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You will never do anything 

In this world without courage

It is the greatest quality

in the mind next to honor – Aristotle

 

 

 

 

I\’ve been thinking a lot recently about courage. There\’s a good deal of life-changing going on around me. New job opportunities, kids graduating into the world, traveling the world, and finding their way. Elders getting older, and fading. There\’s no stopping it – I sometimes feel like a cat trying to find purchase on a slippery incline, or these cars trying to stop on an icy turn.

I always go back to my library in times like this, which is stacked with half-read books, especially the texts from my OSR days. One such book is Leading from Within, where I found this wonderful poem:

Courage –

Courage is the price which life extracts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not, knows no release

From little things

Knows not the livid loneliness of fear

nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear

The sound of wings.

How can life grant us boon of living, compensate

For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate

Unless we dare

The soul\’s dominion? Each time we make a choice we pay

With courage to behold resistless day

And count it fair

-Amelia Earhart

Finally, there\’s an excellent article via Inc magazine by Andrew Thomas.  In it he has ten tips about building self confidence. Let\’s see a few:

2. Avoid comparing yourself with others.

In almost every case, when you compare yourself with someone else, it takes the form of negative self-talk about how you\’re not good enough. Doing this weakens self-confidence. The only person you need to compare yourself with is the version of yourself that you want to become. That\’s it.

6. Take action.

Fear can be paralyzing. Ignore the voice in your head telling you that you can\’t do something, and take action anyway. The more you let fear hold you back, the stronger the negative voice will become. It works in the other direction too: The more you take action, the quieter the negative voice will become.

8. Focus on the positive.

Negative self-talk and pessimism are a vicious cycle, and a drain on your confidence. Focus on your positive attributes instead of perceived weaknesses; focus on your accomplishments rather than on your perceived failures. Keep focused on what is working instead of what is not working.

If you want to see all of his ten, check him out here.

Summary:

Risk something! This is the way to practice. Get a real sense of the risk, of course, and ensure that it does not result in catastrophic loss if you fail. The idea is to extend yourself into discomfort on occasion because that\’s where the growth happens. These are calculated risks, but risks nonetheless, and taking them with courage is key to a fulfilling life.

What will you have courage about in the find month of May?

 

Happy Week 12!  Say goodbye to March and its Madness. For this week\’s update, we discuss the importance of feedback. Without high quality feedback a person will simply not grow. Adaptation cannot occur in its absence, regardless if you\’re a person or an ecosystem. For people trying to improve themselves it is a must understand the types of feedback that exists so that they can leverage it to their highest effect.

The problem often isn\’t a lack of feedback. Anyone can give advice and people often do so even without prodding, so the challenge is to be able to filter the advice so it helps you. This does not mean that feedback needs to be unicorns and rainbows, but it does mean that it has to be constructive. We\’ve all heard of constructive criticism, so why is it so rare? From whom should we be seeking feedback? How do we choose the feedback we get?  I heard a story from my wife about a piano student who did not get great feedback on exam that she was taking to move up a level in the studio. This was an advanced student who loved music, and the feedback was awful. The cretin questioned her fundamental abilities, and provided nothing she could launch from. Nothing to build on. It was devastating.

Let\’s evaluate the four types of feedback and some advice on how to deal with it when it comes:

Type I – Strangers Feedback

This could be a comment on a website, a snide remark in a school cafeteria about your clothing, or something about your physical characteristics.  If these are negative, they can be very impactful. Even if it\’s positive feedback, you can\’t hang your hat on it too much, especially if they\’ve seen your face. There was a test to see if people could judge who would win elections based on just a picture of their faces and the folks were accurate more than 70% of the time.

Strengths:  We need the scale of strangers.  It is from the masses that we identify our tribe in the Internet age. We all need strangers, because we\’d eventually like strangers to become friends. If we\’re creators, we want our fans to love us, since they are our source of power/income. If your competitors provide more payment flexibility, you risk losing customers to businesses that offer merchant services. Explore the comprehensive offerings of the Top 20 merchant accounts.

