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Why Your Meetings Suck. And How to Fix Them.

February 11, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“One either meets or one works,” wrote Peter Drucker. “One cannot do both at the same time.” And yet we continue to fill our days at work with meetings, leaving people less time to actually do the work they’re paid to do.

Meetings have become that aspect of work we all complain about, yet no one ever does anything to fix. Partly because we tend to think that our meetings aren’t the problem. It’s all those other people.

Our meetings are useful and effective. That’s obvious. It’s just the ones that everyone else runs that suck.

Except everyone else seems to feel the same way about their own meetings. Like those 98% of college professors who feel they’re better than average, it seems that meetings provide yet another example of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains our tendency to be overconfident in our skills, especially in situations where we have limited abilities. When we struggle in an area, we can’t accurately assess our own capabilities. So our inexperience casts an illusion of expertise.

It’s easy to see how this becomes a vicious circle. Our meetings are ineffective, but we don’t recognize it. So we don’t solicit feedback or look to make improvements. And we continue to waste peoples’ time with ineffective meetings, wrapped in a cocoon of our own ignorance.

And the process continues.

Unless, of course, we decide to do something about it.

Canceling All Meetings Isn’t the Answer

“Meetings at work present great opportunities to showcase your talent. Do not let them go to waste.” – Abhishek Ratna

I don’t know how many meetings you attend each week, but I’m guessing its both more than you’d like and more than is necessary.

In many companies, people can no longer even get work done during the day. They need to reserve their evenings or early mornings for actual work because the majority of their days are taken up with ineffective meetings.

Faced with this problem, some companies elect to simply ban meetings completely.

Which seems to be a ridiculous overreaction.

Are we that incapable of running effective meetings? Like a child that’s doesn’t responsibly use a tool, do we really need to revoke this privilege?

Because meetings are a tool – a useful one when used appropriately. And a necessary one for anyone who needs to collaborate at work.

As the world continues to change and become more dynamic, our need to collaborate and effectively work with others will become ever more critical.

Meetings give us a way to communicate vision and strategy, develop responses to challenges and opportunities, and provide forums for debating and crafting new ideas. They play a large role in employee socialization and shape the overall culture.

I’m not suggesting you don’t have meetings that could – and should – be cut from your weekly schedule. I know that I do. But it’s important to recognize that, contrary to popular opinion, meetings are (or at least can be) actually useful.

They’re a tool. And like any tool, only worthwhile if they’re used well.

We just need to make sure we leverage them effectively. Which isn’t really all that complicated.

Because you already know why you hate everyone else’s meetings. Then it just comes down to addressing those issues.

There’s No Purpose.

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” – Seneca

Have you ever been sitting in a meeting and someone asked, what are we doing here again? Of course you have. A better question would be, how often do you attend a meeting and actually know what you’re supposed to accomplish while there?

It’s amazing how frequently people get together without a clear idea of why they’re doing so. Hoping for serendipitous success isn’t exactly a high-percentage plan.

You wouldn’t sit down to write a letter without knowing the purpose. And I doubt you’d invest time in developing a presentation without having a clear idea of the intended takeaway. Yet with meetings we often neglect this requirement.

Most meetings fall into three categories: we’re either looking to share information, gather input for a decision, or make a decision. Or perhaps some combination of those three. If people aren’t clear on which of these actions is the purpose of the meeting, it’s going to end in frustration. And ineffectiveness. And a host of criticism about you after the fact.

Let people know the purpose in advance and they’re more likely to come prepared to support it. Let people know the purpose at the start and they’re more likely to work towards accomplishing it. And return to the purpose at the end and people will make sure that it was addressed.

Identifying the purpose also drives us to consider whether the benefit is worth the cost. If the purpose of your meeting is for ten people to provide updates that could just as easily occur via email, it’s a little easier to spot this egregious waste of everyone’s time. And if you’re not quite comfortable identifying the purpose of your meeting to the group, there’s probably a good argument for canceling it completely.

By clarifying the purpose to everyone, we help people filter the signal from the noise. If our meetings are a tool, and we hope to use them effectively, first and foremost we need to be clear on the purpose. As Seneca mentioned, that sail is of little use if we don’t know which direction we want to go.

They’re Too Long.

“The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” – Tim Cook

The common saying that, “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time,” could easily apply to meetings as well. I would have run a shorter meeting, but I didn’t have time to plan it out accordingly.

Meeting length is inversely proportional to preparation. Take care of one and the other generally comes with it.

Few people would suggest that you could show up and provide a quality client proposal or give an effective presentation without any preparation or planning. Yet too often people are willing to ignore this requirement when it comes to meetings and default into trying to have it coalesce on its own. A path that often quickly degenerates into a confused discussion of random tangents and pontifications.

People are busy. And if you’re a steward of their time, you have a responsibility to use it effectively. As Jim Collins of Built to Last fame once wrote, “To abuse people’s time by failing to prepare shorter, better meetings amounts to stealing a portion of their lives.”

It all comes down to deliberate choices. What are you trying to accomplish? How are you going to make that happen? Whom do you need to make sure you’re successful? And what are you expecting them to contribute?

If you can’t answer these questions in advance, you’re likely not ready to effectively use peoples’ time.

They Spiral Out of Control.

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” – W. Edwards Deming

We’ve all been in meetings where that long-winded guy from marketing derails the whole thing with his “big-picture” philosophical tangents. As a side-note, anyone who describes himself as a “big-picture person” should be considered immediately suspect.

Yes, we all know that meetings are supposed to have an agenda. We’ve all – at one point or another – vowed to never attend another meeting that doesn’t have a published agenda in advance. And yet few of us actually invest the time to develop a meaningful one.

We rarely succeed on a project without a process. Few coordinated successes result in people just randomly figuring it out on their own. And if we don’t give people a process to achieve the objective, they’ll default into whatever they’re most comfortable.

An agenda doesn’t need to be complicated. A series of topics with responsibility, start times, and end times is usually sufficient. For bonus points, add the expected preparation for each item and the process for discussing it during the meeting.

One of my favorite tactics is to replace agenda topics as questions that the team needs to answer. A broad topic is often open-ended and easily becomes off-track. A question encourages people to better prepare for their position and monitor when the team is getting distracted. It also provides a common criterion for when the discussion is complete.

Start on time. Don’t send the message that any one person’s time is more important than everyone who did show up on time. And be disciplined to finish on time. Few things bother busy people more than a meeting that runs over schedule.

But between these two points, be sure to give people a process that will help people become – and stay – focused throughout the meeting. Because if you give up on the process, you’re also giving up on the result.

They Never Result in Anything Meaningful.

“Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.” – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

How often do you find yourself in a meeting discussing the same problem as last time? In a terrible sense of déjà vu, we become stuck in a vicious time loop where the same issue is repeatedly debated but nothing ever happens to address it.

We’ve all been through meetings full of positive conversations and felt good about the group’s progress only to later be disappointed when nothing happens as a result. This isn’t (necessarily) malicious. People are busy and often running from one problem to another. But it is frustrating for everyone involved.

And this happens for one key reason – shared responsibility often means no responsibility.

Steve Jobs insisted that every item on a meeting agenda have a designated person responsible for that task and any follow-up work. He called that person the DRI – the Directly Responsible Individual.

Whatever the method, each topic and follow-on action needs to have a single owner. Someone to close out each item with three main steps:

Check for completion. Take a moment to make sure you’ve addressed the intended purpose and everyone has contributed their part. If you move forward without verifying completion, people will keep returning to the topic later.
Check for alignment. Make sure everyone can live with where the group ended on a topic. The final position may not be their ideal solution, but they need to be able to support it once they leave the meeting. And if not, they need the opportunity to voice their dissent.
Agree on next steps. Nothing happens afterwards without firm, clear commitments and deadlines. Who is going to do what by when? Or put another way, nothing happens without names, actions, and dates.

Finally, document the results and send them out. Few things drive accountability like putting someone’s name next to an agreed-upon action. As the Chinese proverb goes, “the palest ink is better than the best memory.”

Names, actions, and dates. Or get ready to have the same conversation next time.

They Never Change (or Improve).

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” – Thomas Carlyle

Few people pause to reflect on the quality of their meetings. If they did, we wouldn’t have so many ineffective ones.

There’s no reason to overcomplicate things. End each meeting with a couple questions:

What did we set out to accomplish?
Did we accomplish that?
Why or why not?
And what are we going to do differently next time?

How well were people prepared? Did you get broad participation from the group? Did everyone stay on topic?

Did you gain diverse ideas and a healthy debate or a push for the status quo? Were people engaged or distracted? How effective was the overall process?

