Eat the Frog — and Other Words to Live By (Part 2)
Still just a metaphor. (photo by Cotxapi.com from Unsplash)
Note: This is the second of a two-part series on the most useful advice I have gotten for my work life. You can find Part 1 here.
In my previous post I confessed to an obsession with advice-giving and getting.
I’m not alone. We apparently love to get advice, enough to pay big bucks for it. Last year in the US we paid $2.875 billion to different organizations to give us advice on how to get young people accepted into colleges; we paid another $2.1 billion to “life coaches” to help us get our careers or lives together.
We also love to give free advice: it makes us feel useful and, most importantly, we don’t have any responsibility to act on it – we’re dumping that responsibility on someone else.
The problem with most advice, I think, is not that it is bad. It probably worked for the advice-giver. But that may have been when they were in their 50’s. Or in the 1950’s. And a lot of the time we’ve already heard the advice or even tried it, but it didn’t work.
My list is the stuff that made me pay attention because it was non-obvious, and it worked. Like eating the frog. Here are numbers 6-10 on my list (What’s on yours? Could you share in comments?).
Maybe the ratio should be 4:1?
6. God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. I first heard this at about age 8 from my great-aunt Sue Shepard, the sweetest woman I knew, and it took me a few years to work out the math and logic of it. I still struggle with it. But you can’t possibly be successful in management or work or life if you don’t get the concept.
7. You get in a lot more gates if you know the gatekeepers. My father was an architect, but his main responsibility was sales – convincing new clients to hire his firm to design buildings for them. But he couldn’t make any sale unless he could get an appointment to see the person who can buy. So he got to know every gatekeeper at every organization – their birthdays, their dog’s names. He took photos, brought them carnations. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do this, and it doesn’t work if it is just a sales tactic; it worked for my father because they saw that he was genuinely interested in them. They also got him on the calendar and put his calls through.
Frederick the Great, tactical genius and horse lover
“He who defends everything defends nothing. ”
8. If you’re about everything, you about nothing. This is a corollary of Frederick the Great’s battlefield advice from former boss Erskine Bowles-ism (see underpromise/overdeliver from previous post); just a reminder that at any given time any given organization can only be exceptional at accomplishing a very small number of things. My tendency has always been to make everything a priority; when I have bombed it has been because that’s meant nothing was a priority. Some things really are more important than others; the challenge of management is making those calls.
“It’s hard to make predictions. Especially about the future. ”
9. Find the problem nobody else is working on. There are always a lot of really smart people working on the blindingly obvious problem at work, and there always should be. But I’ve never had any confidence I was smarter than everyone else in the room, so I’ve tried to find projects that nobody else in the room is working on. And it turns out that there is less competition -- and an incredible opportunity -- for anyone who is thinking about and working on the problem behind the problem, or the aspect of the problem that will present itself once the immediate challenge is met. The person who can see around the corner and begin thinking about that problem becomes really valuable.
It’s so easy to fall for the hype of linear success…
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
10. The path to the future is …squiggly: You’ll hear plenty of people tell the story of their incredible string of victories, and very few mentioning their fails, small or large. You’ll see plenty of growth curves showing that success in projects, or organizations or life moves along a 45 degree up-sloping trend line or explodes like the profile of a hockey stick. But it never does; despite our best plans, land mines blow up. If we are lucky we move two steps forward and one step back -- but we aren’t always lucky.
We need to get people prepared for a squiggly life.
So that’s my list of 10 hard-won truths that have made my work life more productive. I Googled “Best Advice” just now, and got a reality check: there were 9,230,000,000 results. I’ve just added 0.000000000108% to the collective trove of advice available.
But maybe our first instinct shouldn’t be to look to others to advise us anyway. As I was looking for advice on this post, I found a great 2018 study from the Journal of Psychological Science that showed that, when faced with challenges in their lives, middle schoolers who were asked to give advice to other students did better than those who received advice from expert teachers. Maybe it’s truly better to give than to receive?
-Leslie
Notes:
Size of college counseling industry: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/education-consultants-industry/#:~:text=The%20market%20size%20of%20the,at%20%242.9bn%20in%202023
Life coaches industry: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/life-coaches-united-states/#:~:text=The%20market%20size%2C%20measured%20by,industry%20increased%202.5%25%20in%202022.
David Brooks new book, How to Know a Person, is essentially a 271-page treatise on listening. My Aunt Sue would be very pleased to read it: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X
There are a lot of gatekeeper strategies: I’m just recommending #3 on this list: https://www.unique.ch/en/blog/gatekeepers-and-how-to-get-past-them
Tis better to give than to receive (advice): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6728546/