What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
We often spend our days doing everything but the hard thing we don’t want to do. We’ll research something to death instead of actually just doing the thing. We’ll talk about it, read about it, buy all the equipment for it, but not actually do the thing. We’ll do our email, messages, small tasks, and check social media or the news — just real quick! — instead of doing the thing.
Why?
Leo Babauta has a few suggestions
“A widespread belief is that large groups engaged in joint actions that require a high level of flexibility are unable to coordinate without the introduction of additional resources such as shared plans or hierarchical organizations. Here, we put this belief to a test, by empirically investigating coordination within a large group of 16 musicians performing collective free improvisation—a genre in which improvisers aim at creating music that is as complex and unprecedented as possible without relying on shared plans or on an external conductor. We show that musicians freely improvising within a large ensemble can achieve significant levels of coordination, both at the level of their musical actions (i.e., their individual decisions to play or to stop playing) and at the level of their directional intentions (i.e., their intentions to change or to support the music produced by the group).”
From a study published in Nature.
Darius Foroux explains with a couple of recent examples:
Our time and credibility are always at stake whenever we write (or even speak). Whether you’re a normal person writing an email, or a high-profile CEO making huge announcements on a blog, your words can and will make a huge impact on your career and life.
VC Fred Wilson, while writing about the importance of mentors, also suggests this:
The thing about mentors is you can’t really ask someone to mentor you. It kind of happens organically. Someone takes you under their wing. They see something in you and want to bring it out, develop it. That’s how the best mentor/mentee relationships happen. And they are so great.
Nothing can be learned through theory alone, you must become a practitioner.
Albert Wenger, VC at USV in a blog post reviewing Maria Konnikova’s book “The Biggest Bluff“.
Seth Godin’s writes about The Boss showing up despite all odds, the company you keep, of doing the work.
Showing up is something almost every creative leader has in common. In business, in the arts, in society. Consistently shipping the work, despite the world’s reaction, despite the nascent nature of our skill, despite the doubts.
Distraction is an old problem, and so is the fantasy that it can be dodged once and for all. There were just as many exciting things to think about 1,600 years ago as there are now. Sometimes it boggled the mind.
Read in full here
HT John Hagel
Jesse Kornbluth’s Headbutler book recommendations are usually pretty on the money. This one, “RBG: The Last Interview & Other Conversations” going on my reading list.
She was a professor at Columbia University — the first time Columbia has chosen a woman for a full-time post higher than lecturer. She immediately noticed the university was firing 25 women who were working as maids, but had fired no men. “I went to the university vice-president, and told him that the university was violating Title VII.” He replied: “Professor Ginsburg, Columbia has excellent Wall Street lawyers representing them and would you like a cup of tea?” So she took her own employers to court. Eventually, Columbia decided in the end to fire no one. RBG: “Faced with the necessity of having to drop about 10 men before they reached the first woman, they found a way to avoid laying off anyone.”
Leadership lessons from FC Bayern Munich team’s turnaround, according to this HBR article.
It’s natural to hope that things are going to be immediately better as the calendar turns from one year to the next but, of course, the trends that were already in play didn’t magically evaporate at midnight, December 31. We’re all still dealing with what we were dealing with last year and will be for some undetermined amount of time going forward. – Scott Eblin
in a blog post titled “New Year, Same Boat“