There’s no universal list of questions. The important thing is to just do it. Investing a few minutes at the end of each meeting not only improves your meeting for next time, but it reinforces to everyone that you value their feedback.

And then review the results before your next meeting. It’ll show that you value that improvement and add a level of accountability for following through on the results.

It Just Takes Some Discipline.

“Meetings are at the heart of an effective organization, and each meeting is an opportunity to clarify issues, set new directions, sharpen focus, create alignment, and move objectives forward.” – Paul Axtell

Leading meetings may be a small part of our jobs, but it has implications far beyond the time spent sitting around the conference room table. When we can effectively leverage this time, we’re better able to focus our team and drive real results. When we send the message that we value peoples’ time, we’re better able to get discretionary effort from others. And when we push for our meetings to be effective, it’s much easier to cancel those that aren’t.

This isn’t complicated. It really just comes down to four main steps:

Define the purpose.
Prepare and develop a process to achieve it.
Close each item and assign follow-on actions.
Reflect and make improvements for next time.

The alternative is to keep wasting everyone’s time each day. And continue reserving your mornings and evenings for doing real work.

The Best $2.99 You’ll Spend All Year

February 5, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating,” said John Cleese in a 1991 lecture on the topic.

Yet how do we actually operate our way to creativity?

We idolize stories of aha moments and equate ideas and inspiration with random flashes of revelation. It’s no wonder that a large portion of the population has given up on being creative. If we consider great ideas as both rare and unpredictable, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to stake your career on reliably finding them.

But behind every aha moment isn’t random rays of insight shining down from the heavens. The actual path to new ideas is neither random nor unpredictable. It’s a process, one that anyone can apply.

It’s this process, this way of operating, that James Webb Young packs in his short but powerful book, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Written 80 years ago, Young – an ad man by profession but a trademark Renaissance man if there ever was one – offers five steps that lead to an effective creative process. And at $2.99 on Kindle, it could easily be the most cost-effective investment you’ll make this year.

The Principles behind Creativity

“What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.” – James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

I’m guessing you’ve gone through the exercise of memorizing facts for a test. Only to take the test and later realize you didn’t actually learn anything.

Facts without understanding don’t lead to knowledge. And having a process without understanding the principles behind it doesn’t lead to ability.

Mainly because reality is constantly changing. So while having a creative process is critical, it’s not much use unless we can adapt it into our changing circumstances. Young recognized this and offers two deceptively simple principles that govern the formation of ideas,

“The first [principle is] that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.”

“The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Similar to Steve Jobs’ view that “creativity is just connecting things,” Young’s principles – that an idea is a new combination and the ability to create new combinations depends on our ability to see relationships between them – provide the foundation for the entire creative process.

Step 1: The Raw Material Gathering Stage

“The more of the elements of that world which are stored away in that pattern-making machine, the mind, the more the chances are increased for the production of new and striking combinations, or ideas.” – James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

In the 1600s, England was in a dire shortage for rags. They banned the use of cotton and linen for burying their dead. There was even talk of harvesting Egyptian mummies for the wrappings.

Why? They needed rags to make paper and there was a critical shortage. Until a French scientist figured out a better way.

Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur was a combination physicist, chemist, and lover of bugs. Walking in the woods one day, he began to examine an abandoned wasps’ nest and realized it was made of paper. Paper that was made without the use of rags.

Reaumur realized that the wasps were chewing wood and plant fibers. And while it took decades to develop the method for producing paper from wood pulp, this realization set the entire process into motion.

All because of a walk in the woods.

Except not really.

Because while Reaumur may have recognized the potential at that point, the realization came as a result of his extensive knowledge across diverse subjects. He was able to make the connection because he’d developed a depth of knowledge across many different areas.

Young’s first step is to gather raw material – those mental resources from which we can create future connections. For this part, Young emphasizes the need for curiosity and a drive for lifelong learning,

“Every really good creative person… whom I have ever know has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested—from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.”

Gather your raw material. Be curious. Learn and experience life. Because the more dots you have, the easier it is to see the connections between them.

Step 2: The Mental Synthesis Stage

“What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit.” – James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

In 1816, Dr. René Laennec was concerned that a young woman had heart problems, but couldn’t hear well enough to make a determination.

Laennec, who was also a musician, considered the problem until he recognized the opportunity to combine his two professions. He rolled up a tube of paper – like a flute – and found that he could hear with much improved clarity. He later made a more permanent one out of wood with a funnel at one end. And the first stethoscope was born.

Laennec’s ability to make this connection helped doctors begin to diagnose problems of the heart that they’d never before had the opportunity to hear.

In this second stage of the creative process, Young encourages us to turn over each fact, looking at each of them from different perspectives. And searching for the potential relationships between them.

“What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.”

Step 3: The Incubation Stage

“In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can.” – James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

In his third stage, Young advocates allowing our unconscious mind to work over the problem.

In Tim Harford’s latest TED talk, he cites the work of Bernice Eiduson and her research on the personalities of 40 leading scientists, including Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman. She was studying their personalities and research habits, trying to understand why some scientists were able to continue producing important work throughout their lives and others were less successful.

The pattern that emerged was surprising – Eiduson found that top scientists frequently switched topics as they developed research projects – a term which Harford dubbed slow-motion multitasking.

The process of frequently switching topics likely provided multiple benefits, including the ability to develop diverse knowledge areas (Stage 1) and see new connections (Stage 2). But another main benefit is that it allowed their minds to unconsciously ponder different problems and work out solutions.

Our minds can’t work out solutions instantaneously – often we’re stuck on a wrong path and getting more frustrated by the minute. We just need a break to clear out those wrong paths before we can recognize the correct one.

Similar to the results of Eiduson’s research, Young advocates that in the third stage, we allow our unconscious mind to work over the problem. The trick is to keep your mind active without focusing on that specific topic.

“So when you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions.”

Take a break. Do something fun. And let your unconscious mind carry the load for a while. As John Cleese put it,

“This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.”

Step 4: The Eureka Stage

“It will come to you when you are least expecting it—while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.” – James Webb Young,A Technique for Producing Ideas

If we’ve followed the first three stages, out of nowhere, everything will eventually click into place and an idea will come to us. Archimedes (supposedly) had his original aha moment while getting in the bath. Charles Darwin progressed his groundbreaking work on evolution while taking walks in his garden. And Einstein attributed some of his major breakthroughs to his violin breaks because he thought they helped connect different parts of his brain in new ways.

This shouldn’t be taken for a guarantee. But most of us are no strangers to a flash of enlightenment hitting us when we least expect it.

Step 5: Bring Your Idea into the World

“In this stage you have to take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality. And when you do you usually find that it is not quite the marvelous child it seemed when you first gave birth to it.” – James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

In the early 1800s, a French artillery officer, Captain Charles Barbier created “night writing.” Trying to help soldiers on the front lines read notes without exposing themselves to the enemy, he developed a code of raised dots poked into a piece of paper.

Later, Barbier introduced his system to the blind and met a thirteen-year-old boy who was thrilled at the chance to learn it. But when the boy found a number of ways to simplify and improve the system, Barbier was insulted that a mere boy thought he could improve on his system. He stalked out of the room and refused to listen to him.

The boy was, of course, Louis Braille. Who, not to be deterred, would go on to develop his own system. And succeed in revealing a new world for the blind.

In the final stage we need to bring our ideas into the world. It’s at that point that they run into obstacles and face the challenges of reality. And it’s our now our job to help our idea evolve and grow to meet that reality.

Derek Sivers wrote that “ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier.” Ideas, regardless of how brilliant they may seem in our own heads, need a strong advocate in the world. As Kevin Ashton, the man who cam up with idea for RFID chips, wrote in How to Fly a Horse,

“Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.”

Yet too often this is exactly what happens. People expect their ideas to be immediately successful. They view creation as a moment instead of a process. And they refuse to put in the work that’s needed to develop their idea into something useful. As Young wrote,

“It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost.”

Braille understood this. Barbier did not.

Everyone is Creative.

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly,” wrote Jonah Lehrer in Imagine: How Creativity Works. “It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code.”

If creativity truly were a unique gift that some people are privileged enough to be born with, the world would be in a lot of trouble. Because we know that only a small minority is born with great gifts in any one area. We couldn’t hope to find enough people to develop ideas and solutions to the problems that face us in today’s world. Indeed, if the ability to develop ideas were a gift,

But fortunately creativity is a process. It’s a system of practices. And practices can always be learned. As Young summarizes,

First, the gathering of raw materials—both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.

