Thoughts & Observations

When You Don’t Know How

2 Comments

There are a lot of things that I postponed doing in life because I didn’t know how. One of the biggest was going out on my own and starting my own business. I thought all of the people who had opened their own businesses or who had launched their own websites had some magic understanding or ability that I didn’t.

I was having a conversation with my 17 year-old co-conspirator in crazy projects, Emily-Anne, the other night and we were talking about the issue of not knowing how. We pondered whether we could create something that answered the question of “how” for potential entrepreneurs (especially kids) so that they wouldn’t stall like I did.

As we talked, there was something that wasn’t quite feeling right about our plans. Emily-Anne made the observation that there really wasn’t a way to define how, at least not in the recipe-like way that people are often craving. Yes, we could tell someone how to build a website or get their company on Facebook, but we couldn’t tell them how to BE Facebook.

When Facebook was being built, Mark Zuckerburg wasn’t even sure what he was building. He had some of the basic skills, but he certainly didn’t have a road map for how.

In fact, when it comes to launching new companies, not having a recipe is what actually creates the magic. It’s what ends up making them stand out.

I’ve been seeing a few mainstream shoe companies mimicking Tom’s Shoes, even upping the ante by giving away two pairs of shoes for every pair you buy. But there is no magic in that. It’s the same old recipe.

Saying you don’t know how is convenient way to avoid doing something.

There are lots of people who came before you who didn’t know how either, but they moved forward anyway.

You will create the how yourself, but only if you start moving.

Thoughts & Observations

A Framework for Choosing

Leave a comment

One thing New York is not short on is choices.

Having a plethora of choices is one of the main reasons why I wanted to move here: an abundance of choices means an abundance of possibilities.

But the main problem with having so many choices is that you eventually have to pick something. I could walk out of my apartment and eat breakfast at any one of dozen places within a couple of blocks, but I can’t eat breakfast at every place at once. There are three events I want to attend tomorrow night, all happening at the same time, but the laws of physics (and public transportation in New York) prevent me from being able to get to all three in one night.

The science of how we decide tells us that the more choices we are presented, the more stressed out we get, and I will admit that one of the only things that has been stressing me out just a little bit over the past two weeks is trying to decide what to do with my time.

I was thinking yesterday about a very successful friend who has his life goals clearly outlined from where he wants to be at the end of this year to where he wants to be five years from now. He was pushing me the last time we met up to make much faster choices about what I was going to be working on over the next few months and he wanted an answer on the spot, but I found coming back to him with anything concrete incredibly difficult.

There are lots of reasons for my hesitation: I just had the disruptive experiences of stepping away from a long-term job, long-term relationship, and long-term home almost concurrently. I had also been totally caught up in the insulated world of Girl Scouts and now feel like I’m a little kid, discovering the world for the first time.

But this morning I had a big realization: it is very easy for my friend to make fast choices because he already knows with extreme clarity what his goals are. When faced with the choice between meeting with one person or another, or spending time blogging or building a network on Twitter, he can make a decision in a split second because every day he is in the habit of testing his choices against how they align with his goals.

When you don’t have clarity around where you see yourself or what you want for your life in the future, it becomes infinitely more difficult to make choices.

 

Thoughts & Observations

But I Put So Much Time In Already

2 Comments

The doctor who hated doing surgery but stuck with being a surgeon anyway, just because he had “put so much time in already.”

The writer who, three-quarters of the way through writing a novel, realized it wasn’t what she wanted to write, but finished it and turned it in anyway because she had “put so much time in already.”

The couple who has been together for 10 years and are both miserable, but decide to enlist in another 10 years of misery just because they “had put so much time in already.”

When we’re young, we’re taught the value of sticking with what we start until it’s done. And that’s a good thing because otherwise we would all be eating half-cooked meals in half-built houses that we drive to and from in half-built cars.

But I think focusing on the value of sticking with things concurrently diminishes the value of quitting. We eventually get to the point where our subconscious is constantly buzzing in our ear, telling us that quitting anything is bad.

We also tend to feel that the more time we’ve put into something, the more value there is to sticking with it. If you’ve trained for years to be surgeon, then you better damn well continue to be a surgeon. It’s as if sticking with it will somehow give it value that up until that point had been completely missing.

But zero multiplied by any number equals zero.

