Along with 30-40 people I’ve been on a thread on Twitter for ~3 years where we talk about anything that comes to mind. Friendships have developed, viewpoints have been expanded, a good time has been had by many. If you’re part of our little band, test your knowledge of the Twitter thread that just won’t quit.
Sci-fi Anachronisms and Themes of Concerns of the Time
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If you read sci-fi, or watch sci-fi TV or movies, you likely have seen technology that’s missing, or some that’s present that shows it was written before current times. The importance of cell phones in our lives is not taken into consideration in most stories that pre date the 1990s. Star Trek has some cell phone like tech, but they require a refrigerator box full of stand alone gadgets to satisfy what we can do with something the size of a pack of smokes – whatever that is.
I’m currently reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, written in 1966, which is about The Moon in the year 2075, which is a politically suppressed colony springing from a penal colony, and the revolution that develops there. In ways it feels like Who Moved My Cheese or The Richest Man in Babylon for revolutionaries, with 60s political ideals. The story makes enough sense in terms of its setting and economy and struggles. It’s not entirely different from The Belters of the much more recent The Expanse series, in its depiction of class struggles and revolution. Where there are problems is the details of the tech, which, if you can overlook, it’s fine.
In Heinlein’s book we see a future without desktop publishing, without the Internet, AI or computers that can easily ingest, store and process massive amounts of data. It makes the future a little…. primitive, and makes for many explanations of things we take for granted now. This made me think of Fahrenheit 451, a sci fi book predicated on books still being on paper.
Prior to The Moon I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Philip K. Dick inspiration for Blade Runner. In this book, written in 1968, which takes place 11 months from now, in 2021. The Dick’s world the Earth is poisoned from the last world war, World War Terminus, when many modern readers probably see disease and extinction more as a result of climate change and things you’d read about in The Sixth Extinction or Guns, Germs and Steel – disease, introduced species, etc. The books ideas about religion, controlled emotions and synthetic animals all seem pretty believable. Digital photography, powerful computers and flat panel screens don’t make it into the timeline for this view of the future. Self aware AI and androids indistinguishable from humans seems maybe 10 years out. What doesn’t seem scientifically or culturally and societally accurate is androids only being able to live for 4 years because their cells can’t replace themselves, and laws against intimacy with machines.
Similar to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, as you’d find in his works like I, Robot, older science fiction made assumptions about how intelligent robots would be developed, how they’d become progressively more capable, and the controls that people would put on them. It’s clear rules and laws about the interaction between man and machine are essentially non existent now, and most likely this won’t change. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle. If anything, people are actively working on robots for sex and killing people.
Before Do You Dream I read The Martian and Ready Player One, and prior to that a bunch of novellas in The Expanse series – all very recent science fiction. The Martian and Ready Player One certainly seem much more pedestrian in their view of the future than the other books mentioned here, but certainly that could be bias because of my own placement on the timeline.
Should CEOs take care of their employees?
My friend Ted Bauer recently blogged about this CEOs are “unaware” their employees are often struggling. WTF? How?
The video he included, of Democrat Katie Porter asking JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon how someone living modestly with an entry level job at his financial empire should survive, is fantastic. Going through the employee’s budget line by line we see she’s at a ~$500/month deficit. Asked about some specific items or for general advice Mr. Dimon seems to be baffled, and needs to think about it and research it more. Not really reassuring for shareholders if the assumption is he’s being honest and not just deflecting.
The assumption after seeing this is, Jamie Dimon is guilty, and CEOs aren’t aware of their own employees, or more likely don’t care, and they should reform or be controlled through wage controls. That does sound nice, to insure that people are paid just a tiny bit more so they’re not making horrible decisions and sunk into poverty. Ah, but alas, that’s not where this will go. If you think government can force everyone to be nice and share their toys I think you may have been napping in a cave for the last several decades, or you’ve been spending your free time watching The Super Bowl and Game of Thrones and not keeping up with current events, economics, history, technology and globalization. Why do I say that?
