“Nobody is rooting for you to fail.
You may succeed. You may fail. But, for the most part, nobody cares one way or the other.
This is good. The world is big and you are small, which means you can chase your dreams with little worry for what people think.”
—James Clear
“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
– Warren Buffett
You can read this post in six minutes. It took Seth Godin more than an hour to write.
That extra editing and polish is a benefit to the reader.
You can read this post instead of 100 others, because people highlighted or shared or ranked or otherwise filtered the other things you might be reading. That curation created value as well.
The math here is interesting indeed: 1,000 would-be authors pitch books but only 30 get published. Each book takes a year to write but just six hours to read. And you didn’t read all thirty of them, just the one that had the best reviews… 10,000 hours of work by authors and editors to deliver six hours to you.
The time dilation of polish and curation is possible because of asynchronicity and the one-to-many nature of publishing ideas.
Asynchronous because you’re not doing it live, reading it as I write it.
And one-to-many because the work of a creator is multiplied across many readers.
A friend recently sent me a note via voice mail. It was 14 minutes long. Because he didn’t spend another ten or fifteen minutes editing it into a three-minute long email, he wasted a ton of my time. But the nature of 1:1 interaction meant that it was his time or mine, even steven.
And listening to someone live, at an open mic nite or at a concert, promises wonderful surprise, but it also means that there’s bound to be a lot of dead time. Because no one is curating, and you have no selection advantage. This is the main reason I dislike podcasts.
One of the surprising unsung benefits of the worldwide web and the organized sharing of information is time dilation. A benefit we constantly waste by seeking the more human habit of mindlessly taking what comes in real-time instead.
You can handle a little risk. You can handle a little discomfort.
You can handle a little pain. You can handle a little inconvenience.
You can handle a little embarrassment. You can handle a little effort.
You can summon a little patience. You can summon a little discipline.
You can do whatever must be done when the reason is meaningful enough. You can get yourself to take the necessary action when it serves a worthy purpose.
What have you avoided, made excuses about, or put off until later just because you thought you couldn’t handle it? Imagine all the good that will come when you go ahead and utilize the strength that’s already there inside you.
— Ralph Marston
The Sun is still rising on the power of words to shape minds and the world.
Contents Tourism: Contents Tourism is a Japanese word and refers to that specific kind of tourism stimulated by Popular Culture. (New Zealand has a standout example of contents tourism: Bored of the Rings, of course. Okay, okay, for those of us who are Kiwis living in Australia, maybe it’s the Hobbit jokes that get old…) Homonormativity: The meaning of homonormativity wasn’t immediately clear to me, and I had to look it up. This word refers to the privileging of heteronormative ideals and constructs onto LGBT+ culture and identity. The word exists because the norms and values of heterosexuality are replicated and performed among the rainbow community. UAP: Unidentifiable Aerial Phenomena. We used to call them UFOs. The new phrase is from the much anticipated document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence back in June. (Trust me, you’ll have more fun reading speculative fiction. Aliens don’t appear at the end.) Paradisiacal: I wouldn’t have guessed that this is the adjectival form of paradise. (Paradicey? Paradick? NO.) Example sentence: “Island remoteness means that one person’s paradisiacal resort can be another person’s temperate prison”, introducing a very good article at The Millions on the symbolism of islands. |
This is a story about Steve Jobs, legacy, and a brutal truth most people never confront.
It’s about a single sentence Jobs included in the letter he wrote when he resigned as CEO of Apple, 10 years ago this week. But it has its roots in the commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.
Here’s the key passage from his resignation letter. It runs just 17 words:
“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”
It’s simple, matter-of-fact, and almost boring, despite how momentous the letter itself was. Read it in the context of what Jobs had said at Stanford, however, and it takes on incredible power.
These lines from that 2005 speech have stuck me ever since I first heard them:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
Steve Jobs
(I’ve embedded the video of Jobs’s speech at the end of this article. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)
By early 2011, Jobs understood that he was becoming “the old,” and that it was happening ahead of his time. Turning 56, he was battling pancreatic cancer for the second time. He’d had to take medical leave for most of the year.
He knew what was coming, and he died just 42 days after stepping down at Apple.
I expect that we’ll see quite a few retrospectives on Jobs’s life over the next little while, as we approach the 10th anniversary of his death.
But, these lines came racing back to me when I read that Cook, Jobs’s hand-picked successor, was entitled to a $750 million bonus this week for having served as Apple CEO for a decade.
It’s a lot of money, obviously. And I’m not going to pretend that Apple is without its detractors and its problems right now.
Still, consider that not only did Jobs recruit Cook to Apple, but he set up a succession plan that has now resulted in stable leadership for a full decade, and a company that is worth more than 7.5 times what it was in 2011.
Things often look inevitable in retrospect. But, all you have to do is compare the seamless transition at Apple over the past decade to succession battles at other companies that wind up consuming everything.
Heck, Jobs was a veteran of multiple succession battles at Apple, for that matter, dating back at least to when he recruited John Sculley as CEO, only for Sculley to force Jobs out of the company.
Couple that history with the fact that Jobs had already had the experience — he talked about it in the Stanford speech — of being told that his cancer would likely kill him in a matter of months.
He defied those odds for several years afterward, but the experience guided him.
The brutal truth here is really twofold:
First, all of us will die someday: you, me, everyone we know and love.
But also, if you want the things that you build to live on, then you have to begin to let go ahead of time.
Think far into the future, recruiting and growing the people you hope will take over. Let go of the very human concern that succession planning is about finding a replacement, and instead think of who might lead in his or her own way, and to destinations you might never dream of.
It means recognizing that when it comes to the tumultuous, emotional experience of a leadership change, it’s much better to be in a position where your official announcement can be as “matter of fact” and “almost boring,” as Jobs’s was.
Here’s the video of his speech at Stanford. If you haven’t seen this, I think it’s worth your time.
The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.
Alexander Graham Bell
“There is peace even in the storm.” — Vincent van Gogh
“The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.” — Haruki Murakami
Nadine Stair, an 85-year-old woman from Louisville, Kentucky, shares her answer when asked, “How would you have lived your life differently if you had a chance?”
“If I had my life to live over again, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I’d limber up. I’d be sillier than I’ve been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances, I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would, perhaps, have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who was sensible and sane, hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I’ve had my moments. If I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else—just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I could do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had to live my life over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances, I would ride more merry-go-rounds, I would pick more daisies.”
Source: Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition
I think most of us can relate to this. I know I can.