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Posts tagged with #Productivity

Hospitality in life

My sons,

We’ve been discussing the concept of hospitality, first generally and then as it applies to work. We shift our focus now to how it applies in life.

I’ve always desired to be hospitable. When I was younger, I lived in a tiny 500 sqft studio apartment, but would regularly host groups of 4-5 of my friends to have a home cooked dinner and to play board games until late into the evening. I didn’t even own a dining table, so we all sat cross legged on the floor around my coffee table, which doubled as our board game surface once dinner was done. Every home I’ve had since then has been purchased with a view of how I can entertain people, and how I can grow the set of things as I learned to be more hospitable.

The more I’ve learned though, the more I’ve discovered that my view of hospitality was limited and very, very incomplete.

For whatever reason, my view of hospitality was that it was simply the willingness/desire for people to host others in their home. This was almost a direct reflection of a few traits:

• Willingness to clean up after people leave
• Enjoyment of making food or having food delivered
• Comfort letting others into your space

As I learned more about what it really means to be hospitable, I realized that hospitality is not just about your willingness to physically serve others. It is a mindset. The hospitality mindset is one of putting people at ease, of being more interested in the lives of others than in telling others about our own lives, and of having the thoughtfulness to think of others even when you’re not physically with them.

How to cultivate a mindset of hospitality

One of the hardest things to do in this life is to adjust one’s mindset. There are a myriad books out there that talk about this - Think Again by Adam Grant and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath are two of my favorites and provide great insight into the psychology of our default behaviors as well as some greatly actionable advice on how to challenge and change our own thinking and behaviors.

Once we’ve identified, acknowledged, and determined the need to change our mindset and have understood the mechanics of changing our behaviors, we need to determine what new habits to instill, and what the goals of those habits are.

1. Build a rich thought life

One of my favorite books of all time is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I first read this book in my teen years, and again many times since, but that very first reading changed my life. In the book, our hero Edmond Dantes is wrongfully imprisoned for several years, and during that time he meets a prisoner that has been there even longer than he, yet who seems to have discovered a way to avoid the madness and depression that isolation typically brings. Instead, he has developed a rich thought life, one that keeps him busy studying, inventing, analyzing, and exploring, all within the recesses of his mind.

I loved that example and aspired to have that same richness in my thought life. As a teen, I realized that there were any number of mundane times where I was left alone without anything to distract. Whether it was sitting on the bus on the way to school, showering every morning, or the minutes dozing before falling asleep at night, there were many daily spaces that could be utilized better, so as often as I could remember, I started making adjustments.

I started small. I simply got myself to think about an idea instead of a situation. Instead of reliving the day on my bus ride home, I’d take an idea and work it out. Instead of imagining waking up early and playing my favorite epic video game (Final Fantasy 2) while falling asleep Friday evening, I’d think about the themes of the game (loyalty, betrayal, love) and ruminate on how I’d seen those themes play out in my life.

Over the years my thought life has developed to the point where I no longer experience boredom acutely, and where I welcome times of inactivity throughout my day so that I can spend time expanding on these ideas, themes, and debates in my mind. This is constantly challenged by the temptation of picking up that little rectangular device and being entertained by it, but the combination of identity (I believe that I am not a person that wastes time on my phone) and habit (I have a daily ritual of reclining in my Eames chair with a glass of wine to read) has helped me fend that off pretty effectively.

2. Put yourself in a position to experience hospitality from others

There are many great things about our hyper connected world and the technologies that enable it. One down side however, is that it enables - nay, causes - our world to become smaller. Why go through the discomfort of striking up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop when your little rectangular device enables you to interact with people you already know? Why put yourself through the stress of not understanding everything on the menu at a new restaurant when you can eat at your favorite haunt again, or can eat at home on your own?

By shrinking our world, we experience the hospitality of others less. By staying in the same small social circles, we limit our understanding and experience of hospitality to those we already know.

In contrast, expanding our world allows us to experience new ways of being hospitable. By trying new restaurants, by meeting new people and being invited to share in their hospitality, and by going to different countries to see how other cultures behave, we grow our awareness and understanding of hospitality and further our own style in how we demonstrate it to others.