Weakness: You can\’t take what a random stranger says too seriously since they might just like your eyes.  Fandom is a fickle beast that can turn on a dime if you do something true to your heart but too far outside of their expectations.

Advice:  Look for patterns. If there are a bunch of people saying the same thing over time, you should check it out to see if it\’s real.  Secondly, limit your diet of this sort of feedback. That is, spend maybe an hour a week reading comments on YouTube or your blog, etc. Do this session with the right mindset, when you\’re confident, well rested and ready to search through a lot of mud to find the gold nuggets. Finally, always thank people when they do feedback right.  It\’ll encourage others to follow suit.

Type II – Family Feedback

Families are the best. I mean, allow me to get sad for a minute here.  I\’ve lost both of my parents already.  They were in their early 50s and 60s, and so I know what it\’s like to not have Mom and Dad around.

Things may not be perfect with your family, but understand it is here that you have your strongest advocates. They have your back and are excellent counterbalances to other Types of feedback. They know your story and have seen your growth as an artist, mathematician, or athlete.

Type II Strengths: Family and close friends are the type, as Brene Brown says, that \”will help you hide a body.\” They will tell you their truth, unvarnished, from their perspective.  This is where your core strength can come from.

Type II Weakness: Families carry baggage.  Mom and Dad may not give critical feedback that is needed for growth.  If you can\’t draw that well, the odds are that Mom and Dad aren\’t going to be the first to crush your Artist dreams. Family feedback could easily lead to the American Idol complex if the right voices aren\’t present.

Advice: Understand that even if this source of feedback is critical, it almost certainly comes out of a place of love. Consider leveraging this invariably positive source of feedback against other Types that tend to be more negative and less constructive.  You know your parents and friends – are they critical? Are you hearing the truth from them?  Only you can decide in the end what you retain.

Type III –  Expert Feedback:

 This could be a football coach, a judge on American Idol, a Life Coach, or a panel of billionaires on Shark Tank. They know your domain better than you, and have possibly done it all. They could even have been a CEO, an angel investor, or a head of a venture capital fund.

This is the type we mostly associate with feedback. It\’s borne of the concept of the gatekeepers, those who hold the key to our future. It\’s Bill Belichick on the sidelines scowling at his near-perfect Patriots, or Pete Carroll beaming like sunshine at his often-imperfect Seahawks.

You might think this the very best level of feedback. They know this stuff, right? If the five gagillionaires on Shark Tank don\’t think you have a hit, well, you probably don\’t.

Of course, believing in The Expert is a terrible strategy. In his recent book Outsiders, Adam Grant claims that experts are often blind to truly original ideas. Grant tells of the famous show Seinfeld, considered by many as one of the most important shows ever.  Yet, did you know it almost never made it past its first season?  It had a very, very poor review from the experts and had a horrible showing in front of test audiences (Type I feedback).  I don\’t want to spoil the story for you. Suffice it to say, the guy who saved it didn\’t even work in TV comedy but had an eye for new ideas.

I found Grant\’s other story even more surprising. It was about the Segway and how Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and other powerful men gathered around the invention and thought it to be potentially \”bigger than the Personal Computer.\” Bezos went onto say, \”You have a product so revolutionary, you\’ll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?\”  Paradoxically, experts in technology were too far askew from transportation to see the problems, but those who evaluated Seinfeld were too close to their domain. 

Oh, and those Shark Tank guys – they\’ve missed plenty, including these four ideas and these thirteen ideas that couldn\’t get to a good deal, and are all million-dollar businesses now.

Even Tom Brady, the current GOAT of NFL Quarterbacks, had a very challenging career, and struggled to get any playtime in college and the NFL early on. He is considered the greatest steal in the history of the NFL draft, aka, another miss by the experts.

Type III Strengths:  They have domain knowledge and if they like your stuff, you could be set. Ultimately, it is their positional authority that will get you on the field, so if you can impress them, do so.

