Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity, Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

Buckminster Fuller, 1970:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody
has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of
us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the
rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this
nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this
false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery
because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his
right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making
instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of
people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was
they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they
had to earn a living.”

In the T Model you alternate between a broad, horizontal phase and a deep, vertical phase, (though it’s actually an upside-down T because starting with the horizontal phase is a must) . In the broad, horizontal phase the goal is to try as many things as possible, and in small doses to maximize variety. You want to continue experimenting until you find many things you are passionate about and also accumulate many reference frames to better categorize and make sense of new experiences and information.

Once you have a huge pool of things that excite you, look to switch to the vertical phase, where you will hone in on a few specific passions and combine them, to do something tangible. (This tangible thing should be something you can point to quickly and say, “I did this” and the word “project” could be considered loosely accurate).

Going through this cycle is very simple conceptually, but rarely executed. But if you look at most successful people they’ve usually followed a path similar to this. This is because in order to be really successful at something you need to be passionate, you need to be able to focus, and increasingly you need to be interdisciplinary. Success without passion exists, but those people are usually severely unhappy and prone to burn out.

Often completing this cycle even once sets off a positive feedback loop, marking the start of a lifetime of engaged pursuit and contribution. On completion of the first cycle an internal flame is lit, that once ignited is very difficult to put out. John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc describes this phenomena as such, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

Many people don’t complete the T cycle because they get stuck in one phase or the other. People who get stuck in the horizontal phases are people who are very creative and always have lots of little side projects going on, but they suffer from a lack of “big wins”, that provide the reputation and credibility that lead to greater opportunities and chances for financial sustainability— not to mention that gratification that comes from pulling off something big. People stuck in this mindset are resistant to focusing on a particular project because they can’t bear the possibility of turning down an interesting opportunity. They fear picking only one thing would put them in a box, vaporizing their multi-facted identity they associate so strongly with. The lives they lead are very unique, but by not reaping the rewards from alternating into cycles of focus, they strongly limit their ability to realize their potential.

Many people also jump into a focus phase prematurely, spending all their energy on something they aren’t passionate about. This is more dangerous than being stuck in the creative phase because the extrinsic reward will be there for focusing even if the activity is done without passion. This often fools people into believing they are headed in the right direction for themselves. But people who make this error frequently end up suffering from burn out, hitting midlife crises or working tirelessly to reach the top of their field only to be left wondering why they are so unfulfilled and whether all the sacrifice was really worth it.

There’s also a large sector of the population who isn’t in either the creative or focus phase and are resigned to getting by with whatever pays the bills. While the onus is on the individual to find their passion, trying to do so in our education system is like swimming upstream against a level 5 rapid. And most people just get swept away. (Even at the better public and private schools, you’re still swimming upstream, just against a lighter current).

If you can complete even one T cycle, the rewards will start rolling in. Executing a project you’re passionate about is rare, and separates you from a cacophony of wannabes. Everybody talks about things they want to do, but few people have the self-discipline and initiative to make projects come to life. This scarcity of executors, makes people pay close attention to you if you are one, and opens up a whole new set of opportunities unavailable before. Opportunities will start chasing you down instead of the other way around. When this happens the second T cycle has begun. You now have the chance to explore horizontally again, this time with more freedom and opportunity.

The exploration here is much richer. You’re a more developed person. You have access to more people. You have more financial freedom. You get flown places to speak and are invited to contribute to more interesting projects. You have more influence, and as a result, people listen to what you have say and want to support or join your cause. This more intensive exploratory phase should lead to a new point of focus, where you can again combine your rapidly growing pool of knowledge, experiences and passions to build something new, likely more ambitious than your last.

As you turn the corner towards your second focus project, true interdisciplinary thinking begins to emerge. You can combine your breadth of knowledge on many subjects with the depth of your previous focus, charting new territory from a variety of informed perspectives.

