Surrounded by the future

# Chapter 196

Surround yourself with the future. You need half of your relationships to be with those who are half your age. Another Lincolnism. This is much more challenging to do than it would appear at first blush. Unless you have some specific context for being with and seeing people half your age, you might find this much more difficult than you first imagined. I mean where do you think you are going to meet people half your age?? At the grocery store? Perhaps I don’t have enough imagination but the only ways I can think of are through sports or music. Sports through a coaching or a support system, unless you are a very gifted and athletic senior and actually play, is one way. And music is another way, bands, clubs and jam sessions. There are churches, symphonic orchestras, teams and clubs and other places to connect with musicians. But if you aren’t a sports buff and or musical. There has to be more ways, but you see the limited scope of my life here.

Then there is the context. Even if you do play in a band, and I do, then American life is so tightly scheduled that there is practically zero time for even small talk, before everyone is gone and off to their next scheduled event or task. And what do you talk about? Their college classes? Their acne? Their relationships? While these people seem very young to you, you seem far far far more removed from their age to them - you are ancient. I have some people in my life that want grey beards around, but not many. You and I are simply irrelevant to them. Well we aren’t really, but to them in their world and viewpoint, we are.

I think this is a great point and easily the most difficult of the 10 on this list.

Making a difference and doing it well

# Chapter 195

Pursue excellence not acceptance. Another Lincolnism. This is about a posture of learning at its core. All great leaders are voracious learners. Great leaders spend all their energy learning and learning how to learn, not posturing and worrying about how they look. In most folks, their capacity learn determines their future success. Instead of being concerned about their looks, their social media, their “likes”, their status in the world’s eyes, they are working hard at doing what they do with excellence. In fact they may not notice whether they are accepted or not, whether they are popular or not. Fame and recognition are not nearly as important as doing a job well. In a world of Facebook, TikTok, snapchat and instagram where recognition and how many followers or friends you have feels so important, leaders aren’t even paying attention to these matters. They are all in on making a difference and doing it well. They are going big on learning all that they can and then owning the field, the company, the competition, whatever.

This top tier leader is often oblivious to the snobbish cultural cues that others around her or him are ultra sensitive to. Heck I had to point out to one of my clients all the causalities they were leaving behind in their relational wake! She just wasn’t really aware because she was so focused on learning and satisfying her curiosity. She was full on in the pursuit of excellence, and those that couldn’t keep up simply got left behind, figuratively and literally. Yet learning is essentially a humble position, and great leaders are humble toward fellow learners.

The companions of leadership

# Chapter 194

Loneliness and melancholy are likely gonna be your companions. They probably already were, but the higher you fly up the leadership ladder, the more you will find them sitting on your door stoop. I have seen this consistently in the leaders that I have work with and alongside of these past four decades. Knowing it is typical takes some of the bite out of it. Knowing that it is coming will also let you know that you are in good company! Most leaders have felt it and experienced it, because who are they going to talk to? Who could they even tell the truth to and be understood? These are very real problems for the leader at the top.

And don’t think that this is a malady only for one genre of leaders or one type of leaders like politicians, just because Lincoln was transparent about it doesn’t mean he was the only one struggling with it. I find business owners, CEO’s, CFO’s CIO’s, Civic leaders, church leaders, researchers, non-profit leaders, and all others to also experience this and struggle with it when it comes. Hell I struggle with it when it comes as much as anyone! Being misunderstood and misconstrued and misaligned and all the other mis’s, brings it on in droves.

Its ok, this too will pass, but you don’t get a bye on experiencing it. This comes and goes like most other things in life. Hang in there!

The Chair!

# Chapter 193

Leaders are willing to step out of the way, or even step down for the cause to succeed. Another Lincolnism. If you stay on or in the way regardless of the consequences, then you are just selfish, and not really leading at all. And we all know far too many “leaders” who think it is all about them. You should never ascribe motives and intentions to people, yet you are capable of reading their regular and consistent actions, and when we see “leaders” consistently taking actions that clearly are for their benefit, then we can reasonably assume that they are being stupid for their own benefit. There is no apparent action here that is for the benefit of the cause or the organization, then this is not a leader.

