Starting Over
Did you know this newsletter was supposed to be a podcast?
I was getting increasingly frustrated with the nonsense that I was reading and listening to about leadership, work, management, business and all the other things I touch upon here and wanted to share my thoughts. I also thought there was a load of good information that wasn’t being shared and discussed and could inform the conversation, so I wanted to share that.
When I say I was getting frustrated, what I mean is that I was shouting at my screen, or whilst I was listening to a podcast (which is a very good way to get a seat on a train, I discovered). So I thought a weekly podcast would be a good thing to do, part therapy and part promotion.
Turns out it’s a lot harder to do than I thought. Ranting for a minute or two is easy, coming up with a coherent monologue for 20 minutes or more is really hard. In my head, I was brilliant. On the recording, I was a bumbling, incoherent fool shouting at the moon.
Well, it was an experiment. It wasn’t a failure because I learnt that I wasn’t really suited to that medium. I have the perfect voice for writing, to rework an old joke. So I started this as an experiment and learnt that this is really my ideal medium, long form writing where I can gather my thoughts and explore topics a bit more deeply.
My progress with this Not-Newsletter is best explained by this quote from Ira Glass, the US public radio personality:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
After more than a hundred of these, almost every week, I feel like I’m getting half decent at this. I can see that my writing and my thinking has improved enormously. I know I can get better still because I’m not as good as my taste but I also know it’s hugely important to do what I can and keep doing it.
Seth Godin says that everyone is an artist. At times, I’ve thought that a bit overblown but now I think he’s right. We all create our lives, we all create in our work, we humans are creative beings. Godin also talks about ‘The Dip’ (he written a book called just that) and how what separates those that we think are successful and the rest of us is not that they are more talented or gifted but simply that they keep pushing and get through the dip.
That’s why it’s important to do something that taps into your intrinsic motivation. Something you love, or find purpose in or feel compelled to do for some reason. That’s what will help you fight your way through, push past the dip and get somewhere near to where your taste is leading you.
This is the truth that lies behind all those glib internet memes about ‘follow your passion’, ‘unlock your inner genius’ and ‘live your dreams’. However, the ‘secret recipe’ is hard work, handling disappointment and persevering anyway. That doesn’t look so good on an Insta post, does it?
It’s also why people often hit a wall in the middle of their careers. The work they are asked to do doesn’t have enough appeal, if any, to their intrinsic motivation. They hit a dip in their career, where their progress has slowed because there’s less space the further you are up the hierarchy, the day-to-day is often tedious bureaucracy wrangling, and the personal cost no longer seems worth the rewards and shiny baubles. What lies ahead is more of the same up until retirement or, more likely, being deemed too expensive/too inflexible/too principled/too old and being pushed out and they just don’t see how they can keep going.
And that’s where my next experiment comes in.
Electric Dreams
But before unveiling that, my podcasting ambition was not entirely thwarted, it just took a different path. And led to a different experiment.
Ben Simpson got in touch to ask me to do a presentation to a group he helped to run, the Deming Alliance, which I duly did. He then asked me if I’d be interested in collaborating in some way to pool our resources, along with Paul Jansen, a mutual acquaintance. Ben’s original idea was a newsletter but we decided that perhaps a discussion between us would be better. Paul said he could record and edit video, so we agreed to put it out on YouTube. And so Work Punks was born.
For the first couple, we all brought a different item to discuss but then we decided focus on a single topic because we thought it would produce a better flow and more interchange. It was supposed to be a bit like a chat down the pub and that was the vibe we were after. A few episodes later we brought in our first guest, Lizzie Benton, and the four-way conversation worked really well. We’d got through the umm’s and ahh’s, the long pauses, the tripping over words and made Paul’s job of editing a lot easier! At the same time, we’d got to know each other and gelled.
That was when we made it a podcast too. (You can listen to all the episodes at www.workpunks.com or wherever you get your podcasts). So I got to become a podcaster but not in the obvious way. I got there BECAUSE I went down a different path, because writing this every week gave me the clarity of thought, the confidence in my views and the fluency of expression I didn’t have in that halting, embarrassing, never-to-be-heard-in-public first solo attempt.
