Eat the Frog — and Other Words to Live By (Part 1)
College application season is running at full throttle in the US these days, and as I found myself giving advice to a high school senior the other day, I could just see her eyes glaze over. A thought bubble appeared above her head.
“Please God make these people stop giving me advice.”
For most of us, where we apply to college is the first truly big decision we get to make for ourselves – and EVERYONE wants in on it.
Including me. I’ve been obsessed with advice for a while now. When our twins were leaving for college, I crowdsourced my friends, asking for their best advice on college. Then I compiled it into a booklet and gave it to the kids.
So I was delighted earlier this month when my daughter, now applying to law schools, was asked to write in one application about (no kidding!) a piece of advice she had received that had been helpful to her. It was a beautiful moment.
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do. It is never of any use to oneself.
”
We’ve all gotten bad advice from time to time, but I have always tried to at least listen to it, and along the way I’ve found a few things that have really helped. My favorite bits have been counterintuitive. And they’ve forced me to completely reimagine the frame of the problem I am facing.
That’s what I am sharing in two parts: a total of 10 bits of side angle insights that have informed my work life, from people who managed to tell me something in a way I could understand and have been able to use.
A drum roll, please….
Oh come on. It’s a metaphor. (photo by Cotxapi.com from Unsplash)
1.Eat the frog: There is plenty of advice out there about starting small. I love putting items on my to-do list that I can knock out in 5 minutes so I can cross them off my list. And I’ve written plenty about the power of small victories. But most days, in most situations, it pays to do what Mark Twain first suggested: if you eat a live frog at the start of the day, everything else will seem easy. Put another way, once you do the hardest task on your list -- the one you’ve been trying to avoid – the rest of the day, you’ll be stunned how much getting that one thing done reduces the stress in your life. (Writing this piece is today’s frog.) Eat your frog.
2. Write the memo: When I first went to work in the administration of North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt in the 1990’s, I knew very little about the world of government and politics, so I asked Gary Pearce, . the Governor’s chief strategist, how I could learn. “Volunteer to be the person who writes the memo summarizing meetings,” he said. It sounded to me like a pain in the patootie – why volunteer to do more work when I was already busy? -- but taking the advice gave me superpowers. If you are the person who writes the memo, it turns out, you have to think more deeply about what really happened than anyone else. You can’t make stuff up, but you get to make decisions about particular points of interest. You can’t overstep, but you often get to assign followup. And you have to fully understand what was and wasn’t said. I learned a boatload about communication and management “writing the memo.”
3. Underpromise; overdeliver: This was one of the mantras of my boss in two different jobs, Erskine Bowles, and it clangs against the “fake it till you make it” culture we live in. I don’t think the point is that we need to set intentionally lame goals; it is that if we promise a result that can only be achieved in the best case scenario, we risk losing someone’s trust. When we rightsize expectations up front, an exceptional outcome leaves everyone feeling good.
4. Speak to the edge of the frame. This was one of my most important lessons when I was working as a TV reporter. The idea is that you have limited time to communicate what you are trying to say, but the video is doing a lot of the work for you. So your job is to tell people what is on the edge of the frame; what they might not see. This lesson has gone way beyond television for me. People’s time is valuable; you need to value it by sharing something they don’t know.
You got to know when to fold ‘em. (photo by Ali Kazal, Unsplash)
5. Grit is good. So is quit. Grit has been on a roll for at least a decade. Thanks to Angela Duckworth’s work, millions more people have persisted through huge challenges. And a lot of them have had good results. But there is an equally strong case for being able to, as Kenny Rogers put it, “know when to fold ‘em; know when to walk away; know when to run.”
We have to be willing to overcome the sunken cost fallacy and admit that there are times an idea is just not going to work, a product is not going to sell and a job is unsalvageable.
Similarly once an idea is underway, the product is selling or the job has been accomplished, there’s a great chance to move on to something else interesting. Annie Duke makes a compelling case for this in her new book: Quit.
“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
But wait. It’s not quite time to shut up… or quit. Next time I’ll share five more….
-Leslie
Notes:
Angela Duckworth and Grit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Duckworth
Annie Duke book on the power of selective quitting: https://www.amazon.com/Quit-Power-Knowing-When-Walk/dp/0593422996