We lived in Eastern Europe for 22 years and they had a special word for such people - the chair! And not just any old chair either, it had to be a chair with arm rests, though I am not sure why. I missed the cultural significance of the armchair bit, but - the chair! The Chair lines his or her own pockets with gold from the company, orders people around, is the big boss, has all the prerogatives, makes all the choices, and is just a general all around bastard looking out for themselves and no one else. This is the antipathy of what we are calling a leader.

The person we admire as a leader is the one who understands what contribution they make to the cause or the org and they are willing to remove anything that prevents the goals of the cause or the org from being reached, including themselves!

Responsibility

# Chapter 192

Take the blame 100% of the time. This is the Lincoln way to lead. Are you to blame? Wrong question. Whether you are to blame or not is not the point. The point is that the leader takes the blame 100% of the time. Of course that does not mean you and I did the wrong or failed to produce or made a mistake, but it means that we take responsibility for what happens. Did you get that, we take responsibility for what happens, we don’t pass along the fantasy that it is always someone else’s fault.

I don’t know about you but this is one of the Lincolnisms that has been most tardy in showing up in my life. Taking responsibility for everything is far too much like being married. But that is precisely the leadership intensity required to be the full adult stand up leader that you and I aspire to be in everyday life. While neither of us can actually be responsible for everything that happens, we can own it in such a manner that we willingly take the blame for all that comes along. Most often this type of leadership is heard among military type stories, where a leader will never let his men be judged or punished for their actions as a group. Instead the leader understands that part of the role of leadership is to provide a covering for followers, those who willingly place their lives into the leaders hands.

Its really wonderful to know that we had such a president in America’s past. More recent versions are of the teflon variety, the kind who take everyone’s credit and zero responsibility or blame.

Pace

# Chapter 191

Pace your leadership to the speed of the people you are leading. Another Lincoln leadership lesson. And the people you are leading are likely either moving much slower than you or much faster than you. I know that you believe they are moving slower rather than faster, but you will be surprised at what is going on between their ears. This is not an intelligence matter, this is an understanding matter. And the people you are leading have a different understanding of what widget you are making, than do you. Different is different, not better or worse, but different and that also means that they will be able to move slower or faster than you based on what they grasp.

But the real point here is to adjust your leadership style and speed to those that you are leading, not trying to get them to move at your speed. If you spend all your energy trying to get them to move at your speed, then you lose what they bring to the table, you lose their expertise, you lose their perspective, you lose their input you lose all the primary values that they bring you and your organization. Lead at their speed, pace your leadership.

I know a pastor and he is a very gifted person. In fact he is about 10 times more gifted than is his congregation. I have encouraged him to move on to a different location because this one frustrates him endlessly because he is not willing to change the pace of his leadership! If you are an intellectual Einstein and your people are mentally lazy and deficient and want to be spoon fed, then this is a recipe for high disappointment. Pace your leadership, or lead something else.

Telling a good story

# Chapter 190

This most significant leadership power of all is telling a good story. Lincoln kept a constantly updated book of great stories. It has been one of my mainstays for all the years I have been in the public-speaking and leadership space. You don’t have to be a public speaker in order to need stories, you need them in your everyday leadership as well. It is how people can see what you are saying, with the same clarity that you see it inside your head. But since people aren’t inside your head, they need a story to have something to grab ahold of, the metaphors needed to understand what is inside your head - your story is what makes the point of it all clear for everyone.

For my 55th birthday Brenda gathered birthday greetings from many people in our past into a video montage. It was surprising how many of those friends recalled a story that they had heard from me which was our original bonding moment, the point where they connected with me, the story was what created the energy between us and their awareness of what they could be and do and accomplish with their lives came alive at that story which made it all seem possible in their minds. The power of story is what brought us together.