All in all, a cycle probably takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years, so you have the opportunity to pursue both learning and doing many times in your life. And the T cycles start linking up very naturally. When they do that they begin resembling something like a series of s curves— a natural evolutionary growth cycle with some intriguing implications (to be explored later). Strictly interpreting the analogy of the T implies alternating between stages of being 100% horizontal and 100% vertical. But it is probably not realistic nor optimal to be one phase 100% of the time. A good rule of thumb is to allocate 80% of your time to the designated phase and 20% of your time to the other phase, i.e. 80% Creative & 20% Focus or vice versa. This allocation will also give the T smoother curves if graphed, creating a more natural looking S curve.

This model can be used as framework for decision making and allocating priorities in almost any field of interest. I’ve shared this model with numerous friends the last few months and many have appreciated the insight and clarity it has produced.

I hope to explore more facets and implications of this model. A few areas I’ve mapped out: The emotional journey through different phases. Why the T Model Works. How School Follows the Exact Opposite of the T Model, which is why students hate it. My Personal Path Along the T. Complimentary Theories to the T Model from Stefan Sagmeister, Seth Godin, and IDEO’s Tim Brown.

While passion is undeniably important for your career I think it is the wrong thing to focus on is because it is an epiphenomenon. And epiphenomenon are by definition elusive if pursued directly.

For finding passions here’s what I’m advocating now:

- Try as many things as possible with as low a commitment as possible: School does a terrible job at this, you get to try a maximum of 6 things a semester, and you’re locked in (after the first two weeks). And outside of school most people don’t try many things on their own. So therein lies a big part of the problem of passion and why most people haven’t found it. They simply have tried enough things and pursued in enough depth to find it. I could go into more depth about why school destroys passion, but here, I won’t.. Many people think that their only options for passions are what school presents them with. So they don’t even try to look outside of school. And they think they don’t have passions, so they give up.

- Ratchet up your commitment one level – Ways to do this: Read more in depth about one of the things you tested out and enjoyed doing, or practice it for an hour, talk with other people who like this thing too, talk with professionals who have done it for years. Then assess whether you want to go further. Passion doesn’t come until you’ve put in enough hours to become hooked. Passion doesn’t really come until you become good at something, or at the very least, you feel good at and no one has told you that you aren’t yet.

- Begin devoting more and more energy to this thing you enjoy, testing whether it can become one of your passions. This is where you try the passion on as a noun. Do I want to be a ___ (artist, dancer, marketer, entrepreneur). Before you were just trying it on as verbs and adjectives (gerunds are verbs for all intents and purposes here): I’m being artistic, I’m dancing, I’m writing copy, I’m being entrepreneurial. Now you can pick up the plethora of advice on literature about how to build your life around following your passion. You can read all the success literature and a lot of it will stick. The hard part was finding your passion in the first place.

And now a personal anecdote of passion seeking and passion finding:

My interest in computers and technology started when I began playing around with the first computer my family positioned in an accessible place. My dad occasionally bought macworld magazines. I read them and began learning more about computers and working through tutorials in the magazines. I began playing with the system and  experimenting on my own. I browsed the internet and bought books.  I was hungry to learn more. I worked through books on html and built a website for my mom. I listened to podcasts online and on my iPod. I found my way through an interview on a tech podcast to the ITConversations site. Where I then began listening to talks on accelerating change. I loved those and listened to more whenever I could. I bought books based on the talks and talked with people about the ideas. When the rest of my family was shopping for in Barcelona, I parked myself on a bench and listened to awe-inspiring lectures.

I went to the conference and began meeting the people involved. I kept showing up. I eventually got a job out of my connections. These big ideas I heard filled in the blank for how I was going to make a difference in the world. At first I thought it was big business, but then later I discovered the idea of entrepreneurship. I reached out to entrepreneurs. I read about entrepreneurship. I went to events when I was underaged and knew nobody. I began to get connected. I helped organize events. I figured out how to turn some of my previous projects into a startup. I started asking for introductions and setting up meetings with people who had done startups before. I met with anyone I could just trying to expand the breadth of people I knew and get new perspectives. I decided this was a path I loved and I decided to take a gap year and give myself the time to focus hard and fully commit. Now I’m fully committed to this passion of mine and I’m learning faster than ever before, meeting incredible people, and opening up new possibilities faster than I could have ever imagined when I began playing with my computer and reading macworld magazine.

