Advice to a 13-year old

Nick Cave:

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too.

Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can.

Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world.

Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.

A great start. Better being habitually awed than, you know, “serious”.

 

Inspiration: don’t wait for it

Simon Sarris:

Inspiration, the admixture of genius and motivation, is sometimes described as a force that strikes us after some patient lull or waiting period. This idleness is a mistake.

The Muse arrives to us most readily during creation, not before. Homer and Hesiod invoke the Muses not while wondering what to compose, but as they begin to sing.

If we are going to call upon inspiration to guide us through, we have to first begin the work.

So it is an error to wait around for inspiration, or to demand some feeling of readiness for an undertaking, or for a teacher or some other golden opportunity.

I think these slouching inclinations come partly from an overly-systematized experience during childhood school years, and partly from a fear of failure. In fact, when you stop waiting for others—for either their permission or instruction—and instead begin on your own, fumbling through, regardless of how ready you are, this could be considered one of the true beginnings of adulthood.

 

The American self-help industrial complex

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in The Yale Review:

As Americans, we find ourselves in a culture that so fetishizes success that it cannot tolerate failure. So it deals with it in one of two ways.

The first is to view failure in individualized and atom­ized terms, blaming the losers for their losses.

The second, which is equally insidious, is to be so disdainful of failure that it insists that what looks like failure in fact is a mere “stepping-stone to success,” in the philosopher Costica Bradatan’s phrase.

Thus the platitudinous self-help bromides that we find adorned on a framed poster in a bank teller’s cubicle (“Failure is success in progress”) or shouted by a fitness influencer hawking protein powder on TikTok (“There’s no failure that willpower can’t turn into success”).

In a culture that demands overcoming against all odds, even failure has been commodified by the American self-help industrial complex: rebranded not as a devastating and possibly life-altering event but as a blip en route to a chest-thumping achievement, accomplish­ment, or acquisition.

Managers: it’s time to remind yourself why anyone should care

From the raw signal group:

Authors observe that a consequence of the great resignation is that people are walking into new jobs with a different attitude.

They didn’t come asking for meaning, or flavour, or for work to delight them. They came with boundaries and a list of expectations. And, listen: that’s a good thing. It’s extremely healthy for workers to want things like limits on working hours, competitive pay regardless of geography, and an ability to shut off work when they aren’t at work. We should hope that those gains, as uneven as they’ve been, outlast any pandemic or economic cycle.

Those changes are necessary. But they aren’t sufficient. Like a shopping mall food court, we’re surrounded by companies shouting about what a good deal they’re offering. Globally competitive salaries! 4 day work weeks in summer! Free dipping sauce! And in the midst of it, it feels like more people than ever before are finding their work really… bland. Like in the fight to compete for attention, employers have forgotten to build a culture worth fighting for.

So, insisting that we return to the office, to the same-old, just won’t cut it. And assuming that we’re all set because we are already remote or distributed won’t do it either. It’s not so much about the mode of work as it is the moment.

Their suggestion?

It’s time to tell the story again, bosses. Get your house in order on compensation and workload and expectations, for sure. But once you’ve done that, it’s time to remind yourself why anyone should care.

You may find this surprisingly hard at first. Why does your work matter? What impact does it have on the world around you, and why should someone who doesn’t care about the details of your industry give a shit? We don’t mean some sanitized corporate mission statement. We mean your own, real, authentically felt, dare-we-say-it-spicy sense of purpose.

Connect with that story. Tell that story. A modern one, with fresh spices. You want your people to feel it, to put the fire back in your organization. And you’re not gonna get there with the version that’s been sitting at the bottom of the drawer since 2019.

It’s not the overused and abused “Storytelling”. It’s creating clarity for yourself first.

Resilience is also about building capability

Greg Case:

Resilience is typically defined as a defensive capability that’s needed to “protect the house.” At Aon, we consider resilience a company-building capability, which is a fundamentally different orientation. We define resilience as the ability to take actions at scale that simultaneously defend the house and build the house, and we’ve seen many opportunities to do both during volatile times.

The most compelling and durable source of resilience is organizational. About 15 years ago, we recognized that our clients’ needs were outpacing our ability to innovate, so we took targeted actions to improve. This included making structural changes to operate as a truly global firm, which we call Aon United.

Our organizational ability to deliver the best of Aon to our clients globally through this strategy has proven critical to our success. It’s helpful in times of crisis, but, as we’ve learned from our clients, it also enables us to see opportunity where others may see only volatility and risk.

Greg Case, is CEO of Aon, a global professional-services firm.

Communicating is not talking at people, it’s co-responding

Many responses to my post on communication.

I can’t address all of the conversations here, but I’ll share a quote and answer a question.

The quote was sent by reader Tom who writes

It jumped to mind as I was reading and I wondered if that quote was coming further down in the text.

It didn’t, but it’s a good one, so here it is:

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. [1]

My response to Tom was that

I was trying to answer the question: How do I know whether people got or understood what I told or wrote them? And I too often observed in my own life and in conversation with managers that the answer “well, I sent out an email” does not ensure understanding.

The question: How then do I ensure that I understood what the other person is trying to say?

A good place to start is Rapoport’s Rules of Argument:

a list of rules promulgated by the social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament).

They are meant to help one put together a “successful critical commentary” as well as “be charitable” to the person you are speaking with. Because the context of the rules is a discussion and possible disagreement, Rapaport calls the person you are talking to “the target”. Here are the rules:

  1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
  2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
  3. You should mention anything that you have learned from your target.
  4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. [2]

In my work with managers I often invite them to seek confirmation that they understood what the other person is saying by prefacing the “re-express” with phrases such as “If I heard you correctly, …” or “What I’m hearing you say is…” followed by the “re-express” in one’s own words and not simply a repetition of the other person’s words.

Another way of going at it is by figuring out how the other person’s ideas came about. I hear managers say “I know where you’re coming from”. However, rather than assume that we know, spelling it out allows the other person to confirm that we are indeed correct. Bertrand Russell states it as follows:

It is important to learn not to be angry with opinions different from your own, but to set to work understanding how they come about. If, after you have understood them, they still seem false, you can then combat them much more effectually than if you had continued to be merely horrified. [3]

In other words, conversation is necessary… and as soon as possible. What avoids the talking at is the quick response that seeks confirmation or clarification. Without that response to the original statement or argument, and a response to that response, we simply do not know whether the other party understands what you are trying to say. In the original post, I called this

both parties making themselves co-responsible in creating a shared understanding.

In practice, the way to be co-responsible in creating a shared understanding is to co-respond: to respond to what the other person is trying to say. Communicating is not talking at people, it’s co-responding.

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[1] The quote has recently been attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Apparently William H. Whyte should get the credit.

[2] Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013).

[3] Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays (1942), Essay I: The Art of Rational Conjecture.