s good, is looking for just one thing: getting students to learn how to integrate the case content and the points made by other classmates, pulling those threads and her own observations together to get to real insight, all in a way that move the discussion forward.

You can save yourself $200,000 and two years at a top business school by starting, today, to say your great, good and OK ideas out loud.  The best place to start?  Not necessarily the ideas you think are the best ones.  Start with the ideas you’re afraid to say out loud, the ones that make your heart beat a little faster.  Fear is a great indicator of how real they are and how much truth they contain.

It’s true that saying these things in a way that they are actually heard is itself an art.  But you’ll never practice that art if your most important ideas are kept under lock and key.

The end of the line

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

One day in the not-so-distant future, you’ll get there.  The end of the line.  The top of your organization.  The top of your field.  Nowhere else to go, because you’ll have arrived.

Most likely, that day won’t be within striking distance of the end of your career.  Far from it.  So there you will be, at the top of your game and the top of the ladder you spent all that time and energy climbing.

And then you’ll have no choice but to make a shift.  They’ll be no sense any more (was there ever?) in the obvious milestones of advancement: title, promotion, compensation.  In all the important ways, those things will be behind you.  At which point your yardstick will cease to be how high you can climb and become, instead, the actual impact you are having on the world, the change you are creating for others.

Imagine not waiting until that future date to let go of striving for the obvious markers of success and progress.  Imagine how letting go now, not five or 10 or 15 years from now, would free up all the energy you’re putting into the climb.  Imagine your confidence and sense of relief in recognizing that someday soon you will get there, which is why there’s no need to (and not much result in) continuing to push the rope.  Imagine your ability to focus on the stuff that really matters: the really important, hard-for-the-right-reasons elements of making a difference.

Isn’t this, in the end, what it means to live a life of service?

Isn’t this why anyone who gets to the “top” discovers that it’s really just a starting line?

A wasted day

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Think about it: on a day when you swing for the fences, you might swing and miss.

A miss means a complete miss, a whiff, an air-ball, and all the associated jeering (we think) from the peanut gallery.  Wouldn’t it be embarrassing, and inefficient, to be completely wrong, to put a big idea out there that goes nowhere at all, one that’s just plain wrong?  Wouldn’t it, objectively, be a waste of time to work on something all day long and have it amount to nothing?

We have no time to waste!  Let’s tick through our To Do list, take the meetings that are on our calendars,, chip away at the projects that others have asked us to work on.  We know, at least, that on a day like that we will never have accomplished nothing.  This not only feels safer, it’s also what we were taught to do for a major portion of our lives.  It’s where good grades come from and how we got good reviews at our first and second jobs.

On the other hand, hitting “send” or “publish” on an outlandish, important idea; digging in and doing the work that no one asked you to do; spending time with people who will push your thinking and take your work to the next level…none of that is linear at all.  And so we are faced with our anticipation of the possibility being totally wrong, of our idea missing the mark, of being embarrassed, of discovering that, at least at this moment, we’re not that good at coming up with The Next Big Thing, and, staring that anticipation in the face, we decide to keep on playing small and safe for long enough that soon enough that’s the only thing we do.

The question becomes: which really is the wasted day?  The one where you tried for something big and failed, or the one where you didn’t step to the plate, didn’t take the shot, didn’t put yourself on the line?

Never trying anything can’t be a strategy for getting from here to there.  Nor can waiting until you’re “in charge,” because: 1. You shouldn’t be put in charge until you’ve shown that you can make new things happen; and 2. If you’re put in charge without having learned how to make important things happen, how will you suddenly know how to break away from the task orientation that had served you so well for so long?

Have you ever met with your boss or a peer and had them tell you: “you’re doing great work, but I’m giving you a terrible review because you played it too safe last year?”   Have you ever told that to someone else?

What does it take to get us to start playing big?

I am generous when…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My daughter made this poster for a project in her Kindergarten class.  The assignment was to finish the sentence: “I am generous when…”

In case it’s hard to read: “I am generous when I have a lot of books and my little sister wants some I let hear her have some.”

Life used to be simple and we made it complicated.

Makes me think about finishing that same sentence from time to time.

Zoe_generous

Save it for another day

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

A good friend told me a beautiful story recently.  She was at a 7-11 and got to the register only to be told that the guy in front of her had paid for her food and her coffee.  Apparently the guy who paid was a regular, a trucker, and he did this from time to time.

It made my friend’s morning, and she immediately offered to pay for the next person on line, to keep paying it forward.

The cashier asked her not to do it.

Better, the cashier said, to do it somewhere else on another day.  Because she, the cashier, had already gotten to experience the joy of being part of an act of kindness.  She had had the chance to deliver the message of the gift given to my friend.  Her day was already a fabulous, exceptional day.

Instead, let someone else (another cashier or waiter or just about anyone) somewhere else experience that same joy on another day.

Nice.

Giving, halfway

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Look down a list of donors and you’ll never be able to figure out the intention behind a donation:  who gave expecting something in return – who is keeping a running balance sheet in his head of credits and debits – and who simply gave a gift?

Part of what led me to start my generosity experiment was exhaustion.  It was exhausting to have an unspoken scorecard attached to every element of my life.  I knew intuitively that I was the one who suffered when I silently kept tabs of every step and every action that I (and others) did and did not take, but I didn’t know how to stop the music.  My calculations were automatic and unintentional.

And then it struck me: what better place to start letting go than with giving itself, with actual money, and all the attachment I (we) have to it?

I’ve discovered a few things along the way.

First, it is possible to change this sort of thing.  Five years later, I truly am able (not every time, but often) to give unconditionally – not just money but time and attention and complements.  Unconditional giving brings me so much more joy, and because the character of these acts is so different they create something categorically different in my life and in the world.  My prior “balanced giving scorecard” was mathematically appealing yet fundamentally flawed.  It presupposed scarcity of the gifts I had to give, and in so doing it shackled me, the giver, never letting me fully know what abundance feels like.

