7-40 Challenge | Planning Week In 2012, I wrote a blog post called “It Is Not All About Me.” I was writing about collaborative leadership — about casting a vision and then letting other people help shape it instead of dictating every step. It was a good post. It was also about half of the … Continue reading Not All About Me (Fourteen Years Later)
Category: Work & Data
Passion Is Not a North Star
I just finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His thesis is that passion follows mastery — you don’t find your dream job by following your heart, you build it by getting so good at something valuable that opportunities find you. He profiles people who spent years developing rare skills before the work … Continue reading Passion Is Not a North Star
Keep Building Context
I met a woman at work recently — we’ll call her Jane — who’s been doing her job for thirty-five years. She made a comment in passing that stuck with me. She said somebody needs to get all the knowledge out of her head before she retires, because if nobody comes to extract it, it’s … Continue reading Keep Building Context
What Do You Have to Offer?
Cal Newport asks a question that most people get backwards. The passion mindset asks, “what can the world offer me?” The craftsman mindset asks, “what can I offer the world?” I’ve been sitting with that second question for a while now. And the honest answer surprised me. For a long time, I didn’t think I … Continue reading What Do You Have to Offer?
The Battle
There’s a battle going on inside me that I’m only now learning to talk about. On one side is the craftsman. He wants systems. Structure. Reps. He wants to know the plan, follow the plan, and measure the results. He’s the one who built a 280-day challenge with assessment weeks and daily checklists. He’s the … Continue reading The Battle