Human Life is Cheap
My father-in-law once told me “In Asia, human life is cheap.” Aside from the fact that it’s a fact, he’s also Asian and lives in Asia, so let’s not think this is offensive somehow, aside from the reality of it. Thanks to globalization and technology inexpensive humans, not just from Asia, are available to all. Call centers are routinely overseas. There are businesses in Romania where people play video games all day to sell the virtual gold for real money. There are companies in India that will intercept “Are you a robot?” captcha questions and solve them so scripts you run won’t be interrupted. Replacing everyone at a bank office with machines and remote workers would probably not be a great deal of work. We’ll even set up tablets so you can look people in the eye while you’re handling your banking with them, I’m sure vendors are already promising. Why isn’t this being done already? It likely is being done here and there in pieces, but there’s a point at which humans are cheaper than machines. Push that line of how much humans are compensated too far and that won’t be an issue anymore. Remember people protesting about McDonald’s employees not being paid enough? Shortly after that we saw most cashiers disappear and huge touchscreens, reportedly peppered with feces, appear. Which brings us to…
Apps, AI & Robots, Oh My!
While it’s often entirely possible to replace your domestic human workers with international ones, sometimes that’s not even necessary, thanks to apps, AI & robotics.
I used to go to the bank at least once a week, if not more. I had to deposit checks, move money around and wire money, as I ran a business and tried to keep my personal account from going negative. I think I’ve been inside the bank once in the past year, when I had a check that was too large to deposit through the app I use now for everything. The days of local bank branches every quarter of a mile or so throughout the suburbs are probably a thing of the past already. Aside from serving as ads for the banks, and maybe locations for workers, there’s not a big retail banking purpose to their existence.
Many scoff at AI, thinking it will never be able to replace people in their jobs – it doesn’t work so well, what would be the point, etc. AI, which in this context I’m using for computer systems that don’t manipulate physical objects, but run largely on their own, is already in use writing sports articles and annual reports, doing legal due diligence, doing compensation analysis, bookkeeping, and many other things. AI plus robotics is where things get really interesting, though.
Even more amazing to me are people who talk about when robots will replace workers, or how they won’t be able to, etc. That day has already come and gone, my friend. And the list of jobs that will go away is growing by the day.
I’ll go through the seemingly endless list of robots that are being developed to insure we don’t have to be burdened with boring, repetitive, straining work anymore (or compensation for that matter), but first, listen to this. You’ve surely heard that Amazon is experimenting with drones to deliver, but up to this point you might have imagined their warehouses to be few and far between and filled with employees pushing carts down aisles, filling them from print outs they carry on clip boards. Oh, that would be quite incorrect. First off, Amazon has so many warehouses of various types in so many cities that they don’t bother to name them in any sort of conventional fashion. The building names are like license plates or social security numbers. There are buildings for same day delivery, that seem like the human and cart style I described. There are large item (canoe, big screen TV, etc) warehouses where there are people controlling machines to move items. There are buildings that are walk in refrigerators and freezers. Then there are the buildings where most of what we all order from Amazon all the time come from. The warehouse in question in my metro area, Dallas, is in an industrial park in Coppell, and it’s the largest building I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s a bit over a million square feet, nondescript and windowless. Inside you’ll find 4,000 employees at work at any time (it operates around the clock), 4 miles of conveyor belts, and….40,000 robots. When I heard that number my jaw dropped. I assumed there would be some, but that’s a tremendous number. And are they worth it?
The Amazon warehouse hiring process is about as easy as it gets, and with little hassle you can be working at least 40 hours a week. The compensation isn’t fantastic, but relative to the friction of getting the job, the qualifications, etc, I think it’s a pretty good situation. If you need a job now, want some upward mobility, and want some degree of control over what shifts you’ll work, it seems like a good option. With that endorsement in mind, though, back to the robots. The robots are cheaper than people? People paid ~$15/hr? Maybe, maybe not. They certainly speed things up and reduce error, breakage and injury. They reduce risks that could come from not finding enough human workers, for whatever reason. I’m fairly certain there is a team at Amazon that monitors everything going on in warehouses and figures out more things robots could do to increase that ratio of robot to human.
Amazon is hardly alone, and certainly not unique in seeming to want to replace low paying jobs with robots. Self driving cars and trucks will likely replace truck drivers and likely cab/uber drivers within 10 years, if not sooner. Amazon is again not alone in trying to replace delivery drivers with drones or wheel based robots. Starship Technologies plans on deploying thousands of delivery robots to college campuses after raising $40 million. So much for getting a job delivering pizzas to make a little extra. I have seen articles on robots that can fold clothes, make coffee and pizza, do farm work, replace police officers stopping speeders and issue tickets, vacuum and mop floors, clean gutters, replace manufacturing jobs, etc.