Everyone I meet now knows I have “the itch,” as they say. But it grew in proportion to my effort. That’s how you know you’ve found one of your passions, when the more time you put into it, your desire to do more increases. Many times you’ll find things that feel like passions in the beginning but you realize you don’t like that much after putting more energy into it. That’s fine. It’s part of the process. Just pick up something new that interests you and run with it. If it feels wrong consider dropping it. But if it feels right keep going. And going.

The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new things that are interesting.

You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.

It becomes one of your core skills by being developing it enough to put you in the top 25% of people.

Personal Example:

Why do I watch so many TEDTalks then?

I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge.  And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.

Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.

The process that I have seen work is:

1) Realize sticking with the status quo isn’t going to get you a life you want

2) Begin learning about alternative paths

3) Start entertaining thoughts about leaving and making a path for an exit in the near future

4) Meanwhile, experimenting with what you’re going to be really great at

5) Make the leap to leave the status quo not as soon as your famous but as soon you see that investing energy in the status quo gets you next to nothing and you have something that you think you might want to be great at.

The only way to know is to give yourself permission to focus hard. You jump when the value of focusing hard on something, even if you eventually abandon it, is more valuable than stalling in the status quo. You don’t jump when you don’t even know what to focus on, though even then maybe you should, because what are you gaining sticking around in the status quo? The only value I see is a subsidized jump due to money and credibility from society’s run of the mill institutions. So you’re just waiting until you have something worth making a bet on. Even if the bet doesn’t pan out you’ll learn how to play your hand better next time.

It seems like whenever you make that big bet someone comes by and hands you a 500 check-point chip that lets you buy back in at 500 for free even if you bust. Then after the next failure you get to buy back in at 1000. And eventually through combination of luck, timing and experiential muscle you win a hand. It doesn’t even have to be a big hand. And that gets it’s own kind of pass where you get access to the VIP room where only people who have won hands are allowed. This is where you meet your partners in crime, your mentors, who carry you on to the next big thing. And it starts with the courage to make the bet but requires committing hard focus to try and play the hand successfully.

To sum up my longwinded response above, I would basically say living a remarkable life requires courage in the beginning to try, and effort to make the remarkable life a reality.

The first thing you must do is muster the courage to dare to be different and be willing to dream. Then you must match the tiny bit of courage required just to entertain possibilities in your mind, with the little bit of effort required to test the possible paths that might lead to a remarkable life. Then once you find a dabbling interest that you’d like to dive deeper into you have to muster a lot more courage to ditch your current status quo driven path by the wayside, and give yourself the opportunity to put in the massive effort required to pull off being remarkable.

It’s a courage-effort escalation ladder.

This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything that can be automated will be. Automation squeezes all jobs out of the marketplace except the ones that require creativity. On the flip side, these automated tools also enhance human creativity for those who choose to embrace it.

If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.

“There may be teams of humans and machines,” says King. “Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It’s crazy.

The run of the mill engineering student who can solve known problems is no longer safe. It is a necessity both for the innovative progress of the world and the scientist’s ability to find work that he be able to break new ground, not just incrementally improve on existing innovations.

At a panel at Singularity University I attended in early August, Scott Hassan of Willow Garage, who worked closely with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, told the story of how they built the first prototype of Google. He recounted how they coded every evening for about 6 weeks. Only 6 weeks. And now they have thousands of engineers just working on improving that small piece of code they churned out in 6 weeks. “What we have found is that it’s very easy to find someone who can improve something just a little bit, but it’s very rare to find someone who can create even just a prototype of something completely new.”

Recommended Reading: Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Richard Florida’s The Rise of The Creative Class (which admittedly I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list. But I have heard Florida’s thesis expressed many times.)

Anyone can do it. If you think you can start your own entrepreneurial venture do it, if you not the self-starter type that’s fine, find someone who is, whose vision you like and work for them. Be a part of something special, something remarkable, something that makes a difference.

