An email inbox has been aptly described as the to-do list that anyone in the world can add an item to. If you're not careful, it can gobble up most of your working week. Then you've become a reactive robot responding to other people's requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities. This is not good.
Not all disasters can be avoided. Not all disasters are fatal. If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change.
If you build a disaster-tolerant company you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won't hide from things. The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst possible outcome.
And once you do that, the upside is more likely to occur. That outcome you were so afraid of isn't so bad, and once you realise you can tolerate it, it's (amazingly, perversely and ironically) less likely to happen.
Being ignored is the same as failure. So you need to not be ignored.
Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have the prints in their homes. Seeing something for free aids its discovery. It will attract attention, spread and then, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid.
Taylor Swift's music is basically free. It's the concerts and films that cost money. McKinsey & Company's consulting philosophy is free, it's the bespoke work that costs money. Watching a movie on Netflix is free - once you pay to belong. Playing golf at the local public course is pretty cheap, it's membership in the fancy club that costs money. The free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive.
The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know how to do it.
You don't have the authority or the resources to do it.
You're afraid.
Once you figure out what needs to be fixed, it's far easier to find the solution (or decide to work on a different problem). Stuck is a state of mind, and it's fixable.
How much are you paying for the privilege of having someone else tell you what to do? So many of us happily give up our freedom and our income potential in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next. How much are you giving up?
Clients and staff make irrational requests all the time. That doesn't make them unreasonable. If satisfying their request moves things forward, it's not always worth the effort to teach someone a lesson. Sometimes, it's more effective to just embrace their irrationality. Being right doesn't always have to be the goal.
Scientists make predictions, and predicting the future is far more valuable than explaining the past. Ask a physicist what will happen if you fire a projectile like this in that direction, and they'll know. Ask Walter White how to make the meth blue and you'll get the right answer.
Analysts who come up with plausible explanations for what just happened don't help us as much, because it's not always easy to turn those explanations into useful action.
The practice, then, is to start making predictions. In writing. You don't have to share them in public, but the habit will push you to understand your instincts and to sharpen your ability to see what works (and what doesn't) without the easy out of having to explain what already happened.
I predict that the more you practice your predictions, the better you'll get at discerning where the science is.
...work hard. That way, you'll have something to show for it. The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work. Stop gossiping and playing stupid games at work with your colleagues. Instead do something to advance your career and the company. In the same amount of time you can expend twice the effort and get far more in exchange.
Companies should never try to change the worldview of the audience they're selling to. The term worldview in this context is the set of expectations and biases that colour the way each of us see the world. The worldview of a 50 year old luxury wine-loving investment banker is very different from that of a 21 year old graduate. One might see a £1,000 bottle of Château Pétrus as both a bargain and a must-have, while the other might see the very same bottle of wine as a tasteless and insane waste of money. Worldview changes three things: attention, bias and vernacular. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we've decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate with people differently based on their worldview. It's extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to change someone's worldview. Sell nuts to squirrels, don't try to persuade dolphins that nuts are delicious.
On social media people talk endlessly about all the things the typical person can't possibly afford. Mansions, cars, jets, jewels, dinners with Gwyneth Paltrow. At the same time, you get negative feedback when you talk about things people have chosen not to have. If you promote a great product that only works on an iPhone, all the people who have chosen Android get angry, that special kind of angry that belongs to the people who made a decision. The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know what would happen. Turns out there is a big difference between "don't tell me what I can't have" and "don't tell me what I've chosen not to be able to have". So dreaming of winning the lottery is fine but experiencing regret over a decision is not.