Second, giving abundantly doesn’t happen every time or at every moment.  Old habits die hard, and life is a dance not a set playbook.  But having a wider repertoire is liberating.

Third, I think I’ve become a better receiver, meaning I’ve become better at accepting gifts openly and with gratitude, and I’m more comfortable allowing gifts to be gifts.  I also have much more appreciation for the truly gracious around me, those who deeply honor the givers around them and who recognize that true giving is not tit-for-tat, it is gifts flowing openly and freely in all directions.

Mostly, I’d like to keep cracking the door open for myself and for others, so that we can all stop giving halfway.  There are few things more limiting than a conditional gift, and few things more liberating than even one small act of radical generosity.  That means there are no strings attached

I hate my microwave

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I moved last year, which was a lot of work but has ultimately been great.  One of the small drawbacks of the kitchen in my new house is that there’s no good space for a microwave, so our only criterion we had when buying a microwave was that it be as small as possible.  We found a suitable-looking Panasonic “Inverter” microwave on Amazon – small, a polished stainless steel look, good-enough customer reviews, inexpensive.  It’s terrible.

Panasonic inverterBy way of background, my favorite button on my last GE Profile microwave was the “Add 30 seconds” button.  This button not only had the right increment (now that microwaves are so powerful, 30 seconds is a more relevant measure than one minute) but the “Add 30 seconds” button actually started the microwave.  You hit just one button and the thing turns on.

Contrast this with my Panasonic.  It has a big knob that you turn to add time, poorly solving (because it over/undershoots too easily) a problem I didn’t have in the first place. The microwave does have an “Add minute” button but it’s one in a grouping of five of tiny indistinguishable buttons, one of which is a “More/Less” button that as far as I can tell does absolutely nothing.  The “Start” button is in that grouping as well, just as tiny as the rest of them.  What a mess.

I’m sure the Panasonic design team doesn’t think they’ve made a terrible microwave.  They’re probably proud of all the tricks their gadget can do.  And I suspect that there’s a microwave power user out there who might appreciate the refinements – though I suspect it’s still poorly designed from a user experience perspective.

The interesting question of course is how Panasonic succeeded in willfully ignoring the most common use case for 95% of their users 95% of the time.  Instead of stopping to figure out what they actually wanted their microwave to be good at, they chose instead to show their customers everything they could make it do.

Easy and trivial to chuckle at this sort of thing, except that this unwillingness to make real choices is everywhere, and it’s reflected in decisions big and small.  It’s why most nonprofit appeals and stories are indistinguishable from one another.  The message is, “we do lots of great things, we’re happy to talk to you about it, but mostly here’s a story that shows that the work we do has heart.”

Without deciding who you want to make happy, where you want to be great, you end up in an indecisive morass of nothingness.

Need proof?  Look at the next five nonprofit newsletters you get in your inbox.  Four of them won’t have a breath of life in them, a whiff that they were written by an actual human being with a voice and a personality.  And the one out of five that actually stand out for having a real voice still will often fall in the trap of 18 ancillary links and articles and “follow us” links and job postings and donate buttons and…and…and…because we may as well put that all in there if we’re sending the thing to 10,000 people.

As usual, the team at IDEO.org shows how to get this right, and reminds us that Swiss Army Knives are good at almost nothing.

(p.s. sadly it seems that the Microwave Oven Standard UI Project never really got off the ground.)

IDEO.org

Man’s search for meaning

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Based on last week’s post, Jeff kindly sent me to a wonderful four-minute lecture excerpt by Viktor Frankl.  Even through the grainy recording you can see the twinkle in Frankl’s eye and his passion for humanity, with all its flaws and all of its potential.

The core of the video is Frankl relating a story of what he recently learned in his flying lessons, about crosswinds and where you have to aim when searching for your destination.

In Frankl’s words, from the video, “If you don’t recognize man’s search for meaning you make him worse, you make him dull, you make him frustrated, you add and contribute to his frustrations…”  Rather, borrowing the words of Goethe, let us aim high, for “if we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of what he can be.”

Summed up even more simply by Frankl, “We have to be idealists in a way, because then we end up as true realists.”  Indeed.

Here’s the rare clip, a 4 minute video of Frankl himself.

Not happiness, meaning

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

A colleague of mine shared this recent article from The Atlantic titled “There’s More to Life than Being Happy” by Emily Esfahani Smith.  The article describes recent research on the difference between living a life in pursuit of happiness and living a life of meaning.

I’d have loosely assumed that the pursuit of meaning has as its outgrowth a high degree of happiness or, putting a finer point on it, of satisfaction.  Which would mean that happiness and meaning are pretty highly correlated.

The researchers came to a different conclusion.  They found that “a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different.  Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a ‘giver.’”

The counter-intuitive piece of the research, for me, is around what a happy life devoid of meaning looks like, and how a life of meaning can sometimes have low degrees of happiness:

Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided… In the meaningful life ‘you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.’  For instance, having more meaning in one’s life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing.

Put another way, the pursuit of meaning isn’t always a bed of roses.  It can involve higher degrees of stress and anxiety, it’s characterized by more thinking about the past and the future, rather than the present.  It’s hard work.

And yet it is this work that makes us human.  Smith refers back to the wisdom of psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning:

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is… A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

The people I see making real and lasting change in the world distinguish themselves with their grit and resilience.  And while I believe that the foundation of grit and resilience is character and values, it makes sense that it is also a sense of meaning, of purpose, of “why” that gives people the strength to bear almost any “how.”

Emily Smith’s full article is definitely worth the read.