Acceptance is not about understanding and appreciating that the world (your friends, acquaintances, family, colleagues, your context, your work, your environment, your company) is wrong, and then spending your life complaining, regretting, plotting.
Acceptance is about understanding and appreciating that the world merely is.
What is around you does not change, it is the degree to which you attempt to cling to it that makes all the difference.
If you have to be bold about one thing in life, be bold about picking yourself.
The time of waiting for others to pick us is over. Bosses, teachers, examiners, recruiters are nowadays just as powerful as we let them.
Be the one to pick yourself instead.
To do what you are passionate about. To do it consistently. To do it in line with your values. To do it for the rewards you decide matter. To do it wherever, and for whomever, you choose to do it.
It is scary, and it is powerful.
Let’s go.
You have spent resources improving your product with features analysts said are necessary in your category.
You have hired hundreds of new employees and built an organization that can sustain higher revenue.
You have rolled out a new tool because the old one was clunky and not providing enough flexibility.
You have gone all-in on that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.
You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.
You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.
And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.
The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.
It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.
Fear, anger, pain. In certain cases, they can start an action. Yet, you need to leave them behind as soon as your action crystallizes and takes a concrete shape.
If you fail to do it, you’ll soon find yourself projecting that initial, important emotion on every body and every thing around you. You will burn down bridges, forgo opportunities, isolate in your own narrative.
Remember fear, anger and pain, but leave them behind as soon as you can.
The change you are seeking demands it.
To be a leader, in life and at work, you need to let go.
Let go of schedules and outcomes, experience and opinions, details and plans. Let go of control. Let go of yourself. Let go of your definition of reality. Let go of your certainties.
If you cling to any of these, being a leader is going to be much more difficult. And eventually you will be the one regretting it the most.
You've got this 