Tag: persistence

Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim – Look Only 20 Feet Ahead

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to do the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim Hike.

It’s the second time I’ve done this hike, and both times it’s been a doozy.

It’s a 24 mile hike that we completed in one day, with a 6am start time and, for me, a ~3:30pm finish. It starts with a 5,000 ft vertical drop in the first 6 miles, followed by a 2,400 foot ascent for the next 9 miles (plus the optional two mile side route to an amazing waterfall), and then, with 19 miles in your legs, a 4,000 foot vertical ascent over the last 5 miles.

That might be why this is the sign you have to pass on your way down the canyon.

Knowing what I had signed up for, I spent the second half of this summer training for this hike, starting with 3-mile runs and ending with 10-milers by late August. And even so, it was really, really hard. As much as I wanted to appreciate the experience—which I did—the last 5 miles are a mental and physical test. It was hard to stay focused and keep the faith.

This route is particularly tricky because it is an upside-down hike: the hardest part coming at the end messes with both your mind and your body.

And it occurred to me that the upside-down hike isn’t so dissimilar from most projects or from building a company. The truth is that the really exciting fun part is often right at the beginning—the downhill where you can see the views, where everything seems possible, where the initial going is easy.

But, for nearly everyone, the hard part lays ahead. It might come in the first few months; it might come a few years down the road. We all have a dip that we need to get through, a hard part that comes long after the initial enthusiasm and excitement has passed.

What did I learn on this hike about pushing my way through the hard part and getting out of the Grand Canyon?

The one behavior that really tripped me up was picking my head up to look too far up the path ahead.

This might seem counterintuitive, but looking too far up the path set off a cycle of doubt. I was so tired, my legs were so shot, and I had so much further to go. Looking up a few hundred vertical feet or, worse, a few thousand—whether spotting a hiker looking to the next ridge—was discouraging. Whereas focusing on my feet, or looking 10-20 feet ahead, worked great.

“I can take this next step, and the next one, and a few after that.” My job was to keep going, without narrative or judgement around how long I thought I could keep it up.

If you find yourself in a hard patch, focus on the now, on that next step, on the work that’s in front of you that you know you can do.

Asking the question “how much longer can I keep this up?” leads to a whole bunch of answers that are inaccurate and that take the wind out of your sails.

Whereas one step at a time can take you a long, long way.

 

Good Self-Talk, Bad Self-Talk

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Longtime readers know I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with swimming.

I was a terrible, terrified swimmer as a kid. About a decade ago, I decided to learn to swim properly. However, because I don’t love swimming, I haven’t prioritized it. Consequently, I’ve improved slowly.

This summer, due to tendinitis in my arm, I’ve been back in the pool a lot. It turns out that doing something 3-4 days a week leads to much greater improvement than doing it once every few weeks.

That’s not the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is the shadow path accompanying the change in my swimming abilities. This path is the narrative I carry about my abilities. It moves independently of my actual abilities. My chart looks something like this:

Two points of note on the graph:

  1. The point of Delusion: Me sitting comfortably at home watching “effortless swim” videos. I feel like I’m learning from all the talk of high elbows and not lifting my head, but I’m not spending actual time in the pool, so my swimming isn’t improving. To note, this point on the graph is the difference between online education and entertainment. (Hint: if you’ve been using a language-learning app for a year and you’re still unable to order lunch in that language, this spot is for you).
  2. Dragging me Down: The pernicious point on the graph. Since I’ve carried a fear of swimming my whole life, at any moment during a swim, I can start noticing I’m swimming. That noticing leads to negative self-talk (“this is hard,” “will it ever end?” “how is my breathing?”) which can ruin a perfectly good swim. It can even make the next swim worse (“I hope that doesn’t happen again.”).

As we work to increase our skillfulness in any area, we must remember that our story and our reality are always interacting. For areas where we have a positive self-narrative, that story sustains us, even through the dips. For areas that have always been challenging, it can be doubly difficult to improve—because we need to do three things: (1) Enhance our skill; (2) Bravely utilize the new skill; (3) Do all of this, over and over again, despite (sometimes) being dragged down by our own negative self-talk.

Examples:

  • [About to walk on stage] “I’m a terrible public speaker”
  • [About to have a difficult conversation] “I hate confrontation.”
  • [Facing down a blank page] “This is so hard. What if I have nothing to say?”
  • [About to close the sale] “What if they, like the last person, say no?”
  • [Working on listening better] “How do I show them that I’m smart enough to be here?”

Every time we let our old, negative story infect our new reality, we perform a little worse. That’s OK, it’s part of the process. It’s also why all writers’ advice on writing starts with a version of Anne Lamott’s reminder to just put our butt in the chair and keep it there.