3. Talk about it with others

In many ways, hospitality has fallen out of fashion in our modern world. Just the other day, we went to a digital food court. The whole idea is that you order your food via touch screen and the machine assigns you a locker number. Once you’ve ordered, someone somewhere prepares your food and deposits the food into the locker through the back and triggers the notification so that your locker lights up and you can open the front door to retrieve your food. Completely contact-less.

Why this is a feature and a desired experience I don’t know, but it was a reminder of just how much technology has enabled our world to become less hospitable.

As such, it becomes incredibly important for us to discuss, to share our experiences, and to talk about our ideas of hospitality with others! We are a social species. We learn from others. We think through talking. If we want to grow our mindset of hospitality, we need to be discussing it with others.

Making magic

Hospitality is about making magic for others. It is about caring for another’s experience. It is about thoughtfully surprising others with how valued, cared for, and known they are. And it is contagious!

Every child has wanted to be a magician at one point in their lives. Some entertain the thought for a mere minute while others spend summers at magic camp. But regardless of how intense the interaction, when one experiences the pure delight and joy that magic brings, one immediately desires to replicate and to be able to perform such feats themselves.

So too is the magic brought from hospitality. When we experience a truly magical moment of hospitality we are compelled to share it. Let us then discuss these moments with others, and let us arm ourselves with the skills to recreate these moments so that we can bring more magic to our world.

Hospitality at work

My sons,

Anything in our world that is worth doing requires teams. We are past the age where any one person can do something truly impactful on their own. Yes, we can tinker, we can prototype, we can come up with ideas on our own (that too is arguable - whether any thought is truly done in isolation is debatable, but that’s another topic for another day), but we cannot build anything worth mentioning on our own.

We need teams.

I’ve been in the business of building, managing, cultivating, and leading teams for almost two decades now, and have been in the study of excellence on the subject for at least as long. I’ve read books and articles dedicated to the subject, listened to the leading experts in the fields of leadership, human psychology, and business, and have experimented with many approaches within my teams. The undeniable truth about all the best teams is this: they have a high amount of psychological safety.

The best of the best actively and intentionally cultivate, nurture, and grow that safety, and are proactive in weeding out individuals, practices, and experiences that take away from it. At the root of that safety is a strong web of relationships built on trust, humility, and shared experiences.

Learning from the best

I once sat in a large exec review with our Senior Vice President with about 20 other people reviewing our organization’s roadmap doc, a small section of which I was responsible for. As we reviewed, our SVP had a question about something in my section. After I answered, he looked over at me and said, “hey, sorry, I know we’ve met before cause I’ve seen you in these meetings a bunch, but we haven’t actually been introduced. What’s your name? … Great to meet you, Sam. Okay, so, I know you know your stuff, and everyone else seems to be nodding at your answer, but I don’t get it yet. Do me a favor will you? In the next month or so, write me a quick doc explaining this to me.”

I would follow that guy anywhere.

In a room of 20 people, probably 6-7 of which were VPs themselves, he took the time to make me feel seen and heard. It took him all of 2 minutes, and I’m sure he’s done that a thousand times and doesn’t remember the incident, but for me, that was magic. That is a moment that I will likely remember for the rest of my career.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons he’s so beloved and successful is that he has intentionally cultivated a practice of hospitality. I’m sure that not only has he reaped the rewards of that, but he has brought that same type of magical experience into the lives of many others.

Hospitality pays

We live in a world where a large majority of our GDP is coming from the service industry and that the most important capital in our world is human capital. It is widely recognized that companies and industries rise and fall because of the teams of people that they are able to hire, attract, and retain. In that world, people matter. Teams matter.

And yet these skills are as undervalued as they are important!

Why do so many companies and teams undervalue these traits? The simple answer is because they are hard to measure, especially in the short term. It’s hard to quantify the gain that we get by investing the time and resources necessary to create a hospitable culture because culture is not a yes or no thing. There’s no measuring before and after because that distinction is binary, and cultural change is a gradient.