You really don’t need anything to get started, but our education system tricks us into thinking we need like 4 degrees and a 5 page resume before we can start something. There is no counsel that accepts and rejects ideas. The only thing stopping you is your own lack of initiative. (Well that’s not entirely true, there are bigger challenges once you get started). But taking the initiative to start is the hardest part and yet it’s really not the hard, it’s just takes a little bit of self reliance and conviction.

The education system will keep telling you need better grades to pass this assessment and get a better job, and that you have to please your superiors. It’s all just a big wankathon. It feels like that scene in the Matrix where you see the mechanistic real world and all the humans plugged into little capsules, that harvests their energy while they are preoccupied with the virtual reality called the Matrix.

In our world today, young people are preoccupied by memorizing information they won’t remember after the test is over, studying topics they don’t care about for a marginal increase in entry level salary, taking boring internships that seem like a good resume check and binge socializing in their free time to forget about how much the aforementioned activities suck.

As I’ve said before, people need to have something they actually want to do. And if you don’t your focus should be on finding that, anything else is a waste of time. Once you find that passion your learning will have a purpose and you’ll be amazed at the increased enjoyability and retention.

What I find very sad is that it’s not students’ fault. They haven’t really chosen this path. It’s the default path and no other options are presented as viable. And default paths are incredibly powerful especially when every other option is seen to be fit only for the losers of society. Interestingly, almost anyone who has been successful has realized that there’s something more out there and have decided to opt out.

I am working on startup that I hope will play a significant role in showing people that there is something more. Many people are already working on this and many people have written books about living successful, fulfilling lives and escaping the status quo. These books pump some people up enough to launch them out of the gravitational pull of the status quo and into a new realm of living. But that’s rare. Most people don’t have the self-confidence and drive to do that. But we still need to help the people who are clearly dissatisfied with their present and would like something more but they don’t know how. Well, that’s what we’re going to do. We are going to show you there’s something more, pop you on a bike with wings, (give you a can of Redbull…kidding, I hate that stuff) guide you past the point of no return and then let you fly off the edge to begin your entrepreneurial ascent, and with your new dimension of freedom you’ll look down on the seemingly two dimensional world below, watching your peers go through the same old pattern of corporate ladder climbing, hard dispassionate work and few rewards.

No really, without the dumb imagery, we’re going to help people who have big ideas, but don’t know how them happen, actually get their ideas off the ground and make them a reality.

I’m  hesitant about linking to Force For the Future, because it’s super, super pre-alpha but there’s a form on the site where you can request advice and mentorship if you’re a young person, or offer it if you’re an older more experienced professional.

Most people like to create the perception of having it all figured out. Most people have duck syndrome.

These are people who look calm on the surface but are paddling furiously just to stay afloat.

It’s important to be able to present yourself well, but I find the paddling much more interesting. How do you brush the water back with your feet? How far down the horizon are you looking? Are you studying the angle that propels your feet forward the fastest? Have you asked yourself where and why you are paddling?

I don’t care about looking calm on the surface. I want to let everyone know I’m thrashing, splaying water in every direction. I know that means my head will get dunked from time to time and choking on water will be a frequent occurrence. But I’ll learn from my mistakes, and by acknowledging my turmoil I’ll get better advice from people about how to overcome it. There’s a famous quote, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” One of the best ways to accelerate the rate of change in your life, the 2nd derivative if you will, is to increase your transparency. But increased transparency is scary because you’re going to have to expose your flaws and admit that you don’t have it all figured out.

Transparency Aids Iteration And Thereby Growth

Transparency is the answer to better government, better policy, better science, and better business. Let’s explore how transparency can make us better, too.

Transparency means that you will be showing off a more accurate picture of yourself, both the good and bad. But why would you want to go out of your way to admit you have a chink in your armor? A dented chainmail certainly isn’t as attractive as a pristine one. And we all know people are attracted to shiny, beautiful objects. Don’t you wish you were a shiny beautiful object? If you could take a nice snap shot of your armor, a well angled picture that captured only your good features, a “MySpace shot” as they say (or used to because no one uses it anymore), wouldn’t you do it?  Wouldn’t that shininess win you friends, fame and a high rolling job?