If we relentlessly keep showing up to do the new thing, our persistent work will always win the day. Our doubting voice may appear from time to time, but its power diminishes and, eventually, evaporates in the face of overwhelming new evidence.

“I’ve done this so much, it’s clear that I’ve become good at it.”

Next stop, greatness.

It’s Not Working

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Just because something isn’t working today doesn’t mean it will never work.

It doesn’t mean it is impossible.

It doesn’t even mean that this will always feel this way.

Often, this feeling either means “it’s been a while” or “this is new.”

Most of our biggest mistakes in judgment and prediction result from over-extrapolating from the present.

What’s happening today is not meaningless.

It is, however, temporary.

The Difference Between Winning and Losing

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In any close contest, the line between winning and losing is thin.

In sports, it’s a few points that go to one team or another, a couple of plays that were close, a few steps between being ‘safe’ or ‘out.’

These few moments create one winner and one loser. They last, at most, a couple of minutes over the course of a few hour.

And yet the story we tell ourselves afterwards is about the whole contest: “this time it was different” or “I really showed him,” or “I can’t believe I blew it, I’m no good.”

In our desire to make meaning, our story dwarfs the fleeting moments that were the difference between winning and losing.

It’s the same thing with any close call—job interviews when you’re one of a few finalists, promotions that are right on the fence, a client who says yes or no to a big sale you’ve been working on.

If it was a tough decision, then a few small (maybe arbitrary) things made the difference.

This helps us remember that “I’m so [adjective]” statements aren’t the right conclusion in these situations.

Instead, try out “it was close, and I [did/didn’t] get it this time.”

This mindset helps us focus more on those few clutch moments, the specific, small thing that kept us from winning—this time. It also frees us from unproductive self-criticism (or unfounded self-praise), shrinking the emotion of both the win and the loss.

Then, instead of telling ourselves a big, unfounded narrative, we can get on with our important work of giving it our best shot the next time around.

 

Going Through the Motions

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

If all you do, each and every day, is go through the motions, then something’s not quite right.

But going through the motions also gets a bad rap.

Each time I start a run, or stand at the side of the pool before swimming laps, or contemplate an at-home yoga or meditation practice, the only way I’m able to start is by going through the motions.

Just start running, slowly.

Just jump into that too-cold water and go.

Just stand, or sit, and breathe a few times.

Before starting, I have lots of ideas about what my experience will be. It turns out that these ideas are terrible predictors of what ends up happening. It’s the act of going through those motions that creates my experience – at times powerful, energizing, or transformative, at times just as plodding and heavy as I feared it would be.

The consistent choice, day after day, to start even if we don’t feel like it, to willingly and deliberately go through the motions, is the embodiment of our persistence. We persist when we ignore the voice that says, “Not this time, not right now, not yet. Today I really can’t.”

It turns out that the story about how terrible it’s going to be doesn’t represent any sort of profound truth. Nor is it a story that’s going to help you to reach your goals.

1,000

~ Sasha ~ 10 Comments

This is my 1,000th post on this blog.

Now, I’m not a big believer in milestones. 1,000 isn’t different in any real way from 998 or 1,002, so why make a big deal of it?

On the other hand, one cannot be a purist about these things, and few would argue that there’s no difference between 1,000 and, say, 662.  And not quitting at 662 mattered.

To start, I hope that those 338 additional posts were useful to you. I hope that they’ve helped you to believe in yourself a bit more, to learn something you didn’t know, or to take a risk that you might not have had the courage to take, all so that you could serve others better.

Those 338 additional posts have also changed me. Most important, each time I think, “this might not work” I have 1,000 published blog posts that tell me to keep at it. I have proof of 1,000 times I didn’t give up, 1,000 times I thought something wasn’t good enough and I hit “publish” anyway, 1,000 times a blank page laughed at me and I laughed back.

Getting from there to here wasn’t a given. Yet for every time I wavered, for every doubt that cropped up, I saw someone raise their hand and share a post with a friend, or reach out to me to say, “this helped me, thank you,” or I glimpsed someone doing something with more bravery, care, and love. And, through those actions, the circle of gift-giving continued.

In trying to make sense of it all, I’m reminded of the fabulous meta-graduation speech given last week by Adam Grant, author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B, at Utah State University. In the speech, Adam analyzed other graduation speeches, pinpointed their themes and gaps, and gave his own insights that honored and expanded upon what he found.

His advice to graduates centers on the ancient wisdom of Aristotle, who believed that we acquire virtues by practicing them, but that virtues should not be lived at the extremes: we should be generous, but not so much that we end up having nothing left to give; we should be studious, but not so much that we miss out on building genuine relationships with others; we should be proud of our work, but not so much that we always place it above the work of others.