There are many examples of companies and industries that are moving towards building sustainable, helpful, fulfilling businesses in a way that values culture and integrity as much as they value profits. In his book Screw Business as usual, Sir Richard Branson talks about the work that he and many others like him have been doing to rethink the way we build teams, companies, and industries, and the impact that those endeavors have on local and global communities. While most of us will likely never be able to build multiple companies and industries in our lifetime, there are many lessons that we can learn from those that do.

1. Make sure everyone knows the goal.

The first and foremost important thing is to ensure that everyone on your team knows what the goal is. The goal is not to build a great product. It is to build a great product that customers will love, so that they will love your brand and the impact it has on their lives and will purchase, so that your company can make money. The goal is not to create a great recipe that is delicious. It is to create a great recipe that is delicious, so that the front of house can offer it to guests at a rate which guests will love, so that guests have a great overall dining experience, so that they will recommend the restaurant to their friends, so that their friends will come and pack the house, so that the restaurant will make money.

Even if you are working at a non-profit, there is the uber goal of the organization that everyone needs to be keenly aware of so that they can take ownership of their space. It is only by knowing the true goal that individuals on our teams can see how their hospitable practices move the needle and impact the thing that really matters.

2. Give lots of credit where it’s due.

Give credit where it’s due. No matter how much value you bring to a team yourself, it is to the team. When there are individuals that do great work, go out of your way to recognize that. As a leader on the team, you naturally get enough spotlight and attention - take every opportunity to shine the spotlight for greatness in other people’s direction.

As leaders, we need to take pride in creating an environment where greatness can happen and can flourish - that is the mark and reward of a great leader, and is the mark of a team that people love, take ownership of, and do their best work for.

3. Deeply understand what it means to be right a lot.

This one tends to trip people up a lot. Especially if you’re a tech person, you’ll have been bombarded with messages telling you that being right is critically important. At Amazon, it’s even one of the leadership principles.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being right about the topic at hand. It’s a good thing to have good instincts and intuition, and to be objectively right. But there’s much more to being situationally right than just the objective debate at hand.

Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. This is true in our personal relationships as well as our professional ones. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re objectively right. This is always going to be best in the long run.

This is especially hard in the business context, because we often believe that when we’re seen as being in the wrong, it will reflect poorly on our performance. This is multiplied if your manager is the one that is seeing you as being in the wrong. This is amplified further if you’re seen as wrong in a large meeting with multiple stakeholders/leaders.

I am fundamentally a long game player, and the long game is all about relationships. Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re clearly right.

I’ll go even further.

If you’ve corrected someone because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.

The common response to this is that “sucking it up when I know I’m right feels demeaning” - yes, true, but the benefit you get to the relationship far outweighs any you lose from making a so-called mistake, especially if/when the other party realizes or discovers that they were actually wrong in the matter. The feeling you leave them with is a far greater testament to your impact than you proving that you are right.

I’m not saying that we should not go back and correct the error - do that, but do it in private. And do it in a way that preserves, and even strengthens the relationship.

Being right a lot isn’t about being objectively right. It’s not about being seen as right. It is about being relationally, long term right. It is about having the tact to know when to correct, and how to continually strengthen the relationship. And that is the definition of hospitality at work.

Managing your time well

My sons,

Much has been said on the topic of time management, and with good reason. Our world seems to be obsessed with it, with the ability to be ever more efficient, and with the relentless pursuit of higher output and productivity. There is much research and many lifetimes of thought that have gone into the topic with many different techniques and practices that I won’t get into.

Instead of focusing on how to manage one’s time, I want to muse on the topic of what it means to manage your time well.

Why do you want to manage time well?

The first question we need to ask is a question of purpose, of motivation. Why do we want to manage our time well? What is the primary purpose? While there are no objectively wrong answers to this question, there are a few dangerous ones that will make success very difficult.

For example, some great motivators for time management are to have more time for one’s pursuits, to have more time at one’s disposal for things of value, and to free up time for others to claim. Some bad motivators are to be more efficient so that we can get more work done, or so that we can cross more toil-based tasks off our seemingly neverending todo list.