Second, the working over of these materials in your mind.

Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis.

Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea—the “Eureka! I have it!” stage.

And fifth, the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness.

Stay curious. Keep learning. And never stop looking for connections.

Want to be Innovative? Embrace the Unknown.

January 28, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible,” wrote science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in what would become the 2nd of his famous 3 laws. Echoing Einstein who said that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” Clarke recognized that there are few greater catalysts for discovery than a willingness to embrace the unknown.

And yet, the unknown and the mysterious become easy things to neglect. In today’s cult of productivity, a willingness to explore beyond the rational seems like a luxury.

Worse still, faced with the growing trends of pseudoscience, post-truth, and seemingly growing factions committed to their own ignorance, it’s easy to adopt a default mode of cynicism. Surrounded by groups who are so open-minded that their brains seem to have fallen out, it’s understandable that we’ve begun to see the unproven with derision and condescension.

But a cynic’s view – one that’s unwilling to entertain the unproven and mysterious – is not the answer. That path only leads to stagnation. As Caitlin Moran wrote on the topic,

“When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas.”

An inherent skepticism is critical to keep us from falling in with modern day phrenologists and conservatives, but it needs to be balanced with that often-neglected sense of wonder. Skepticism without wonder sets us up for a life limited to the proven ideas of others. Or, as Carl Sagan once described, “You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world.”

And while there’s plenty of evidence to support that perspective, it still prevents us from recognizing those new opportunities worth pursuing. Indeed, our sense of wonder – our willingness to wade into the mysterious – is often the critical driver for innovation and growth.

A Catalyst for Innovation

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” is Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law, explaining our typical awe when we encounter a new technology for the first time. And just as a new advancement may seem magical to us, often that first spark of a new idea comes from a similar pursuit of the unknown.

Before Robert Boyle became the father of modern chemistry, he was an alchemist. His initial experiments were aimed at turning lead into gold. His experiments that proved the existence of atoms, demonstrated the inverse proportionality of pressure and volume, and pioneered the modern Scientific method, all started from an interest in the mysterious and the magical.

Nikola Tesla, whose work with alternating current and induction motors impacts us all every day, began his journey into electricity by a mysterious incident from his childhood. As he recounted in a 1939 letter, Tesla told the story of how petting his cat, Macak, shocked him into a lifelong fascination with electricity.

“In the dusk of the evening as I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle which made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light, and my hand produced a shower of crackling sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house … My mother seemed charmed — ‘Stop playing with the cat,’ she said. ‘He might start a fire.’ But I was thinking abstractly. Is Nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back?… I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself, what is electricity?”

When we’re young, we’re often surrounded by the magical and the mysterious. We play pretend and listen to fairy tales. We read about superheroes and believe in all sorts of fantasies.

Eventually we grow older and learn the truth behind these tales. And as adults, we’re expected to root ourselves in the known and rational world.

Yet by shutting ourselves off from these mysteries, we miss out on countless opportunities to break beyond our current boundaries. By limiting ourselves to the rational and the established, we sacrifice our ability to discover the new.

We all develop our own mental models of the world. We fill them with explanations that explain how the world works. We fill them with constraints – both known and assumed – that bound our current views of reality.

Magic, mystery, the unknown – all of these are simply things that challenge those constraints. If we’re not willing to embrace these areas, how do we ever expect to break beyond our current limits?

Look for What Doesn’t Make Sense

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” – Eden Phillpotts

How often do you hear someone say, that something just doesn’t make sense?

Whenever people encounter a new fact that’s at odds with their definition of the world, their typical response is to say that it just doesn’t make sense.

But ultimately the world always makes sense. It’s just that our understanding of it hasn’t always caught up with reality.

Instead, we should be saying that our current mental model no longer makes sense. It’s been presented with new evidence and is now outdated.

In one of my favorite commencement speeches of all time, David Foster Wallace argued that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

We’re surrounded by the mysterious and the unknown every day. All around us are things that can challenge our current view of the world. We each get to choose how and what we think about these opportunities. And how we respond when they present themselves.

The cynic writes them off as something that doesn’t make sense – refusing to grow their perspectives of the world. The alternative is to seek out the mysterious. Embrace the unknown. Look for what doesn’t make sense and go there. As Oscar Wilde put it,

“The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.”

How to Avoid the Work-Life Balance Trap

January 22, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard,” wrote philosopher David Whyte in his insightful book The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship. And indeed, the idea of needing to maintain a continuous balance between the various demanding parts of our lives is a recipe for endless frustration.

Despite countless tips and hacks on how to manage it all within those precious 168 hours each week, there’s no easy answer. Sure, you could follow the example of Elon Musk and choose your companies over your children and your health, but that definition of success never really made a lot of sense to me.

And so for most of us, this concept of work-life balance implies that we’re always failing at something. When considered as a straight binary trade-off, an investment in one area also brings a counteracting neglect of another. Time spent being a good father and husband is also time spent being a poor manager and leader.

When this concept of balance becomes a zero-sum view of our lives and careers, is it any surprise that the market’s become flooded with self-proclaimed time management and productivity coaches? I have no idea what it takes to qualify for one of these professions, but I’m hoping it’s more than the ability to make a to-do list.

It’s this definition of work-life balance that needs to change. Because it’s not a balance. It’s more of an integrated system. Or as David Whyte described it,

“The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.”

The Work-Life System

“The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle

Complex systems are those where the collective behavior of the individual parts bring properties that couldn’t be gained from the parts themselves. The aggregate activity is nonlinear and dynamic, and cannot be modeled by a linear summation of its components.

Instead of trade-offs, each action builds off another. Instead of random or disparate directions, each action builds toward a common purpose.

The other aspect of a complex system is that turning off a critical part doesn’t increase the effectiveness of the other components. Which is one reason why The Four Burners Theory for prioritizing your life is so flawed.

At a high level, The Four Burners Theory considers our lives as a stove with four burners on it. Each burner symbolizes a major part of our lives – family, friends, health, and work. It then tells us that in order to be successful you need to turn off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you need to turn two off.

Yet neglecting a critical aspect of our lives rarely leads to long-term success. A series of career successes that you earn while your kidneys fail and your family desert you doesn’t really have a lot of allure.

It’s also ridiculous to suggest that these burners can be turned off for years at a time, ready to be lit the moment it’s convenient for us. The more likely scenario is that the gas line will have rotted out and the entire thing will be beyond repair.

When we’re aiming for balance, the natural impulse is to look for things to cut. But when we view these areas as components within a system, it’s easier to recognize that cutting out one part rarely leads to a more effective overall solution.

There doesn’t need to be a definitive balance. Because there’s no definitive separation.

Instead of viewing your time with work, hobbies, and family and friends as a bunch of disparate parts of each day, try considering them more like components within a complex system – each one playing a critical role towards your overall purpose.

At which point it’s not a question of hitting some prescribed balance, but leveraging each in pursuit of the overall system pursuit. As Charles Dickens put it,

“The best way to lengthen our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.”

Aim for Life-Work and Not Work-Life

“The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.” ―Michel de Montaigne

Many people have pushed this idea of work-life integration. And it’s at this point that they would likely segue into the passion speech. You know the one – that oft-preached diatribe which says that unless we spend each day in a job that defines our life’s purpose, we’re wasting our lives.

This passion fixation encourages people to take work-life integration and turn it into modeling your life after your work. And while I doubt that this idea was originally put forward by an evil cabal of CEOs to get us to bias our time towards the work side of the equation, it does tend to have that affect.

Now, life is too short to spend our days doing something we hate. And for everyone who’s incredibly passionate about their career, that’s wonderful. But with 70% of employees actively disengaged in their work, maybe we ought to tone down the whole passion obsession.

Maybe, instead, we should consider the inverse.

Instead of integrating our lives into our work, doesn’t it make more sense to integrate our work into our lives?

Instead of considering what type of career should represent our purpose, doesn’t it make more sense to decide what type of person we want to be? Or what type of life we want to lead?

And then tailor our work to suit that purpose. Instead of the other way around.

When we recognize the type of life we want to lead – it’s easier to recognize the distinct role that work plays in fulfilling that purpose. It’s easier to forget about balancing two binary tensions and appropriately assign our time in the best way that fits our vision for the future. In the words of Margaret Young,

“You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”

Recognize What’s Truly Important

“To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

After working for many years in palliative care, Hospice nurse Bronnie Ware documented some of the main regrets of her dying patients. One common to every male patient was “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” In Ware’s words,

“They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship…All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

I don’t doubt that many of these people felt passionate about their careers and that their work was both meaningful and fulfilling. Yet when they looked back on how they spent their time, they still regretted allowing their work to drive their lives.