“It’s gonna really hurt” said my grandpa, my uncle Adam and I ignored him. “No I mean its really gonna hurt, so stop that right now” grandpa said more strongly, as Adam and I continued to try and stick the screwdriver into the electrical outlet. We were eight years old and ready to pay the stupid tax when Adam, the metal screwdriver, and the electricity finally made a complete circuit. The sparks were flying and …”

This story from my childhood captures everyone’s attention. And raises so many questions!!! Enough said.

How to choose your leaders

# Chapter 189

Choose your leaders based on their abilities and strengths not based on your friendships and connections. This is another Lincolnism. President Lincoln did this well. For some reason we find this very hard to do. I find myself and most everyone I know doing the precise opposite of this. The first people we look to are those that we are connected to and that are our buds. Nary a thought to their skills or abilities to get the tasks completed, but only that we “trust them” or some nonsense such as that. And we make poor leadership decisions because we aren’t willing to take the risks of hiring and/or placing the right people in the right seats on the bus that we are driving. Thus we never reap any of the rewards that could and would come from such minor risks.

Instead we prefer the misogynistic and nepotistic practices of putting our buds in the positions of impact that we control. We oughta be ashamed of ourselves for such poor leadership and development of the people and organizations that we lead. I need to make some board changes and you might need to make some personnel changes and we both are cognizant of the fact that changes are needed! More importantly this is an admonition of preventative medicine rather than corrective medicine, and that should shame us as well. We were afraid or insecure earlier in our leadership journeys and now we need to stand up straight and take the responsibility that we should have been showing all along. This is what makes for strong and growing organizations and people, not putting people into positions that they have neither the ability nor talent to accomplish - which means each and every time that these important tasks never get done ever.

Rewrites

# Chapter 188

Rewrite your first draft - every time. And then if you are really wise, rewrite it again and again. This is the next Lincoln lesson. Those who don’t need to rewrite their first draft aren’t human. We simply get better with practice. This lesson I learned really well as a public speaker. The more times I rewrote my speech the more it smoothed out and was easier and easier to deliver and the more clarity that existed in the words. (see that sentence needs a rewrite!)

Since I was a public speaker for more than 30 years I truly have polished this principle. And then I graduated to a team of public speakers and I discovered that they had no discipline at all when it came to rewriting. They waited to write their speech the night before they were to deliver it and it showed badly. I quickly removed those people from my team. Instead I wanted public speakers who would polish what they had written. Every edit and rewrite made it so much better, and that in fact is the real work of public speaking.

Of course modern politicians don’t write their own speeches like Lincoln did, instead they have professional speech writers crafting their words, and the tools we have to work with today are so far improved, iPads, thesaurus, dictionary and online tools aplenty. But the tools and professionals aside, the real work is in the rewriting, no matter who is doing it.

Lastly the most important tool in the rewriting toolbox is practicing it out loud. When a sentence is spoke out loud it reads differently than a sentence read on a page, as you hear it in your head. And that is a game changer. Then it becomes almost painfully obvious what needs to be changed and rewritten. Better yet, video yourself speaking your current draft, and you will have plenty to rewrite immediately as you listen to yourself.

Pauses

# Chapter 187

Pause before speaking, pause or pay the stupid tax. This is another gem from Lincoln. Don’t answer immediately. Wait before you answer. This is the power of the pause. Give yourself a few cotton-picking minutes to think before you pay the stupid tax. This is the way to operate most strategically. Delay is your friend here. If you wait a while, a good pause or delay or break, takes all the emotion out of your answer. It allows you to not break things nor relationships with your quick thoughtless replies. While you may win some small kudos for being quick on your feet, it generally costs you far more in damage and mistakes.

