Tag: success

Categories
Networking Social media

The Quickest Way to a Better Career

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I hate meeting people. I would prefer to be holed up in my apartment, lovingly arranged to every last detail purely to make me comfortable, than to present myself to the world. It’s not that I actually dislike people, but the whole process. The getting ready, the logistics, scheduling a time, finding a place – nevermind if you can’t meet me in my preferred five block radius. If it’s raining outside, I will cancel. If I have a blemish on my face, I will cancel. If you want to meet for no reason, I will cancel.

Meeting people is like writing is like exercise. All take convincing. You have to talk yourself into it, hype yourself up. Then things go fine. Great even. Sometimes amazing.

Last week, I was in New York for a media tour. That’s where you pack twelve meetings in two days and meet with anyone – editors, reporters, interns – who will listen. And oh, holy crap, how I loved it.

Sure, we could have saved a couple thousand in expenses, and done the same thing over email, or the phone, over web-ex or even text. But the power of face-to-face, to see these people in person, to meet and speak… to have a conversation.  Well, if I could do media tours full-time, I would (except, with my own bed at night).

Technology is supposed to make it easier for us to connect, but it actually makes it worse to have a conversation. That’s the argument of Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and author, most recently, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t,” Turkle argues. “Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.”

Nowhere is this more important than if you’re trying to do something. Build a company. Launch your career. Get a raise. Do anything but settle. Meeting people is the quickest way to success.  I used to say when you put yourself out there, the universe rises to meet you, but really it’s your network.

So if meeting people is like fruit, technology is like candy. And the longer we stay in front of our computers, the more sluggish we feel. The anxiety kicks in. So do the excuses. Then it’s just easier to stay home, send an email, and do absolutely nothing.

We convince ourselves that working works. But it doesn’t. So get up. Talk to someone. Have a conversation. Tell me how it goes. Tell me how things start happening for you. It is single-handedly the best thing you can do for your career, company, life.

(Technology gives us shortcuts. This isn’t one of them.)

Categories
Behind-the-Business

Got a Right to Be Wrong

This is the first installment in a series of behind-the-scenes posts on Kontrary.

Ideas are common, so I’ll tell you now that how I came up with the idea for Kontrary isn’t interesting. What is interesting is how immediately I jumped into a case of “professor syndrome” where I believed that for Kontrary to work, I would have to be less personal and aspirational, and more editorial and analytical. I know better. I know better, but still, I held onto the notion.

I thought business was serious business. And I confused serious with significance in thinking about charging for content. The mistake has cost me hours upon days of sitting fraught in front of my screen with dozens of tabs of half-finished posts. I struggle to provide high value at a level that is interesting and relatable. That is, I struggle with being myself, because myself doesn’t seem good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Ramit Sethi has a great exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

I can’t charge for my services. I’m not a professional. I have no CFP. I have no client base. No one will pay me.

My industry is saturated with people who have more experience/qualifications than myself.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

If we listen to the imposter, we have to be experts to succeed. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. You don’t have to be an expert all the time, and really, people don’t want you to be. The saying, “the customer is always right” is true, not because they are, but because it’s always possible that you’re wrong. That your company is wrong. That your products might suck. That you’ll make mistakes and have to own up.

Maybe it’s because I have run multiple organizations and have had tons of people disagree with me, but I know that people are just looking for you to be human, for your company to be human. To recognize themselves in your products and your values.

When I started my last position, I had a volunteer write a tirade against me before she met me and email it to her entire address book. Point by point, she laid out why I was the wrong person to lead the organization. The Board that had just hired me was incensed (it was an indictment on them as well, after all), but my first thought was how invested this volunteer was in the organization and how highly she esteemed its mission. I immediately asked her to have coffee so we could talk about her concerns. Anyone that is that protective of something is someone I want to meet.  You have to care a lot to write an email like that.

When faced with conflict, I’ve noticed most people’s reactions are to do the opposite. Most people will clam up, stand by their ways, and shine their shoes. Good companies understand that they are not infalliable though. Good customer service understands that you will make mistakes, people will be upset and it is your job to make it right. Really terrific customer service, however, understands that sometimes you will not make mistakes, but people will still be upset, and it is still your job to make it right.