With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes much easier to recognize whether our actions aligned with our priorities. And whether we spent our time doing things we truly value.

We seem much more likely to start asking these questions once we’ve aged and gained the benefit of past wisdom.

Perhaps we should start thinking about them now – while we have the chance to make changes. As the great Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations,

“Let each thing you would do, say or intend be like that of a dying person.”

Life Happens One Day at a Time

“Every day of our lives, we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.” – Mignon McLaughlin

I realize it’s difficult to pin down your life’s purpose. And it may not yet be clear exactly where your passions all lie. But most of us can largely describe the type of person that we want to be. And I’m guessing we all have a general idea of the type of life we want to lead.

So forget about planning the rest of your life. Just focus on today. And maybe tomorrow.

Did your actions today represent the life you want to lead?

And if not, what are you going to do differently tomorrow?

Forget about balance. Just aim for letting each day represent the person you want to be and the life you want to lead. Because as Annie Dillard reminds us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

How to Stop Lying to Yourself, You Liar

January 15, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“Lying,” Sam Harris defines, “is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.”

From the white lies we tell to spare someone’s feelings to more serious breaches of trust, we’re surrounded by levels of dishonesty. In her engaging TED talk, Pamela Meyer cites research that says we’re lied to anywhere between 10 and 200 times per day.

And for anyone who’s followed recent political budget talks, that upper bound actually might seem low.

But between the ridiculous fabrications of your average conservative grandstanding to the useless feedback of your gutless manager, none of these represent the most harmful untruths we hear on a daily basis.

That privilege is reserved for the lies we tell ourselves.

Don’t Trust that Person in the Mirror

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman, 1974 Caltech commencement address, Cargo Cult Science.

In his timeless speech, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Charlie Munger discusses the criminals in Tolstoy’s novels and their respective self-deceptions. He breaks their defense mechanisms into two main types – they’re either in denial of committing the crime at all or they justify it based on their hardships.

Each of these villains – characters the rest of us see as evil – mentally protect their own identities through a series of denials and rationalizations. And while our own transgressions may not compare with theirs, we’re all guilty of spinning our own behaviors to align with our preferred self-image.

We tell external lies to put a boundary between the truth that we’re living and the version that others see, for concern of their judgment. Our internal dishonesty follows this same pattern – except we deny this very truth from ourselves. As Adrienne Rich describes this impact in her 1975 speech-turned-essay Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,

“We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.”

Psychology has long referred to this behavior as cognitive dissonance – that mental discomfort that occurs when we’re faced with conflicting evidence. And like many other biases, it becomes especially problematic when it threatens our self-identity. In these instances, we’re particularly motivated to quiet the disconfirming evidence through whatever rationalization is most handy.

We spend our lives constructing a positive self-image of ourselves. It would be a shame to let something trivial like reality jeopardize that.

We credit our success to skill and determination while our failures are attributed to factors outside of our control. We’re always the protagonist in our own story and we routinely believe ourselves to be better than average, regardless of the discipline or evidence.

So it shouldn’t be surprising if our default reaction to this dissonance is one of rationalization and denial.

Yet it’s easy to see how this quickly develops into a vicious cycle. As we continue to self-justify our actions we further align ourselves to a particular self-image. One that we’re now even more committed to justify against conflicting evidence.

Our choices continue to reinforce themselves and foreshadow future behavior, pushing us toward increasingly extreme positions. Sam Harris’s description of this rabbit hole of dishonesty applies just as aptly to our internal self-rationalizations,

“Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.”

Our rationalizations and denials protect our self-image, but at the cost of actually achieving it. Without the understanding that our external behaviors don’t match our internal aspirations, we lack any motivation to change. And we doom ourselves to repeat the same mistakes.

The alternative, of course, is to recognize this tendency. And counteract it.

Protect Yourself from Your Own Lies

“When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, ‘Hey, my world, our world, it’s going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized.’” – Pamela Meyer, Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

The good news is that we’re not destined to repeat this cycle of self-justification. We always have the power to recognize and correct it.

The first step is simply recognizing this tendency and being vigilant. While we may never banish these biases from our mind, we can question our intuition and consider whether we’re being honest with ourselves.

I know, much easier said than done.While lies about inauguration attendance are easy to spot, full and total honesty is much less clear. There is rarely ever just one truth – regardless of what that cult down the street tells you. As Adrienne Rich described in words far better than I’ll ever manage,

“There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’ — truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”

Given the ambiguity and interconnectedness of our thoughts and actions, it becomes all the more critical to be mindful and vigilant against our internal deceit. And while Noah Zandan and TED Ed put out a good short animation on common traits of liars, and Pamela Meyer’s Liespotting is an interesting read, there are no universal signals.

The answer lies in our own introspection. It’s about taking the time to reflect on our daily actions and consider when we’ve self-justified poor behavior to the detriment of our future growth.

And recognizing the triggers and patterns that typically bring about this behavior in each of us. Once we better appreciate the environments and causes for our own self-justifications, we’re better able to counteract them.

And for some people, this knowledge came from changing the question they asked themselves.

Introspect on the What, Not Just the Why

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

With the wave of meditation, journaling, reflection, thinking time, root cause analysis, critiques, lessons learned, postmortems, premortems, and after-action reviews filling our time, you’d think introspection is at an all-time high.

And maybe it is.

But in a study by Tasha Eurich of Harvard Business Review, her team found that all of this introspection isn’t helping us to be more self-aware. It’s not that introspection isn’t an effective tool – it’s just that most people aren’t using it effectively.

Eurich found that most people focus on asking “why” questions during periods of introspection. Which is understandable – we’re trying to determine the basis for our emotions and behaviors which lends itself to reflecting on our motives. Yet they also found that these questions lead less to self-aware understanding as to immediate answers and embellished negative stories.

Alternatively, the study found that those who ask themselves “what” questions demonstrate greater self-awareness and are better aligned between their internal and external behaviors. Instead of asking why something happened, they focus on what caused them to behave a certain way and what they’ll do differently next time.

This keeps people objective and future-focused while providing actionable changes going forward.

It also keeps us grounded in reality and opens up more future options. Which, if we actually want to make changes, is really the whole point.

Choose the Hard Choices

“Choices are the hinges of destiny.” – Edwin Markham

All of the introspection and resulting self-awareness in the world is for naught if we don’t use it to make better decisions going forward. Which mostly comes down to a method of framing our options.

The function of a lie is usually singular – to make things simpler for the liar than they ought to be.

So one of the first steps in counteracting our internal rationalizations is to recognize when we’re stretching to make things simpler for ourselves than they should be. In the advice of poet and weight-lifting champion Jerzy Gregorek, who recognizes that a fulfilling life is only gained through hard choices,

“In every difficult moment ask yourself, ‘What is a hard choice and what is an easy choice?’ and you will know instantly what is right.”

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely suggests a similar mentality when evaluating future decisions. In a podcast discussion with Shane Parrish of The Knowledge Project, he suggests three strategies to consider when faced with difficult decisions:

Consider yourself as an external advisor instead of the person making the decision. We’re almost always able to solve other peoples’ problems because we see them from a more rational viewpoint.
Consider that you’re making this decision as a long-term rule instead of one-time instance. When we associate today’s decision with long-term behaviors/habits/impacts/trends, we’re more likely to act responsibly.
Consider whether your decision would be consistent if it was a major event or a minor one. We tend to make exceptions for minor events yet it’s the minor events that add up to define our long-term standards.

Regardless of the method that works best for you, how we frame our decisions can determine whether it’s our intuition or our rational self making the final call.

Cultivate Self-Esteem over Pride

“To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are,” wrote Bruce Lee in an essay called The Passionate State of Mind. “Yet it is remarkable that the very people who are most self-dissatisfied and crave most for a new identity have the least self-awareness. They have turned away from an unwanted self and hence never had a good look at it. The result is that those most dissatisfied can neither dissimulate nor attain a real change of heart. They are transparent, and their unwanted qualities persist through all attempts at self-dramatization and self-transformation.”

We lie to ourselves to preserve a self-image that isn’t consistent with reality. But this version exists only in our heads. The rest of the world continues to see a different version. And insulated in our own self-justifications, we never address those shortcomings which differentiate the two.

Lee would cite this defining motivation as one of pride – a sense of self-worth that’s derived from external rather than internal factors. When we lack self-awareness, we look to others to tell us who we are. And we open ourselves to the pull of conformity and rationalization.