Trickle Down Employment
Ah, but the dawn of our technological Utopia will free people from drudgery and allow people to program and service robots instead of flipping burgers or driving trucks. I’ve actually heard people say this. Assuming that no one will make robots that program and service robots, which seems like a ludicrous assumption, and assuming robots wouldn’t just be discarded, the way TVs and cars and so many other devices full of complex electronics seem to be now when they don’t work properly, is it at all reasonable to expect people to get the education and experience necessary to do this highly complex work – en masse? That seems beyond naive. It’s like a Mad Libs version of trickle down economics, but replacing employment for income. What is far more likely is there will be fewer and fewer jobs. The jobs that will exist will be for the very wealthy and connected who run companies, the very well educated and experienced needed to keep them running, or jobs machines can’t do or that aren’t worth doing. Bleak? Yes. This isn’t meant as a big PR piece for Andrew Yang and Universal Basic Income (UBI), but if you’ve ever read The Expanse series of books I think you probably have a fairly accurate view of what life will be like for the masses living on Basic. Here’s an interesting blog post on The Expanse and UBI. The same dystopian future has been imagined in other forms in many other works of fiction.
In Conclusion
The bottom line is, it’s likely that the current system, where people live off of earnings from their labor, will, of necessity, change. Assumptions that CEOs will shift their focus from increasing shareholder value to the well being of the least of their employees are naive. And efforts to force businesses to take better care of their employees will result in jobs disappearing, as the cost of local humans end up being greater than the cost of machines or offshore resources. This isn’t a justification for UBI. It’s not a call for a socialist government. It’s not a warning sign for people everywhere to skill up or be pushed aside. It’s a series of observations that seem fairly obvious, with a future that seems inevitable.
Offering Solutions to Specific Problems
Photo by Michael Prewett on Unsplash Pretty unrelated to this blog post, but I was getting bored looking for images and liked this one.
In the early 1990s I was in an introductory Industrial/Organizational Psychology class and the professor, someone who worked more often in the non academic world than in it, told us she saw work transforming to non permanent, to contracts. Today we might call them gigs. Whatever the case, the age of the gold watch and pension, of management training programs and lifelong employment are largely gone. That there are exceptions only highlights the rule, the default, the status quo. For most of us we will change careers multiple times, we will have many jobs, and we will not have the sense of job security. This isn’t news. You’ve probably read on this a lot already.
Financial Incentives
If you’ve looked at projected salaries for positions listed on LinkedIn you might have noticed low little they pay. From The Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ (emphasis added by me) “But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the
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highest-paid tier of workers...Meanwhile, wage gains have gone largely to the highest earners. Since 2000, usual weekly wages have risen 3% (in real terms) among workers in the lowest tenth of the earnings distribution and 4.3% among the lowest quarter. But among people in the top tenth of the distribution, real wages have risen a cumulative 15.7%, to $2,112 a week – nearly five times the usual weekly earnings of the bottom tenth ($426).”
We’ve been taught, through start ups offshoring, through MBA programs and business books to find the lowest possible cost for products and services. We have been taught that employees typically are less knowledgeable than contractors or agencies in particular functions that aren’t entirely unique to particular organizations. The transformation to the gig economy for workers isn’t just about mobility and convenience for those working. It’s also the end of the fairy tale view of full time permanent employment, 1950s style, that many of us grew up being told about.
While there are exceptions to this, maybe in highly regulated industries with a lot of educational requirements or industries with a strong union presence, otherwise, this is where things are headed.
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This isn’t a view into the gig economy. It’s the deeper implications. You’re not a soldier, you’re a hired gun. Let’s see what that means.
How Gigs Differ from Employees
When a company would hire someone for the long term they’d be interested in lifelong professional development. You want people to be well rounded, to be able to do a bunch of different things, and to offer different solutions. If you have someone on the payroll for years it makes sense to invest in their continuing education. It makes sense to do trials and plan upgrades and long term support.
When you hire contractors for gigs you do not plan on them being around forever, or paying for their education. You’re paying for something specific.
