#194: Preach to your choir (thank you Robert Reich)
Happy Sunday friends
If you love owls (who doesn’t?) Hirokazu Kozakai’s ‘O Wise One’ will make you smile.
Last week, I told you that Cape Town gallery Southern Guild was opening in Los Angeles. Chadd Scott’s Forbes article does a magnificent job of explaining why this is a milestone not only for the gallery but for African creativity.
For those of you concerned with competition policy, industrial policy and the state of the world, you may want to spend twenty minutes with Cory Doctorow’s FT piece, ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything.
If you’re uncertain, this provocation might entice you, “We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of sh*t. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying”.
On Friday, I posted about my recent ‘enshittification’ experience and Brendan McNulty suggested I read How To Fix the Internet. It’s a great companion piece to Doctorow.
/strategy
Berkeley professor, former US Secretary of Labour, Robert Reich is one of the world’s most consistent critics of widening inequality and is a master at reducing camouflage of complexity to simple truth. If it is something you care about, you’ll want to follow his Instagram account or subscribe to his daily newsletter.
A few weeks ago, he wrote “Why I preach to the choir”.
He started it, “Several of you have asked me why I spend so much time and energy on this letter, which is read mainly (if not exclusively) by people who already share my views and values. ‘Why are you preaching to the choir?’ you ask. Wouldn’t your efforts be more useful if you tried to convince people who aren’t already convinced?’”
He gives two reasons why he thinks its worth the effort.
First, he hopes “that the data, arguments, logic, and analyses in this letter help you make your case to others in the range of your voice — to friends, family members, and acquaintances whose minds are not closed, and who could be persuaded of the truth”.
Second, his wish is “that these daily letters give you confidence that you’re rational and not alone”.
I see this often in my coaching practice; a client will have a dream that they believe is impossible or a problem that they believe is intractable. Discovering others’ experiences gives them the confidence to move forward.
In change processes, in strategy formulation and implementation, we spend no end of energy winning support from the sceptics and that is important.
As important, is preaching to your own choir, the people who support you, who believe in the vision and those who are quiet, undecided, but listening.
They need to hear your message as much as the sceptics do. They’ll definitely do more with it.
Reich reflects that “it’s sometimes hard to remain confident of one’s views”, particularly in contexts where there are many loud voices.
Your choir needs to be reminded of your message. When you need it, they’ll add their voices to yours.
Wharton Business School professor, Adam Grant, reminds us that leaders are nine times more likely to be criticised for under-communicating than over-communicating. Make sure your choir knows the lyrics.
//self
Apart from thinking whilst walking, writing to music, singing in the shower, and one or two other things, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. There is only divided attention. That WhatsApp you’re about to send your colleague in your Teams call has guaranteed that you didn’t hear what was just said.
Fred Wilson is a co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm with investments in, amongst others, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy and MongoDB. You’d assume that he is completely inoculated against any phishing scam. Wrong.
In Anatomy of A Twitter/X Account Takeover Hack he describes falling for a scam that resulted in his Twitter account, with 700,000 followers, being hijacked. Its worth reading to remind yourself of how easy it is.
The bit that caught my attention was this “On Tuesday at 3:35pm eastern, while I was in a taxi on my way from a doctor appointment to my home office, I saw this email come into my inbox…”
Wilson goes on to show the email, describe the series of errors he made, and explain what he should’ve done.
He concludes, “But I did none of those things. I was multi-tasking, in transit, and jet lagged. And I screwed up”.
I was multi-tasking, in transit, and jet lagged!
Here’s someone who has invested in the creation of the world’s largest digital businesses and, when multi-tasking, in transit and jet lagged (yes, I am repeating myself) makes an elementary mistake.
What makes you think that you’ll be different?
Focus, slow-down, one thing at a time.
(I discovered Wilson’s story thanks to Tim Ferriss’s Five Bullet Friday).
/// soul
In last week’s letter I wrote, “If we want a richer world, we need to listen, we need space for compassion, understanding and the possibility of connection”.
I unknowingly echoed Bertrand Russel’s sentiments expressed in his essay, How to Grow Old.
He wrote, “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile” and advises “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged with universal life”.
You can apply this in every sphere of life, curiosity and eclectic exploration coupled to friendliness are guaranteed to make you happier and more effective.
(I found these quotations thanks to the treasure chest that is Maria Popova’s The Marginalian).
On Friday we tick into March. Times marches on, take the time to slow it down.
Karl
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