#173: Be Who You Are
Dear Friends
Thank you for your messages following the Love + Work and Build Better Teams letters. I appreciated understanding how they were useful for you. If you’d like to comment on last week’s letter, you can do so here.
Today’s letter is a little idiosyncratic. I hope that it works. Please let me know what you think.
/ strategy
Georgi Gospodinov’s, International Booker Prize-winning, Time Shelter, is an immense novel.
I will revisit it in greater detail in ‘soul’ below. For now, I want to draw your attention to this sentence, “People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch”.
This sentence appears in a part of the novel, where countries and their people are wrestling with different claims about their national identity. And Gospodinov writes those words, the words that say, “People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch”.
Of course, we know that is true, but we forget it. In political discussion, we know how Africa’s map came to be or the arbitrary partitioning of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In everyday conversation, we forget those moments of mostly arbitrary creation, and nations become biblical patriarchs.
By now, you’re wondering what this has to do with strategy.
It comes to this, when we look at our companies, how often do infants masquerade as patriarchs? How often do we forget that something that seems geologically fixed is the result of decisions we took just a few months or years ago?
There’s that department, or workflow, or budget line that seems like it is a national border. We police it, we ringfence it, it is cast in stone and yet, in truth, it is always something that someone, at some time, created in response to some challenge or opportunity that may or may not have passed.
As you engage with your businesses, with the strategic challenges you face, I thought it would help to have Gospodinov in mind.
Explore how what is in front of you came to be.
Don’t be trapped by the myths of what is, understand how it came to be, assess the possibilities, and then act with precision and knowledge.
// self
Ironically, the mirror of Gospodinov’s insight can help us unlock increased effectiveness.
In his latest book, Magic Words, Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger draws our attention to the power of nouns.
Berger reviews a number of studies showing that turning your actions into your identity can be powerful fuel for how you are perceived.
For example, “Changing a verb-based description (e.g., “drinks coffee”) to a noun (e.g., “is a coffee drinker”) made it seem like that person’s attitudes or preferences were more dispositional, and thus stronger and more stable. Part of someone’s identity, rather than just an attitude they happen to hold”.
In one example, researchers explore whether changing language could change voter behaviour. Instead of asking people to vote (a verb-based request), they spoke to them about the power of being a voter. That simple shift increased voter turnout by 15%.
Berger summarises, “Want people to listen? Ask them to be a listener. Want them to lead? Ask them to be a leader. Want them to work harder? Encourage them to be a top performer.”
Think about things that you do, that you’d like to make a more stable part of your life. Experiment with claiming that identity. Declare yourself to be that. Say, “I am a…”
/// soul
I loved Nobel-winning author, Olga Tokarczuk’s description of Gospodinov’s Time Shelter.
She comments that it is, “The most exquisite kind of literature, on our perception of time, written in a masterful and totally unpredictable style. Each page comes as a surprise, so that you never know where the author is going to take you next.”
Time Shelter is nominally about a treatment for Alzheimer sufferers, a clinic that reproduces decades past in exacting detail, taking patients back to times of comfort, offering them peace.
In one instance, the day’s news is printed on old paper stock procured from a publisher’s forgotten stash. Day after day, the news of years long gone is reprinted and repeated with the same texture, the same ink smell and smudge. But it doesn’t stay there for long.
Soon, Gospodinov takes us off into a flight of fancy where nations themselves start referendums to return to their own golden periods. Of course, there’s no agreement on when that golden period was.
Reviews of Time Shelter tell of the book’s major themes but in doing so they flatten it, they smooth off its edges, making it seem like a coherent story that unfolds as it should, but the book’s real joy is what Tokarczuk points us to, the masterful and unpredictable. It is idiosyncratic in the extreme. It is peculiar, intelligent, and curious.
Gospodinov shoots off in multiple directions. For a few sentences and sometimes a few pages, something catches his attention, and the words follow. They do not serve the plot or the narrative in any discernible way, but they leave you, the reader, richer.
He writes things like, “When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing since there’s no such thing as a half a past. It is as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And no-one understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone.”
He warns us that “History in the rearview mirror is always closer than it seems” and “History can afford to make a hash of fifty or sixty of its years, it’s got thousands of them, to history, that’s no more than a second, but what is that human fly to do, for whom that historical second is his whole life?”
He tells us that “Whatever you read is what you shall become.”
Reflecting on World War Two, he writes, “Birds sang even during the war. Therein lies the whole horror…and consolation.”
Each of those passages made me smile. They made me stop. They made me think. They helped me see the world anew. I hope you enjoy them too. But my real reason for sharing them is to demonstrate that Gospodinov has written a novel that is unequivocally his. He follows his curiosities. He indulges and nurtures them. He spends pages on them. He defies convention and in doing so has won one of the world’s most prestigious awards.
He is himself. Excellence is always idiosyncratic.
I wish you a week in which you get to be you.
Claim your identity.
Be you.
Much love
Karl