That episode with Lizzie popped up in my podcast feed recently, so I thought I’d listen to it and, to my pleasant surprise, I thought it wasn’t out of place at all. It’s definitely not as good as my regular listens like ‘Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat’ by Bruce Daisley, ’Leading from the Heart’ by Mark C.Crowley or ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ by Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd but it’s good enough. Plus they have many more episodes on us, so we have lots of room for improvement.
The latest episode has just dropped, a discussion about the office of the future and how to design for it, where we’re joined by workplace expert Damian Mears. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to the podcast.
The most important thing about this experiment, and what’s really made it a success, is that it’s been fun and I’ve built better relationships with a couple of great guys. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the things you enjoy turn out to be successful and sustainable, but it’s definitely not said often enough. Be guided by that and you won’t go too far wrong.
What’s Your Name?
And so to my next experiment, the Corporate Survival Guide, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
It’s going to include all the things I wish I’d known when I was in Corporate, the stuff that would have alerted me to the dangers and given me the tools to avoid the problems and protect myself from the damage that Corporate life can, and often does, inflict.
My intention is to help you navigate your way through the hazardous waters and use your agency and power to get to a better place. That might be to make change happen in your organisation, it may be to figure out what to do when you hit that wall in mid-career or it may be how to process what’s happened to you and start to re-invent yourself for a post-corporate life.
It’s very much a work-in-progress, I have some ideas that I’ll be bringing forward next month after my summer break and looking to get people involved soon after.
If it sounds like something you would be interested in, you can register your interest and I’ll keep you up-to-date with developments and make sure you get first offers for whatever I end up putting out. I’d love you to help me design it too, so I can be sure I’m meeting your needs. You can register your interest by leaving your email HERE.
It Started With A Whisper
When I started Decrapify Work, it was because I felt there were voices that weren’t getting heard, experiences that weren’t being shared, needs that were very much being overlooked. I had some trepidation because, well, who was I to point this stuff out?
I hadn’t been a CEO or sat on a board. I wasn’t an ‘entrepreneur’. I wasn’t an academic, or an expert or a ‘guru'. I wasn’t from HR, or Organisational Development. I didn’t have an MBA, I hadn’t written a book, I hadn’t done a TedTalk. I hadn’t worked for one of the big consultancies, or one of the FAANGs. I hadn’t studied leadership, or management theory, or philosophy, or psychology. I wasn’t like any of the people who I read, watched and listened to.
All I had was my own experience, as someone who held an operational role, who had managed and led people, who had run many projects and launched many products and services. I had been there and done it and been battered and bruised in the process. I not only had the T-shirt, I had the wounds and scars.
And I’d spoken to lots of people much like me, people who had got the rough end of corporate life, who had never made the ‘corner office’ or the ‘top floor’ but had just slogged their away in the middle.
Exactly the voice and experiences that weren’t being heard. And I felt really needed to be.
So, ignoring all the reasons not to do it, I thought “Sod it! Someone’s got to say something. If not me, then who?”.
It’s one of those trite phrases that ‘inspirational’ speakers often trot out, isn’t it? “If not you, then who?”. Just before the slide saying “Be the change you want to be”. But, as you can see from my experiences, it’s not as simple as they make out. It involves quote a lot of stumbling around, half-starts, periodically being crippled with doubt and fear, embarrassing experiments, blind alleys, mood swings, luck and whole lot more besides (some of which you’re not too proud of when you think back).
But all you need to do is start, to speak out (even if it’s ever so quietly). If it’s something you really want to do, really need to do, then you can build from there. And one day you’ll look back and think, “Oh, turns out it WAS me who had to do that. And I did become the change that I wanted to see”. Only it didn’t feel like a noble and courageous act of a slick Insta post but more like undiginified scrabbling around in the dirt of the arena until you lucked out.
So get scrabbling. That’s the real work to be done.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt