Losing and the Myth That Hard Work Always = Success

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My basketball team is losing a lot, more so this year then the program ever has in recent memory. Being at the helm of the ship, I will take a lot of personal responsibility. Among the thousands of definitions of leadership, I think the one that is most applicable to team sports is “to allow and promote team members to fulfill their potential.” Unlike any other team activity, sports is the only one where the team truly needs each and every member of a 12 man squad to contribute. You occasionally will hear of a player who “took over the game” but those instances are rare. From the seemingly trivial – making sure water is ready on the bench during timeouts – to the very real and practical on the court, everyone needs to be giving 100% or else the whole thing falls apart. Unlike, say, cross-country, a basketball team lives and dies based on every person’s effort. This makes the experience both exhilarating and frustrating.

Losing – be it games, deals, employees, or whatever – can always be taken in two ways. Do you learn something from it or not. In my opinion, you can’t be an entrepreneur without being competitive. If you don’t feel nervous before something important, and don’t temporarily feel like shit if you don’t win, then you don’t care enough. True competitors, though, do not let the emotions of a win or loss overtake the most important thing which is careful attention to why certain things turned out they way they did.

A hard lesson that my team and I are discovering is that hard work doesn’t always equate to success. A lot of adults tell kids “Keep on working hard and you can be/do anything.” Ding ding ding – it’s REALITY time! Working hard is a critical factor and should be framed as the only factor that YOU can control. If something outside your control goes haywire, well, shit happens.

Last night, I watched a DVD for pleasure for the first time in awhile – Friday Night Lights – based on the popular book and true story. It is a must-see for anyone who is interested in how crazy high school football in West Texas is. The movie put my athletic experiences in perspective, as my life (unlike the students in the movie) does not start and end with basketball.

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Dare To Be Mediocre (Time/Energy Management)

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Nothing is more hip then being busy. Never have I ever encountered an entrepreneur or business-person who wasn’t “crazy busy.” If you aren’t running around closing deals, meeting people, firing off emails, or taking care of office work, then surely you aren’t successful, or so it goes. Several months ago I posted on a study that showed that some people intentionally delay responding to email so people don’t think they are too available. In the majority of cases, I think this whole “up to my eyeballs” is BS and people just like the “cowboy” approach of running around fighting fires as they come up.

The most common question I get from people I first meet is “How do you manage school, business, and everything else?” I’ve never had a good answer, but recently I distilled my three time management techniques into one simple sound bite: a) Don’t watch TV, b) For every new commitment you take on, drop one other equal commitment, and c) If it can be done in under a minute, do it NOW.

A teacher mentioned another one to our class today – dare to be mediocre. Being a perfectionist in everything is silly. Dare to be mediocre in some things, and your total value added will be extraordinary. I like it. Dare to be mediocre. Now I have a fourth sound bite.

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A couple good journalism articles

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Salon has a free, well-written review of Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media. It touches on a number of important issues about how “every morning’s edition of the Times defines what the terms of discourse will be on that day for the political, intellectual and media elites of the United States.” (Hat tip: Jesse Berrett).

In this month’s Columbia Journalism Review, there is a thoughtful essay called Let’s Blame the Readers which articulates how the changing notion of citizenship has affected newspaper readership. “The traditional and primary collective goal of public schools building literate citizens able to engage in democratic practices has been replaced by the goal of social efficiency, that is, preparing students for a competitive labor market anchored in a swiftly changing economy.” The essay cities a recent study of citizen education which described three different varieties of citizenship: the “personally responsible citizen,” the “participatory citizen,” and the “justice-oriented citizen. The first contributes food to a food drive, the second helps organize a food drive, while the third explores why people are hungry and acts to solve root causes.” (Hat tip: Tim Porter.)

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Paul Graham on What You'll Wish You'd Known (High School)

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In his book Hackers & Painters Paul Graham spent a surprising amount of time talking about high school and college and the education system. Today, he published an essay on his web site called What You’ll Wish You’d Known written in second-person voice directed to high school students but applicable to anyone interested in youth or the education system.

It’s a good read. The first part of the essay is golden (the second half he starts rambling a bit). He talks about how high school kids are freaking out about what their life work is going to be – so true – and how every May graduation speakers tell us “don’t give up your dreams!” What that means, he says, is that we are encouraged to pick a goal 20 years out and work backwards from it. But this means that we’re bound by some plan we made early on and can lead to a disaster. He has lots of other thought-provoking nuggets, so stop reading me, and go read his essay if you a) have kids, b) are a kid, c) interested in young people, d) interested in how we approach education and teaching.

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Beyond a "Flat Hierarchy" in Business

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I had an interesting lunch with Don Yates and Chris Yeh the other day. Don is an HBS grad and UCLA PhD in Management Science who’s now a management consultant with an admittidly radical philosophy. I described Chris here. Don’s fundamental premise is this: command-and-control, hierarchical, boss/subordinate management is dead wrong. The culture of an "extraordinary organization" embraces:

  • freedom
  • equality
  • community
  • individual fulfillment

replacing the current culture of:

  • command
  • control
  • hierarchy
  • class structure
  • people as means to organizational ends

He recently profiled an organization embracing this culture, and this was the bait that got me interested in Don. The Sudbury Valley School is a charter school in MA that has no "teachers" or "principal," just independent kids from ages 4-19 who show up each day and decide what to do. They can fish all day if they want or they can ask an adult to teach them math. Every school rule is decided at a School Meeting in which each student and adult has one vote. When a student feels like s/he is ready to move on, he writes a thesis and paper explaining why he thinks he’s ready to graduate. The Assembly (Board of Trustees) considers the thesis and may issue a diploma. 80% of the students go on to college. Talk about changing the paradigm. Don wants to spread this model to more for-profit companies. He scoffs as the recent trend of "empowering" employees because that indicates that there is someone who is in power to do the empowering! He scoffs at the idea of "flat hierarchies" – indeed, he sees no middle ground. Either the paradigm shifts or it doesn’t. Either self-managed work groups and a workplace where everyone is equal becomes the culture, or it doesn’t. How in the world do decisions get made in an environment like this? Majority-rules, consensus-based decisions with an emphasis on retaining the hearts and minds of the minority. How do you ever find consensus? By getting at the core of a person’s belief system. Don believes that by asking "why do you believe that?" four times you arrive at someone’s core beliefs which probably unknowingly drive everything. It’s hard to get your head around a totally radical way of thinking about management, but it makes you think. And that’s a good thing.

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