For you, for me

September 23, 2010September 22, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

For some folks, the fact that I blog is a semi-mysterious black box of cool, kind of like talking with a great English accent (if I had one). It is something people kinda sorta want to do before they talk themselves off the ledge instead of leaping.

When they ask me about it, here’s what I say: that I had no idea what I was getting into when I started; that it’s been harder and better than I expected; that I learn from every post that I write and from the things I hear back from folks; and that I’m absolutely positively sure that I would stop doing it if I didn’t have lots readers out there reading.

There are tons of great external things that come from blogging but what I get from it each and every day – even (especially?) on the days it’s hard – is already plenty of payback.

Each person reading is part of what makes this possible, part of what allows me to bring something into your day and mine.

So thank you, because I write for you but I also write for me.

And, with that in mind, what about you? Why not make today the day you leap into that thing you’ve been thinking about doing? Why not get up and spread the word about something that you love?

Whatever it is you’re thinking of doing, do it already.

Return to Sender

July 14, 2010July 14, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s a mathematical fact that you can never be 100% sure an email has arrived. Never. It’s a heady concept, but the proof stems from the fact that there’s always a nonzero chance that one of the following doesn’t arrive: the email that was sent, the confirmation, the confirmation of the confirmation…and so on.

Practically speaking, emails do tend to arrive, but that lack of certainty is a good analogy for how we can over-rely on email. All too often, conversations unfold like this:

“Hey, did you manage to set up that meeting you were hoping to line up.” [you know, the one you’ve been saying for the past three months you really want to make happen].

“Nah, I haven’t heard back yet.”

This is a lazy, backward-leaning response that comes either from fear or lack of commitment or both. It’s not the way you act if you care more about the result than you do about going through the motions.

Here’s the counterexample: today I got a phone call from Germany from a guy I’ve never met, following up on an email I hadn’t read. He’s offering (for free) an interesting training software that at first blush doesn’t seem too relevant to me. And it may not be. But the guy called, and in the 5 minutes we spent on the phone, I got a sense of him, of his enthusiasm, and I heard his pitch of the idea. And I’ve now got the demo software in my inbox, which I’m about a million times more likely to download than I had been if I’d just received his email.

Bully for him – he’s doing his job.

The asynchronicity of email is a blessing and a curse. Often – especially with newer, less well-established relationships – it can be a crutch. “I emailed and I didn’t hear back” let’s you pretend that you tried hard enough, which you didn’t.

Plus since everyone is over-relying on email these days, it’s made it a hundred times easier to stand out by just picking up the darn telephone.

Go ahead. It still works. And I bet you get a human being on the other end, not an Inbox, and wasn’t that the point in the first place?

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Habits, decisions, and arbitrary deadlines

April 6, 2010April 5, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I started practicing yoga ten years ago – very intensively in the early years, a drop-off when I moved away from the first yoga studio I really loved, with a slow but consistent decline in the past few years as my life has gotten busier and my kids have gotten bigger. Over the last few months, things got so full that whole weeks were passing without any yoga at all, and it was affecting my sleep, my mood, how my joints felt, the works (all worse).

I know enough about yoga and about how the mind and body work to know, intellectually, that between practicing a lot every so often (that is, 2 hours every Saturday) or a little a lot (30 minutes every day), a little a lot is much better. Once a week feels virtuous, but thirty minutes a day is a habit, it’s part of my life, it builds.

But I don’t have this kind of time. I don’t have an extra 30 minutes (which always becomes 40 or 45 minutes), certainly not every day.

Or do I?

Last week, I decided the time had come to do something. So I decided then that the next day and every day I’d wake up 30 minutes earlier. No planning involved, no “I’ll get to it at the end of the day.” I admitted to myself that I needed to make an arbitrary commitment that was clear and time-delineated and non-negotiable.

It’s early days, but so far so good. It’s working because it’s clear, it’s simple, it’s something I can do right now. I’ve created a structure that works for me.

We are all filled with good intentions. There are lots of things we want to have in our lives but we don’t create space for them – because our lives are full, our days are full, and because it’s easy to do what we’ve done. We need help doing the things that we want to do, doing the things that will make us happy. We need a structure that will help us act.

One of the problems so many nonprofits face is that the issues we tackle are so big that they’ll be here tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. This is the perfect excuse for someone who genuinely cares to end up not acting – because of the gap between good intentions and good actions.

WE, the nonprofit professionals, feel the urgency today, but that’s because we live in our world; because we’ve dedicated our lives to this. For everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this, we need to translate this sense of urgency. When we talk to people and try to motivate them to act, we cannot simply say “this is important, I want you to help.” We need to communicate why we need their help NOW. We need to move that person to action – to help her do what she wants to do but isn’t doing – with a calendar and a deadline and things that will not happen if they don’t act now. (and “now” doesn’t have to be today, but now can’t be “someday” either. More than six months away is the same as “whenever.”).

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1 in 100

November 24, 2009November 23, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

At a dinner recently, guests were asked to go around the table and share what was on their mind. One guest said,

“I often imagine myself on a platform, waiting for a train, with 100 other people. And I think that I am the most fortunate of those 100 people, which makes me feel blessed and also gives me a tremendous sense of responsibility of what to do with that good fortune.”

At first when I heard this, I thought the good fortune she described was economic, which would make sense given the distribution of wealth globally: you only have to earn $49,000 to be in the richest 1% of the world’s population.

The facts on income alone are sobering. But I think there’s more to it, and it gets you past the 1% mark to the 0.1% mark or even the 0.01% mark – the knowledge that you are an agent of change, that the tools are available today in a way that they never were before that allow you to take all that you have been given and make an enormous impact on the world.

There has never been a moment in history when a single person can do more.

The knowledge of this simple fact, and the impetus to back it up, is the real 1 in 100 revelation.

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Ideas or action?

April 23, 2009April 22, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

The NYC Police and the Metropolitan Transit Association have run a catchy public service campaign for the last few years whose tagline is, “If you see something, say something.”

The ad on the train I’m on has these words is big letters, with a picture of an abandoned bag. The message is to keep an eye out for suspect or abandoned packages.

I’ve probably seen this ad two or three times a week for the past few years, and only this morning I paid enough attention to notice the words underneath the tagline: “Tell us, a cop, or call 1-888-NYC-SAFE.”

I bet if you asked 50 people who had seen this ad what phone number to call, 49 of them wouldn’t remember.

It’s easy to make an example of this ad because it so clearly separates out the IDEA (“if you see something…”) from the ACTION (call this number). It could be that they figure “say something” is self-explanatory, but couldn’t they have traded catchy for memorable and said, “See something? Tell a cop or call 888-NYC-SAFE.”

The point is, most of the time we write or speak with the goal of convincing people of an idea rather than convincing them to take an action.

It’s actually much harder to get people to act. You only need to convince them of an idea while you’re talking. But to get them to act, they have to remember what you said long after you’re done . You’ll probably have to come at the idea from a number of different angles, getting people to work through their barriers and their internal conversation about why they should do nothing. You’ll have to be a lot less elegant and a lot more explicit. You’ll have to give examples and be motivational and inspirational and pound the table some.

You’ll have to sell.

And you absolutely, positively, definitely wouldn’t get stuck at a conceptual level if what you cared the most about was action.

If you see something, say something that will get me to act.

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