Month: February 2024

The Daily Stoic posted this:

“Napoleon famously would wait three weeks until he opened his mail because he knew that most issues would resolve themselves. If you are always reachable, if you can be gotten a hold of at a moment’s notice, you will not be focused on the big important things, you will not be doing your work.” 

For most of my career I prided myself on efficient and rapid response to emails.  I could get to inbox zero pretty often, moving only a subset of items to my @action folder.  Of course this meant I was constantly busy, and it almost hurt to ‘unplug’ from work because of the addictive adrenaline spikes. I was rewarded for this, especially when I was in direct support and operation leader roles.  My main strategy for getting blocks of time for project deliverables was to work early and ‘clear the decks’ to give me some flexible time mid-day.  

I’m not in those kinds of roles now.  And neither are most senior managers, up to the CEO.  They need to structure their accessibility and time quite differently.  They’ll pay attention to email or texts from a specific subset of people, but they’re not rewarded for inbox zero across the board. 

Here’s my challenge for you: What more could you accomplish with a disciplined approach to being less available and less responsive-in-the-moment?  What issues will you force others to resolve (as they should) rather than you driving a resolution?  What’s the $10,000/hour and $100,000/hour work that only you can do?  

I’ve written before about how you must choose one thing to optimize, and then maybe a distant second.  This is simple reality.

Project managers know that you navigate the 3 classic elements of tradeoffs: Scope, Time, Resources.  Sometimes you’ll hear “Pick any two.” 

This pattern is widespread:

Want to buy a car?  Exactly what you want, customized?  You’ll pay more and wait much longer than accepting one of the cars available on the lot. 

Health coverage options?  People want universal coverage, low prices, and high quality – but the reality is that you must pick 2 of these.

Leadership decisions are frequently about these kinds of tradeoffs.  Lean into options and be prepared to explain to people (repeatedly) why their fantasies of optimizing on all three dimensions is impossible.

One more thing: If someone gives you an example of all three, I guarantee that someone else is subsidizing the costs or absorbing some complexity. 

There are two Greek words translated as “time” in the New Testament.  Chronos is chronological time, the passing of the hours, days and years. Kairos is qualitative time, or opportune time – the characteristic of a moment or a movement.  When Jesus announces, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), it’s kairos.

We all tend to worry about the passing of time (chronos) and the difficulties of the current time (kairos), and the anxiousness of the coming time (kairos).  We develop practices which help us be efficient and effective with chronos.  We must have wisdom, insight, and faith to respond well to kairos.  An awesome message of the Bible is God saying “I’ve got this. I’ve got you. Trust me.”  Living in the truth of that message is how we recognize the kairos in our lives.  Truly, we were all born for such a time as this.

Note: This is an excerpt from the draft of an upcoming book about the journey to becoming a deep person.

The deep people you know and admire are interesting and brilliant.

I’ve thought about how to be fully yourself, maximally using your intellect, and be considered interesting (even brilliant) by others.  What do you do to stand out?  What practices, done consistently well, make you a compelling and trustworthy character?  What avenues should you take and what traps to avoid?

I’m barely treading in the foothills of possibilities.  Still, here are my recommendations:

Decide to be this way. No hiding, no excuses, willing to be different.  Pre-decide that you’ll be ok if many people misunderstand you.  You risk being ruled by fear of others until you make this decision.

Do things better than others.  Execute at a consistently high level, working to your strengths.  Focusing on fewer things improves your excellence with what you deliver.

Be fantastically curious about multiple domains.  Ask questions. Follow-up with more questions.  This is true for people you meet in person, or dead authors, or historical events.  Don’t name yourself a problem solver; think of your identity as an explorer across a landscape of possibilities.

Care for yourself as a discoverer, inventor, and creator.  Feed your mind and body with good-for-you food. Sleep well.  Exercise your body so your mind gets what it needs, including toughness and resilience. Develop rhythms of hard work and breaks. This is investing in yourself.

Make plans, then act.  Revise plans. Repeat.  Navigate forward, adjusting your traveling vector without surrendering. Be willing to be bad at something so you can (with feedback) become good at it.  Focus on what you can control, within your domain.  Waste no energy on what you cannot control, but influence by words and example.

Help others and encourage them. Develop and nurture relationships for they are the stuff of a thriving life.  Draw near to people who are also curious, questioning, and seeking wisdom.  

Be different without being frightful to others.  The person who follows a trend is in a herd.  Find opportunities to lead.

Stay hungry and stay lean.  Travel light, dropping unhelpful mental and physical baggage.  Don’t allow your passion to settle after a success but go on to the next thing.

Savor steady 1% improvements while looking for occasional big leaps.  Abandon perfection as the only goal while striving for it.  Share your work and listen for feedback. This is the way of mastery.

Get outside, breathe deeply.  Walk. Get away from screens and fancy technology. Move.

Do hard things to develop self-control.  Lack of self-control sabotages your potential. Measure how many decisions you make which are about your comfort.

Treat every experience as input for your creative output.  Capture notes, make connections, explore metaphors.

Tap into Wisdom. The world didn’t begin when you arrived.  Seek Lady Wisdom. Learn from others. Take C.S. Lewis’ advice:  Read at least two old books (pre-Gutenberg preferred) for every contemporary book you read.  Dive deep for principles, and the tactics will take care of themselves.

Be responsible.  Do the work.  Be a professional, especially with the basics of your craft. Excuses are lies you tell yourself.

Be unsurprised at the foibles and sins of others, even as you aim to be trustworthy and true to them.

Devote yourself to a consistent creative practice, with rituals, and (ideally) hold your workspace as sacred. (HT: Steven Pressfield) Create and teach others as a means of learning and reinforcing. 

