I think with my brain, but…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I spent some time today talking with a great filmmaker and TV producer.  Her mantra for everything she creates is to what she called the “micro story:” that one, personal narrative that captures the whole.

We know this, but we don’t practice it.

We throw up statistics.  We create mash-up stories profiling a series of good projects and forget that the end result of the glossy portrayals is so much less than the sum of the parts.  We have conversations about giving to our organization that lead with programmatic jargon, budgets, abbreviations and ratios.

I think we’re afraid that telling real, honest stories will somehow be insulting to someone’s intelligence.  We know that “people respond to stories” but the woman across the table from you is so smart and so accomplished that of course she “really wants to dig in.”

What if we imagine our audience wearing block-lettered, tacky t-shirts (like the caps that Frank from 30 Rock wears) that shout out:

I THINK WITH MY BRAIN

BUT I ACT FROM MY HEART

I bet we’d act differently, we’d inspire more often, we’d create genuine connection and a sense of hope.

The illusion

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

Three years since I first started blogging, I’m beginning to get a glimpse of the phantoms that real writers battle:

The illusion that, regardless of what happened yesterday, today you’ll have nothing to say.

The twinge of loss when you write something worth writing.

The pain of putting an idea out into the world.

The fear that something has left you that you can’t get back

It is like giving away anything real and true – love or friendship or money or some other long-treasured thing.  Our mind tricks us into feeling that these things we give away are ours, that they are finite, that the safest thing to do is to cling to them fiercely.

Over and over we practice creating and letting go.  We practice being open.  We dare to strive to be our best selves, reaching so far that we are exposed and vulnerable.  And yes, sometimes we fail. Our leap comes up short.  We crash into the chasm and end up sore, bruised and limping.

But mostly we discover that what we give away is a reflection of the abundance within us, is proof of our grace and all that we have to give.

So we sit back down again, ready to wrestle the illusion of scarcity to the ground, never giving up or giving in.

Work really hard

~ Sasha ~ 8 Comments

All the most incredible people I know work hard.  Really hard.  Crazily hard.

My first job out of college was as a management consultant.  The deal in those jobs is that you sign away your life for a few years in exchange for a professional experience that gives you a lot more exposure and learning than you really deserve, given what you know.

That was my experience.  In the first two months on the job I worked 7 days a week, 12-14 hours a day.  It was pretty miserable.  And that was a close approximation of the next four years.  Of course, I also learned a lot.

I also figured that working that hard had to be temporary.  It had to be, I figured, since the distinction between “work” and “my life” was a bright line.  Work wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely work = something I had to do.  Not working = fun.  Over time, the more I worked the less I felt I was living.  For me, that was exhausting.

That’s why I think passion and loving what you do win every time – because you want to be there.  Your mind is always churning with the next idea, not because your boss tells you to but because you’re doing your life’s work.

Of course you’re not going to love every job every day starting today for the rest of your life.  It takes some time to get there, since it’s a combination of self-discovery, trial-and-error, and chance.

If you’re not working at your dream job today, what do you do?

The easier, but ultimately limiting, option is to slog away at the job you don’t love, and steal every last minute you can for “free time.”

The other option is to make finding and living your passion a big part of what you do, starting today.  You don’t do this by quitting your job (assuming that’s not an option) but by taking the time you have when not at “work” to keep on working, not on your day job but at discovering and learning your craft and your passion.

Jump into your dreams today.  Find the 15 most influential/inspirational people doing/writing about the work you hope to do, and read them religiously.  Add in a few people who are going to give you a daily dose of kick-in-the-pants inspiration.  Get involved in conversations that will lead to opportunities for real-life interaction and opportunity. Learn the skills that will serve you in your life’s work – by setting aside the time today, rolling up your sleeves, and doing the work.

Stephen King famously said that step 1 in writing is “Put butt in chair.” That chair isn’t placed in front of a TV or a computer that’s browsing Facebook, it’s not a barstool and when you sit in it you’re not reading a trashy novel.

It’s placed squarely in front of the tools of your trade, the ones you hope, someday, to master.

The what and the why

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

We’re generally really good at and comfortable with talking about “what:” what we’re proposing, what the big vision is, what the plan looks like. We’re eager to spend our time constructing the argument, perfecting the slides, and standing up and making our big pitch.

“We want to do this and this and then this.”

But “why” often stumps us.  We treat “why” like it’s some sort of attack.  “Why” makes us feel defensive.

“Why” can sound to us like someone is tearing down the “what,” just without doing it directly.

Here’s a suggestion. Hear “why” for what it is: a chance to dig into the assumptions, the core issues, the strategic opportunity.  “Why” means: I share your goal of getting to the bottom of this one, let’s figure it out together by getting to the core issues.

More often than not, when someone asks “why” they really mean just that.

Why?

Re: Question

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Never let an email go out of your inbox with this subject line.  Instead, answer the question in the subject line.