We’ll get to why those are bad motivators later, but for now let’s suffice it to say that our motivators not just whether we’re successful but also the nature and the route by which we’re successful in managing our time well.

How we work

Whether we’re discussing our professional work life or making progress in our personal life, the way we work tends to be similar across both. Some of us are list people, some are chaotic feeling-driven people, some are guilt-driven, and some are externally driven.

Regardless of your preferred style, there are a few things that are simply limitations of the human brain that affect us all.

First, the human brain is only able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Contrary to popular belief, multitasking is not actually possible for the human mind. Our brains perform similarly to single CPU-based systems - we switch between each of our multiple tasks at a rate that is passable (ie not immediately obvious but easily noticeable to the keen observer).

For our brains as it is for CPUs, this is expensive. This is because context switching wastes cycles. In computing, this means that each time the CPU switches tasks, the context that it needs is recalled from memory. That recall process wastes time and cycles. This is also true of our brains - switching context back into focus wastes our brain energy and takes time.

Studies tell us that it takes on average 23 minutes for an average adult brain to get from one task into a flow state on a different task. This means that each time we context switch, it takes us 23 minutes to be back to working at full strength!

All this is to say that we cannot, and should not attempt to multitask.

As such, we must prioritize. We first build a list of all of our priorities. Then we need to remove our distracting priorities. This means that for anything that doesn’t fall into our top 5, we must actively avoid them because they were priorities that didn’t make the core 5 but are close enough that they can (and certainly will, if we allow them) distract us from accomplishing our top ones.

This is hard! These are things that we actively want to do and believe there is much value in doing, so letting go of them will be incredibly difficult!

Next, once you’ve finished the top 5, don’t just automatically get to the next one - re-evaluate your list at that time to determine if the next things still are the next right things to do. We often find that they aren’t!

Lastly, management experts suggest no more than three things going on at a time. Many successful executives who seem to do so many things at once in fact limit themselves to doing one thing at a time - they get that thing done well, and then move onto the next.

For example, Mozart is the only known composer who was able to work on multiple works at once, all of which were masterpieces. Bach, Haydn, Handel, Beethoven - they all worked on a single piece at a time, and didn’t move onto the next until the first was finished.

Chances are, you are not a Mozart.

Incredibly effective executives have focus, concentrate on one thing, and concentrate their organization on one thing. Know where you need to concentrate your time and your team’s time, and do so intentionally.

Know what we can realistically accomplish

As we progress in our lives they become increasingly busy. Professionally, we have more demands and requirements of our time, and our added value to our organizations mean that more weight is placed on the things assigned to us. Personally, our lives expand to include dating, spouses, children, social obligations, taking care of aging loved ones, and hopefully, going on vacation and seeing the world!

What do we do with all of these demands?

We attempt to do them all. We try to make time for everything that feels important, but the problem is that constantly adding more without taking away anything is a fools errand, but we’re often too foolishly optimistic (or too stubborn) to see that.

Part of the problem is that what is important, or what “matters” is subjective. What matters to each of us may be quite different and very nuanced. It therefore behooves us to be thoughtful about processing our inputs so that we determine for ourselves what matters, instead of simply adopting the beliefs and opinions of others.

Another problem is that the minute you start feeling “on top of things”, the goal posts will move and more things will get added to the list.

This is because with each time-saving invention, the bar simply moves to accommodate. For example, the advent of the washing machine made it such that now that you COULD keep all your clothes cleaned, you SHOULD have them always cleaned. As a result, our inventions do not free us but rather enslave us further.

This is made explicitly clearly when we consider those much less fortunate than us. It is a common adage that those living in countries with much less are much happier. This is because they are not burdened with the ever increasing set of things that are possible with some effort and as a result don’t spiral into cultural expectations of making all the possible things required with much effort.

The answer then, lies not in finding ways to do more and to accomplish everything that we think is remotely important. Instead, it lies in us being thoughtful about what truly is important.

