The simplest of advice, yet often not so easy to follow.
Other things are more interesting. Newer. Flashier.
Work is supposed to be novel and challenging, right?
Yes, it is. But that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent it every day.
The choice to run some experiments and keep running with the ones that work is always available.
The secret to good work is stick-to-it-iveness.
And the secret to stick-to-it-iveness is stick-togetherness.
If you want to be tenacious, start building a team.
We’re all making it up as we go along, aren’t we?
Whatever the future of work means, we’re inventing it every day — each and all of us.
From communication habits and platforms to the question of whether and when we go into the office at all, so much feels up for grabs right now.
Of course, even making it up as we go along requires certain boundaries. We have to know how to show up so that others can make sense of us and our work.
And that begs a couple of big questions: how different is this time, really? And how applicable is the old advice in this new environment?
Careers certainly don’t look like they used to. Shouldn’t career services and advice adapt, too?
Two articles (actually, an article and a book) to highlight this week:
First, the article. In “Why the U.S. Economy isn’t as Competitive or Free as You Think,” the FT’s Martin Wolf reviews French economist Thomas Philippon’s The Great Reversal, which, in Wolf’s reading, “overturn[s] much of what almost everybody takes as read about the world’s biggest economy.”
[Philippon] crisply summarises the results: “First, US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high in many industries, leaders are entrenched, and their profit rates are excessive. Second, this lack of competition has hurt US consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. Third, and contrary to common wisdom, the main explanation is political, not technological: I have traced the decrease in competition to increasing barriers to entry and weak antitrust enforcement, sustained by heavy lobbying and campaign contributions.”
Second, the book. Ten years after the “great deleveraging” of 2008, hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio released Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises. In synthetic overview and detailed, graph-based walkthroughs, he analyzes some of the worst debt crises in history — from the fall of the Roman Empire through 2008 — and argues that these are the results of cyclical flows in credit and debt.
You can download the entire 300-plus-page book as a PDF from the link above — or simply scroll through that page to watch an annotated replay of the cycle leading up to and through the 2008 crisis.
Managing money through the 2008 financial crisis felt in many ways like trying to navigate our way through a blizzard — a flurry of information would hit us day after day that we had to make sense of in order to be able to react well to the evolving conditions. Living through that experience reinforced the value of having a template to help us understand what was going on. While most people have not lived through many big debt crises, these crises have happened many times throughout history.
When it’s time to make a big jump, how do you go about it?
Can you make one giant leap, or do you have (or prefer) to go by smallest viable steps?
The answer I keep hearing seems to be that the best strategy is to find a “north star” and then walk toward it at the pace you can manage — and that, as ever, those who want to go far do best when they go in groups.
Something has to get done and out the door.
What’s the something? What’s good enough? What does “better” look like? When’s the deadline? And who ultimately gets to determine these things?
When something has to get done, it can help to deliberate and complicate somewhat, for some amount of time.
But, sooner or later, it has to be time to cut off new input and make the best of what’s on the table.
Deliberate vigorously, then decide rigorously. And put a clear deadline on both.
There’s only so much to give each day.
How will you spend it?
How often do you have to revisit that decision?
They’re everywhere — especially when you start looking for them.
How you structure an email. How you run a meeting. How you interact with the people around you. What you choose for lunch (and if or how you you talk about it).
The world doesn’t need more puritans, patronizers, or know-it-alls.
But it could certainly stand some more generous, principled leadership by example.
Last week, I was working on a prompt that involved making a list of creative heroes, past and present, then looking for patterns among them.
So here’s a list — and a chance to publicly acknowledge some people who have really influenced the way I live, think, and work.
That’s a wordy bunch, isn’t it! Many thanks to all of them for their guidance and example — whether they meant to give it or not.
Last weekend, I was thinking aloud about moving house.
And, for whatever reason, the first thing that sprang to mind was the rowing machine I keep in the basement of my current house.
Of course I’d miss it if it were gone, but there’s really no logical reason to make that rowing machine a constraint on my next move. (Perhaps especially if you consider that it’s a vintage model I got for free … and maybe my current housemates would enjoy it.)
The fact is, the rowing machine is a nice-to-have: it works just fine and I have no desire to get rid of it if I don’t have to. But structuring my next move around my rowing machine is the definition of yak shaving.
Colin Steele 