Type III Weaknesses: If taken too much to heart, Type III feedback can really take out your mojo.  It was told that Brady had to have therapy because he wasn\’t getting enough playtime in the NFL before he became the starter for the Patriots.  It takes a lot of psychic energy and some intestinal fortitude to push against overly critical feedback from this crowd, despite evidence that shows that they\’re as often wrong as they are right.

Advice: If you\’re doing creative, cutting-edge stuff, don\’t pay this group too much heed.  Take what they say as another group of strangers, perhaps important strangers, but nothing more. Experts are an incredibly useful source of feedback, but guard your heart – negatives hit as hard as ten positives from this group.  Don\’t ever give up after getting hit by a Type III.

Type IV – Peer Feedback

Peers are those in your career path, those who are around you and are generally at your level.  Surprisingly, Adam Grant claims that this form of review can be the most accurate in the terms of predicting success. This type of feedback has components of family- since they truly are with you in a shared career- plus a different perspective, without the Expert mindset Type III influences.  This type of feedback can be seen as the true porridge of feedback – not too hot, not too cold.

Type IV Strengths:  People who aren\’t putting on the hat of critic tend to view your craft with a more open mind. This will often be more generative feedback since those who are peers are likely feeling empathy for your position because they\’re so close to it.

Type IV Weakness: They\’re peers – this means they haven\’t been there. They don\’t have the wisdom of being there and do not hold the keys to the kingdom like Type IIIers do. Finally, if they\’re friends, they could be a bit too easy on you if you don\’t prod them.

Advice: Grant tells us that we should be looking for peers with some diversity of experience. Pick those folks who have traveled a bit, or even lived abroad, or have done work in other industries. A diverse mind will mean that your peer will be more apt to pick out good work that doesn\’t quite fit the mold. Finally, there are courses online that teach how to give feedback constructively. This could be an excellent team-level growth exercise.

Conclusion

Feedback is a big issue. Humans are social animals and crave the acceptance of their peers and seniors. This post covered the uses of feedback by considering the types that you might see out in the world. Knowing these types before you go into a critical situation will allow you to position your heart and mind to gain from the feedback.  Seek feedback from all four types, and you should start seeing patterns among them.  By choosing different types of feedback you\’ll ensure that you\’re not falling into the American Idol syndrome, or worse, thinking you can\’t sing when you can.

I have to admit it – I\’m not a big basketball guy.  Where I grew up, there wasn\’t a lot of fandom, since most of us were Yankee fans, and then maybe Giants or Jets ( eventually resolving to Steelers for me), and the NBA was a distant concern. That is until I discovered March Madness.  When this tournament starts, I\’m all in, rooting for young men I\’ve never heard of like they were my own children, and weeping over my broken bracket. Why?

Well, its incredibly popular, so there\’s that. There are millions of brackets picked every year. Obama famously picks a bracket and does a good job at it. And then there\’s the wonderful, inherent difficulty of picking a perfect bracket. Indeed, its nearly impossible. NCAA.com puts it this way:

\”It is incredibly difficult to pick a Final Four correctly. In the past six years of Bracket Challenge Game, the percentage of perfect Final Fours has ranged from zero to 1.36 percent.\”

From that same article, check out the last few years:

YEAR	FINAL FOUR (SEEDS)	PCT CORRECT
2016	(1) North Carolina, (2) Villanova, (2) Oklahoma, (10) Syracuse	.0093%
2015	(1) Kentucky, (1) Wisconsin, (1) Duke, (7) Michigan State	1.36%
2014	(1) Florida, (2) Wisconsin, (7) Connecticut, (8) Kentucky	.0063%
2013	(1) Louisville, (4) Michigan, (4) Syracuse, (9) Wichita State	0%
2012	(1) Kentucky, (2) Ohio State, (2) Kansas, (4) Louisville,	.22%
2011	(3) Connecticut, (4) Kentucky, (8) Butler, (11) Florida	0%

What\’s the point? I think we live our lives like we\’re able to predict our own championship. That is, since we are the heroes of our own story, and we wall want to be cutting down the net at the end.  We see ourselves as a doctor, president, famous actor, and plan accordingly. The trouble is, its impossible to predict our lives for some of the same reasons we cannot predict the winner of March Madness.