I got into a car accident last year (it was my fault), and I remember calling my insurance company Geico crying. The woman on the other end of the line was asking me questions I couldn’t answer and I snapped. The rep didn’t even flinch. She continued to be so warm that just having her on the phone made me feel safe and like everything was going to be okay (which it was). I had many conversations with numerous Geico reps after that and every single one of the calls was similar. Even when I sold my car and cancelled my insurance, I wanted to invite the woman to dinner.

I didn’t have to train Geico to be a good company; the company trained me to be a good customer.

Your product doesn’t have to be perfect. Customers and clients and readers, they will be patient while you figure it out. We all root for you to succeed. And when you succeed, your customers get to be a part of that. And when you fail – but you’re human – your customers are just as proud to be a part of that.

Expertise doesn’t win, but empathy does. The biggest mistake you can make in any position is to act like a know-it-all. Everyone just wants to be heard. No matter your title, your job is only to make that your mission.

You’re good enough because you try. You’re good enough because you care. You’re good enough because you showed the professor the door. Now, go.

Categories
Happiness

The Delusions of Happiness

Happiness is relative, but I’ve been really happy lately.  Secrets to happiness? Yes, I’ve got those. Try exercising, meditation, setting goals, spending time with friends and family, trying new things. Those should all sound familiar; people tell you those things all the time and they may or may not work for you. The real secret? I’ll get to that in a moment… (and it isn’t something foolish like follow-through).

Meditation, though. That’s something people are hot about lately. “It’s like a key that opens the door to the treasury within,” filmmaker David Lynch tells a New York Times columnist. “Here’s an experience — poooft! — total brain coherence. It’s what’s missing from life today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy, peace. Things like tension, anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear — poooft! — all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people that experience and — poooft. Man, it’s beautiful.”

This coming from the man who created Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive. The point of meditation isn’t bliss (as any earnest attempt to understand the practice will reveal), but let’s look at the delusions supported in Lynch’s statement – primarily, that meditation will bring you peace. While the practice certainly can do that for you momentarily, we are decidedly fooling ourselves if we think that we can rid ourselves of negative emotions all together.

A great many people try and fail in that pursuit of happiness. Blogger Jenny Blake wrote a book on the topic and shortly after its launch admitted that “The book is meant to be aspirational — even for me.” It’s aspirational, but is presented as realistic. No one could possibly do or be everything in Blake’s book, and yet, that is the ambition. Why is impossible the ideal?

Society gets off on when you compare yourself to others, when you try to live by other’s beliefs, or when you try to get others to live by yours, and so and so forth. Unconditional happiness is just as destructive as uncontrollable anger. But the happiness ideal states you should learn from failures (instead of feel upset) and find lessons in whatever goes wrong. Theoretically, these happy nuggets serve to make sense of your pain but in reality, all they do is suppress it which is exhausting.

“Those who keep a check on their frustrations are at least three times more likely to admit they have disappointing personal lives and have hit a glass ceiling in their career. But those who let their anger out in a constructive manner were more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with loved ones,” reports a study by the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

“People think of anger as a terribly dangerous emotion and are encouraged to practise ‘positive thinking’, but we find that approach is self-defeating and ultimately a damaging denial of dreadful reality,” says Professor George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Let’s go back to meditation. One type of meditation is yoga, which is a study in the union of opposites (think Dog/Cat). In that vein, I’d like to suggest that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. And that the union of these two emotions, and indeed many others, is the end goal, not the glorification of one over the other.

Struggle isn’t something to overcome then (and feel good about after), but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Personal growth advocates assume you want to avoid those bad days whereas I don’t think that’s possible or necessary. In the moment you are failing, you are also succeeding.

Life is great and it sucks, always simultaneously. Most people can’t live in that environment so they live in delusions. Religion, personal development, companies – all are too eager to create those delusions for you. But life is a duality and I’m all for happiness, just not at the sacrifice of negativity, depression, anger, tension, anxiety, stress, hate, rage, or sorrow.