Cultivate self-respect; crush pride. Measure yourself by yourself, not others. Are you better today than yesterday?  Are you on the correct vector?  Neither lie nor boast. Celebrate the work of others. You are part of a Larger Story, accountable to higher Power.

Treasure a dynamic, changing world.  A static world has no learning, no adaptation, no resilience and no renewal.  

Reframe fears as a guide to where you’re supposed to act. Replace worry with a focus on being resourceful.  

Start. There is no ‘someday’ or ‘somebody else.’

I’m all for clean air, clean water, preserving natural beauty, and abundant energy & food for every person.  Net-zero goals are unlikely to achieve what some believe. 

Imagine that we reach net-zero C02.  Human activity is no longer introducing more C02 into the atmosphere. 

What other climate-driving forces aside from atmospheric C02 will still be at work?

• Solar radiation variation over time, which also drives oceanic heating and cooling patterns
• Deep geological forces uplifting continents and powering volcanoes
• Whatever else drove long cycles of glaciation and retreat before 28,000 years ago

No one knows what the “right” temperature is, or the “right” amount of C02 in the atmosphere.  Everything in the physical world is dynamic. 

So, it’s important to think carefully about the costs of net-zero (for everyone) and the tradeoffs.  About 1.5-2 billion people do not have enough energy (fuel, electricity) to thrive.  Despite our terrific progress in reducing starvation to almost zero, about 1.2 billion people a month are getting only enough calories to survive.  Clean water is not readily available to 800 million people.  We need to make progress on these for human flourishing.  I’d be in favor of addressing those issues and then using energy and calories with clean water to adapt to variations in climate. 

I am not giving dating advice.

I am not giving dating advice.

I am not giving dating advice.

I am not giving dating advice.

But I will say this…

People often focus their energy this way: “I want to be with someone.  I’m ready to be with someone.  I just have to find them.” Instead of spending all your energy and focus on that mindset, devote yourself to becoming a better person – taking care of yourself, developing competence, pursuing things that interest you, practicing self-control.  That is the path to becoming an interesting person, and far more likely to find someone who is a meaningful match.

It’s the same with friends and good neighbors.

I’ve been a quote collector for a long time, starting in earnest in about the year 2005.

I compile insightful and helpful quotes into a file, adding a few each week. The file is currently about 60,000 words long.  I publish 2 or 3 a day on LinkedIn, dripping out these diamonds of compressed wisdom to my community there. 

I’ve learned so much from others.  Many people think I’m wise, but frankly being wise is about learning from the best.  Montaigne knew this when he wrote “I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.” 

We can all be collectors and compilers.  The voice of wisdom is always speaking to those willing to listen. 

A friend who teaches at a business school asked me for recommended resources on decision-making from a Christian perspective.  Here was my response:

Proverbs!   Might be the best business book if you consider how relevant it remains after 3000 years.

I’m not aware of a book on decision-making which is explicitly Christian.  Most resources on decision-making stress rational thinking, which of course is a Western (Athens + Jerusalem) idea.  Most, like the excellent recent book “Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish, articulate how human emotion and natural psychology affect our ability to make rational decisions.  Where many fail, in my view, is that we can’t completely separate our emotions from our rationale thinking process, any more than we can separate our mind from our body. 

There are learnable disciplines about how to structure information to make better decisions.  Those are worthwhile.  We study ourselves and learn where we have tendencies that get in the way of the best decisions.

The Christian worldview reinforces the “Why” and “What we optimize for” questions.  Decisions are always about tradeoffs, and it’s your worldview that shapes how you weight the tradeoffs.  If you only optimize for financial short-term, you’ll run your business into ruin and hurt people. The Christian worldview does not treat employees as soul-less slaves and lesser beings, and honors the value of work.  If you only optimize for making employees comfy, or to be everything to every customer, your business won’t go the distance.  Efficiency and effectiveness are both important, in different parts of a business, and can vary over time.  It’s possible to do sales and marketing in deceitful and manipulative ways, or with integrity.  Business leaders have made many foolish decisions in trying to appear to be ‘righteous’ rather than committing to a tough course of action (e.g., spending cuts).  It might help your students to explain that top executives spend very little time reading the ‘latest’ business books.  They know what they need is in spiritual texts, biographies, history, and philosophy.   My own view, today, is that the present crisis of meaning is creating the opportunity for religious people to lead and develop organizations, especially businesses. 

Have you noticed that our ability to listen is highly degraded in this Tiktok media age?  Listening requires a special kind of concentration.

Here is a way to measure if you’re truly listening:  How often do you have a whack-the-forehead moment, realizing you were wrong, see a new perspective, or are uncomfortably shocked into reconsidering an opinion? 

Only a divine, omniscient being will never say “Oh, I didn’t see that coming.  Oh, I never considered that perspective.” 

If you aren’t occasionally knocked into an awkward moment of re-evaluation, you’re not listening hard enough to a diverse set of voices. 

[Sidebar: One of the striking things about all the biblical accounts of God speaking to people via angels, strangers, voices from heaven, and dreams:  The message is never quite what you’d expect them to hear, and is never ‘convenient.’  For example, Samuel isn’t told that he’ll grow up to be a great prophet, but that God is going to destroy Eli, his father figure.  I score these accounts as true, because made-up stories would be quite different.] 

Hold this in tension with this key insight about human nature: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone opts for the latter.” (John Kenneth Galbraith)

Why is this?  We’re social creatures, and most of our opinions are the opinions of a group.  These opinions are resilient in the face of conflicting information.  It’s quite difficult to develop a viewpoint or opinion at odds with your primary group.  Teaching point:  make sure you’re in a good group!