If I have put five hours or five days or even five years into something and it is making me miserable, not adding value to my life, not my best work, has little prospect of getting better, has little long-term benefit, or was just simply the wrong path to take in the first place, then putting in another five hours, days or years continuing down the same path is not likely to make it any better.

We avoid quitting because as much as sticking with something can make us miserable, quitting and having to start over can be downright painful. It can be gut-wrenching and vomit inducing. But I think I’d rather deal with the momentary unpleasantness of barfing then deal with feeling queasy and uneasy over the long haul, knowing I was still walking down the wrong path.

*Seth Godin has a few interesting things to say on this subject – check out The Dip

Thoughts & Observations

Bend Your Knees

Leave a comment

When we were kids, there were two pieces of advice that my dad would impart with enough frequency to illicit eye-rolling and groans: “mind over matter” and “bend your knees.”

When he was teaching us to ice skate: “bend your knees!”

When he was showing us how to play tennis: “bend your knees!”

When we were negotiating how to balance on a moving sailboat as it cut through the water: “bend your knees!”

I was totally unappreciative of the wisdom of his advice at the time. He understood the physics of how our bodies work and realized that lowering your center of gravity in almost any situation gives you more control.

As I was navigating up an icy sidewalk in high-heeled boots the other day, I wondered how I was going to stay upright, when I remembered his advice. “Bend your knees,” I said to myself, and it worked. I glided along that sidewalk like I was back on the ice rink in New Hampshire.

As I’ve been riding the train throughout the NYC over the past week, muttering “bend your knees” to myself has kept me from doing a nose dive into my neighbors as the train jerked around the track.

But I’ve come to believe that “bend your knees” means something more than that. When you’re bending your knees, you’re not only lowering your center of gravity, but you’re also setting yourself up to be able to be agile. When the train moves suddenly, you can adjust yourself quickly and avoid completely falling over.

If you’re too stiff, too uptight, too afraid, you’re more likely to get knocked down and the fall will be harder and hurt even more.

When you’re scared and facing a lot of unknowns, inside of stealing yourself against what’s to come, bend your knees.

Thoughts & Observations

Will It Be Good Enough?

2 Comments

There is no shortage of ideas.

There is no shortage of dreams.

But there is a shortage of people actually willing to turn their ideas and dreams into something.

If you’re waiting to start something or launch something or create something because you aren’t sure it will be good enough, join the club. Almost everyone you know has been secretly (or very vocally) dreaming for years about writing a book or starting a company. The majority of the time, people stay in that state forever.

Everyone has ideas. So stop worrying about whether yours is good enough.

Just realize that if you actually do something with your idea, you’re already ahead of 99% of the people out there.

*Inspired by a little kick in the pants by Seth Godin

Thoughts & Observations

What’s the Worst that Can Happen?

7 Comments

When we were kids, most of us spent at least some amount of time being scared of things that didn’t actually exist – monsters under the bed, ghosts in the closet, witches in the abandoned house around the corner.

As adults, we still do the same thing.

It just manifests itself a little bit differently.

We tend to let our imaginations run away with themselves when we think about what the potential negative outcomes of a situation are. We experience the emotional reaction of failure without even being able fully articulate what the failure we are afraid of looks like.

I was thinking about Julia Child this morning (inspired by a friend doing a fabulous job cooking Julia’s famous boeuf bourguignon for the first time at a dinner party last night) and I came across this quote of hers that I love:

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” – Julia Child

Having a what-the-hell attitude isn’t always easy because we imagine the impact of failure to be monumentally bad.

In deciding to leave Girl Scouts and move to New York, it didn’t really feel like I could have a flippant attitude about it. The consequences of failure felt huge. But that’s the issue – they simply felt huge.

I finally made myself actually write down the worst thing that could happen and here’s what it was:

The worst thing that could happen is that I would move to New York, make no money, go bankrupt, and have to move in with my parents for a while until I got back on my feet.

Hmmmmmm. We actually, that’s not that bad. My parents are great cooks, are fun to be around, and have a wonderful house (and mom and dad, if you’re reading this, I get the sense that you wouldn’t mind that set up either, at least for a little while anyway).

As “worst things” go, that barely makes it on the scale of bad. Even if the worst-case scenario had been a lot heavier and more negative then that, at least writing it down would have given me something concrete to deal with.

