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.

Leverage or control

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Ever funder, rightly, loves “leverage,” as in “each dollar I put in brought in another four dollars of additional funding.”

What’s not to love?

Except of course that getting leverage means you’re giving up control.  There are more folks around the table, more great ideas being kicked around, and, yes, more expectations and priorities to manage.

All good, unless you’ve decided that doing it your way is more important than getting it done.

Your choice.

No Ask?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The fundraiser typically sweats about when the perfect moment is to make “the ask.”  It’s a Goldilocks mentality: not too soon, not too late.

Broadly speaking that is right.  But not if it means there’s no a sense of purpose.

Meaning: imagine for a moment that you’re the philanthropist.  You get emails and calls and invitations from the fundraiser (who could easily be the CEO or the Exec Director) pushing for a meeting.  The notes get increasingly urgent.  You sense something is in the air, and you take the meeting.

And then the meeting is just chit-chat.  It’s the sound of one hand clapping.

You, the philanthropist, discover that their urgency and your urgency don’t meet the same standard.  You suspect that there’s a punchline somewhere out there, but you’re feeling less patient about waiting to hear it.  You don’t take the next meeting.

This doesn’t mean that you, the fundraiser, greet someone and say, “Nice to meet you Analise, I’m hoping you’ll give us a million dollars.”  It does mean being clear about purpose every step of the way.

How you execute on that is up to you.

Global Philanthropy Forum – video is live

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I had a great time on Tuesday’s panel at the Global Philanthropy Forum with Matt Bannick, Maya Chorengel and David Bank.  It was an opportunity for all of us to dig in, in a substantive way, to the “facts and fictions” of impact investing.  My high-level takeaways from the panel were:

  1. We all agreed that just because there may not always be tradeoffs between financial return and social impact certainly doesn’t mean that there are never tradeoffs between the two.  This was language that Matt Bannick used and I thought it captured very well the nuance that, it feels to me, the impact investing sector misses when you just read the headlines.
  2. While the impact investing sector has grown and there’s more money at play, there’s still very little risk capital available, especially for early-stage ventures.  I include philanthropically-backed investment capital and enterprise philanthropy in the bucket of “risk capital,” and I’d say that, by and large, a year after the publication of the Blueprint to Scale report, as a sector we haven’t in any substantive way addressed the “Pioneer Gap” of early-stage, risk capital for entrepreneurs looking to solve old problems in new ways.
  3. A corollary of the previous two points is that we still haven’t mapped out a clear third way between “100% loss of principal” (philanthropy) and “market rate returns.”   My view is that until we create an equilibrium point around what this third way is, and until we do a better job articulating the impact we are having (and on who), then we have come up short in creating a new sector and a new way to solve problems.
  4. We have to get the metrics right.  If we can achieve breakthrough in how we quantify and understand impact, I believe we could change the whole game.  We all agree that there are some tradeoffs between seeking returns and seeking impact, but because it’s so much easier to gravitate to what we can quantify – the financial returns – and so much harder to accept tradeoffs when you struggle to describe what you’re gaining when you take more risk, we keep on gravitating to financial returns as the best indicator of success.   The onus is on all of us to articulate and quantify the increased impact you can have when you target harder-to-reach populations; when you dig into untested sectors like truly low-income housing or land rights or sanitation; or when put up risk capital on new, untested, potentially breakthrough ideas.

This panel was a conversation that wouldn’t have happened just a few years ago, and it’s a testament to how far we have come as a sector that we are able to delve deeper into the questions that underlie this work.  Enough time has passed that we have real data from which to draw initial conclusions.