Agency of Record
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In the old days, companies hired an agency to be their agency of record, and they handled their marketing. Increasingly over the last couple of decades we’ve seen brands move to a project by project basis, where internal employees determine strategy, decide on projects and assess agencies. Some of these relationships are more strategic, some more tactical. But the days of skimming a percentage off the top of a big budget you got to use are much like the gold watch, full time permanent jobs now, increasingly rare. And lest you think the client side marketing people have the endangered beast full time permanent jobs, keep in mind the life expectancy of a CMO is 43 months, and when a new boss comes in you can expect them to bring their posse with them.
Focus and Bargain Shopping
We’re seeing more and more services focused on particular tasks or deliverables that can make operating a company cheaper and easier. The downside is, if your job was doing something that can be replaced by a company that specializes in that, that charges little to do it, your job just evaporated. Even if there are just options to make it possible for amateurs to do what you did, with some helping hands, your job likely disappears.
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What Does All of This Mean?
The take away from all of this is generalists are out of favor. And the meaning of generalist is becoming more specific. If you’re a master at writing or design or programming you’re now a specialist but in a general sense. This sounds like nonsense, but what it means is you can’t just sell yourself as an expert in your discipline, you need to offer something very specific and tangible. If someone wants to hire someone for an indefinite period to handle lots of things you’re a good choice. However, if someone needs something specific – if they need a project or something precise done, they don’t want a generalist. If you’re an agency or a contractor, a freelancer, a gun for hire, this is very important.
The problem a lot of freelancers and smaller agencies have is a lack of specificity or focus. It’s understandable – you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner, where you can’t pitch for work because you’re saying you’re a specialist in something much more specific. But if you make yourself a generalist your pitch is to people who trust you and know they need someone who knows what they’re doing. In other words, you need someone smart enough to know they need to trust someone, and they need to acknowledge that they can’t do everything themselves. You’re limiting yourself to people who have trust you via referrals or relationship, who know they don’t know everything and they need to trust someone else. These people are not that common, and you need to work hard to sell your personal or agency brand.
Contrast that with offering solutions to specific problems, knowing that’s how companies usually shop these days. If you sell yourself as an expert in small team project management, or graphic design for health supplements, or Facebook ads expert for restaurants, your pitch is a lot simpler, and the mental arithmetic for seeing if you’re what’s needed is a lot simpler. You’re not trying to sell that you can do anything related to buying media or graphic design or programming. You’re offering a solution, not yourself.
You have designers and developers and writers on staff, who could probably learn how to make an app. At the same time, you have a company offer to customize an app for you based off a working one they have that you can test, and you can see examples of the customized versions they’ve made. You’re choosing between asking your employees to take on more work and do something they haven’t done before and paying a vendor to do something they specialize in. If the vendor fails, you blame them. It’s not your fault.
You need to make an annual report. You have staff that could probably handle it. Or you have an agency make it that specializes in reports like that. The perception is they are experts and your employees aren’t. You could probably think of dozens of examples like this. In the end, where we are currently, employees are taken for granted and not empowered to take risks, innovate and succeed. They’re blamed for when things don’t go right and for cultures of stagnation, but they’re not equipped to change those cultures. The idea of long term vision, of planning and training, is largely disappearing with companies and founders shopping for best of breed solutions to particular problems. At the same time, what’s handed off to outside vendors is more tactical, as well. They aren’t empowered to guide strategy and execution – they’re directed to do very specific things.
Knowing the game is the only way to play it with a hope of success. In most organizations, these are the changes that are happening around us.
You’re a failure, and I’m very excited for you
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In a February 2018 article in Psychology Today the author guides us through some of the studies and research on expectations. One theme that emerges is there are realistic expectations and premeditated resentments. Let’s briefly unpack that so you know what that means, if you didn’t click over to the article and read it. Expectations are what you think will happen. You have some coffee, you perk up. You have a day off, you’ll do something fun. You go shopping, you’ll get a new shirt. Resentment comes when our expectations, our unwritten rules, are not fulfilled. One example in the article was someone who served as an amateur therapist for all their friends for years, and then when she needed a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear, she didn’t get them. You’re probably resentful on her behalf just reading that! There’s an invisible tally sheet, or so we all think, keeping score and deciding what we deserve.