Adam ends his speech with a story of his early self-described failures as a public speaker, doing so to challenge the advice (given in more than half of all graduation speeches!) to “be true to yourself.” Adam wisely takes issue with this advice, arguing that we must learn to distinguish between being true to our authentic selves today and being true to the authentic self we might someday become.

In Adam’s words:

When I was in grad school, a friend asked me to give a guest lecture for her class. I was terrified of public speaking, but I wanted to be helpful, so I agreed. I figured it would be a good learning opportunity, so after the class I handed out feedback forms asking how I could improve. It was brutal. One student wrote that I was so nervous I was causing the whole class to physically shake in their seats.

My authentic self was not a fan of public speaking. But I started volunteering to give more guest lectures, knowing it was the only way to get better. I wasn’t being true to myself, I was being true to the self I wanted to become.

This blog has been an effort to be true to the self that I want to become. Like all projects of this type, it is a forever-unfinished process of unfolding, of evolving, of learning and adjusting and shifting and renewing of commitment.

My thanks go out to all of you for reading, sharing, challenging yourselves, and doing the important work that you do.

My promise, for the next thousand posts, is to keep on being a tree falling in a forest. What keeps me going is that you keep on showing up to hear it land.

Sarabande: What’s one plus one?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Here’s an excerpt of Handel’s Sarabande, which you may have heard on its own or as part of the soundtrack for Deer Hunter, American Horror Story, 21 Grams, or more than 100 other movies and TV shows.

My son has been learning this on the piano, and as you might be able to tell from all the markings, we’ve spent a lot of time together trying to get these three measures right.

What’s tricky about this piece is that it has three separate voices but the pianist has only two hands. (If you’re not a musician, don’t panic, this is easy: the notes on the top staff with the stems pointing up are the top voice; the ones on the top staff with the stems pointing down are the middle voice; and the ones on the bottom staff are the bottom voice. So in this section you need to play, and think about, two voices in your right hand).

Watching him take this on is a sometimes-sobering reflection on how learning really happens.

The way you pick apart a piece like this is to work on one hand, or one voice, alone; then work on the other voice or hand alone; and then put it all together.

So, right hand first, over and over again until it is easy and natural.

Then left hand, over and over again until it is easy and natural.

And then, voila! Both hands together.

What drives my son insane is that it just doesn’t work like this. Not even close.

There “voila” doesn’t happen because when you put both hands together, things usually fall apart. All the old habits and wrong notes and fingerings that don’t quite work – the ones that are ingrained at a deeper level of (muscle) memory – come roaring back in the face of the complexity of trying to put all of the pieces together.

And so, it’s back to the drawing board. To each hand alone. To putting hands together in tiny increments until those hold together. To putting bigger and bigger pieces together, and having those fall apart too. And then, bit by bit, it sticks, you can play the whole thing.

And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and it’s fallen apart. Again. Only this time the putting back together happens more quickly, more naturally.

And then one day, you arrive.

What we’re experiencing is that the act of putting together more than one new behavior isn’t a 1+1 = 2 process. It’s a 1+1 = 1 process, over and over and over again until, if you stick with it, if you don’t get too discouraged, if you’re willing not to abandon ship, 1+1 = 4.

More often than not, it’s not the learning of new things that we find hard, it’s the work of not giving up. We are often unwilling to slog through that awful period in the middle, that part where we know what we’re trying to do, we’ve done a bunch of work, and the new behaviors don’t hold together. We often have little reason to believe, in the midst of not getting there yet, that we are actually on the right path, that this is what the work looks like, that real growth and progress are never linear and that new skills are fragile things that crumble, at first, when exposed to the light.

Until they don’t. Until they become a part of us. Until they become natural and we just show up and play, beautifully.

 

 

Some days

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Some days you get a lot of praise for work well done.

It can feel like this praise isn’t deserved, or that it is for things that came easily to you, or that it is not worth all the fuss. Often this means that you won’t allow yourself to fully hear the gratitude and appreciation that someone expresses.

Other days you toil and sweat and put your heart and soul into a thing and nothing comes back. Or, worse, it’s exactly your best work that engenders criticism or nit-picking or downright resistance.

The thing to remember is this: gift-giving is circular. Your best ideas, your art, your emotional labor, your love, these things never come back to you in a binary way. Imagine instead that the positive words you’re hearing took a long, circuitous route to get to you. They are the winding, imperfect product of you putting bravest, truest self out into the world.

What we need from you is your continued courage, grit and determination.

And what we encourage is that you allow yourself to be sustained by the positive words that do come back your way, because the people sharing these words are, secretly, messengers for many.

Reps

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Way (way) back when, when I was a high school wrestler, I used to lift weights. This was old school stuff. I spent most of my training time off-season at the local Y surrounded by barbells, dumbbells, and big metal plates, not the wooshing white, ergonomically advanced machines of today.