At the same time, I’m reminded of how early we are in our evolution as a sector.  “Impact investing” as a term was coined in 2007, and each of the sectors in which we are investing – whether clean energy, agriculture, primary health services, etc. – are themselves nascent.  It is early days, and we must continually remind ourselves that we are in a period of experimentation and learning.  Indeed I fear that in an age where information and ideas flow so rapidly, we have rushed to conclusions far too quickly relative to the time it takes to actually build businesses on the ground.  We must ask ourselves: what changes can be accelerated by better information flows, better technology, more appropriate risk capital, and what changes necessarily come more slowly?  I know that if we retain a spirit of inquiry and openness, if we allow ourselves to continue to learn and evolve, rather than getting boxed in to old, narrow of what success looks like, then I believe we can really get there.

In case you missed the livestream, here’s the video of the panel.  Enjoy.

Global Philanthropy Forum – livestream

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I’m excited to be speaking today at the Global Philanthropy Forum together with Matt Bannick (Managing Partner, Omidyar Network), Maya Chorengel (Founding Partner, Elevar Equity) in a session moderated by David Bank (CEO and Editor, Impact IQ).

If you’d like to tune in the plenary panel is being livestreamed.  The panel is at 12:45pm Pacific time (on Tuesday April 16th).  The link is: www.philanthropyforum.org/live

The title of the panel is “Facts and Fiction of Impact Investing” and is described in the program as:

The impact investing field is at a critical juncture as it moves to scale. There are various theories of change about how to get more early-stage capital off the sidelines and differences in how organizations define impact. This panel will have a frank, provocative discussion exploring the true realities on the ground as well as whether and when there are real trade-offs between social and financial returns.

I’m sure it will be a fun, provocative conversation.  I hope you’ll tune in, and if you have questions you think the panel should address just leave them in the comments or drop me a line.

Saving lunchtime

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

The other day I got lunch at Bowery Eats, a cooking supply store in Chelsea Market that also happens to have a sandwich bar.  My timing was terrible and when I got there at 1:20pm, there was a long line plus a stack of phoned-in orders.

Bowery EatsMore than 10 minutes passed and I still hadn’t gotten my Peter Parker wrap (avocado, warm portabella mushroom, lettuce, a bit of mozzarella, and vinaigrette on a spinach wrap).

10 minutes isn’t long, but it’s more than a couple of standard deviations away from the mean in terms of how long you expect to wait for a sandwich.  Plus, five people with higher order numbers than I had gotten their sandwiches, so I started to get antsy.  I asked the woman at the counter how things were coming, and if they’d lost track of my order.

That’s when things got interesting.  She smiled.  She went to the back to check on my order.  She explained that it was taking longer because they heat up the mushrooms in the oven.  She checked again a few minutes later.  And then, 15 minutes in (five minutes after I’d first asked how things were coming), she actually said to the staff, in Spanish, “I’m not going to put any more sandwiches out until we finish up Order 31.”

And, I swear, I hadn’t made a big fuss at all.

Because of her, not only was I not annoyed, I was impressed.  Her job description might appear to be taking orders, getting customers’ money, and giving them sandwiches, but she was a natural at knowing just what to say and how to say it, with a smile, to make me feel attended to.

This knack is something I look for in hiring fundraisers.  Sure they need storytelling skills and passion and empathy, they need a thick skin and a dogged determination and the ability to build relationships.  But all the truly great fundraisers I know are also….something that this woman had.   “Polite” is the word that comes to mind but that doesn’t capture it, though people who naturally have good manners have some of the trait I’m looking for.  It’s more an unspoken knack to let someone know that you see them, that you’re paying attention, that you are a concierge for them within your organization.

It’s not the easiest thing to test for, but after you conduct your interviews of your top candidates, you can take a step back and ask everyone who interacted with the interviewees: how did they make you feel?

 

 

(p.s. thanks to DC Foodrag for the picture)

Jawbone UP Band – we are what we measure

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I recently received a Jawbone UP band as a gift.  It is one of a handful of devices on the market designed to help you live a better, happier, life through measurement.  And who doesn’t love fun with measurement?!