Premeditated Resentments
The phrase “premeditated resentments” is a fun one. You’ve probably heard the term premeditated a lot in crime dramas. It means thought out before hand. Like premeditated murder – it wasn’t a crime of passion, it was planned out. In crime dramas that makes it somehow worse. It’s cold and calculated, not out of passion. Premeditated resentment means you plan on getting upset about your expectations not being fulfilled. I have a day off next week and I’m already upset that the weather looks like we’re not going to be able to go to the water park that day!
Setting Low Expectations
The Psychology Today article is really about learning to live a happy life by setting low expectations. This is apparently an idea in anonymous groups, like alcoholics anonymous. I can see the logic. Expect less and be delighted when something decent happens. I was basically raised with this philosophy – some sort of odd 12 step parenting technique? Hello, my name is Josh and I’m your son. Hi Josh! You can imagine how your life would be more pleasant if you didn’t set yourself up for disappointment, and found joy even when things happen that aren’t a big deal.
But let’s look at the other side of this. What if you accept that the only expectations you should have are realistic ones, ones based on prior experience. The effect of this would be that your expectations will probably go down in terms of expected results. Coffee doesn’t always pep you up. Sometimes you go shopping and you don’t find a shirt. Maybe we should lower our expectations? Maybe I’ll find a shirt. Maybe I’ll feel more alert. That way I won’t be disappointed when things don’t go the way I want them to.
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When you were a kid you probably had fanciful ideas of what you’d do with your life. As a teen and in your early 20s you’d travel the world, make a huge impact, be recognized as you walked into a room and asked to speak in front of crowds. In all likelihood, your experience didn’t meet your aspirations. Hopefully this didn’t produce too much resentment on your part, but it almost certainly resulted in you adjusting your expectations. Maybe you hoped to be respected in your company, maybe have some important position, and have enough time off and money to go to fun places a couple of times a year. Things sometimes get tough. Salaries stagnate or go down, and employers want younger, less expensive people. Maybe your hopes change to keeping your job, being able to pay your bills, maybe having an hour or two of fun with your family a night, and some camping trips and visits to family in other states via a road trip.
This is life, and this is reality. Adjusting your expectations is necessary to keep you from being crushed when you don’t become an astronaut, pro soccer player or YouTube star. There’s a benefit to appreciating the little things in life, and not needing the ego boosts and constant pleasures life doesn’t seem to deliver with regularity. But consider if your expectations are a gauge or meter. What if they are not properly calibrated?
Gauging Expectations
When people are exposed to stressful situations with regularity their perspective on life is altered. They are on edge. They expect bad things to happen all the time. They are living with adrenaline, with fight or flight being a constant presence. If people had gauges for their emotional state and stress, where maybe the default state of that gauge would be at a 3 out of 10 for most people, for people frequently exposed to stressful situations their gauge may be at a 6. They’re just short of the boiling point all the time. Everything will throw them into a panic.
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If there was another of these mythical gauges in us for expectations, constantly learning to turn your expectations down might make our gauges go from a default state of 5 to a 3 or a 1. If you are always learning to tone down your expectations so you don’t have premeditated resentments, you are lowering your expectations until you expect just about nothing. While lowered expectations might be good to prevent resentment, they also encourage us to settle, and to reach less.
You won’t get to great success by settling. That’s not the direction to go in to get to the top. You won’t get there on your own, and no one will pluck you from quiet obscurity to place you on a pedestal. It’s very rare that quiet, obscure diligence results in someone noticing and rewarding you. You need to reach and try. We love stories like this – it’s the foundation for the reality shows like America’s Got Talent. You didn’t progress through the system, but you have the ability, and you’re willing to subject yourself to failure for the possibility of success. The odds of winning the lottery are so bad it’s joked they’re a tax on people bad at math, and yet one marketing slogan lotteries have used is – you can’t win it if you don’t play.
And success isn’t just from one in a million tries. Regularly reaching beyond your reasonable expectations can have positive results, and repeatedly trying trains you to do a better job of reaching.
What are our goals?
Maybe the issue isn’t with adjusting our expectations all the time, but changing the goals we are setting that lead to potential disappointment and resentment. Edison’s ability to invent is at least partially attributed to his willingness to try every possible option to find just the right one. He tried 6,000 different substances for the filament of a light bulb before finding the right one. Other inventors, like the Wright brothers, have similar histories of trying many, many times before succeeding. But it isn’t just a willingness to jump back up and not give up. They learned as they failed, and so failure wasn’t an all or nothing thing.
