Tag: self-improvement

Give me your losers

Fabrizio2 Comments

It is understable to be wanting to learn from winners. To look up to them as if they were demi-god, to try to absorb all of their practices, strategies, tactics, to susped our disbelief when reading of their heroic feats, to become at times obsessed with their words and spread them as if they were ours.

The fact is that we all start from wanting to win.

One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, “it made me what I am!” But looking forward, you think, “I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t want to fail.” The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward looking. We have to try extra hard to make it safe to fail.

Ed Catmull, interview

We have much more to learn from reflecting on mistakes and failures than we have from tacitly assimilate what others, in different circumstances, have done to succeed.

Let’s look at winners, by all means. And let’s also look at what they did wrong, how they overcame difficult situations, how they woke up and lived the day after. And then, let’s look at those who are stuck there, who have started ten companies with no successful exit, let’s attempt to understand how they cope, what motivates them, and let’s reward them for keep trying.

Winning is the easy bit. I want to hear about losers.

Legacy

Fabrizio3 Comments

What is your predominant status?

Anger. “You can’t, you shan’t”. This is the status of fear, of control, of walls to be built, of closed doors and burnt down bridges, of punishment, of arrogance, of self-blindness, of others as a tool to achieve your goals.

Regret. “I could, I should”. This is the status of incompleteness, of insatisfaction, of “if only”, of constant research of something you have already achieved, of blaming the circumstances, of not going beyond because you don’t know what’s behind.

Judgement. “They could’ve, they should’ve”. This is the status of gossip, of spreading mean words, of thinking ourselves better than others, of looking outside rather than inside, of being stuck, of never getting along with anybody.

Empowerement. “We can, we shall”. This is the status of leaders, of knowing about the possibilities, of not letting go to desperation even if you do not know the path, of getting other together around a dream, of looking where others can go and not where they are now.

All are possible, and different circumstances might make us prefer one or the other. Yet eventually you’ll have to start thinking about your legacy, and double down on what you want to leave behind.

Your own experience

FabrizioLeave a comment

Most of the information online nowadays is organised in bullet points. There’s an “how-to” step-by-step guide for basically everything, and listicles are one of the most popular form of content that gets consumed.

Yet, a part from very practical type of instructions (changing a tyre, replacing a lightbulb, starting off your grill, and so on), this type of content fails to deliver outstanding returns on topics such as leadership, self-improvement, marketing, and more generally speaking “success”. They can certainly turn your day into a black hole of information search, yet their effectiveness is debatable.

It is mainly because the people that write them attempt to summarize a certain type of success retroactively. They look from the present towards the past to identify certain patterns, moments or actions that have influenced their achievements. It might be a good exercise in self-reflection, yet as readers we should take all that with a grain of salt.

Kahneman has demonstrated how fallible we are when we attempt to recall experiences from the past, and on top of that it is quite improbable that the challenges you are facing now and the context you are living in are the same as the writer’s.

Value your own experience more than anything else. Stop searching for shortcuts or solutions online and start experimenting. Keep a journal and reflect on what is happening to you, learn from mistakes and improve on your next step. And when you come across a potentially interesting article about a topic that is dear to you, seek not the single points and the tactics, but the underlying strategy and mindset that made that case successful.

And of course, this is my “how to” guide on “how to approach how-to type of content on the net”. So, you know what to do. Nobody ever wrote a memoir by saying: “I have achieved what I have achieved by following this other guy’s life instruction”.

Out of fear

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I was enjoying some of the early Spring (“early” for Finnish standards) with my daugther yesterday, as she was playing on the trampoline. She was jumping amazingly, doing flips I had never seen her doing before. She was gaining confidence, until she miscalculated and slightly hit her head on the rubber surface of the trampoline. Nothing too painful, yet it suddenly made me realize how dangerous what she was doing felt.

She tried to repeat the flips a couple of times, and I was way too scared to let that continue. I only had terrible images of terrible things happening to her in my mind. Eventually, I told her to stop, as it was too dangerous and she could get hurt. After that, she continued jumping more safely and certainly less enjoyably on the trampoline, and I could perceive she had lost part of the confidence that she had so bravely conquered.

The point is, when we are in a position of power, our words and behaviours have an immense impact on the people that look up to us. We can pretend that is not true, that it does not matter, that after all we are just sharing our opinion, and that we are no different from the people we lead. This is a trap I see many flat-organization hands-off managers and leaders do. And still words and behaviours are the major determinant of what we will get from our people.

I am not sharing this to give the impression that overanalyzing or beating ourselves up for our faults is a good option. If we do keep awareness on this power, there are plenty of ways we can correct our mistakes.

“I am sorry I asked you to stop, I was acting out of fear.”
“There is really no reason why you should not apply for that internal position, I am just panicking at the idea to lose such a valid team member.“
“Please, go ahead and do as you were suggesting yesterday. My initial reaction has not been one of the best, and it is because we have never tried that before and honestly I have no idea if that could work or not.“

If we do not maintain awareness, on the other hands, all we get is compliance and bottlenecks that have blossomed out of our own fears and self-doubts.

Against denigration and disregard

Fabrizio5 Comments

We attach labels to people and groups of people, partly because we try to make sense of what we do not understand, and partly to reinforce our identity and belonging to a different group.

“People that are born in that period are weak.”
“People that work in that team are lazy.”
“People that come from that geographical area are dishonest.”

Even if we assume that these types of labels have some truth behind them (they usually do not and are more of a reflection of our internal insecurities, yet humor me for the sake of the argument), the best and more effective approach would be to first understand the deeper level of the manifestation that inititated the labelling, and then try to imagine and build an environment in which the deeper reason can either be leveraged or addressed.

So, for example, if we believe that a group of people is particularly weak, on a deeper level this might mean that they are better in touch with their own feelings and emotions. As a reaction, we could try to figure out a way to make sure that their improved understanding of their selves could be employed and put to good use.

If we assert that a certain team or department is lazy, it might be because they do not have the tools necessary to effectively do their job, or because their team lead is not sufficiently motivating. As a reaction, we might want to try to facilitate their tasks and work in any possible way, or look for another manager.

This happens very seldom. The easiest and most common reaction to labelling is either denigration or disregard. Denigration is where every form of extremism is born: we reinforce the labelling by supporting it with every evidence we might find, and we feed it to the public forum every time it is possible. Disregard is instead working around the group and their characteristics, building walls to keep them out, pretending they do not exist.

It takes a great deal of awareness and courage to act differently when we catch ourselves in lazy labelling.