Why?  Why bother being persnickety about such a trivial thing?

Maybe it’s not so trivial.  The subject line is of each email you send is your headline.  Can you imagine if the NY Post’s headline today had been “Re: IMF”  (instead of “French Whine” in reference to Dominique Strauss-Kahn not being given any special treatment by the NYPD.)  Re:IMF doesn’t sell newspapers, and it doesn’t help your email get to the top of the pile.

The subject of your email is a trigger for people to read your note (or not), to read it immediately (or not).  Tweaking this is one more way to avoid letting your message get lost in the shuffle.

A guy I know puts my name in the subject line of every email he sends to me.  It’s pretty weird, pretty far outside of regular email norms, but I absolutely know when an email is just to me and when it’s to a group, and it makes a difference in how I respond.

So, for kicks, a list of norm-breaking email suggestions:

  1. If you are the author of an email, make the subject Tweetable.  (NOT “Question” but instead “Should we move the launch date up a week?”).  Flex those 140-character-or-less authoring muscles for something more useful.
  2. Have as few people as possible receive every email
  3. Especially when you ignore #2, establish that you want replies from people in the To: line.  Cc: means “I’m just letting you know.”
  4. If someone has written a vague, general email subject line, change it.  Reply to “Question” with “Moving up launch date [Re: Question]”  This way the email is still searchable under the original subject plus it’s more clear to everyone what’s going on
  5. When an email thread veers off to a totally different topic, start a new thread or change the subject line.  Having a conversation about a potential promotion in a thread whose subject is “Re:Staff Retreat” is just plain inefficient.
  6. If threads are getting really long, pick up the phone instead (yes, that counts as an email tip)
  7. If a conversation has become irrelevant to some people, drop them off
  8. If #7 makes you/them uncomfortable, move the people who are being dropped off to Bcc: and say in the note: “I’m moving Pankaj and Sarah to Bcc: and the rest of us will continue the thread.”
  9. Make your emails shorter
  10. Write each email as if the time of each of the person reading it is valuable – because it is, even if being loose with these sorts of things feels like a hassle to you.

I wish all the popular email programs made it a default to have the cursor jump to the subject line when you hit “Reply.”  In the meantime, my answer to “Re: Question” is “No!”

Tune in for mindless affirmation

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

File this ad for New York TV station WPIX under: I’m not even sure I get what they’re saying.

“If you’re thinking it, they’re saying it” is the slogan.  Huh?  It seems to mean, “We promise everything you see on our station will be an echo chamber that reinforces your existing opinions.  We swear we won’t challenge your thinking.”

I wasn’t tuning in to local news anyway, so this starts out as a post about a somewhat troubling and pretty weak subway ad.   But it’s a worrisome meme: watch us because you know we agree with you.

We’re getting more information flows are made just for us: we choose who to follow on Twitter and who our Facebook friends are, what blogs to read and what news sites to peruse.  Mass-customization might allow us to hone in on what most interests us, but it might also be code for “We swear we won’t challenge your thinking.”

Worse, there’s a lot more filtering of information than you might think.  Eli Pariser gave a chilling talk at TED 2011 in which he showed how Facebook is filtering his (and your and my) feed, showing a lot more updates from his lefty friends than from his righty friends.  And, one week after the uprising in Tahir Square, Eli showed how two people on two different computers got radically different Google search results for “Egypt”  – one got political news, the other got vacation and travel sites.

This makes it all the more important for us to decide why we read – for pleasure, for edification, to learn something, to challenge ourselves?  When I recommend a book that’s designed to challenge people’s thinking – like all the manifestos by the Domino Project (Poke the Box, Do the Work); or Cognitive Surplus or Drive or Made to Stick or Rework or even my Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs – I always wonder what people who tell me they didn’t like the books really mean.

Does “I didn’t like it” mean “…because it made me really uncomfortable” or “…because I disagreed” or “…because this is different than the way I do things” or something else?

We have access to more information than ever, and it’s becoming less likely that we stumble across contradictory views.  This can’t be good for civic discourse, for our political process, for our shared values and culture.

Armed with this knowledge, it’s incumbent upon us to seek discomfort in what we read.  It also means, for the writer/blogger, how illusory and deceptive it is to strive for popularity.

Here’s Eli Pariser’s TED Talk

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/1091


Good posts, bad posts, and the dragon

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I have a confession to make: yesterday’s post wasn’t really finished.  I simply ran out of time, and even though I wanted to give it another read, to tweak it some, to tighten it and make it a little punchier, I just couldn’t.

So I published it.

And you know what?  I bet you didn’t notice, because my own inner critic screams a heck of a lot louder than you do.  And if you did notice, you probably didn’t care all that much.

I just finished Stephen Pressfield’s manifesto Do the Work (available for FREE on Kindle), the second book published by The Domino Project.  It’s an entire book about the Resistance, a malevolent force (an actual dragon) out to fight you to the death, to stop you in your tracks, to keep you from producing great art and for sharing your gifts with the world.

