Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (9 page)

Two weeks ago, I took a five-hour plane ride. That’s enough time for me to get a huge amount of productive writing done. Instead, I turned on the Wi-Fi connection and accomplished precisely no new measurable work between New York and Los Angeles.

More and more, we’re finding it easy to get engaged with activities that feel like work, but aren’t. I can appear just as engaged (and probably
enjoy some of the same endorphins) when I beat someone in Words With Friends as I do when I’m writing the chapter for a new book. The challenge is that the pleasure from winning a game fades fast, but writing a book contributes to readers (and to me) for years to come.

One reason for this confusion is that we’re often
using precisely the same device to do our work as we are to
distract
ourselves from our work
. The distractions come along with the productivity. The boss (and even our honest selves) would probably freak out if we took hours of ping pong breaks while at the office, but spending the same amount of time engaged with others online is easier to rationalize. Hence this proposal:

THE TWO-DEVICE SOLUTION

Simple but bold: Use your computer only for work. Real work. The work of making something.

Have a second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, Web commenting, online shopping, networking … anything that doesn’t directly create valued output. (No need to have an argument here about what is work and what is not-work—draw a line, any line, and separate the two of them. If you don’t like the results from that line, draw a new line.)

Now, when you pick up the iPad, you can say to yourself, “break time.” And if you find yourself taking a lot of that break time, you’ve just learned something important.

Go, make something. We need it!

You don’t know what to do.

You don’t know how to do it.

You don’t have the authority or the resources to do it.

You’re afraid.

Once you figure out what’s getting in the way, it’s far easier to find the answer (or decide to work on a different problem).

Stuck is a state of mind, and it’s curable.

There are two problems with this strategy:

Listen to your fear but don’t obey it.

Either can work, both do, but don’t confuse them.

The shoemaker/copywriter/plumber who seeks a regular itinerary of gigs is building a job—a job with multiple bosses at the same time there is no boss, but still a job. You wake up in the morning and you do your craft, with occasional interruptions to do the dreaded looking-for-work dance.

The entrepreneur is in a different game. For her, the gig is building the gig.

Often we consider an opportunity based on how easy it is. The problem with this analysis is that if it’s easy, it’s often not worth doing. It’s easy to start a blog, but of course, starting a blog doesn’t really deliver a lot of value. Posting 4,100 blog posts in a row, though, isn’t easy. It’s do-able, clearly do-able, and might just be worth it.

Successful organizations seek out the do-able. When Amazon went after the big bookstore chains, analysts ridiculed them for doing
something insanely difficult. But it was clearly do-able. Requiring persistence and talent and a bit of luck, sure, but do-able.

Sometimes we seek out things that are impossible. Building a search engine that’s just like Google but better is impossible (if your goal is to dominate the market with it). It’s fun to do impossible projects because then you don’t have to worry about what happens if you succeed—you have a safety net because you’re dreaming the impossible dream.

Do-able, though, is within our reach. Ignore easy.

When confronted with a new idea, do you:

• Consider the cost of switching before you consider the benefits?
  
• Highlight the pain for a few instead of the benefits for the many?
  
• Exaggerate how good things are now in order to reduce your fear of change?
  
• Undercut the credibility, authority, or experience of the people behind the change?
  
• Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong, instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right?
  
• Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short term is more vivid for you?
  
• Fight to retain benefits and status earned only through tenure and longevity?
  
• Embrace an instinct to accept consistent ongoing costs instead of swallowing a one-time expense?
  
• Slow implementation and decision making down instead of speeding them up?
  
• Embrace sunk costs?
  
• Imagine that your competition is going to be as afraid of change as you are? Even the competition that hasn’t entered the market yet and has nothing to lose?
  
• Emphasize emergency preparation at the expense of handling a chronic and degenerative condition?
  
• Compare the best of what you have now with the possible worst of what a change might bring?
  

Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

Why, then, is writer’s block endemic?

The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern about whether our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.

We talk poorly, and then eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can we get talker’s block after all this practice?

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly—you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

If you know you have to write
something
every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with
quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.

The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have to write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad, and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.

Write like you talk. Often.

Are you going to succeed because you return emails a few minutes faster, tweet a bit more often, and stay at work an hour longer than anyone else?

I think that’s unlikely. When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more showing up and more following instructions), you’re racing to the bottom.

It seems to me that you will succeed because you confronted and overcame anxiety and the lizard brain better than anyone else. Perhaps because you overcame inertia and got significantly better at your craft, even when it was uncomfortable because you were risking failure. When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options, and then go ahead and ship work that scares others—that’s when you succeed.