The alternative then is an intrinsic source of motivation – not pride but self-esteem. As Lee wrote,

“Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not part of us, while self-esteem derives from the potentialities and achievements of self.”

We all have this ability. It comes from being honest with ourselves and making the difficult choices. It comes from recognizing when our first reaction is to make things easy and counteracting that to do what’s right. And it comes from day-in and day-out, choosing to embrace reality instead of self-justifications.

Start today. Because as Bruce Lee would tell us, “The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task that taxes all of the individual’s power and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day.”

7 Ways to Improve Your Ability to Deliver Criticism

January 9, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

“The trouble with most of us, said Norman Vincent Peale, “is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.” Yet while a certain percentage of the population is happy to reinforce the walls of their own echo chambers, Peale’s statement is a discredit to the vast majority of people.

While our initial reactions may too often be one of defensiveness, in my experience the most people do want to understand how they can get improve. And they recognize that feedback is a necessary part of that process.

Rarely do you meet someone who, upon realizing a mistake, wishes they could have stayed within their previous ignorance. And I have yet to find anyone who, once corrected, wishes they could have continued repeating that same mistake for years to come.

The problem, in fact, isn’t that people are unwilling to listen to criticism. The problem is that most criticism isn’t worth listening to.

People Do Actually Want Feedback

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

We often hear sound bites about people not wanting criticism or that employees aren’t open enough to feedback. But study after study shows this to be untrue.

People don’t have some genetic disease that keeps them from engaging in meaningful conversations. They want feedback. Because they want to improve.

In a recent study, 81% of employees who rated their manager poorly also noted that he or she did not provide sufficient feedback. In contrast, with employees that ranked their manager highly, the percentage that were dissatisfied with feedback dropped to 17%.

It’s this aspect – in the quality and quantity of corrective feedback – that often differentiates whether people consider their manage is effective or not. And just as top athletes look for the best coaches, top employees will always move into areas where they’ll receive the feedback they need to grow.

We can all remember times when we’ve been offered biting criticism that we took to heart. It may have knocked our ego down a couple pegs, but ultimately we were better for hearing it. And given the choice between getting corrective feedback and getting no feedback – the majority of us will choose the former.

So whenever you hear someone complaining about peoples’ general unwillingness to learn, the more likely case is that they’re using it to mask their own inability to offer worthwhile feedback.

The good news is, this is a much easier problem to solve.

Negative Feedback Isn’t Negative

We’re all very good at developing mental worst-case scenarios and then convincing ourselves that it’s an inevitability. So when most people consider giving corrective feedback, they often picture soap-opera style confrontations and relationship-destroying arguments.

And as a result they hesitate. They put it off until it becomes too late. And they never actually provide that feedback until the problem becomes too big to ignore.

It’s easy to see how this can become a vicious circle. People don’t say something initially, thereby normalizing a poor behavior. And they struggle to address it the next time since they’ve previously allowed it.

But performance rarely gets better on its own. Which brings us to the main idea behind all corrective feedback.

Rule 1: It’s much easier to correct a minor issue than a major one. So once you see something, say something.

We’re in a much better position to do this when we’re engaged in the work. And we’re more likely to have this confrontation early when we have regular conversations in place. Performance discussions become the norm instead of the exception.

Yet too often we still hold back for fear of offending people. We assume that negative feedback will guarantee a negative reaction.

This mentality has to change. We need to stop seeing corrective feedback as negative feedback. Because for most people, it’s anything but.

If you ask people whether they’d prefer to receive praise on their success or insight into their struggles, most will choose to better understanding what they’re doing wrong. So while we tend to categorize this as negative feedback, it’s actually the communication that people view most positively. Whilst disingenuous positive feedback – that cheap atta-boy that’s thrown around for the sake of checking a box – is as welcome as a factchecker at a conservative political rally.

Rule 2: The only negative feedback is feedback that doesn’t support future improvement.

And the accompanying…

Rule 3: If you cannot think of a way to give your criticism so that it supports future improvement, then keep it to yourself until you can.

Don’t Overcomplicate Things

I once knew a manager whose feedback method was to tell elaborate stories. They’d end with some convoluted moral that represented the feedback he wanted to give to his employees. Like some kind of deranged Aesop, the guy was constantly pontificating obtuse fables that no one understood.

Too often, people over complicate the process of giving corrective feedback. It doesn’t require elaborate stories or some pop psychology analysis. Just a straightforward discussion with a few key points.

Establish a Shared Purpose

“He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.” – Abraham Lincoln

No one like used car salesmen. Even used car salesmen don’t like them.

I don’t mean to generalize. I’m sure some of them are okay.

But in general they get a bad rap. Because no one ever trusts anything they say. And because no one looks good in checkered jackets.

The consummate used car salesman is out for himself and only himself. If we wind up with a lemon in the process, it’s no concern to him. His advice suits his purposes, but very rarely ours.

Too often, when people refuse to listen to feedback, it’s because they’re equating it with a similarly biased purpose.

Which isn’t very surprising. After all, no one wonders why you don’t take job advice from career academics.

So if we expect people to listen to our feedback, first we need to establish a sense of mutual purpose. We need to show people that our interests align with theirs.

When people realize we’re working towards a common goal, they understand that we care about their interests and values. And consequently they’re much more receptive to our input.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something that’s easy to fake. Simply telling someone that you have their best interest at heart and spouting off vague platitudes without backing it up with actions doesn’t establish trust. No matter what that example in 2016 may have shown us.

To establish mutual purpose and trust we need to engage with people, ask about their interests, and actively listen to their concerns.

In short, we need to show them that we care about them as well as the job. If we can’t do that, we shouldn’t expect people to trust our motives.

Rule 4: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

So take an interest in people. Understand their values and how they influence their goals and aspirations. Ask questions and take the time to learn where they want to go. Not until then should we expect their trust.

Agree on the Facts, then discuss the Story

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” said Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the chagrin of climate change deniers everywhere.

Facts are often the linchpin behind the argument – they represent the foundation of belief. So until everyone can agree on the facts, there’s little hope of having a meaningful conversation.

And they’re the least controversial. So it’s always easier to start by establishing and agreeing on the facts. As John Adams described them,

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

State the expectation. Then state the facts of what happened. And let the other person explain why there’s a difference. It’s not complicated, but it’s surprising how many people fail to do it.

Yet facts alone are rarely enough to warrant corrective feedback. It’s the facts plus the impact that necessitates your intervention.

So once facts are agreed upon, explain the consequences of their behavior. The other person needs to understand the impact they had on you and the organization as a whole. It’s this knowledge that will encourage people to make changes going forward.

There’s no need to pile it on. While we often feel we need to repeat ourselves to make our point, we only succeed in coming across as a condescending jerk. Make your point and move on.

Rule 5: First agree on the facts. Then discuss the impacts.

Discuss Behaviors, Not People

“The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there. Every time someone holds back on a new idea, fails to give their manager much needed feedback, and is afraid to speak up in front of a client you can be sure shame played a part. That deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled and of feeling less than, is what stops us taking the very risks required to move our companies forward.” – Peter Sheahan, CEO of ChangeLabs

The purpose of corrective feedback is never to shame someone into compliance. When someone feels ashamed, they’re more likely to disengage and withdraw from future situations. Or become defensive and blame others for their behaviors. Which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Brene Brown described it perfectly in Daring Greatly with “Guilt = I did something bad. Shame = I am bad.”

Guilt encourages us to compare our behavior against our own performance standards and recognize the difference. This cognitive dissonance is what motivates us to make meaningful change.

Shame, on the other hand, threatens our very identity. Which will often cause disengagement and defensiveness – neither of which are productive towards changing future behaviors.

You’re not a psychiatrist. Or at least the odds are likely that you’re not a psychiatrist. So you’re also likely not qualified to diagnose someone’s motives and analyze them on a personal level.

Rule 6: Focus on the behaviors and what someone did rather than what type of person you imagine him or her to be.

As Frank A. Clark put it, “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.”

Don’t Take Ownership

“Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” — Neil Gaiman

We’ve established a mutual purpose, discussed the facts, talked about the impacts, and highlighted problematic behaviors without insulting anyone’s identity. Yet the entire point was to elicit a behavior change going forward.

So it’s not over until you agree on what they’ll do differently next time.

Which often requires one of the most difficult activities for any of us – keeping our mouths shut.

We’ve all been in situations where someone prescribed our actions for us. And we likely nodded along, agreeing to their suggestions in theory. But as time went by, we weren’t committed to that solution. Because it was theirs, not ours.

The same principle applies when we want people to change behavior going forward. It’s their issue and it needs to be their solution. Otherwise we’re just setting ourselves up for a repeat discussion down the road.