Jawbone UP

The are tons of UP product reviews out there so I won’t take a full stab at that.  In terms of my experience with the UP band, I find it comfortable to wear, reassuringly low-tech (techies grouse that it doesn’t use Bluetooth to synch to your iPhone, I find that somewhat comforting since I’m wearing it 24/7), and I love the fact that the battery lasts for 10 days so I don’t have yet another device to charge daily.

It syncs to my iPhone using the audio (headphone) port which was surprising but which works very well and quickly.  UP’s iPhone software is slick enough, and except for a few minor annoyances (around logging and editing activities) I don’t have any real complaints.  I have already lost the tiny charger – which is hard to find anywhere but online – and people complain about losing the cap at one end of the wristband, thought I’ve managed not to lose mine, yet.

Unlike the Nike Fuelband, Jawbone’s UP band measures both activity and sleep.  Given how structured my days are, I quickly discovered that measuring my activity level (steps taken) has been interesting but has had little effect.  I walk 3.75 miles each day as part of my commute, and I generally move around a good deal while I’m at the office, so while I enjoy seeing the activity information I could soon live without it.

The part that has been more revolutionary is sleep information.  I have no idea of the accuracy of the data, but the UP band tells me how long I’ve slept, how often I’ve woken up (though I’ve found it can’t fully distinguish between asleep and lying in bed with my eyes open), and it gives a minute-by-minute tracking of light and deep sleep.  This has been quite profound, because seeing the feedback on my sleep has taught me how sensitive I am to the amount of sleep I get and how my body does what it can to catch up when I fall behind on sleep (more deep sleep after nights of less sleep).  I can see the effects of just 10 minutes of meditation before bed (better, deeper sleep).  I can see the direct tradeoff I end up making between sleeping and exercising.  And I can no longer trick myself into thinking that missing an hour of sleep, or even a half hour, doesn’t affect me – it does.

Perhaps the most interesting societal part these observations is that while we know that sleep and activity are the two most important ingredients to living a happy and healthy life, it would seem natural to talk about exercising more and hitting a daily 10,000 steps goal (I’m not – I’m usually at around 7,800); whereas boasting that I’m doing a much better job at getting the 7 ½ hours of sleep I need seems odd.  It’s as if being a high-achiever and sleeping enough are somehow at odds, as if acknowledging that I need as much sleep as the next guy is an admission of just a little bit of frailty.

In one of the funniest and most honest interviews I ever read with GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Immelt joked that “If I put my head down at your feet right now, I’d be asleep in 30 seconds. I can sleep anywhere, anyplace, anytime.”  That’s how tiring it was to be the CEO of GE.  These stories abound.  And while I admit to secretly wanting to be the kind of person who can produce at high levels and feel great with 4 or 5 hours of sleep, the truth is I’m not wired that way.

So, while I can’t tell you whether the UP band is better or worse than the Fitbit or the Nike Fuelband as an activity tracker, I will say that I prefer having a device that helps me keep track of how I spend all 24 hours of my day and not just the 16 ½ (or so) that I spend awake.

And it seems pretty clear to me that the next iteration of the smartphone is going to be some sort of wearable device, and I wonder if 10 years from now we’ll all laugh that we had those clunky things in our pockets, as we’ll have devices on our wrists that have all the functionality of our phones and of activity-trackers, and we’ll use glasses or any screen in front of us as visual displays.

In the meantime, sleep well.

Attaining excellence

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Continuing on the theme from last week’s post from Bruce Feiler’s The Secrets of Happy Families, I also appreciated the book’s inquiry into how we attain excellence.

American families are obsessed with having their kids play organized sports, so Feiler took to investigating where great athletes come from.  He turned to research by psychologist Benjamin Bloom who, in the 1980’s, analyzed the trajectories of world-class performers in six different areas, “concert pianists, Olympic swimmers, sculptors, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists.”

Bloom’s results, documented in Developing Talent in Young People, are surprising:

The child who ‘made it’ was not always the one who was considered to be the most ‘talented.’  Many parents said another one of their children had more ‘natural ability.’  So what distinguished the high achiever from the underachieving sibling?  ‘A willingness to work and a desire to excel,’ Bloom wrote.  The most common words used were persistence, determination, and eagerness.

