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.