One would think that with all of the super computers and experience we have with the tournament that we\’d be better at picking which teams would land in the Final Four, but why can\’t we? March Madness is compelling, frustrating, entertaining mostly due to the nature of this complexity, but when it comes to our lives, it aint so funny.  What can we learn about life through the lens of college basketball and prevent unnecessary misery? 

Reviewing the laws of complexity  I came up with three. Scan it and pick out the tips from complexity science if you\’re in a hurry.

a) Human Behavior

Human behavior varies in countless ways. If a player is sick, responds poorly to pressure, or gets distracted by the bright lights of the tournament, you can be assured that his or her performance will be affected. This isn\’t just isolated to the basketball court, as this article shows that almost sport sees serious symptoms arise in their athletes, as discussed here:

\”Tabloid tales of sportsmen behaving badly often mask deeper psychological problems, she said. \”Alcoholism, gambling and promiscuity are all associated with depression and stress.\”

Human behavior is something we muse about a lot but don\’t do anything about.  Men will say they don\’t understand women, parents don\’t understand teenagers, and so on.  Complexity tip:  Get educated on the dimensions of human personality. Read books about topics like parenting a teen, and leverage personality tests like Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, or the Big Five, which give us a vocabulary to understand each other. Vocabulary will not make the complexity go away, but it will enable you to design experiments with people that could improve your relationships with them.

b) Shifting Landscape – This term usually means that the rules change while you\’re doing something. That is, a situation moves from Complicated to Complex when the rules that the system operates on change.  In experiences like the NCAA Tourney, the rules don\’t change, but the experience itself does. Though smaller tourney\’s exist, being in the Big Dance means you\’ll face teams you\’ve never faced, play in places you\’ve never been, and have pressures most haven\’t experienced. Why does this matter?  When you get that new manager at work, are you ready for change? Regular folks run into this stuff all the time and yet proceed as if nothing will change in their jobs, that somehow the way your shop ran yesterday is tied to some immutable law of physics. Better to think of life in the idea of seasons, and seasons change. What is true from summer isn\’t true for winter.  Getting a new manager, or even by getting older, the rules change around you.  Complexity tip: get ahead of the change. Through planning (see Search  sparc cars), brainstorm in advance of such events if you can, or shortly after. That new manager shows up, you better get that mind map out and refactor it with components of finding a new gig.

c) Computational Complexity (number of nodes)  –  The math on picking a perfect bracket is so challenging that math professors don\’t agree on the odds.  One claims a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance, the other more optimist math dude claims 1 in 128 billion.  Either way, you\’re odds of becoming an Astronaut or President of the United States is better (a mere 1 in 10 million).  The reason for this is that there are 64 teams, so the equations start around 2^63 power. This is a much higher number than the number of stars in the sky.

Why does this matter to your life?  How many people do you know? I bet its more than 63.  I also bet that while some of your life is predicable, the tough parts are closer to the young folks on the NCAA courts.  The difficult thing for regular life is to recognize when you\’re in a space that\’s new. Complexity tip: use the pause button on decisions if you\’re sensing a new level of complexity. Delayed decisions are typically better ones.

I think sports are popular because they are inherently unpredictable, despite copious data points.  There\’s no script, but there is plenty of drama. Now, if that doesn\’t sound like life, what does?

 

 

Happy Week 11 folks!  Quick quiz!  How many of these statements have you thought or said this year?

• I should be making more money
• I should have chosen a different major in college
• I should have gotten married sooner/later
• I should have gotten a dog
• I should be better at this by now
• Life shouldn\’t be this hard at my age
• I should be able to buy a house
• I should have fewer bills
• I should have had more children
• I should have more coffee

I can say confidently I\’ve thought at least five of these this year, if not this morning.  You might have guessed  it by now – the most dangerous word in the English language is should.  