Rule 7: People are much more committed to a solution if they own it.

So close your mouth and let them suggest a plan of action. Feel free to ask open-ended questions and help them develop ideas, but whenever possible let them come up with a solution that will work for them. As founder and start-up investor Mike Maples Jr. told Tim Ferriss,

“People who offer great advice understand that their goal is to help someone on their unique journey. People who offer bad advice are trying to relive their old glories.”

Feedback is Everyone’s Responsibility

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” – Wole Soyinka

With regards to personnel development, there are only three types of companies.

Bad companies ignore poor performing employees. Management sticks them in a corner where they can do the least amount of damage. Or transfers them around like a bad penny, never addressing the issue.

In good companies, managers eventually take on these problems. They’re engaged with the work and hold regular discussions to recognize and correct issues as they see them.

But in great companies, this responsibility is shared by everyone in the organization. Everyone holds everyone else accountable. All employees, regardless of position or level, offer feedback to encourage growth and development from their coworkers.

Peer-provided feedback is both the most effective and most under-utilized performance improvement tool available to organizations. While management only sees a fraction of an employee’s actions, peers work more closely and more often with their coworkers. As a result, they’re in a much better position to provide immediate feedback and stimulate growth.

The only barrier is helping people feel comfortable in this role. And giving them a couple rules to keep in mind throughout the process.

It’s much easier to correct a minor issue than a major one. So once you see something, say something.
The only negative feedback is feedback that doesn’t support future improvement.
If you cannot think of a way to give your criticism so that it supports future improvement, then keep it to yourself until you can.
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
First agree on the facts. Then discuss the impacts.
Focus on the behaviors and what someone did rather than what type of person you imagine him or her to be.
People are much more committed to a solution if they own it.

Top talent will always congregate around those who will make them better. People are looking for these opportunities to improve. Don’t hesitate to help them do it.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I suppose it would be quite hypocritical to end this without an invitation for any corrective criticism you may have, so please feel free to share your thoughts.

20 Powerful Books to Increase Your Growth in 2019

January 4, 2019 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

“Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves, so that we can travel in them more reliably and with less of a feeling of paranoia or persecution,” said Alain de Botton in his four-point perspective on the importance of reading. And while the Internet and other forms of entertainment offer renewed competition for books and literature, their place in our lives is as critical as ever.

Books give us the benefit of more wisdom and perspective than we’d ever be able to get on our own. They contribute to how we view the world and help us better understand our own thoughts. As the great poet and Brainpickings curator Maria Popova answered nine-year-old Ottilie on why we have books,

“Books build bridges to the lives of others, both the characters in them and your countless fellow readers across other lands and other eras, and in doing so elevate you and anchor you more solidly into your own life. They give you a telescope into the minds of others, through which you begin to see with ever greater clarity the starscape of your own mind.”

To this end, I started 2018 with the goal of reading one book each week, 52 on the year. And while it’s debatable whether I actually hit that mark (it depends on whether you count a few books I re-read), I did read more than in any year since I was a kid. Which is really the whole point anyways.

So to start off 2019, I wanted to suggest my favorite 20 from this batch. Whether it was helping me understand some new perspectives, develop some new ideas, or just become a little less dull, this list was a tremendous trigger for personal development over the past year. As a 20-year-old Frank Kafka wrote to his childhood friend, the art historian Oskar Pollak,

“Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”

Here’s 20 of the favorites I read last year. I hope you find them as helpful as I did. And may some of them be a key to your own unfamiliar rooms.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

A masterful book to better understand your own mind and why it occasionally seems to be working against you. I was expecting an extended research paper and was thrilled to discover an engaging conversation on why we can’t always trust our intuitions and how our own confidence masquerades as a treacherous form of false evidence. Kahneman offers a humbling antidote to our current self-righteous mindset, complete with methods to recognize and counteract the many biases and heuristics conspiring to limit our deliberate thinking. A necessity for anyone interested in self-improvement.

“The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harrari

A tremendous history of the world, but made truly unique by Harrari’s perspectives on the myths and humanist stories that pull everyone together. Harrari combines history and science to open our eyes to many of the “truths” that have defined us as a species. His vivid and convincing storytelling not only convinced me to become a vegetarian, but to better project history forward and more actively consider what stories I want to shape my future.

“Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown

While we all inherently know the dangers of falling into the busyness trap, it continues to be a struggle to remain present in the face of a procutivity-obsessed world. Essentialism offers a systematic solution for focusing on the critical and eliminating everything that isn’t. McKeown offers a toolkit full of actionable advice to maximize our contribution in the areas that matter and recognize the trade-offs that come with this commitment.

Broadly applicable to work and life. I think I highlighted more passages in this book than anything not written by Ed Catmull or Seth Godin.

“When we look back on our careers and our lives, would we rather see a long laundry list of “accomplishments” that don’t really matter or just a few major accomplishments that have real meaning and significance?”

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, Clive James

A biographical masterwork, James provides over 100 different stories covering artists, intellectuals, and political leaders and offers an appreciative or condemning look into their lives based the choices they made in either championing liberal humanism or siding with totalitarianism of both the left and right. A timeless piece that continues to present lessons and wisdom that we could all learn from.

Additionally, reading James’s talented writing and unique storytelling can’t help but make you a better writer.

“If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.”

Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, Eric Greitens

Written as a collection of letters to his friend and former SEAL comrade, Zach Walker, who’s struggling with finding his purpose upon returning home, Greitens offers invaluable thoughts on what it takes to build resilience into our lives. In a culture where too many people offer the advice to just be happy, Greitens offers wisdom from Stoic philosophers, our founding fathers, and today’s thinkers and heroes on how true resilience comes not through the events of our lives but in how we respond to them.

An incredibly powerful book full of reminders that ultimately our identity comes out of our actions. And we all get to choose our own actions.

“What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.”

Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure, William Bolitho

Driven into huge demand and up to correspondingly inexorbitant prices by Elon Musk’s recommendation, I was thrilled to see this finally become available on Kindle. Bolitho tells the tales of twelve of history’s greatest adventurers – from Alexander the Great to Woodrow Wilson. In each instance, he shows how these makers of history have been driven by the same internal conflicts as the rest of us, but their greed for life ultimately tips the balance into their war with the unknown.

A great read – educational and entertaining – and written with the passion and skill of an author whose deeply committed to telling these stories. But primarily it serves as a reminder of the thrill of adventure that too often lies dormant in most of us. And an equal reminder that there’s still plenty of adventures out there waiting.

“And so, the adventurous life is our first choice. Any baby that can walk is a splendid and typical adventurer; if they had the power as they have the will, what exploits and crimes would they not commit! We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quite die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.”

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, L. David Marquet

Former Navy Captain Marquet’s story of improving the culture and operational ability of the USS Santa Fe offers simple and straight-forward suggestions for increasing engagement by driving decision-making responsibility to the lowest levels possible.

His structure of equipping people with competence and clarity in order to make quality decisions offers a model for anyone looking to drive change throughout an organization and not just lead people – but build more leaders. A critical book for anyone in a position of leadership. And like it or not, we’re all in a position of leadership.

“Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership.”

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan

Published shortly before Sagan’s death, this masterwork offers science as the ultimate tool of democracy. Sagan encourages us and gives us the means to confront the growing obsession with pseudoscience and superstition by remaining steadfast in science and reason.

In a topic that’s only become more critical in our post-truth, fake news world, Sagan reminds us that uninformed irrationality leads us down a path that threatens our most basic freedoms. A necessity for anyone who continues to worry over the path we seem intent on heading down.

“If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us.”

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder

An eye-opening history of how complacency and overconfidence allowed fascism to grow throughout the 20th century. Complete with practical advice on how to resist this change as it becomes readily more apparent with every passing day. A short, but all the more critical volume for everyone who looks toward 2020 with hope of change.

Snyder’s manifesto is one of those books I’ve added to my yearly re-reading cycle. His lessons and reminders – that were earned with the lives of 20th Century heroes – are too costly to forget.

“To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.”

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

While Orwell’s 1984 shows how fascism can control people through fear and violence, Huxley’s genius is to show how the same feat can be accomplished much more effectively through pleasure and short-term happiness. A classic science fiction book that gives us the picture of a future where everyone is happy all of the time and people are raised for the express purpose of appreciating the life they’re designed to have. And yet despite an abundance of seemingly happy people, they’ve sacrificed all real meaning and fulfillment.

It serves as a powerful message that true happiness is much more than having a positive ratio of pleasant to unpleasant moments.

“Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness.”

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday

My favorite Ryan Holiday book to date. He tells the story of Gawker’s downfall in a format that makes it a compulsion to keep turning the pages. Before reading this, I wouldn’t have thought it possible to empathize with a conservative billionaire, a tabloid muckraker, or Hulk Hogan. Yet Holiday manages to accomplish all three, reminding us that people are much deeper and more complicated than the two dimensional images we typically see.

Through everything, it’s a study on power, strategy, and the determination of one man to do something he was repeatedly told could not be done. Highly entertaining.

“It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.’ Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a ‘high-agency person.’ How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.”

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel

A true manifesto. Full of practical advice on developing a start-up, building a team, or instilling change within any culture. Zero to One offers insight into the mind of one of today’s great intellectuals and gives thought-provoking discussions for favoring boldness over timidity. Thiel’s ideas for escaping the competition, moving your company into a new direction, and avoiding the trap of incrementalization are applicable and actionable at any level.

“Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1.”

Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson

I’m a fan of most of Brandon Sanderson’s work so when a new novel comes out, it’s quickly added to my reading list. In Oathbringer, he continues his elaborate Stormlight Archive plot and expands upon a world full of rich, divisive characters. With George R.R. Martin neglecting to continue his book series and Patrick Rothfuss taking an extended hiatus, Sanderson’s ability to reliably turn out high quality material is much appreciated.

It may not be the best investment for personal development, but I’ve found that reading authors who excel at weaving together storylines is a great way to improve your own storytelling ability. Plus, it’s too easy to get burned out with solely focusing on non-fiction.

“Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination. – Windrunner Ideal”

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, Kurt Andersen

Wow. A sweeping history of the steps leading from the founding of America until today, Andersen shows how our current fake news problems are just the latest in a series of embarrassments and tragedies spanning back 500 years. From the Salem Witch Trials and Puritan fanatics to Internet hucksters and conspiracy theorists, Andersen offers a voice of reason amidst a country that has fantasy embedded in its DNA.

An indispensable book for understanding today’s America and the seemingly insane choices that many people are committed to pursue. The most unfortunate part is that those who really should read this book – and open themselves up to a much needed sense of skepticism – won’t, for that very reason.

“If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.”

Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual, Jocko Willink

Immediately actionable advice on leading a disciplined life from someone who has us all beat in that category. If you implement only a handful of suggestions from the book, you’ll be doing better than the large majority of people out there.

“Question yourself every day. Ask yourself: Who am I? What have I learned? What have I created? What forward progress have I made? Who have I helped? What am I doing to improve myself—today? To get better, faster, stronger, healthier, smarter?”

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A familiar phrase to most of us yet one that few have ever stopped to contemplate and apply to their own lives. Taleb demonstrates how skin in the game is a critical component of those we respect and value in our world.

The depth to which Taleb portrays multiple ideas and examples are somewhat diminished by his occasional glib and often unsubstantiated insults of notable peers, namely Steven Pinker and Richard Thaler. Worth a read regardless, as there’s many opportunities for thoughtful reflection and practical application, but it would be better if perhaps Nassim Taleb wasn’t such a big fan of Nassim Taleb.

“Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

The Greatest Minds and Idea of All Time by Will Durant

Clear and concise writing. Will Durant walks us through the greatest ideas, thinkers, and books throughout history with a sense of optimism for the future. His descriptions of the people, ideas, and inventions that have shaped the course of history not only document but encourage others to do the same.

A short collection of our current heritage, written in a manner that held my interest much better than your traditional history book. For anyone who’s a fan of history, I also highly recommend both the short The Lessons of History and the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, written by Durant with his wife Ariel.

“I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead.”

50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, Scott O. Lilienfield, Steven Jay Lynn, and John Ruscio

An interesting read of the various psychological theories and assertions that we’ve heard so many times that we’ve begun to accept them without question. Using common misconceptions with regards to thinking, learning, emotions, and understanding our own selves, the authors provide a toolkit to help distinguish science from pseudoscience. Always useful and full of knowledge you can use to correct people who are still laboring under these misconceptions – just try not to preach too much, or be prepared to deal with the inevitable eye rolls.

“Everyday life isn’t easy, even for the best adjusted of us. Many of us struggle to find ways to lose weight, get enough sleep, perform well on exams, enjoy our jobs, and find a lifelong romantic partner. It’s hardly a surprise that we glom on to techniques that offer foolproof promises of rapid and painless behavior changes.”

Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive, Bradley Staats

The only constant is change – another idea that we all inherently know but too often fail to represent in our daily actions. Staats offers the principles behind becoming a dynamic learner and the outlines the framework to pursue this goal in our daily lives. Full of actionable ideas to help us reflect on how we’re embracing continuous growth – or more likely – how we’re not.

“It’s not just knowledge that’s necessary—it’s using that knowledge to build more knowledge.”

Ready Player One: A Novel, Ernest Cline

An absolute blast to read. The 1980s pop culture trivia makes it all the better. Just don’t start it on a night when you need to be up early the next day.

“I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

As the great Carl Sagan discussed in his legendary Cosmos series, “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.”

I hope that this list can help deliver a small portion of this magic that it’s provided me over the course of the past year. And thanks, as always, for reading.

Overcome These 4 Biases for a Better 2019

December 28, 2018 by Jake Wilder Leave a Comment

A concerned citizens brigade is suing our town council and school board. It’s the latest tactic of a poorly thrown together strategy to prevent the town from building a new elementary school.

They’re upset over the potential increase in tax dollars. So they decided to sue the town.

In their effort to prevent a marginal tax increase, they’ve decided to spend ten times that amount for court litigation. I’m not sure if they realize their tax dollars will also be paying for the town’s defense.

One more instance of a poorly managed campaign that’s only succeeded in guaranteeing their own failure. A strategy that to date has included belittling those with decision-making authority, promulgating alternative fact sheets, and one particularly boisterous woman who drew comparisons between her attempts to block the school development and her grandfather’s role in smuggling Jews out of Nazi Germany.

Yeah, that actually happened.

And while this merry band of self-deluded crazies may be on the far end of the irrationality range, their mistakes are similar to many of the pitfalls that plague the rest of us.

More pronounced and ridiculous perhaps, but similar all the same.

Faced with repeated defeats and setbacks, they had two choices: move on with their lives or double down on their investment.

And despite the overwhelming amount of evidence showing them the futility of their efforts, they elected to continue down a path which is now completely contrary to their original purpose.

As we get ready to start 2019, complete with dozens of goals and aspirations for accomplishing more, where are we pursuing things that are no longer worth the effort. How often do we become so blind to the path that we’re on, we don’t stop to consider whether it’s still the right one. In the wise words of Seth Godin,

“If you’re trying to succeed in a job or a relationship or at a task, you’re either moving forward, falling behind, or standing still. There are only three choices.”

So instead of taking on a dozen new resolutions in 2019, a more effective investment would be to consider which current efforts are no longer delivering value. We all have areas where we’re investing our time, energy, and money without seeing a worthwhile return. If we can cut these out, we’ll have much less constraints on focusing our efforts towards something that will yield a meaningful impact.

Unfortunately, it’s not always as straightforward as looking at a balance sheet and highlighting the red numbers. We have multiple biases and fallacies that trick our minds into looking past these doomed investments and continuing down failed paths.

The key is simply to recognize and counteract them. And manage them before they manage you.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

“No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.” – Turkish proverb

The Concorde was an engineering marvel. It traveled between New York and London at twice the speed of sound and took less than half the time of a typical flight.

Every aspect of the design was optimized for aerodynamic efficiency while balancing the stability and heat transfer necessary to support speeds that could outpace the sun. It flew on the edge of space where passengers could see the curvature of the earth. You could literally gain back time while disproving Flat-Earthers in the process.

Yet despite these benefits, it was also a complete financial failure. Over the course of four decades, the British and French governments continued to pour more money into the project even when it became clear that the project would never be profitable.

We see this same behavior in our own lives. We overvalue our previous investments – our sunk costs – when determining future investments. How often do we continue pouring time into projects, relationships, and jobs that we know won’t yield a future benefit?

No one likes to admit that they’re wrong or be seen as a quitter. So we stick with a failing strategy in the hopes that it will eventually turn around and our prior decisions will be vindicated. Yet continuing down the wrong path simply because we’ve already been on it for a long time isn’t perseverance. It’s craziness.

The sunk cost fallacy describes our tendency to focus on the past rather than on the future. It pushes us into making backward looking decisions instead of considering which option will yield the greatest future benefit.