So how do you know what is important?

A common strategy here is to do a small amount of work to generate some vague definition of importance in one’s life, and to allow that amorphous cloud unpredictably determine one’s actions. For example, we may decide that we value relationships and friendships. This is such a broad value that it is almost meaningless when it comes to being an input for how to manage one’s life. There are many types of relationships, and each individual relationship is unique in its nature, its time requirements, and therefore its value. As such if we simply act on the value system that we value relationships, a bad relationship may in fact cause us to make bad decisions.

Professional success is another such amorphous value. Not only is this vague description harmful, but it has the additional unfortunate reality that it expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. No matter how much time you give it, it will always use that time, and more. This is why being more efficient so that one can get more work done is a fools errand - there will always be more work.

As such it becomes critically important for us to ensure we have the right boundaries around work, and the amount of our lives that we’re willing to give it. These boundaries need not only be restricted to time boundaries! A common misconception when it comes to work is that boundaries here simply mean time restrictions. Work takes up more than just our time - it takes up our thought space, our emotional capacity, our relational capabilities. We need to ensure we’ve got healthy boundaries across all of those.

Adjustments, not solutions

As always, my aim here is not to provide solutions but rather to stir thought and conversation around the topic at hand. As such, I will also not offer solutions but rather a few suggestions for tweaks that we can make in our journey towards managing our time well.

1. Realize you won’t get it all done. This realization leads to freedom. Ancient farmers knew this - they would get done whatever they could in a day and do the rest the next. They knew that they were not capable of rushing a harvest or of growing a herd, so they accepted that pace of life. Somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that and try to cram more in a day than is humanly physically possible.
2. Time should not be your own. Because time is a networked resource, it has Much more value the more people around you have control over it. This means that having an abundance of jealously hoarded free time is not useful, but having time where friends can drop by, loved ones can reach out for help, and children can demand your time to play with them is what makes time infinitely more meaningful.
3. Realize that there are important things and there are urgent ones. You must not starve the important for the urgent. And there are always enough urgent things to take up all of your time, if you let them. Therefore we must ruthlessly prioritize!
4. Invest in systems that evolve over time. Set aside some time to build systems that will scale for you over time. Learn to make more categorical decisions - choices which once made allow you to eliminates dozens of other choices.

My sons, it is never too late or too early to start learning to manage one’s time well. As such my hope is that you will begin now, no matter when “now” happens to be. Managing our time well will allow us to get more out of the limited time on this earth that we have. And that is a truly beautiful thing.

The gift of creating

My son,

I love being inspired.

One of the most inspiring things is witnessing the things man can accomplish. Watching a painter pour their soul onto their canvas, experiencing for the first time a new piece reflecting a musician's inner turmoil, reading a short story written to celebrate life's great virtues, or walking into the great architecture of the ages built as places of worship or safekeeping - all of these things inspire me to be better, to reach higher, and to aim for the stars.

It's a beautiful thing about life, this ability to create. We are all created beings, created in the image of God, in His likeness. That means we have God's spark in us, and with that spark comes the ability for us as created beings to in turn create. Now, obviously we don't have God's omnipotence, so we can't make something from nothing, but we have a glimpse of his creativity and imagination, and can in our own way create beauty where there was none before.

Whether it’s taking a year to write your own symphony or taking an hour to paint a sunset, I believe that something within us pulses stronger when we create. It is in that moment, that space where we forget about the world, abandon its distractions, and focus solely on the object of our creation that we are elevated from the temporary into the timeless. We see the world from another angle; we gain a new perspective, and with new perspective comes new understanding.

Have you ever noticed how things of great beauty are often epic and awesome in nature? Sunsets, canyons, monuments, masterpieces, mountaintops - all of these things are vast in their being, and bring us to a place of awe and wonder.

I believe that the wonder we feel is the creator in us resonating with the creation we're experiencing.

And so with that, I'll leave you with a challenge. Create! Build, paint, compose, craft; express the experiences, thoughts, and dreams that are uniquely you. Because you are beautifully and wonderfully made.