It is much easier to fight the ghosts and goblins that are scaring you if you’re honest about what they actually are.
Thoughts & Observations

The Real Estate of Your Brain

2 Comments

In any given day, the number of things you can think about is finite.

You have to make choices about what you allow to occupy your mind.

I had the epiphany a month or so ago that I was giving up a huge percentage of the space of my brain to thinking about things that were not truly what I wanted to be focused on. It occurred to me that if I removed those things from my life, I would open up a tremendous amount of real estate in mind. I would be able to spend time thinking about things that truly excited me and that produced a much better return on investment.

Your brain is valuable real estate.

What are you choosing to fill it up with?

 

Thoughts & Observations

The Validation Trap

Leave a comment

This morning, I sat looking out the window watching the snow come down. My heart felt happy and there was something that just felt right about being exactly where I was.

There is something to be said for listening to what your body and your heart tell you. Whether a place is right. Whether what you are doing is right. Whether who you are being is right.

And not right for other people. Right for you.

There is so much noise around us all the time, pointing us in one direction or another, that our own internal voice gets drowned out. We are almost always judging ourselves by what the rest of the world tells us is right for us. Yes, climb up that corporate ladder. Yes, take that job because it pays more even if it means you never see your kids. Yes, work 80 hours a week because someone in the company will recognize your work…eventually. Yes, be miserable for forty years because then you can eventually retire and sip tropical drinks under a giant umbrella.

But we don’t stop very often to ask ourselves if those are things we actually want, if they are things that make us happy or give our lives meaning. Instead, we blindly follow this unwritten guidebook to life that has become part of our collective subconscious. Why? Because by following it we feel at least partially validated.

But our constant search for validation is a trap. The outside world can never make us feel completely, totally validated. Not everyone is going to be your fan. Not everyone is going to think you are doing the right things all the time. You won’t get a five-star “you’re totally valid” rating from everyone you meet.

That’s why there’s something very special that happens when you stop looking at the rest of the world for validation and you think with clarity about who you are and what gives your life meaning.

Understanding yourself in that way isn’t a selfish pursuit. If you think about it, if one of our key interests in life is contributing something of value to the world, we have the highest likelihood of successfully doing that if we contribute whatever comes from our authentic selves. If we contribute by just following whatever path society has dictated for us, we are not as likely to contribute with our highest levels of energy, insight, and creativity.

The more we seek validation, the farther we get from actually finding it. We are looking everywhere for it, except the one place that matters.

To thine own self be true. -William Shakespeare



Thoughts & Observations

Choose Your Own Adventure

15 Comments

I usually make decisions quickly. I don’t dilly-dally. I get the information I need, give it just enough thought, and then I go.

But I couldn’t do that in this case.

This time, I had to sit with a feeling for months. I kept thinking and thinking and coming to the same conclusion in my gut, but I couldn’t move. I had to keep dipping my toe in the water, hoping that at some point the temperature would feel perfect.

I finally had the realization over the past month that the water was never going to be just right, that the circumstances were never going to align themselves perfectly. If I wanted the change I had been envisioning, I just had to jump.

Last week, I turned in my good-bye letter to Girl Scouts. I had been with the organization for seven and a half years. That was a mighty big band-aid to rip off. But I needed to do it. I realized that I had grown comfortable: I was addicted to the stability of a consistent paycheck and the comfort of health insurance.

On the surface, those may not seem like bad things to get addicted to, but once I realized what I was giving up in the name of achieving that security, I couldn’t look back.

When I first started working, I believed that work was a life sentence we all had to serve, and that the best I could hope for was a job I didn’t hate, with a good salary and some benefits. I felt pretty lucky to have found that comfort at a young age.

But when I became CEO three years ago, a light bulb was flipped on for me. It was dim at first – this slight flicker of an idea that somehow the way that society had conditioned me and everyone else around me to work was wrong. There was something wrong with being chastised like a five year-old for showing up ten minutes late to work. There was something wrong with having to ask permission to take a couple hours off in the afternoon to go to the doctor, as if we were third graders asking for a bathroom pass. There was something wrong with a hierarchy that required staff to write multiple memos to justify buying a $12 pair of computer speakers so that they could listen to an online training. There was something wrong with the fact that I felt that every time I walked through those office doors I had to leave half of myself on the sidewalk.

