Everyone knows …
Everyone I know thinks …
Everyone’s doing …
It’s easy and common to think this way (dare I say everyone does?), but everyone’s “everyone” is different.
It’s often useful to know what “everyone” thinks — they might be right about the new movie, or music, for instance.
But there’s a lot that everyone doesn’t know, or on which they might be wrong. And it pays to know when “everyone” merely knows what you know.
The longest and most challenging one-day mountain walk in Ireland is called the Maamturks Challenge. It starts before dawn and hits 12 peaks.
Right before the last one is the “Col of Despondency” — a last climb that’s challenging on any day and even more so with 11 other peaks already under your belt.
You can do or feel whatever you like at the base of the col, but the choices are really just two: walk, or quit. The only way to the finish line is up and over.
When I arrived at the col, I was almost completely exhausted. I’d been up earlier than most to volunteer at the start, walked as hard as I could, and hadn’t managed my nutrition well at all.
Looking up, the name made sense — but, looking around, I was encouraged by my friends at the checkpoint and in the group I was hiking with.
After a snack and a few photos, we started the climb with all the energy we didn’t know we had left. Soon enough it was over, and we walked down the far slope on jellied but victorious legs.
***
I’ve never been back to that particular piece of ground, but I have been through other cols of despondency since then. More often than not, there’s a steep climb before a goal. The approach is the same, though: looking up at the climb won’t help, but looking round at friends does.
“Money makes money,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “and the money that money makes makes money.”
That, of course is the magic of compound interest (plus investment and reinvestment).
Last week, the FT published this extraordinary chart of U.S. household equity ownership since 1990:
It’s striking that the top 1 percent have held close to 50 percent of this wealth across the entire time span, yet the post-2008 acceleration is more dramatic still.
Compounding works, and it works really, really well when you own 56 percent of the wealth (or close to 90 percent, if we look at the top 10 percent of households).
The trend lines are clear, and so is the math. Some kind of debate about whether this is a problem for society can’t wait forever, and, if it is a problem, any attempt at remedy is going to have to be political. That debate is going to continue for a lot longer than eight months.
Marches, mass demonstrations, and popular mobilization are common phenomena around the world today. Why?
Growing up, I remember reading about and seeing footage of the protests of the 60s and 70s and wondering how such things could ever happen. The Soviet Union disintegrated when I was too young to remember; ditto the LA riots. I recall protests as generally local and specific: at G7 meetings, for example, or maybe about a particular environmental outrage.
Today, though, people are on the move again. And although economic and political frustration are certainly part of the story (as always), I wonder if a big part of the motivation is the return of a sense of truly existential dread.
In addition to Vietnam and Nixon’s lies, the Boomers who protested in the late 60s were the first generation to grow up under the nuclear shadow. By contrast, Generation X and the Millennials were shaped by the unipolar moment: we never had to crawl under our desks to hide from the bomb, and globalization generally looked pretty good.
Generation Z, however, was born straight into the return of history — with several important changes. First, they’re connected like never before, so they’re both more aware and more able to organize. Second, the climate emergency has brought back a sense of existential threat to life on earth, yet one perpetrated every day by all of us instead of one that might be triggered some day by one or two of us.
When those are perceived to be the stakes, why wouldn’t you take to the streets?
Seeking a change of pace, I recently listened to a couple of episodes of the podcast Broken Record, including this extraordinary hour with Rosanne Cash.
Among many, many wise comments throughout the show, one thing the singer said really stuck with me. Asked about her writing practice, she replied, “I don’t write a song every day, but every day I’m a songwriter.” Even on the days she doesn’t write, Cash continued, she’s paying careful attention to what’s going on around her and taking notes that inform her future songwriting in one way or another.
We all have such a thing, don’t we — an art that we claim and practice even on days when it doesn’t look like it.
What’s your art? What are you, every day?
Or, how certain do you need to be?
Assuming you don’t want to be (or seem, or feel) a fraud, there’s a good chance you’re often worried about what you don’t know, or don’t yet know that you don’t know. How, in good faith, can you possibly serve people older, wiser, or more expert than you?
It is possible, but it requires getting really clear about a few things:
There’s always more to learn, but it’s quite possible you already know enough to begin.
My grandfather retired on his 65th birthday from the only company he ever worked for.
Today, almost no one I know expects to do that. We have opportunities our grandparents never dreamed of — including the “opportunity” to go through an intense job search every few years.
Surely a single career was simpler in some ways, but not in others. The level of angst in a 21st-century job search is not new to the human experience, and that makes me wonder what comparable stressors our grandparents faced in their working lives.
They may not, for example, have looked so intently for meaning, purpose, or contribution in their work. And being stuck with the wrong boss or culture for decades must have been excruciating. (If you only search once, you’d better get it right — or maybe martini lunches begin to make a lot more sense.)
In this lifetime, the search goes on. But, in the back of my mind, I’ll keep wondering what the search looked and felt like several generations ago.
These three often show up together in a muddled mass.
But they’re three fundamentally different things:
I don’t know what I’m doing (or what I’m supposed to do).
I’ll never know what I’m doing!
If what I’m doing doesn’t work, I’ll have two months to find a new way to make the rent.
Risk is arguably the easiest to manage: you can figure out your appetite and capacity for it with some back-of-the-envelope math or probabilistic thinking. (Should you leave 15 extra minutes to get to that important meeting?)
Fear and uncertainty, though, respond best to practice. The risk of falling at the climbing gym is pretty manageable, but that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re on the wall? The longer you learn to sit with it, the better you’ll be able to stand it.
Two words that are not always linked in the mind — and sometimes for good reason. (Beware “creative” accountants.)
But leaders have at lest two important things in common with real creatives:
First, good leadership is usually about finding new solutions — sometimes to new problems, sometimes to old ones. Same old, same old generally doesn’t cut it.
Second, leaders have to go to work every day. A creative who waits for inspiration is doomed, as is a leader who only shows up when the mood is right or conditions are perfect.
Making things better is a daily practice and a generous act.
The best read of the week, without question, was the FT’s gripping account of what might well be the last trial of a German as accessory to the murder of millions.
It delves into a national psyche, deep questions of choice and culpability, and, perhaps above all, memory.
The idea of a “murder machine” in the heart of Europe may beggar the imaginations of those (like me) who have grown up in the era of the Euro, but this long peace is exceptional in European history.
Remembering is a choice. And it might inform how we choose to act.
Colin Steele 