“Wait a second.”
That’s difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it’s not always welcome advice.
And so we’ve ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop everything for.
The book of concern is more than a conceptual hack. It’s an actual physical intervention, and it might be worth trying for a week.
Write down the emergency of this moment. The one that’s taking your gaze away from your strategy and the long-term work you set out to do. Write it down.
If it’s still important in two days, go ahead and focus on it.
What you’ll probably discover is that almost all of the concerns go away on their own. The ones that don’t are definitely worthy of your scarce attention.
It might be an issue with the neighbor, a competitor or a customer. It might be a fashion concern or a social challenge. (If the building is on fire, please go ahead and put it out). Anything else, write it down. Affixing our concern to paper keeps it safely in one place, and the record we create becomes a useful reminder for next time.
What do your supporters tell their friends?
That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea.
Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters.
And yet, we spend most of our time treating people like customers, not supporters. We try to turn strangers into people who do business with us, taking the friends and supporters we’ve earned for granted.
Instead, with planning and focus, you can create the conditions where your efforts strike a chord. When your customers become fans, they spread the word. When your story is true, relevant, focused, and sticky, new fans arrive. Not because it matters to you, but because it matters to them.
The second circle is out of your direct control, and it’s tempting to ignore it. But the second circle unlocks the change you seek to make.
That’s the appeal of it, of course. There isn’t a definitive study. There can’t be.
Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there’d be room for someone to ask “what about?…”
It doesn’t matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent results we have are clear to those who read them with an open mind.
The attraction of simple stories about complex phenomena is that we get to make them up and imbue them with whatever reassurance, solace or threat we choose. Human beings didn’t evolve to be rational decision makers. We’re creators and consumers of stories, seeking status and affiliation, and prioritizing short-term feelings over long-term evidence.
It’s nice when a story that’s precious to us is reinforced by evidence, but it’s rarely essential. Belief isn’t dependent on facts, that’s why we call it belief instead of facts.
It’s helpful to wonder who benefits from sharing a particular story with us, and what it costs us to believe it.
What does it mean for us to own something?
If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back?
Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are influenced by forces out of our control.
Do we own responsibility? Is it something we take or acquire or accept?
We can try to own our past, but the best we can do is influence our future.
Ownership is a shared understanding, a construct that can shift depending on where we stand. It’s not always up to us, but it often works better if we acknowledge it.
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