Microbusiness

Delbert’s creator, Scott Adams, is interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about his new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

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His article in the WSJ, excerpted from the book is fantastic – one of best the perspectives on choosing your career and work that I’ve ever read. It is consistent with a point I make frequently, don’t follow best practices, do what works for the unique you.

Here are some nuggets.

On following your passion:

But the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

On goal setting:

Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent pre-success failure.

You must fail, often:

If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can’t control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it’s your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

I’m an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—it’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too.

Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” It sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy. I don’t want my failures to simply make me stronger, which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. (To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word “stronger” to include anything that makes you more capable. I’d ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn’t kill him.)

Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it’s only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.

 

Via the great folks at Copyblogger, Scott Burkun has a great post about his new book, The Year Without Pants, WordPress.com and the Future of Work.

The fact that this is not new information is a good sign. Work has been moving in this direction for some time. It’s no longer a fad. The new work is not like the old work, and that is good. More freedom, more responsibility, more being able to be a grown up and control your work experience and life.

On being treated like an adult:

A recent Gallup Poll of American workers found that 70% of workers aren’t engaged at work. This is a disaster.

It means 3 of 4 of you reading this (at least in the U.S.) have jobs you do not care for. And the reasons you don’t care are reasonable: most employees are treated like children. Bureaucracies, rulebooks, protocols and processes all presume that the rule maker has the hard job, but we know that’s rarely true.

At WordPress.com team managers see their jobs as facilitators, not dictators. People are hired for their talents and the job of management is to stay out of talent’s way and guide it when needed.

On where you work does not matter, really:

All 170 employees at Automattic work from anywhere in the world they wish. They’re in more than 40 countries and nearly every time zone. Some people join the company and then travel the world while working.

This fact typically blows people’s minds, but it shouldn’t.

The typical office worker spends much of their time interacting with coworkers via email, the web and the phone. It’s mostly mediated through screens and machines. If that’s the case, why does location matter?

We complain about how painfully stupid most in-person meetings are, yet we oddly resist their elimination. Provided the results are great, why should anyone care where someone works from? They shouldn’t.

On how you must try new things, and even fail, to improve and innovate:

Many people talk about wanting big ideas, but it’s rare that talk is matched with action.

The grand frustration in the working world is stasis. Even if you don’t think what WordPress.com does can work for you, you must respect their willingness to experiment. The fact that they hired me, a veteran big company manager, shows their willingness to mix things up and learn from the results.

The history of all innovation makes clear it’s only through trying something new that progress happens. No one can talk their way to progress: we have to step off the stupid — but crowded — path called status quo and experience change.

Isn’t that what our leaders are supposed to be paid to do? If we should demand anything from managers, and perhaps from ourselves, it’s to take the first step, and learning from WordPress.com is an easy place to start.

 

 

 

Steven Pressfield’s Writing Wednesday post today discusses Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule – you know, the rule that you must spend 10,000 hours (roughly 10 years) of focused practice to master any complex skill. Pressfield has his usual unique take on why the 10,000 hour rule is true:

But what exactly are we learning when we’re beating our brains out all those years? What was Charles Bukowski learning while he was boozing and wenching and sorting mail at the P.O.? What was Henry Miller accomplishing in Brooklyn and Paris? Or Miyamoto Musashi dueling all those samurai swordsmen?

Skill, certainly. Patience, professionalism, many other things. But it was something much more subtle—and far more difficult. I almost hesitate to write about this, in that it borders on the mysterious and the sacred. I must silently (or not so silently) beseech the Muse’s permission.

What these masters were learning was to speak in their own voice. They were learning to act as themselves. In my opinion, this is the hardest thing in the world.

To speak in one’s own voice means to let go of all the other voices in our heads. Whose voices? The voices of what is expected of us. Yes, that means the voices of our parents, teachers, mentors. But it means something more elusive too. It means our own expectations of what we should be doing or ought to be thinking—what is “normal” or “right” or “the way it ought to be.”

…

How does the actor get past his own excruciating self-consciousness? How does the entrepreneur come up with an idea that’s really new? The answer is they both beat their heads against the wall over and over and over until finally, from pure exhaustion, they can’t “try” any more and they just “do.” Ten thousand hours if you’re lucky, more if you’re not. The gods are watching for those ten thousand hours, like instructors at Navy SEALs training. They can tell when we’re faking and they can tell when we’re for real. They can pick out those of us who really want it from those who are only pretending.

It takes a lot of time, effort and patience to trust in yourself and to believe in your heart that you know what you are doing and that your unique way, not the “best practices” way, is the right way for you to best serve those you were meant to serve.

Kathy Robertson’s cover story in The Sacramento Business Journal is about how partners at big law firms now have to bring in clients and do the work. In the good old days, partners had to bring in new business, but the actual attorney work was done by associates. Partners didn’t do the grunt work. That’s all changed.

As new lawyers pound the streets for work, senior partners are finding that their own path to Easy Street is more elusive than before. The three-martini lunches, regular golf dates and card-room competitions enjoyed by their predecessors are gone.Now everybody has to pull their weight in an increasingly competitive legal market — and this new reality has fundamentally changed the rules for those at the top of the food chain as well as those at the bottom.

The economics of lawyering, like everything else, has changed. Now many partners do the basic work they used to delegate. Clients are demanding that the attorney they know do the work.

Alan Weiss, an wildly successful management consultant and prolific writer, has no employees, works out of his home, makes over a million dollars a year, and he advocates this model when he mentors consultants.

By doing the work yourself, you not only shed the costly overhead of staff and unnecessary accoutrements like a big marque office, but you remove the middleman and forge deeper direct relationships with your clients and customers. This is what they want and really what you need.