In my senior year of high school, the guy I trained with, who could bench press well over 300 pounds, changed our routine. Every other day, instead of a regular weight-lifting session, we’d do a pushup workout. In each set, you’d do as many pushups as you could, until your muscles failed. The trick was, instead of counting normally (1-2-3-4-5-6) you’d count in a pyramid:

1

1-2

1-2-3

1-2-3-4

And so on

The only other rule was that if you gave up before finishing a number you had to redo that number (meaning, if you were trying to get to 15 but you stopped at 10, when your next set started you had to repeat number 15).

The entire workout was to go up to 20 and back, and try to do it in as few sets as possible.

For those of you doing the math, you’ll quickly see that all we were doing was 400 pushups. So why all the rigmarole, and why, week in and week out, would we keep on doing the pyramid instead of counting our way up to 50, 60, or (on a good day) 70 pushups per set?

It’s because even that counting trick was powerful. Each milestone felt achievable. The structure made it hard to how big the whole was. Doing 400 pushups? Wow, that’s a lot. But just doing a first set counting from 1 to 10? That doesn’t seem that bad, now does it (even though it is 55 pushups)?

The work we are all doing requires walking long, hard roads. Long as in years, maybe decades. And hard because we’re taking on the gnarly, unsolved problems in the world.

Part of the way we do that is through deep exploration of and connection to purpose. We must turn on a light inside of us, through a deep investigation of our own “why,” and we must keep that flame burning by revisiting that why time and again.

But we can’t be revisiting all the time, and certainly not every day.

Because most days what the world needs from us is work, not reflection. And what our work needs from us is that we show up, that we see where we need to go today, that we do that work with skill, focus, energy, and with full and hopeful conviction, so that we move the ball forward a bit.

That next achievable, daily milestone is a very valuable thing. It takes the cross-hairs off of the big gigantic goal, moving it to our peripheral vision – still in sight, but not quite clear enough to overwhelm. We can set the milestones so we have to stretch some, because getting to pushup 15 when you feel like you can only do 10, is possible.

Over time, the daily work of doing a little more than we thought possible adds up to weeks, months and years of amazing, surprising progress. It’s always been that the act of showing up today, workman-like, and moving forward as much as we can is actually a great way to do big, important and great things over time.

The Long Haul

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

“I’ve just heard about a great new ______ that will solve the ______ problem!”

And so goes the optimistic, well-intentioned refrain. The blanks can be straws or a well or a hospital on a boat or a cheap rugged laptop or or or….it doesn’t matter, because the trope is the same: there’s a thing that someone has invented (usually in the West) and it will finally solve such-and-such problem for good. (And, implied, it will be quick and easy!)

I’m torn about how to react to this. There’s a version of this story that I find hugely energizing, and another that feels like a modern, techno-optimistic belittling of a faraway problem, one that creates a caricature of the problem and of the people living with it…and this is never a good thing.

On the plus side, I deeply, emphatically believe that one of the biggest opportunities in the world is to get our best and brightest minds focusing on solving the most important problems of our generation. I don’t need a toothbrush that might deliver caffeine, or “mega” and “mini” sized M&Ms (thanks Tim), or a razor with 22 blades.

But just because we (sometimes) turn our attention to the big problems in the world doesn’t mean we will flip a switch and easily solve them. That great idea may be great, but after it’s made into a great product, that product will still have to be manufactured, it will have to get through customs, it will have to survive contact with customers and distribution and dealer margins and fraud and theft and warranties and repairs…usually all of this far away from reliable sources of power, good roads, good anything that makes things easier to pull off. That’s a long-term play.

The notion that any big, thorny problem will “just” be solved by a better gizmo not only runs the risk of pouring resources into the wrong initiatives, it also belittles the problem and, in so doing, belittles the people who are struggling to live without access to safe water, to affordable, reliable power, or to decent, affordable schools.

Yes, we are desperate for breakthroughs, the kinds that leverage technology platforms to deliver better information and banking services, or ones that capitalize on and accelerate declining cost curves for solar to engineer all sorts of products in new and better ways – ways that cut the costs by 100-fold while not sacrificing quality.

But achieving these sorts of breakthroughs gets us to the starting line, not to the finish line, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either naïve or is angling for a fast buck.

Getting whatever that miraculous invention is to a few billion people is always going to be a long road, one with twists and turns and endless surprising pitfalls along the way. Navigating this road will take grit and determination and perseverance beyond the capacity of most people. Indeed, this is the “sacred trust” of leadership that Chinua Achebe speaks about so eloquently, it’s what we must look for in all leaders who are making real change in the world.

The problems they are working on are not insurmountable. Not by a long shot. But there are also no quick fixes.

Indeed, everyone I know who is changing the world is in the long-haul business.