Why should? I first was alerted to the dangers of this word by my wonderful life coach Diane Gasal, who I\’ve mentioned before on this blog. When she said it, I thought to myself that it was some woo-woo soft-skills coaching thing that was either silly or beyond me. Slowly, my sensitivity to the word has grown.

I mean, there\’s this silly \”Shoulda, woulda, coulda\” thing from my childhood, a small rhyme that those who were tired of you complaining about stuff would chant at you when you used one of the terms, but beyond that, the concept seemed mundane. In the context with Diane, I was complaining a lot about a particular manager I was working with and the general state of my career. With the patience of a saint, she\’d listen to me blather on about my the charred remains of a once promising career.  After a few sessions of this, she started to interrupt my weepings when I would say things like \”I should be able to do my work without Manager X over my shoulder…\”  Diane would counter with something like, \”Should is a word we need to be careful with. Try to remove it from your story.\”

Boom.

As I pondered this concept, and hearing on the tongues of others around me, I realized that should implies a judgement. You can often say it with a righteous indignation.

• The world should be fair
• This project should be better funded
• These programmers/analysts should be better
• That person shouldn\’t be elected
• That person shouldn\’t be my manager
• That person should be better
• There shouldn\’t be any poor people

Regardless if those judgement are incorrect or correct, the effect it has a negative effect on your psyche, especially when you can\’t change it. Should looks backward, into an immutable past. Should removes your power and can damage the imagination and stifle re-framing. After much internal work I became conscious of the using the word and it has helped.

Fast forward a few years. As I drove into work I was stuck in the perennially horrendous Seattle area traffic (which should be better!)  I came upon Phuc Tran\’s TED talk (NPR Podcast) on the dark side of the subjunctive.  To review, a subjunctive is a form of sentences that do not describe known objective facts, versus the indicative, which is all facts.  \”I am writing this blog\” is indicative.  \”My typing skills should be better\” is subjunctive.

Phuc says there is no subjunctive in his family\’s native language of Vietnamese.  Some debate rages in the comments about the validity of some of Phuc\’s claims, but I do not want to make this an English lesson. Watch the video, and see if you can grasp the concept.  I trust the spirit of what this guy is saying regardless of the technical details of the language.

 

As you heard from Phuc, the subjunctive allows us to both see into the future, and imagine great things, or look into the past, and make our hearts ache with what could have been. What should have been. According to Phuc, Vietnamese does not have a subjunctive. The opposite of the subjunctive is the indicative, a perspective of what is, not what should be, is shared. His parents lived in the indicative which provide them with an incredible resilience because they \”didn\’t expend psychic energy on what could have been.\” 

We worry about what we should have been almost at any age.  At twenty we\’re worried about if we chose the wrong college, should have done better in high school, should have lifted more weights, should have played better, gotten different friends.  At thirty and forty, its the career, which is a never-ending quagmire of should-haves and would-haves. This is mostly due to the complexity of the environment. Very little is directly under your control in life, but we compare to ideals, rumors, and facades of others we know. I realized that the habit to indulge in Shouldism will grow as a person ages. When more of your life is in the past, it becomes evermore tempting to review it with a powerless imagination of \”what would have happened if I did that differently?\” I wonder if this contributes to depression in the elderly as it it did for the young Phuc, driving him to suicidal thoughts. The desire to be someone else as a youth can be seriously debilitating, and his message is to embrace what you are, and who you are. Accept the indicative, and still leverage the subjunctive to grow your creativity and passion for the future.

  \”Embrace the indicativeness of your passions…don\’t be fixed on what isn\’t.  Acceptance of things they way they are.  It takes courage to embrace the indicative. The subjunctive allows us to be creative but also allows us to become mired in regret. The indicative doesn\’t allow us to imagine, but it does allow us to talk about ourselves and our experience in real terms… if we have the courage to embrace that reality.\”