While I’m not specifically interested in what makes star athletes, I’m hugely interested in people reaching their full potential, and Bloom’s observations ring true.  Time and again, the people I meet who are exceptional are the ones who have decided that they are going to be great at something.

Recently I heard Maria Popova, the now-famous Brain Pickings blogger, describe her path from college to where she is today.  Maria hated college but discovered that she loved discovery, she loved self-directed learning.  And so she started exploring and writing about what she was learning and sharing it on a blog.  It was hard work, it sounded pretty lonely, and it didn’t pay anything.  For four full years Maria gutted things out, barely getting by, and doing her work.  In just one telling illustration, Maria decided she needed to take a computer course to learn how to code for her own blog.  The only problem was that she was broke.  So Maria chose to eat beans and tuna for weeks to save up the money she needed for one HTML course.  And that was just one step on her long journey to becoming Maria Popova.  One of a thousand decisions she made to do the work she needed to do.  Maria didn’t spend four lonely years waiting to get discovered, she spent four years honing her craft to become someone worth discovering.

In some ways Maria’s story is familiar: the heroic figure who toils in obscurity for years and then breaks through.  But there’s a danger in this heroic narrative.  It insulates us from the story, it allows us to trick ourselves into thinking that because we are not heroes, because we’re doing what we’re doing and not what they did (*gasp* because we JUST have a job) that we don’t have the potential to transform or the right to be great.

Part of the problem, I think, is that when you have a job you see all the signposts of title and official job responsibility and, yes, how much you are paid.   The concreteness of those external markers supersedes the much more important personal reckoning of discovering who we are and where we are in our own development.  Instead, we play by the rules of whatever system we are in, and in the process we create a numbing separation from the work we do.  We make an uneven exchange of “persistence, determination and eagerness” for doing what needs to be done to get the kinds of rewards bestowed by the system we are in.  And then we get frustrated because the system doesn’t give us what we really want AND we aren’t growing the way we hoped we would grow.

One way to break the cycle is to wake up to the fact that we have greatness inside of us and to find the joy in creating what we are meant to create in this world – even if today we are creating just a small part of it.  The simple act of caring and making personal investment transforms the quality of everything we do, big and small.  Suddenly we put ourselves into the things we create, and we create them as part of a broader undertaking of daring and learning and failing and picking ourselves up again.  The ultimate power of this broader undertaking, this broader narrative, is that we begin for the first time to see that our own growth happens in long cycles.  We trade in “where am I going to be 12 months from now (job, title, etc.)” for “what’s the real work I need to do now to be a transformed person in five or 7 or 10 years’ time?”

Reflecting on my own growth and development, I know that if I can make just one real, substantive change in how I work each year then I’ve had a transformational year.  Think, then, of the shape of the arc that gets me from where I am today to where I need to be.

Of course it is hard to see, looking forward, that we will only become who we are going to become in the long run, and that in fact we have the time we need to get there.  The easily quantified, externally-recognizable stepping stones to get from here to come at the pace they are going to come.  But there’s no escaping the real work we need to do to become the person we are meant to be.

Persistence, determination, and eagerness.

Four tips for better group decision-making

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I’m most of the way through Bruce Feiler’s The Secrets of Happy Families.  The book takes the best, recent insights on how groups/organizations perform and applies it to families and raising kids.  This results in surprising suggestions like using agile development principles to make getting kids to school on time less stressful or coming together to write down and display family mission statements.  Feiler is non-doctrinaire in his writing, avoiding “must do” and “top 7” lists in favor of a series of surprising, useful, often counter-intuitive recommendations, many of which seem worth a real shot.

Outside of the book’s relevance for anyone raising kids, The Secrets of Happy Families is also a great refresher on new thinking in organizational behavior.  There’s lots to mine here, and I thought Feiler’s summary of four factors for better group decision-making were particularly on point.  (all the quotations below are from The Secrets of Happy Families).