In the short term yes, but in the long term absolutely no. A lesson that will surface time and time again is think long term. If you want to make the most of this life, start thinking long term now.

Most people take the approach of showing only their positive sides. Exposing only positive traits can aid the cultivation of a mystique. If you can prove you are exceptional at a few things, always remain confident and composed and reveal little else about yourself, many people will fill in the blank by extrapolating from your exceptional qualities and assume your are exceptional at everything. So taking well-angled snapshots can create the perception of being an absolute magnet. But sadly, you aren’t. Sooner or later you’ll be found out or you can spend your life protecting your pristine image, seeing other people only when you can show off. You can’t be that perfect knight in shining armor, if you haven’t yet been to battle. If you’re young you should be looking for battles that challenge you and have good chance of knocking you down. And when you rise again and dust yourself off after hitting the ground. Now is the time to be transparent and look for feedback. If you gave your all and know where to look there will be plenty of people who want to help you get to the next stage and overcome the challenge.

You’ve pushed yourself and taken what is traditionally known as failure not as a sign that you’re not good enough but as an opportunity to gain feedback for how to improve. If you get back up and learn from your defeats you’ve turned a failure into a great learning experience. I will be talking more on the blog about transparency and feedback, as those I believe are universal principles underlying progress.

When you get back up show off your ugly dents and battle scars because you’re in a rare class of people. You’re dreaming big and willing to fight for something. You haven’t just talked you have taken action. You haven’t just taken any action you’ve put yourself on the line and got burned, learned from your mistakes and asked for more.

That process isn’t really that hard but so few people are willing to embark on it with any vigor and consistency. Because they don’t want to be transparent about their inadequacies, they want to seem like they’ve got it all figured it out. So they don’t grow. Transparency = Increased Feedback. Feedback + Effort = Growth.

Start this process and great things will happen. Dream big. Take Action. Get knocked down. Share your difficulties and ask for help from those with more experience. Learn from your mistakes. Get back up and try again.

Every one starts out with a shiny wide-eyed awe view of the world. But then we start to take some hits and most people don’t get back up. They seek shelter. They crave comfort. But growth is uncomfortable. If you want to grow you have to get used to being uncomfortable. Comfort is overrated anyway. There is nothing interesting about comfort. It is a homeostatic state of complacency. Comfort comes when you’ve mastered a skill relative to the difficulty of your surroundings and you refuse to seek higher competition. Discomfort is the only way to get the best things in life, and why would you settle for anything less. And believe it or not, the walls that guard those abandoned dreams are very surmountable, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked around at the hordes people licking their wounds and the cacophony of cries telling you not to climb because you will get hurt. Don’t listen. All that is needed is the conviction to endure a little discomfort and the will power to persist and take the right, but uncomfortable actions. Understand that a negative emotion here and there isn’t the worst thing in the world. As Randy Pausch said, “Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.”  And it works remarkably well. 99% of people are deterred by discomfort; they follow their emotions. Your emotions just want to ensure basic survival. But if you’re like me and care about doing something remarkable with your life, you’re not just looking to survive, you’re looking to thrive.

Focus on Growth

A muscle grows only when it’s been pushed just past its limit. Growth requires becoming okay with admitting your weaknesses and the limits of your abilities. Growth requires embracing your present state, having the desire and pushing yourself to move beyond it, and listening to the feedback about how you can improve. I’m not saying you should focus on fixing all your weaknesses, that’s an outdated paradigm. Dan Pink (who I’m a huge fan of) says the new paradigm for success is to focus on strengths not weaknesses. But even your strengths have limits, and in order to strengthen your strengths you must be willing to acknowledge their limits and push past them, a necessary discomfort for growth.

Be more transparent about your growth process and you will increase your pace of change and paths to change.

Transparency increases self-awareness because you know other people are watching, thereby increasing accountability. Accountability is an influence that isn’t given enough consideration because if we were perfectly rational, we wouldn’t need external pressures to make sure we do what we say we will do. It’s been proven that if a person sets the goal of going to the gym 3 times a week, they are more likely to fulfill that goal if they give a friend $100 and allow them to keep the money if they don’t achieve their goal of making it to the gym 3 times that week. It’s even more effective if you give the money to an organization you hate, like the National Organization for Marriage. Transparency makes it more likely you will uphold your commitments because you’ve added a nudge of social pressure.