It will take you about two hours to read this book, and I promise it will stick with you for the rest of your life.  Every time you start to hesitate, to hold back, to put off something even a little bit, you’ll know that dragon is out there leering at you, snickering in the knowledge that he might win another round.

That dragon was telling me not to post yesterday, was telling me the post wasn’t good enough.   Tomorrow it will tell me that I don’t have a post in me, or if I do come up with something, it will tell me that what I do have to say isn’t good enough or insightful enough or clever enough to make it worth reading.

My ace in the hole is that I’ve already shipped.  I do it every day. I know how to win this battle.

And so do you.  Fight on!

(Here’s the link again to Do the Work, free on Kindle, in case something or someone held you back from getting it the first time.  Pressfield is the real deal, the author of 8 books, and he knows of what he speaks.)

The mutual interview

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

There are two things you’re aiming to accomplish every time you have a job interview:

  1. Figure out whether you want the job
  2. (assuming yes to question #1) Show the person interviewing you that you want the job and should get the job

This is delicate dance, since spending too much energy and time on either question can make a mess of the thing.

At one end of the spectrum, in the past few years I’ve occasionally “interviewed” folks who literally spent all of our time together grilling me, which didn’t feel right at all – and made it virtually impossible for me to consider them for the job.  Conversely, I’ve also made the mistake (and seen others do the same) of getting a job offer after multiple interviews and not knowing if I really wanted it.

As you get more senior, it’s generally understood that the pendulum will start to swing more towards the middle – that the job interview is more matchmaking than a test (though in truth, ALL job interviews are matchmaking and anyone who tells you otherwise is either deluded or putting you on).  But no matter who you are and what job you’re signing up for, you owe it to yourself to figure out whether the fit is right AND you have to find a way to do this without giving up the opportunity to convince your interviewer that you’re passionate about and qualified for the job.

Lifetimes ago (it feels) I was in college and had what I was understood to be an informational interview at an investment bank.  It became an interview interview.

When it got to my one question at the end of the interview, I asked, “When it’s after midnight and you get that phone call from a Partner that means you’ll have to work until the next morning, what motivates you to do it?”

My interviewer, sensing weakness (I suspect), replied, “That’s a great question, and I’d like to turn that back around at you and ask how you’d answer that question.”

At this point, I proceeded to show all my cards, and I blabbered on about how I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go into banking, etc. etc. etc.  Shockingly, I didn’t get called back for a follow-up conversation.

I’m glad that job interview didn’t work out for me – it wasn’t right for me.  But I learned that day that it was up to me to decide why I was interviewing: to get a job, or to figure out if I wanted a job.

Two different objective, two different sets of strategies, both are equally valid, you just have to decide.

Moms matter

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Happy (almost) Mothers Day!  (If you haven’t got your plans in place to celebrate Mom, you’d better get moving.  And sharing this video with your mom will be a great way to start.)

Search for the Obvious, a microsite run by Acumen (where I work) has just announced the winner of its latest challenge: Moms Matter.  This is the winning video, and I challenge you to watch without shedding a tear and without instantly forwarding it on to mom.

The great news is that it’s going be featured on the YouTube homepage for Mother’s Day, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be seen a million times.  (All the more reason to watch it now, first.  If it’s not showing up in your RSS reader click here.)

The Moms Matter challenge had winners in five categories:

–          Best Video: A World Without Moms

–          Best Tweets: #1, #2, and #3

–          Best Print Ad: Mothers Shape Identity

–          Best Essay: Putting Ourselves in the Problem: Thoughts from Ghana

–          Best Guerrilla Marketing Idea: Strollers

I’m awed by the quality of work this community produces, humbled by the grace and skill with which James Wu curates Search for the Obvious, and also thankful for my own mom and all the moms out there who make life make sense for all of us.

To quote the winning Tweet by @JasonBurke524: More than 1,000 mothers each day give their life while giving life.  8/10 deaths could be easily prevented.  http://j.mp/savemoms Pls RT!

The ones we’re waiting for

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Yeah, it’s us.

What if you knew that no one else was coming?  What if it’s up to you?  What if all the ideas you’re quietly kicking around are desperately needed by your organization and in the world?

I’ve seen too many amazingly capable people (at all levels – some very senior) spend their energy in side conversations  diagnosing the problem, all the while acting like it is someone else’s job to FIX the problem.

Maybe someone else isn’t coming.

Maybe their train got delayed or they got lost.

Maybe it’s just you.

How would you act now?

Waiting for a white knight who will set the right tone, expect the best, inspire others, make the tough call, lead with clarity of vision AND all the official authority that you might not have (but maybe you do!), that’s still just waiting.  And waiting around or complaining on the sidelines makes you part of the problem.   So does saying that you had a great idea but no one listened.  Having the idea isn’t enough.  You need to persuade people that it’s right.

It’s just us, and time’s a wastin’.