Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men, and anyone else that's interested.
Posts tagged with #Excellence
My sons,
We live in a world that expects instant results. Whether it is startup life where companies are expected to achieve 8 figure revenues in their first year of existence, corporate life where employees are expected to turn around problematic behaviors or troublesome team dynamics in the next quarter, or personal life where we expect same day delivery, instant meals, high speed wireless internet, and every other instant gratification method we can think of, our world has been barreling down the path of bigger, better, faster, and more instantaneous.
In such a cultural dynamic, it is often difficult to pause, to take the time to think, and to expend the effort required to make decisions that are holistic and focused on the long term.
The value of patience
Fortunately, with a little bit of effort to expand our field of view, we can find many examples of outcomes that were only made possible with persistence, grit, and a steadfast commitment to stay the course. A number of age old adages come to mind:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day” “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” “Slow and steady wins the race”
Every one of these points us to the fact that nothing truly great can be rushed. Whether we’re talking about industry changing products, society changing cultural adjustments, or even life changing romances, every single thing that lasts, that is remarkable, that is revolutionary takes time.
Constant, gentle pressure
When I was younger, I believed in the epic moment, the great reveal, the climactic prestige. Everything around me pointed to it, and much of my surroundings and inputs led me to place a lot of value in it. Hollywood taught me that no matter how dire things got, a grand gesture (romantic or otherwise) can save the day, repair a relationship, or turn the tide of battle. I was repeatedly fed the myth that a hero could take any bad situation - a failed relationship, a lifelong rivalry, a generations-old conflict - and completely turn it around and be victorious. And they could do it in style, with a flair that was immediately daring and yet attainable, and all in the movie goer friendly timespan of two hours. Cue the credits.
Sadly, real life doesn’t work that way.
Real life works over the span of a lifetime. It works through the duration of a career, over the course of one’s academic tenure, and over the full cycles of our economic process. It requires a collection of little things, of the steadfast and persistent determination that is willing to do the unglamorous, of the grit required to slog it out. Not some heroic flash bang effort.
Success in real life requires constant and gentle pressure.
Slow cooking my steak
I love steak. When my brother got his first paycheck at his college internship, he took my parents and I to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. While I’ve never solved the mysteries of who Ruth is, and what a “Chris steakhouse” is, that experience got me hooked onto steak for life. Throughout my young adult years I ventured into as many steakhouses as I could afford, lucky as I was to have work pay for many of these experiences in the guise of a work trip (I’ve been to every steakhouse in Cedar Rapids Iowa, Boulder Colorado, and even Mountain View and Sunnyvale California).
As I got older and became more financially responsible, I decided to learn how to recreate these culinary delights myself. I went through all sorts of books and articles, watched any number of master chefs argue for their method being the best, and experimented with everything from the reverse sear to direct grilling to baking and using my Searzall.
But then one fateful day during the COVID pandemic, I discovered the Sous Vide, and my life was changed forever. Picture perfect steak, cooked consistently all the way through, every single time. Heaven. The secret? Constant and gentle pressure. Well, constant low temperature water bath anyway. But you get the point.
The small things
As a dad, I’ve discovered that model to be an extremely effective one that works across a myriad of scenarios raising my children. My son now pitches for his select baseball team. But 6 years ago when we started, he hated baseball. Never wanted to play catch, didn’t want to go to practices. But over those years, several times a week I’d coax him outside to throw 20 balls with me each time. Slowly - painfully slowly - he started coming around to it, to the point where much of his identity is wrapped up in baseball, in his team, in his development.
Constant, gentle pressure.
As a leader and a manager, one of my strengths is in building great teams. We live in a world where nothing meaningful can be done on one’s own. Everything requires teams, and the more effective the team, the better the outcome.
A technique I stole from the late great Bill Campbell is the practice of starting every staff meeting with 90 seconds around the room of non-work stuff. There is much research that has shown that the greatest teams are the ones that have a strong amount of psychological safety. The root of psychological safety is trust and vulnerability - you need to trust that when you share your open and honest view that your teammates will respond well, regardless of whether they agree or violently disagree with the point at hand. Freedom to express without fear of retribution.