  1. Too Few Cooks Spoil the Broth.  This addresses the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki) and how large groups with the right information can be smarter than the smartest person in the group.  The part that I found most interesting was: “Uzzi [a sociologist] analyzed 321 Broadway musicals and found that teams of people who had never met did not work well together and produced more flops.  Meanwhile, groups that had collaborated before were also not that successful, because they tended to rehash ideas and not come up with fresh concepts.  The sweet spot was a mix of strong and weak ties, where trust existed but new ideas could flow.”  To me this speaks to the need to have fluidity of both people and ideas (often from outside the organization) to get to the best decisions.
  2. Vote first, talk later. “I was shocked to learn that groups are better at making decisions if participants express their views at the start of a meeting before they’ve had a chance to listen to anybody else.  Countless studies have shown that once the discussion begins, the people who speak first tend to persuade others of their position, even when their positions are wrong.  Daniel Kahneman offered a helpful blueprint. ‘A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position.’   This seems like the easiest tactic of all to employ – simply ask people to write down what they think at the start of an important conversation.
  3. Hold a premortem.  “As the conversation reaches a climax, it’s important to encourage people to express their true opinions, especially if they disagree with the group…psychologist Gary Klein calls [this] a ‘premortem.’  When teams engage in prospective hindsight…they increase their ability to identify what might possibly go wrong…[e.g.] ‘Let’s imagine it’s a year from now.  We’re following this plan, and it hasn’t worked out.  Let’s write down what we think would have gone wrong. Klein says the main value of a premortem is to legitimize doubts and let skeptics voice their concerns.”     What’s powerful about this is that it engages us in a concrete thought experiment that grounds a conversation of “what if’s” and complex dependencies.  By placing ourselves in a future space, we can see the decision from a new vantage point and understand the risks and opportunities of the different paths we might take.
  4. The Law of Two Women.  “One night I was having dinner with an executive at Google, and I asked him to tell me the most significant change he’s seen in how his company runs meetings.  Without hesitating, he told me they always make sure there is more than one woman in the room.  He then told me about the study that led to this principle…”  I won’t summarize the subsequent MIT study – the punchline is “groups that had a higher proportion of females were more effective.  These groups were more sensitive to input from everyone, more capable of reaching compromise, and more efficient at making decisions.”      This one is fascinating and, again, very easy to implement.

Increasingly I’m coming to appreciate the importance and power of small groups that come together to make decisions.  I’m also coming to understand that just putting a handful of smart, effective people together and saying “be an effective group” is a pretty terrible strategy.  You need trust and safety and mutual investment and a sense of shared purpose and higher goals.  And you also benefit greatly from tactics that are proven to result in better decisions.

This list seems like a great way to start the important work of making your groups as high-performing as the individuals in them.

Not just whether, how

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

One way to end a sales meeting is with the big push.  You’ve done the work, you’ve made the pitch, you go to close the sale.

Before that moment, and in the meetings preceding that meeting, you’re having a different conversation.

And it IS supposed to be a conversation.  That means questions are very often the answer.  One of the biggest mistake people make in trying to make a sale is the rush to get out your “whole story:” your job is to make a pitch, and you’d better say everything you need to say the clock runs out on your meeting.

Of course the problem with that is that you can’t solve someone’s problem if you never bother to find out in the first place what their problem is.

The other day I was stopped cold by a great question I’ve never asked so directly (but wished I had):

“What factors are most important for you in making this decision?”

So simple, but I’d never actually paused to ask that clear, direct, transparent, non-threatening, and quite objective question.

I wouldn’t do it in every situation – this question can, if not asked in the right way, put your prospect in a “head” rather than “gut” or “heart” space in terms of her decision-making, which might not always be the right thing to do.

But if you’re in a complex, relationship-based, multi-faceted decision-making situation, asking directly how the decision is going to be made is probably going to help most of the time.