Take Heed

Being more transparent will certainly help achieve goals faster, but it is not without risk.

When you’re exposing your weaknesses, or the limits of relative strengths, you do need to be careful how you present them. Toeing the line between complaining and problem solving is a delicate balance. Especially if you’re putting in the effort to solve the problems you are struggling with. The main difference between complaining and problem solving is whether you are just looking for sympathy or are actively looking to adopt solutions.

Transparency Has Negatives But Negatives Used Correctly Have Virtues

Projecting negativity is unattractive. It is not emotionally pleasing and the recipients of your negative anecdotes could leave with a sour taste in the mouth. But negativity shouldn’t be avoided at all costs. It’s a necessary discomfort of using increased transparency to grow faster.

Even though there are things to be gained from sharing problems you still must be careful not to emotionally pollute your relationships. Sharing negativity is like injecting a little toxic gas that could cause decay, but if the noxious gas is overcome the relationship has built immunity and the bond is strengthened.

The key difference between the good and bad kind of negativity is whether you are proactively trying to problem solve or are just complaining to get things off your chest. The good and bad become grossly intertwined when you intend to share the good kind of negativity but it is misconstrued and misinterpreted as complaining. But that is your fault not the recipient’s. The meaning of the communication is the response you get. Of course, another variable is the person who is receiving the communication. So an additional filter is to recognize whether you respect the person who misunderstood you and whether they are trying to help you or are merely projecting their own insecurities.

Even though risks exist, don’t let potential negatives of sharing problems overshadow the positive. If you express the desire that you want to improve you are more likely to receive advice and opportunities about how to improve rather than unconstructive criticism. Unfortunately humans are incredibly risk averse and place considerably more importance on avoiding losses and than achieving gains and frequently miss out on learning opportunities because they mistakenly feel they have more to lose than to gain.

A simple rule of thumb for knowing when to share things that aren’t going well in your life is whether you have established some level of trust or respect with the person you are talking to. (If you’re sharing issues online you will be better received if you’ve already established credibility and reputability). But don’t go around sharing your problems with everyone you meet. Negativity is a double-edged sword that if used carelessly is more likely to cut you than your problems.

I consider myself an overwhelmingly positive person. But I think a healthy dose of negativity is a good thing. At first glance 100% positivity attractive, but on second glance, it is not because it is not an accurate portrayal of anybody. Everybody has things in their life that aren’t perfect, that they could improve. Overconfidence can be attractive but it is not honest. That attraction can be useful when a leader is trying to inspire the fainter hearted to take on challenges they would normally shy away from, but if you are someone who is a calculated risk taker, understanding limitations is essential for growth.

The question is do you want to take the safe route and save face whenever possible or are you willing to take a risk and admit you have a problem with the intent to improve?

Value Process Over Tips and Nuggets

The process of hearing how another person solves problems in their lives is filled with transferable lessons and teachable moments. Few people talk about their challenges because they don’t want to expose any vulnerability. The common answer I hear when most people’s problems come up in conversation is, “Whatever, I’ll figure it out,” an attempt to quickly divert any attention from being focused on their struggle.

Personally, I find it very interesting to hear about people’s challenges and how they are approaching solving them. Our information society often reveals only the successes and punchy takeaways, hiding the process and all the false starts along the way. Success is often the result of  ordinary actions taken over and over again. There is no magic formula and by exposing your intermediary steps you can gain feedback on the daily processes that really matter instead of just relying on a few lessons that the winners have encapsulated and enshrined after their triumph. Brian Kim voices this well, “There’s a hidden danger that comes with relying on tips that most people don’t realize. The people who offer these tips in a short article or book often attribute the solution to a particular problem via these tips, when in reality, they’ve actually laid the foundation down first which is the real solution without ever realizing it. The tips they offered are then byproducts of that foundation.”