How do we build trust and vulnerability? By getting to know each other on a human level. Turns out when you hear 90s a week about a person’s life and you engage with them on those small tidbits, over the course of a year or two, you’ve actually gotten to know quite a lot about that person. I now know more than I could have imagined about fishing, about the types of gear, the different techniques, when one fishes from a boat vs shore etc, and I’ve never held a fishing rod in my adult life because every week for the better part of 4 years, one of my teammates would tell us all about his fishing adventures.
Constant, gentle pressure.
Turning on the pressure
A few thoughts on how to effectively start your own slow cooking process:
- Be transparent about your intentions. Whether you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your team, to teach your children some great habits, or to elevate the conversations of your friend group, being transparent about your intentions up front is crucial. No one wants to feel hoodwinked, and if your intentions are good, generally you’ll get people to lean in simply by sharing with them what you’re trying to do.
- Start small. Remember, it’s gentle pressure. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows us that the way to change our habits is to start small. Want to lose weight? Don’t start by trying to cut out all your favorite snacks and move to green smoothies. Start simply by stepping on the weight scale every morning after you shower.
- Be consistent. Whether we’re talking about raising children, growing teams, or managing customers, consistency matters. A lot. If you’re a notoriously chaotic person, then you’ve got to develop systems that will help you maintain that consistency despite your personal working style.
We see this phenomenon in nature as well. Places like Antelope Canyon in Arizona are breathtaking in their natural beauty. It took hundreds of thousands of years filled with flowing water, windblown sand, and natural erosion to produce something so marvelous. Let’s take a page from mother nature’s playbook and apply that same constant, gentle pressure to the beautiful things that we endeavor to build!
My sons,
We live in a world of deteriorating standards. Across the board, our world’s standards seem to be slowly but surely dropping. Whether we’re talking about personal standards (ie standards of excellence, of learned behavior, of understanding and tolerance of others) or corporate ones (ie corporate responsibility, loyalty towards employees and customers alike) it is easy to see things degrading.
Gone are the days when people sought excellence purely for excellence’s sake. Excellence is now a means to an end, and its pursuit is one for which people are always trying to find shortcuts and hacks. Excellence sought for excellence itself is passé. This is because there is an ever shrinking set of circumstances in which one seeks those that are excellent. Instead, we now seek the popular, the trendy, the viral. The leap to a hyper-connected world that technology is shrinking everyday has had the unintended negative side effect of overloading us with so many choices and alternatives that our pursuit of excellence has been replaced.
We now seek to be just “good enough”.
Because excellence isn’t rewarded. Because who cares if someone else is better, so long as you’re more popular and are good enough. Because our shrinking attention spans have an increasingly difficult time telling the difference.
And yet it’s there.
In the recesses of our minds, in the quiet place that still occasionally gets a small amount of attention, in that faintest of voices that is getting harder to hear as each year goes by, we know that there is a difference. We know that excellence matters. We know that humans are capable of much more. We know that we are capable of much more.
Why having high standards is hard
Our world has become increasingly more complex. There are more things to do in a given day than ever before. More requirements, more demands, more complexity to each of those demands. More inputs that we need to stay on top of, more trendy waves that come and go that we need to ride. And yet we still have the same 24 hours in a day that our ancestors had.
As such, things get missed. We try to cut corners. We don’t have the time to look deeply into things, so we find substitutes. We find believable people and trust their recommendations. We look at facades and veneers and try to judge books by their covers. We find ways to make progress and make decisions despite not having the time to fully consider all the options. And slowly but surely, we move towards a space where popularity and perceived excellence matters more than actual excellence.
And slowly our standards drop. Not maliciously but unconsciously. Not intentionally but unobtrusively and unnoticed.
Our attention spans have lowered so much that headliners pass as news, twitter passes as a worthy news source, and reading the top 5 customer reviews passes as doing our own product research. We are no longer concerned with excellence. We have replaced that with a concern for “good enough” performance. Who cares if one has an excellent product so long as the one we do have is good enough and performs well enough to fool the average observer?
Surely there is a better way.