We tend to see this behavior most often when we’ve invested a significant amount of time, money, or energy into something. Our investment to date becomes a reason to carry on, even if we no longer see a viable long-term solution.

It’s easy to see how this can quickly become a vicious circle. The more we invest, the more committed we become to keep going, and the less we’re likely to recognize a poor long-term investment.

In his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin suggests that we treat sunk costs as a gift from our past self to our current self. Stop looking at them as time spent and purely see today’s investment as a starting gift. And with this starting point, then decide which path will deliver the most expected value.

Regardless of how much that gift may have cost, it’s purely a starting point for today. And equipped with that gift, our focus can be limited to considering the future costs against their expected benefit.

Whatever the method, we need to keep our focus on the seeing expected value of our actions, without distorting that view based on prior commitments. Remember that the past is set while our future remains malleable. And remind yourself that there’s no shame in admitting to a past mistake – it just means that we’ve grown wiser than we were before.

Because like Henry Gribbohm learned after spending his life savings, $2,600 in total, trying to win an Xbox Kinect at a carnival – sometimes the costs of continuing on no longer justify the expected benefit. Or in the wise words of Warren Buffet,

“When you find yourself in a hole, the best thing you can do is stop digging.”

Loss Aversion

“If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.” – Alan Hirsch

One of the reasons that I no longer gamble in casinos is that while I’d be happy with a positive gain, I’d be furious over a corresponding loss. The impact of losing money weighed much more heavily than the benefit of winning it.

Studies show I’m not alone in this. Often described as loss aversion, people are on average twice as averse to losing something as gaining it. Put another way, a loss of $100 would provide the same emotional impact as a gain of $200. And there are very few casinos out there willing to offer me these kinds of odds.

Yet we do ourselves a great disservice by allowing our feelings of loss aversion to prevent us from taking future worthwhile risks. Not concerning casino gambling, that’s likely a good decision, but if we’re held to a 2:1 ratio of gains to losses, we’re acting with economic irrationality and missing out on likely gains.

The great economist Paul Samuelson once asked a friend whether he would accept a coin-toss gamble in which he would lose $100 or win $200. His friend replied, “I won’t bet because I would feel the $100 loss more than the $200 gain. But I’ll take you on if you promise to let me make 100 such bets.”

It’s clear that when we apply the law of big numbers, Paul’s friend is much more likely to come away with a gain. Yet his logic in turning down the initial gamble reflects a poor posture on risk. While we’re unlikely to have the same exact gamble offered 100 times, life is full of such risks. If we can stop viewing each of these risks independently and start viewing them as a large group of gambles, we’ll see that we’re much more likely to come out ahead in the end.

This difference of view often comes down to how we see the question – with narrow framing or broad.

Consider that you’re evaluating potential stocks to sell. One has increased $5000 from your purchase price and the other has decreased by the same amount. If you need some on-hand cash and have to sell one, which would you choose?

The majority of people will choose to sell the winning stock, regardless of how well they expect each stock to do in the future. The reasoning is simple – investors often set up individual mental accounts for each stock purchase and want to close each as a gain.

Narrow framing causes us to focus on individual decisions instead of considering the bigger picture. And when we limit our focus to one-time actions, we’re more likely to adopt a risk-averse mindset and settle for preserving the status quo.

In a similar situation, imagine that you have $2,000 in your checking account and you’re asked the following question:

Would you accept a 50/50 chance of either losing $300 or winning $500?

Is your initial reaction to take the risk or stay safe and avoid a potential loss? Now what if you were asked: Would you prefer to keep a balance of $2,000 or take a 50/50 chance of either $1,700 or $2,500?

Both are essentially the same question, yet studies show that many people turn down the first choice yet accept the second.

The difference in reactions is the product of the reference point in each frame. In the first question, we see incremental gains and losses and the thought of losing money triggers a conservative response – narrow framing at work. The second question, however, offers a broad frame reference point of $2,000 and gives a more balanced perspective for a rational financial decision.

To counteract our inherent aversion to loss, look for ways to reframe the problem in multiple ways, looking for both broad and narrow frames. Consider how your thinking changes based on the different framing and reference points. And when all else fails, try to follow Warren Buffet’s advice,

“Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we’re trying to do. It’s imperfect but that’s what it’s all about.”

Endowment Effect

“One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” – Dan Ariely

If my neighbor offered to mow my lawn for $20, I wouldn’t accept. But if he offered me $50 to mow his comparably sized lawn, I’d also turn him down.

A rational person would recognize the time it takes to mow a lawn and determine an appropriate rate for his time. After which he’d then accept or reject offers based on this singular number.

Yet we’re not rational people. And the value which we assign certain things is heavily dependent based on our level of ownership. As the old saying goes, “No car accelerates faster, brakes harder, or fits into a tighter parking space than a rental car.”

To emphasize this point, Jack Knetsch, Richard Thaler, and Daniel Kahneman designed an experiment in which they gave coffee mugs to half of the participants. The Sellers had the mug in front of them, and the Buyers were invited to look at their neighbor’s mug, after which everyone gave the price at which they would either buy or sell.

The results were dramatic: the average selling price was double the average buying price. The Sellers high price point reflected the reluctance to give up an object they already owned – a clear tendency of the endowment effect.

How many of us have things we no longer use cluttering our basement, closets, and shelves for the simple reason that we’re unwilling to part with them. The endowment effect – a tendency to undervalue things that we don’t own and overvalue things that are ours – keeps us from parting with these outdated items.

Unfortunately, this same fallacy also applies to activities and projects that we’ve undertaken. A failing work project seems all the more significant when we’re leading it or it was our initiative. The struggling employee that’s negatively affecting our team is more likely to get the benefit of the doubt if we’ve hired him. And when new businesses begin to fail, we’re likely to invest more capital to turn them around if we started the company than if we’d purchased it.

In many ways this is a good thing. It drives commitment and accountability and pushes people to drive results in the face of crises. But it can also blind us to a failing investment and become a drain on our time.

To differentiate between these cases, look for ways to separate decision-making from advocacy. When companies go through re-organizations, they often bring on new CEOs from outside. The board doesn’t necessarily believe that an external CEO will be more competent, but they know she’ll have different mental accounts and will be able to make forward-looking decisions without the burden of previous ownership.

Another option is to change the way we frame the question to consider how we’d respond if we didn’t have the same level of ownership. As Greg McKeown suggests in Essentialism,

“Don’t ask, ‘How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?’ but rather, ‘If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it.’”

Focusing on the expected future value in terms of go-forward trade-offs helps separate out the irrationality of past investment and the attachment of ownership.

Status Quo Bias

“Men are always averse to enterprises in which they foresee difficulties.” – Nicolo Machiavelli

The Declaration of Independence warns us that “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

How often do we find ourselves drifting through the same motions, simply because that’s the way things have always been done? Whether it’s a work procedure that no one understands, a series of meetings where no one sees the benefit, or those projects that seem to lumber along with no end in sight, these are all examples of the status quo bias.

More importantly, it’s one of the reasons that people stay in dead-end jobs and poor relationships instead of finding something better. The pain isn’t too bad. It’s sufferable. And so, as our founding fathers recognized, we hesitate to implement a substantial change.

There’s a reason they’re called dead-end jobs. Because while you work and work and work, things don’t change. And whether it’s a job, relationship, project, or hobby, the end result is the same – it’s preventing you from doing something more meaningful.

Instead of being content to accept things as they’ve always been done, focus on stopping those things you wouldn’t start. Ask yourself:

Would I be willing to accept this job, or start this relationship, or join this project today? Would I be willing to implement this process or schedule this meeting now?

If it were a decision to start something you are already invested in, would you? If not, why should you keep doing it? As Bob Iger put it,

“The riskiest thing you can do is just maintain the status quo.”

Recognize Your Biases and Take Action Today

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” – Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

It’s easy to recognize when someone else is following a doomed strategy. And it’s usually obvious when someone else can’t seem to recognize the warnings of a fast-approaching dead-end. Yet while we’re quick to recognize these issues with others, we’re much less adept at applying that same objectivity to our own lives. Despite the evidence to the contrary, too often we forget about our own blind spots.

None of us are exempt from these biases and fallacies. Our brains are constantly at work to protect us from loss, validate our prior decisions, and promote the safe, predictable status quo. A path that, left unchecked, will encourage us to squander our limited resources and distract us from those opportunities to make a real impact.

The key is to recognize and manage them. Take an objective view and reframe the situation to separate out your biases. And ask yourself, what’s the expected value of this action?

At least before you end up standing in front of a crowd of people, comparing your role in preventing a school development to that of a World War II hero.