There’s a lot to learn from failure. And if you go into something with the expectation that you’ll fail, and adjust your expectations, it can help. I’ve tried to do this with teaching my kids to tie their shoes. I’ve told them you have to fail 100 times before you’ll succeed, and when they fail to tie their shoes correctly I praise them excitedly. With these adjusted expectations they didn’t fail to learn to tie their shoes – they succeeded in failing the first time. Only 99 more failures to go. I’d like to think this helps them, I’m not certain, but what I’m trying to instill in them is while it’s nice if they can do something perfect the first try, what’s more important is they can do it. If you’re the best hitter on the baseball team you’re still the best whether it came naturally to you or not. How you got there is an interesting story, but it won’t alter the success of your team.
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Baseball is a good subject to consider when discussion expectations. I’ve never been into sports, and am now learning most of what little I know about baseball because my young son is playing baseball, so please excuse me if what I say doesn’t grasp everything about baseball it should. The reason I feel it’s a good subject for a discussion on expectations is the tremendous use of statistics in baseball, and the importance of limited success.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Moneyball, or read the book, or even just watched a baseball game or talked with serious fans, you’ll hear so many statistics being thrown around you’d think you’re hanging out with people running a major financial system. Everything is recorded and measured. One of the simplest statistics recorded is the batting average. How often does a swing of the bat result in something other than a strike? How often does the player earn one or more bases? In professional baseball a very good player will have an average somewhere in the 300s, which is a decimal, suggesting about 1/3rd of the time they earn a base. Let that sink in for a second. A very good player fails 2/3rds of the time. They go nowhere. They lose. There are four big things I want to take from this.
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Measure
First, If you don’t know what your goals are, and don’t set some metrics to measure, you don’t have any way of measuring your success. You absolutely need to do this. There’s no need to guess. Knowing your goals and measuring them is the first step in being able to tell if you’re succeeding. We’re getting to baseball like statistics gathering with trackers for screen time, sleep, exercise and diet. Learning programs are gamefied. Just about everything is measured. Leverage that data on yourself.
Set expectations
Second, we clearly need to adjust our expectations of success. If we knew we’d fail 2/3rds of the time, our expectations would be seriously adjusted. You wouldn’t have a fear of performing, of trying, of taking risks, or stepping up to the plate. This is the scenario. You succeed one in three times. You will fail. And that’s ok. It’s actually more than ok. If you fail a mere 66% of the time you’re one of the best in the world at what you do. And that’s if you play baseball. Remember, Edison’s lightbulb filament took 6,000 tries!
Fail early, fail often
Third, you don’t succeed 1/3rd of the time without failing 2/3rds of the time. The best players in the world succeed after they have failed. That’s the way it works. If you get on base, you don’t swing anymore. You don’t fail after you succeed. Just like when you lose something, you look for it and find it – the last place you looked is where something was. You don’t look after you found it. We need to get comfortable with failure. We need to relish it. Learn from it. Count it off and expect it to happen again. Only after failure will there be success.
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Don’t judge prematurely
Fourth, statistics aren’t made from one time up at bat. They’re not even made from one game. They are at least from one season, but can also be lifetime. That means you need to be ready, eager, prepared to fail and fail and fail and fail. Great leaders need to not just tolerate, but welcome failure. It is inevitable, and it’s also a learning experience. Being deflated by it is defying reality, and impeding your inevitable success. You succeed after failure. You must go through failure first.
Great leaders don’t judge someone on their progress after one swing or one at bat – that would be ridiculous. You mustn’t judge yourself that way either, and be very wary of being under the leadership of someone so resistance to success. You read that correctly – success. If they aren’t willing to have you fail repeatedly, they don’t want success. No one in their right mind expects a home run at every swing of a bat. No one has ever had a success ratio like that. It’s beyond unrealistic expectations, it’s fanciful dreaming.
Success is built on a foundation of failure, of disappointment and frustration. But those experiences need to be respected and learned from. They need to be expected and welcomed. If you’re the world’s greatest baseball player failing 66% of the time is the dramatic music building up to a deafening crescendo before you crack the bat against the ball and send it beyond the stands and into the parking lot. You should be smiling while you fail. You don’t succeed without it, and exciting times are coming.
You’re a failure, and I’m very excited for you.
If you’d like me to speak on this subject to your organization, send me a note.