Many of my friends and acquaintances bemoan the fact that they think of the right answer long after their conversation has finished. They should be most thankful for that, instead of being disappointed in their failure to pop off some flippant comeback in a verbal tussle. If you plan want or intend to lead, your pause should be automatic and planned. This is the only way to move forward and preserve all your relationships and plans. This is the way to be a statesperson within your field or vocation. At the end of the day, most everyone wants to be led or under the authority of a thoughtful person who gives a measured response.

While the flippant quick answer person who takes no guff is the life of the party and plenty fun to be around in the right context, this is not the person we want to lead our organizations, our teams, our communities.

Excellence

# Chapter 186

There are few statesmen in the history of the USA that are more quoted than Abraham Lincoln. I have read a number of book synopsis lately on his life and from this gleaned ways to lead and live. One of his quotes that I enjoy and respect so much “whatever you do, be a good one” is just filled to the brim with great application. I think that the most powerful thing that this statement shows is that Abe Lincoln is not encouraging you to be a politician. We could stay right here on this point all day.

First of all it is a celebration of all vocations. Whatever you choose to do . . . is whatever you choose to do. There are no good vocations or bad vocations, there are just the jobs that we choose to do. However if he was advising you on jobs, he clearly is not advising you to pursue politics, given the golden opportunity he had here. And neither did my parents encourage my brother or me to follow in their footsteps, as the person in a vocation keenly sees understands and feels all the negatives of that vocation, and other vocations seem attractive to them when they are feeling those negatives.

But most importantly and significantly Lincoln is promoting excellence. Do it well. Whatever your whatever is, do it well. Don’t let anyone or anything prevent you from being one of the best at it. Have pride in what you do, have respect for your vocation even with all the negatives. Do it well. The world is hungry for excellence and that appetite never wanes.

Decisions

# Chapter 185

A decision is looming large on the short horizon. And like happens many times, there seems to be a paralysis in pulling the trigger as my mind endlessly debates the pros and cons. Every day I delay raises the cost if I follow through and that in and of itself is a growing con. There are so many moments like this in life and in the clarity of the aftermath, we find ourselves wondering why we did not make the decision and we sit there with decision regret. And decision regret can have a higher price than the struggle to decide in the first place. Yes I am doing decision analysis this morning.

These leisure decisions are the worse. Required decisions where all you have to decide are the details are relatively easy - you have to go to work and all you have to decide is what you are wearing. Leisure decisions are opportunities that come along and they generally carry a high price as well as the great opportunity. These leisure decisions have a heavy tradeoff element - you get to do something and plus you don’t get to do this other thing. You get this one opportunity that you won’t get again in this way, and if you don’t decide to do it, you don’t know what you would have experienced and enjoyed and remembered for the rest of your life. If you don’t decide, then you can predict what you get instead. The known for the unknown, the standard outcome versus the opportunity. You are not getting any younger, make the decision.

Distance is relative

# Chapter 184

Distance is relative. Relatives in California or three miles down the road, distance is relative. Brenda and her family lived in Africa when she was a kid and they saw their Africa-based cousins even though they lived in different countries. When they moved back to the states, they did not see their cousins because they lived too far away. Distance is relative. My dad was just talking about how rarely he saw his uncles and aunts even though they lived only three miles away, as he was growing up as a kid.

When my aunt and uncle needed some work done on their house, my cousin Keith asked all the relatives if some of them could help. Me and my uncle were the only two who came and helped and we live farther away than the rest by far. Distance is relative. Understand that we have lots lots of relatives and most of them live four miles away. I drove 652 miles to get there. My parents have often said that we visit them more than the children down the road visit their parents who live seven miles away. Distance is relative.

I have also been making a play on words here about relatives and distance because this is one of the areas of life that have always been difficult for us since we lived overseas 27 years and seeing our relatives was a big deal, to them and to us. When we lived in Canada we regularly made long long haul trips to visit a sister or a cousin. Distance is relative and your relatives are worth it.