More time on the problem isn’t the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.

I think it comes down to one or the other:

How little can I get away with?

vs.

How much can I do?

Surprisingly, they both take a lot of work. The closer you get to either edge, the more it takes. That’s why most people settle for the simplest path, which is to do just enough to remain unnoticed.

No one can maximize on every engagement, every project, every
customer, and every opportunity. The art of it, I think, is to be rigorous about where you’re prepared to overdeliver, and not get hooked on doing it for all, because otherwise you just become another mediocrity, easily overlooked.

That means more “no.” More “No, I can’t take that on, because to do so would mean not dramatically overdelivering on what I’m doing now.”

And it means more “yes.” More “Yes, I’m able to confront my fear and my competing priorities and dramatically step up my promises and my willingness to keep them.”

The pain of a lousy boss, of careless mistakes, of insufficient credit. The pain of instability, of bullying, of inadequate tools. The pain of poor cash flow, corrosive feedback, and work that isn’t worthy of you.

Pain is part of work. And it leads to two mistakes.

The notion that you can trade your way out of pain
.

“If I just get a little bigger, a little more famous, a little richer—then the pain will go away.”

This notion creates a cycle of dissatisfaction, an unwillingness to stick it out. There’s always a pain-free gig right around the corner, so screw this, let’s go try that.

The truth is that pain is everywhere, in every project and in every relationship and in every job. Wandering from one to another merely wastes your energy.

The other choice, though, is:

Embracing your current pain and avoiding newer, unknown pains
.

This is precisely the opposite mistake. This leads to paralysis. Falling in love with the pain you’ve got as a way of avoiding unknown future pains gets you stuck, wasting your potential.

As usual, when you’re confronted with two obvious choices, it’s the third choice that pays.

Did you wake up fresh today, a new start, a blank slate with resources and opportunities … or is today yet another day of living out the narrative you’ve been engaged in for years?

For all of us, it’s the latter. We maintain our worldview, our biases, our grudges, and our affections. We nurse our grudges and see the very same person (and situation) in the mirror today that we did yesterday. We may have a tiny break, a bit of freshness, but no, there’s no complete fresh start available to us.

Marketers have been using this persistence to their advantage forever. They sell us a car or a trip or a service that fits the story we tell ourselves. I don’t buy the thing because it’s the right thing for everyone; I buy it because it’s right for me, for the us I invented, the I that’s part of the story I’ve been telling myself for a long time.

The socialite walks into the ski shop and buys a $3,000 ski jacket she’ll wear once. Why? Not because she’ll stay warmer in it than in a different jacket, but because that’s what someone like her does. It’s part of her story. In fact,
it’s easier for her to buy the jacket than it is to change her story
.

If you went to bed as a loyal company man or an impatient entrepreneur or as the put-upon retiree or the lady who lunches, chances are you woke up that way as well. Which is certainly safe and easy and consistent and non-confusing. But is it helping?

We dismiss the midlife crisis as an aberration to be avoided or ridiculed, as a dangerous blip in a consistent narrative. But what if we had them all the time? What if we took the trust and momentum and resources that help us and decided to let the other stuff go?

It’s painful to even consider giving up the narrative we use to navigate our life. We vividly remember the last time we made an investment that didn’t match our self-story, or the last time we went to the “wrong” restaurant or acted the “wrong” way in a sales call. No, that’s too risky, especially now, in this economy.

So we play it safe and go back to our story.

The truth, though, is that doing what you’ve been doing is going to get you what you’ve been getting. If the narrative is getting in the way, if
the archetypes you’ve been modeling and the worldview you’ve been nursing no longer match the culture, the economy, or your goals, something’s got to give.

When decisions roll around—from what to have for breakfast, to whether to make that investment, to what TV show (or none) to watch tonight—the question to ask is: Is this decision a reflex that’s part of my long-told story, or is this actually a good decision? When patterns in engagements with the people around you become well worn and ineffective, are they persistent because they have to be or because the story demands it?

We’re bad at it. And marketers know this.

Consider: you’re buying a $30,000 car and you have the option of upgrading the stereo to the 18-speaker, 100-watt version for just $500 more. Should you?

Or perhaps you’re considering two jobs, one that you love and one that pays $2,000 more. Which to choose?

Or …

You are lucky enough to be able to choose between two colleges. One, the one with the nice campus and slightly more famous name, will cost your parents (and your long-term debt) about $200,000 for four years, and the other (“lesser”) school has offered you a full scholarship.