Not revealing the process or placing due importance on it is very dangerous. The anecdotes of those who have failed are often more informative and insightful than the anecdotes from those who succeeded. I find it more interesting to hear about what isn’t going well is than to hear about what is going well. Assuming though, that we’re not taking a failure story from someone who is completely incompetent. There are more lessons to be had from a failure story if it appeared the person had a lot going for them. And when you hear negative anecdotes from a person, it’s not as interesting, from a perspective of success, if they’ve frequently made poor decisions throughout their life compared to someone who appears to be making all the right moves.

Similarly in business, common wisdom says to keep business ideas to yourself. But this is not the smart move. It’s extremely unlikely somebody will steal your idea and you’ll learn much more from the feedback you receive as a result of freely sharing your ideas. When you start talking about your idea with everyone you will get a very large source of wisdom and a diversity of perspectives that will likely reveal opportunities and challenges you never considered. Business ideas are almost always about solving a problem. And a negative issue of life if framed correctly, similarly should be about solving a problem, in which case many business principles apply. In fact, in many cases thinking about your life as a company is a helpful analogy for finding the best places to improve and grow.

Being more transparent about dilemmas in our life is healthy and productive.  It is sexy to project an attitude that you’ve got it all figured out all the time, but there’s a lot to be gained from sharing it all, including the struggles. Don’t just share the end result of your winning battles, share the process both the good and the bad and your success will hasten. But most people figure it foolish to let others know they are thrashing.

So many people write about the solutions they’ve found and the things they’ve discovered. I rarely see people write about they problems they are confronting, the different factors they are weighing, the sacrifices they are making and ultimately how they decide. We hear success stories all the time, that follow a traditional story arc: at first he didn’t know what to do, then he got an idea, but the challenge seemed too daunting and he thought about giving up, but he persevered and made it happen. You can do it, too! And then they run off a list of traits that they think allowed them to succeed. But those lists are most of the time emotional feel good junk food. They make us feel good, pump us up and let us know that it is possible for us to enjoy that success as well. But pumping someone up and not giving them good options about how to proceed is very dangerous. It’s deceptive to credit success with tips that hint at the process that underly it without providing enough awareness of the real ingredients. It is the process that unlocks that potential to replicate results.

I’m not saying these are bad, it’s good to share your story and I don’t know how much more can be accomplished in the time speeches like these are given, except for the emphasis on the hard work needed, and on pointing to resources that allow the inspired to learn more in depth about the process of building a strong foundation for success. I don’t know many of organizations that really prepare young people holistically for success. School certainly doesn’t teach you how to be successful. It teaches you socialization and a narrow band of academic knowledge. Being more transparent about your process will give other people the opportunity to guide you in the right direction through offering advice, point to resources and opening up opportunities. That’s the approach I’ve taken, I had no idea how to get Force For the Future started. So I took my ambitious ideas for a project and learned how to get lunch and coffee meetings with people who could give me the feedback and point me to the resources necessary to begin down an entrepreneurial road. I picked their brains and told them about my problems and got advice about how to succeed and now I have a network of friends and advisors who I can rely on for almost any problem I have.

Getting pumped up is necessary but being told something is possible without being told how is like telling a kid there’s candy hidden somewhere in a one hundred room mansion. He’ll be excited at first and run around looking for it. But then he’ll give up after while, frustrated. And maybe his eyes will light up again when he’s reminded tomorrow that there’s still candy somewhere in the mansion. But his enthusiasm will soon fade and his expectations will lower next time you bring it up. And he won’t ever find the candy because he was only told of it’s existence he wasn’t told anything about how to find it. And that’s how most people start to feel about success: like a helpless kid who just doesn’t want to be messed with anymore. He’d rather sit and suck his thumb than get his hopes up again only to be disappointed.

We need better structures to support those with the desire to do something big to actually make it happen. This is an incredibly important problem to solve. We need more young people on a trajectory towards solving today’s big issues and providing the resources, support structure and education for them to do that is the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work or an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity. This is a problem that I think is very surmountable and am working with some great people on some solutions right now.