Just admit you don’t know

# Chapter 183

After two days on the road we finally arrived and the first and only thing I wanted to do was exercise this leg! However the first and only thing my dad wanted to do was eat! Eating was absolutely last on my list of wants, but I ate a bit just to avoid any arguments and hurt feelings. But the bike was glorious and the day was beautiful and the blood pumping through my body was perfect. The audiobook was entertaining and distracting and made the afternoon a great experience. It is difficult to know what the proper recovery actions for such a diagnosis are, since the drs can’t agree on what causes it and how to treat it and no wonder people turn to google for the answers they are seeking, because they can’t get those answers from the people that are trained in medicine.

Don’t get me wrong, we got lots of answers - just standard, lightly researched SOP answers - the same ones we got off of google! What we need from the medical establishment is just a simple acknowledgment that they don’t know. We can work with that and go from there. That would give credibility back to the medicinal organizations that we all need. But drs don’t often say those words, “I don’t know.”

And the net result is that my aunt Linda’s dr tells her to rest and elevate her blood clot, and my dr tells me to exercise all I want and to elevate when I am not exercising. Who is giving the correct advice? I have no idea and neither do they.

Road trips

# Chapter 182

There are few things more interesting or boring than a road trip and this one has been both. Interesting in that I get time with my wife alone and that is always rare, she is in high demand. And then I got some time with old friends that we have shared many experiences with and who support the work we do around the world and we got some meals in together and some cigars together, and great conversations that were so much fun. There are few things more precious than days like this.

Boring in the sense of endless mindless miles, but that too can be a wonderful state of being, where your mind can float and make new connections or can just vegetate and not make any connection, a general state of rest and storing up some renewal. Everyone needs some of these kinds of states of being and experiences on a regular basis.

This almost always requires you to get away from “home” in order to do it though, and that is where it falls apart for most people. Most people only get away from home on an annual vacation if they are lucky. Planning to get away from home is something most Americans have to schedule and do intentionally. It won’t happen unless you have jobs like my wife and I do, where road trips and International travel is a near daily experience. This is something you need to address. My problem is just the opposite, I don’t get enough home time! But that is a post for another day.

Driven to do

# Chapter 181

Road trips with blood clots and broken feet are not what the wise choose to do. But wisdom rarely drives many of our decisions it seems. We are instead, emotional creatures and our sense of obligation and “ought to” apparently drives us far more often. Because here we are barreling down the road at 65 miles an hour with these precise ailments wearing us down and long road trips are not part of the prescribed solution, and are in fact part of the cause of these problems. Yeah long road trips on the highway or in the air should not be a part of our current schedules, but yet they are, because of guilt and expectations.

If we were wise we would expect those other people to come see us, and to make the long trip to our house, to travel hours and hours and hours to check in on us. But this does not happen, because we decide that they are more important than we are, and that this burden lies at our feet, broken though they may be. This is not wise, this is foolhardy and yet it is happening.

So to mitigate all the things that are going wrong with our bodies, we are stopping often, stretching our legs and walking often (or limping as the case may be) and generally throwing the schedule of speed out the door along with our wisdom. We will get there when we get there, but we are still going to get there. I don’t remember being this foolish when I was living overseas, it must be an American affliction.

Setbacks versus failures

# Chapter 180

Setbacks are a regular part of living. I have them you have them we all have them. There are setbacks and then there are setbacks. You have to decide how much weight to give each one of them. What are setbacks some of you wonder? The rest of us already hate you, but setbacks are when your ideal progress in a certain direction or toward a certain goal is not moving in the desired direction, thus the phrase setback. Some days can feel like one setback after another one. This is when a book like the Gain and the Gap are very handy and encouraging, that you have made progress, not today perhaps, but overall you have come so far.

That bigger perspective is super critical, understanding how far you have come and even while knowing that you want to go further, you have not failed. A setback is a setback, not a failure. A failure would be giving up. A setback is a reframing and decision making time - what are you going to do now? What changes are you deciding to make to reverse the setback of today? How are you going to dig in deeper and accomplish better? What steps are you planning and putting into play to turn this around? As long as you can answer any of these questions, or are even willing to try, then you are not a failure. Setbacks are temporary, failure is just giving up and losing all your gains.

