Noodling

        

If someone offers you “feedback,” your Spidey sense might start to tingle. Feedback isn’t often part of a warm and fuzzy feeling.

“Advice” is better. If you ask someone else for advice, you’re engaging them in your journey.

But, as Peter Shepherd points out, “noodling” is the best of all. When we start noodling over an idea, we can be sure that no one is going to get injured.

From education to learning

        

Education is the hustle for a credential. It exchanges compliance for certification. An institution can educate you.

Learning can’t be done to you. It is a choice and it requires active participation, not simple adherence to metrics.

Learning is the only place to find resilience, possibility and contribution, because learning is a lifelong skill that isn’t domain dependent.

Most of the learning moments in our lives are accidental or random. A situation presents itself and if we’re lucky, we learn something from it.

We built the altMBA to make learning intentional.

The last session of the year is in October, and applications are due tomorrow, August 25th.

You’ll be surrounded by a cohort of others, each on their way to leveling up and moving forward. We only do it four times a year, only with a few hundred people, always with our alumni coaches on board.

I hope you’ll check it out. Learning is our best way forward, because learning creates community.

Cheating

There are really only two ways to approach this:

“We don’t cheat.”

“We cheat when we can get away with it.”

The posture of, “our side doesn’t cheat,” is the belief in the validity of the game itself. It’s a statement of moral authority, a promise of consistency and valor. It respects the process.

The posture of, “cheat if you can,” is the belief in the ends at any cost. It degrades the system, because if everyone cheats, then there is no system left.

Cheaters often brag about their exploits, because they want to normalize them.

Sophisticated competitors, the ones who really want to win, understand that cheating destroys the very thing they set out to do. Because once cheating is normalized, the winner is the person who had the guts to cheat the most and destroy the system, not the one who deserved to win. Being against cheating doesn’t mean you don’t want to compete, it means that you do.

In every community, on every team, there are people who believe that they only chance they’ve got is to cheat. Our systems persist only when peers in the community step up and insist that the cheater stop. Because being on a team that wins by cheating is ultimately self-defeating.

Spreading like wildflowers

Often, people encounter ideas that are spreading like wildfire.

The problem with a wildfire is that not only is it out of control, but it leaves nothing but destruction in its wake.

Build an idea that spreads like wildflowers instead.

The opposite of confidence

It’s not anxiety.

And it’s not panic.

The opposite of confident is not confident. Unsure.

Being unsure can be healthy. It can help us focus on how we can make our work more likely to become the contribution we seek.

But anxiety and panic have nothing to do with an informed understanding of how the world is unfolding.

Situational gravity

        

All of us are good at rationalizing. It helps us process the world, navigate our choices and live with ourselves.

But gravity doesn’t care if you got a lot of sleep last night or not. It’s still the same amount of force.

The pavement doesn’t care if you always wear a helmet on your bike, except just this one time when you didn’t, because you were having a video taken.

Melanoma doesn’t care that you always wear sun screen, except that one day when you were really busy and couldn’t go back to the house for it.

Outside forces don’t care about the situation, because they have no awareness or memory. They simply are.

Newton’s law doesn’t care that you were really distracted and that’s why you weren’t wearing a seatbelt, and the virus that infected your friend doesn’t care about why that person in the office decided not to wear a mask, either.

People are very good at stories. That’s our core technology. Everything else in the world, though, has no interest in them.

Amplify your strengths

        

People don’t hire you, buy from you or recommend you because you’re indifferently average and well rounded.

They do it because you’re exceptional at something.

What if you invested the energy to be even more exceptional at it?