A short post from the road this week.

First up, “Deployment to Iraq Changed My View of God, Country, and Humankind. So Did Coming Home,” by Phil Klay.

This is not a great war story to tell at a bar. It does not have the clean trajectory of a sniper’s bullet, the satisfying moral conclusion of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, or the awe-inspiring display of force that was the Second Battle of Fallujah. It is not even really possible to know whether it was the right choice …

Second, another golden (relatively) oldie, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” by Roy Scranton.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

***

Enjoy the weekend, and the 100th celebration of Veterans Day on Monday.

Are you doing the work or coordinating the work?

Doing the work might be challenging, but coordinating the work is really valuable.

It’s also real work — and it’s worth learning how to do it well if you want to do it.

There comes a time in the life of a project when it seems to call for processes and platforms.

To get the idea into the world requires an email account, a word processor, a project-management system, an instant-messaging service, and on and on.

Granted, there’s probably a better or faster way than the way any one of us uses. We learn to swim in the ways that work, and then we learn to use tech tools similarly.

My version of the crawl stroke sure isn’t the prettiest or most efficient, but it’s the one that works for me — it gets me from here to there faster and with less frustration or fuss than some other version of the stroke. Changing to an objectively more efficient technique would cost me time and energy, at least in the short run.

Processes help get better work get out the door quicker — if they’re implemented wisely. Those are worth fighting through the short-term learning curve.

On the other hand, some processes are just an excuse to send a message about the email about the comment about the task.

Every time you add a process, what’s the purpose?

Interiority is different than individualism, much less self-centeredness.

I’d argue it’s even different from introversion: some people — let’s call them interior extroverts — clearly enjoy being around people, yet are also deeply in touch with their inner lives and worlds.

What does it mean to work with interiority in community — to experience along with others that which can ultimately only be experienced for ourselves?

I’m not sure, but I certainly am looking forward to playing with this over the next several days.

I’ve been captivated by an idea this past week.

“Embrace your funk,” Graham Duncan writes. In other words, put your quirk — your essential weirdness, the thing you do because you just can’t help it — at the very center of your work.

Don’t bring it along as a nice-to-have. Be known for it.

Bold advice — and not easy to follow. Perhaps you’re not aware of that thing, since it comes naturally as breathing. Perhaps you’re not confident in it, since you don’t know how you do what you do. Perhaps you’re afraid or ashamed of it, since it’s somehow not the regular kind.

But the regular kind is a commodity, and commodity profits get competed away.

Virgin Airways might not be for everyone, but it sure isn’t Delta or American.

In the long run, it’s much easier and more successful to be yourself: once your people spot one of their own, the choice is clear.

I think we can all more or less agree that some important learning and growth has to happen between the ages of about 18 and 22.

But I hope we can also agree that those ages are, in the end, fairly arbitrary — and that any intervention in those four years will probably not prove adequate, on its own, to the changes and challenges of a four-plus-decade career in the network economy.

It makes you wonder why colleges (not to mention graduate schools) sell the whole thing all at once. Especially when you also consider that they generally try to enroll a completely different group of students in their experiments with executive (modular) and online education.

I doubt the cafeterias, pools, and a cappella groups have much value left to add. If tuition keeps going up — and schools keep promising lifelong transformation — why not start demanding some honest-to-goodness lifelong learning as part of the package?

What is strategy? And what is strategy for?

Books — libraries! — have been written on the definition, and we still don’t have a good one. (“Choosing what not to do,” Michael Porter’s submission, at least wins points for succinctness.)

So let’s think about two different examples of what strategy is for:

In the first case (call it big strategy) it’s for surfacing, complicating, and assessing all the options, variables, and potential payoffs. In big strategy, almost nothing is off limits. And that can be valuable — when deciding what to do with your one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver wrote, it’s good to think big.

The other case (small strategy) is about any particular episode of a life. Maybe your life, maybe that of your organization or project. But, in any case, it’s about deciding how to do what you’ve already decided to do. In this kind of strategy, boundaries, deadlines, and constraints are essential. The point isn’t to dream up a better world, but to get your work into the world so the change can start sooner rather than never.

Small strategy is about putting the “s” on “crappy.” How to ship good-enough is a question in a different category from whether to ship at all.

If the work is important enough to deserve strategizing about, you’d better know which kind of strategy is called for.

Today’s as good a day as any to try something I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s a reminder of what many of my favorite blogs from 10 years ago would do on weekends, and what some spectacular sites still do: provide a list of the best of the week, for your weekend reading enjoyment.

Without further ado …

Scott Galloway, “Yogababble“
“[W]e looked at the S-1 language of a bunch of tech firms and made a qualitative assessment of the level of bullsh*t. Then we looked at their performance one year post-IPO. We believe there is an inverse correlation that may be a forward-looking indicator for a firm’s share performance.“

It’s easy to laugh at Adam Neumann. It’s harder to reconcile with what Prof. Galloway rightly points out as the overreaching emphasis on meaning in mission. I like meaning and mission as much as the next Millennial — and I think businesses with real values are better preferable to the other kind — but how do we separate the meaningful missions from the BS?

[Tip o’ the hat: this came via SYPartners‘ excellent monthly letter.]

Graham Duncan, “Letter to a Friend …“
“If you can find the thing you do for its own sake, the compulsive piece of your process, and dial that up and up, beyond the imaginary ceiling for that activity you may be creating, my experience is the world comes to you for that thing and you massively outperform the others who don’t actually like hitting that particular ball. I think the rest of career advice is commentary on this essential truth.“

Yes, he’s writing to a friend who might start a new investment platform. But, as he says, many of the points are relevant to anyone starting (or considering) a significant undertaking in life and/or work.

[Tip o’ the hat: this came via Khe Hy’s totally rad newsletter.]

[PS: Speaking of Grahams, you should read Paul Graham’s blog, too.]

Casper ter Kuile, “When Work Culture Becomes a Work Cult“
“‘The primary role of clergy is rarely defined as “the social construction of reality”…Yet that is precisely what clergy do,’ writes Lebacqz. And with mission-driven organizational leaders increasingly playing the role of moral, pastoral and even spiritual leader, it is — in part — this power that leads so many good-hearted people into destructive situations.“

I look forward to Casper’s newsletter every Friday. You should, too. This week’s is, for my money, especially packed with insights and connections.

And perhaps we should all consider his practice of a “digital sabbath” from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday? That’s no bull.

Interesting work — work that’s interesting to others, that helps them see the world differently — is otherwise known as art.

Where are your opportunities to make art?

How many do you encounter in a day?

How many can you accept?

Awkwardness hasn’t killed anyone yet.

But isn’t it amazing how often we act as if it could?

A friend reminded me (again!) the other day of how many of us, how often, play small because we’re afraid it might be awkward.

As in the Zen story about fear, the way to defeat awkward is to learn to listen to it without actually acting on its demands.