The lost art

# Chapter 179

Focus is a lost art. It has so much competition in the screen obsessed world we live in. Heck we can’t even control our attention much less our focus. And attention precedes focus. Attention is easier to manage than focus and that is not to say that attention is easy at all with every ding, ping and vibration to let me know something or someone is clamoring for my attention! We haven’t reached for focus yet, just trying to reign in our attention. One of my best friends runs an intense business, you should listen to us have a conversation on the phone; talk for 30 seconds to 2 minutes and his business phone rings interrupting our call which we then pause until the customer is taken care of, usually 4-6 minutes, then we continue our conversation, and over the course of an hour or so, we get in a 20 minute conversation finally. We are so accustomed to this fractured way of talking and attention-switching that we think of it as normal. It is not normal.

Normal would be a phone call or a face to face conversation that goes deeper and deeper and deeper until we reach a focused state, where we gather all our concentration into this one thing, not allowing any intrusions into this conversation. But this normal is a far distant past normal for Westerners. One of the street dives that I enjoy in Asia has a sign up, “put your phone down because we don’t have wifi. Pretend that it is 1995 and talk to the person across from you.”

What we have received in the trade-off from technology are better profit margins, but less depth to our relationships. Not sure at all that this is a real improvement or even an advantage. Focus is a lost art.

Commitment

# Chapter 178

Commitment weakened culture? Oh yes. Or are we just measuring commitment wrongly? Or are we measuring the wrong thing entirely?

I had a breakfast with a local pastor yesterday and all the lament was about the lack of commitment. He couldn’t get anyone to agree to fill the leadership roles within the church, and without those positions being filled, his structure doesn’t work. So if the commitment being measured within the local congregation is the willingness to take on more responsibility and hard work and hanging an official title around your neck, then clearly commitment is lacking. If we make this the definition of our dedication to a cause or organization then we are in big trouble. People are clearly not interested in expressing their commitment, dedication or enthusiasm in these ways.

But what if we changed the measuring stick we are using to measure commitment? What if we measured engagement as the marker of commitment rather than willingness to take on predefined roles of responsibility? What if we measured commitment by the depth and frequency of hang out together times outside of the regular workday or church-day? What if we measured how often and to what extent they helped others achieve their goals? What if we measured the quality and quantity of their investments in the lives of the other people in our organization, as the measurement of commitment? Essentially what if we measured their character, rather than their enthusiasm for a pre-defined job that doesn’t interest them or fit their skills? There are just so many other ways to decide if people are committed or not.

Push it to the limit or . . .?

# Chapter 177

How to find our limits and how to know when to cut our losses? Honestly I don’t know. These two overlap in such a way that I could argue for either, but I can’t think of a formula for when to break one of them off in favor of the other action. The find-our-limits club is the never quit club. If you quit, if you give up, if you stop then there is no way for you to discover and explore the outer reaches of your capabilities. And I am not sure why we are in love with the idea of going as far as we can go on any given subject or action, but we seem to be. Perhaps it is the idea of loss that drives this phenomenon instead. That if I don’t become all that I could have been, then I have lost something precious, the world has lost some new vaccines, the universe is one doctor short of . . . whatever. There is some kind of equation here about potential and actualization. About becoming what you were made to do, sent to accomplish, your mission in life can’t be realized unless you find your limits?

The cut-your-losses-on-a-losing-bet club are the stop quickly group. Don’t keep pouring resources into a black hole kind of thing. This would be the innovator’s club, where you iterate quickly and intentionally and regularly, only staying with some pursuit or action or development as long as the positive results are clear and apparent. This is how many of the most useful tools we use in every day life were created. They aren’t push-it-to-the-limit tools.

And there you have it. Oh and don’t forget sunk costs to mix this up even more. I am sure there are other factors that I am forgetting or not realizing, this is a complicated subject and it was fun thinking about it.