So I decided to change everything. I read an amazing book called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, and within a month we became the first non-profit Results-Only Work Environment in the country. I found inspiration from Zappos and books like The Levity Effect and realized that half of what made work suck was that it wasn’t much fun. I started serving kids’ cereal at morning meetings. It became ok for people to laugh and to dress in silly costumes and to just be themselves.

I didn’t realize it as first, but as our organizational culture changed, I changed too. Our VP of Human Resources used to joke that when he first met me, he thought I had no personality. People who met me two or three years ago, when all of this change was just starting to happen, say that I’m a completely different person now – in a good way.

The difference is that I got comfortable being myself.

That light bulb that was once dim was now glowing brightly.

When I launched my Regret Me Not Project back in September, I knew I wasn’t the same person I had been. I was looking at life differently. And looking at work differently. I put a new value on every minute of my day, and didn’t want to waste any of time doing things that drained my spirit and stifled what I knew I was capable of contributing.

Soon, I started to have this strange, nagging feeling that I wasn’t quite where I was supposed to be and that I wasn’t quite doing what I was supposed to do. I started to feel frustrated and knew in my gut that it was time for me to make a big change.

There was still the problem, though, of the paycheck and the health insurance. Those things had built fences around me, and fences have a funny way of creating both a sense of security and a sense of fear.

But the more I sat with the fear, the more I realized I wasn’t willing to live with a constant state of unease and the overwhelming feeling that life had much more to offer me. I realized that staying behind the fences was actually more frightening then stepping out.

So I stopped dipping my toe in the water and I jumped in.

Within the week or so, I will have moved to New York City. I’ll be exploring, doing whatever work I get most excited about, and living a choose my own adventure, walking down my own path.

Starting now.

Thoughts & Observations

Do You Create Art?

1 Comment

The village store in the town where I grew up is what I think city folk envision when they plan an escape to the country. It is right in the center of town, up the street from the church and the little schoolhouse. There is no parking lot. You just pull your car to the side of the road and make your way up the two granite steps in front of the store. You push open the heavy red wood door and an old-fashioned bell hanging above the door announces your arrival. The old wooden floorboards have weathered the footsteps of the town for almost 200 years. If you stop in early on a weekday morning, you will likely catch the standard group of townspeople nursing cups of coffee as they discuss the business of the town: a situation at the dump, the volunteer fire department needing new equipment, or the politics of an upcoming election.

It would be easy for this village store to be just like any other convenience store. It would be easy to stock the shelves full of Bud Light and potato chips, beef jerky and quarts of milk. It would also be easy to write the store off: the population it is serving has lingered between 1,000 and 1,500 since it was first established in the early 1800s. If you run out of milk or need an extra cup of sugar, it is the only place in town you can go. They have built in demand and that could make it inviting to just kick back and take the path of least resistance in running the store.

That, however, is not the path that the owners of the village store chose. They have turned owning the village store in a little town into an art. They have one of the best selections of beer in the state. They stock eggs laid by chickens right up the road and maple syrup made from the town’s maple trees. Their honey is from local beehives, and they stock local ice cream, coffee, and wine. They partnered with a local chef to create an amazing selection of healthy pre-made meals for busy townspeople rushing home from a long day of work.

They chose the difficult path, a path that requires creative thinking and the emotional work of finding just the right products to take up the precious space on their few shelves. They did not have a guarantee that running a store the way they chose would produce more revenue. I have a feeling that was not necessarily the basis for their decision. Nor do I think they did it because they wanted to get written up in the paper or featured in some foodie magazine. I think they did it because they could not imagine running a store in any other way.

The work that they undertook is not easy. Once they started down their path, they could not turn back. If they did, everyone would notice that they have given up.

This is why so few people turn their business into art. There is tremendous fear associated with giving up on the old formula and creating a brand new one. There is no guarantee that it will work and we tend to like to walk down paths that have a predetermined destination.

Even more fear inducing though, is thinking about what will happen when you do succeed. Once you succeed, you have to keep it up. Once you are known for having an amazing beer selection, you can never go back to just carrying Bud Light. Once you have established that you are great (or your store is great or your product is great), you have to keep being great. People find it much easier to be consistently mediocre and surprise people with slight movements into the territory of great every once and a while, then to be great all the time.

Each time I cross over the threshold to the store and hear the bell clinging over my head, it feels like everything in the world is as it should be. Work should always be transformed into that type of art.