It turns out that despite the slow and steady dampening of our senses, our world on a whole is still able to recognize excellence in those rare moments that it appears. While it unfortunately will take a crisis moment for this awareness to surface, we by and large are still universally able to recognize these rare moments of excellence when they appear. Because of the increasing rarity of these events, their impact becomes disproportionally large; a fact which the keen observer internalizes as an incentive to demonstrate excellence, which in turn drives the desire to actually be excellent.
Why it’s hard to hold others to a high standard
Keeping standards high is hard. It is unnatural (nothing sinister here, just simply not-natural) and difficult, and over time can become taxing and seemingly not worth it. Anyone practiced in discipline knows that keeping standards high comes at a price. Often that price is a hard trade off that our natural selves don’t want to accept. Sometimes that price is a difficult trade off that not only impacts ourselves, but others around us as well.
As such, we don’t want to inflict those trade offs on others. We are often very eager to give people passes, to lower the expectations, to extend grace - this is especially true for those that we love! This is natural, but is also harmful for a number of reasons that immediately surface once we apply any amount of critical thinking to our actions.
The dangers of relaxing our standards
In not holding our loved ones to high standards we do them a disservice as they will presently come to believe that the lower standard is sufficient, which will end up hindering their personal growth and progress. Often this is done with the best intentions! When someone we care about performs below their capacity we are brought to a crossroads that we perceive to have two possible outcomes:
- We give feedback and hold the bar high and as a result cause hurt, force an uncomfortable conversation, and potentially damage/ruin the relationship.
- We let this instance slide and opt instead to offer less direct feedback, hinting at or implying a performance issue while protecting the relationship.
When faced with these decisions, we will often pick the latter option both because we want to maintain the relationship and because we typically aren’t equipped to have a critical conversation in a manner that is clear, direct, and yet kind.
It is also worth noting that both of these outcome descriptions only consider short term consequences. Yes, it is true that providing hard feedback will cause someone hurt in the short term. However, when done correctly, clear and constructive feedback will benefit the individual much more in the long run! We have to be long game players!
It behooves us therefore to learn how to give great feedback in a way that is clear, specific, and most importantly, kind. Because we care for people, we ought to want the best for them, and holding the line for them when it counts will help us toward that end.
Loving people through high standards
High standards are critical for people to grow. This is true in both our personal and our work lives. We must be tough on people. We must keep our standards high. Especially for those we care most about and are most invested in their progress and growth, we must keep pushing them and raising them up.
But we must love people through it.
Sometimes those that we’re tough on aren’t used to it. Sometimes they hate it. Sometimes they lash back out at us. Sometimes they choose to ignore us and move on with their lives. Sometimes they cut us out completely, unable to see past their own hurt.
But we must love them through it.
Remember that being tough gives us the opportunity to demonstrate love and care for people, and that loving and caring for people allows us to be tougher on them. This is a virtuous cycle that is hard to start but incredibly valuable when done right.
As I write this, my eldest boy is 9. He is in little league. It’s been hard for him, as there are some kids who have been throwing a ball daily since they were 3. He hasn’t. But he has potential, he has drive, he has the desire to play well. At one of the early practices he made a bunch of overthrows past the first baseman’s head.
I could have pat him on the back and told him, “good try!”, but that wouldn’t be enough. As our famous little green friend says, “do or do not; there is no try”. So I hold the standard. I tell him the reason he is overthrowing when others on his team are hitting the mark is because he hasn’t practiced as much as they have. I hold the line.
But then I love him through it. We start a new ritual together where everyday after school we go outside and throw the ball for 30 minutes. We watch videos on how to throw more accurately and with more power together. We practice wrist motions to snap the ball on release. We do this everyday for a month, and his throwing drastically improves. He makes some clutch throws during games and throws out a bunch of runners from long distances. He has found a new pride in his craft, and loves baseball even more now. We’re going to work on hitting next.
In everything, be it parenting, coaching, mentoring, managing teams, or simply being a friend, we need to hold our standards high, but we need to love people through it. And we need to surround ourselves with people who will hold us to those same high standards, and will love us through them too.
My sons, I have so much love for you both. And yet I want to hold standards high for you. My prayer is that by the time you read this, that you’ll be able to look back on your childhood and see that daddy had high standards for you but he also loved you strongly and walked with you through it all.