Recent Good Books:

1. In Livewired, David Eagleman provides a powerful summary of the capacity of the human brain to grow and change. In a sense, the brain is “livewired”. Here were my favorite excerpts:

When you learn something – the location of a restaurant you like, a piece of gossip about your boss, that addictive new song on the radio- your brain physically changes. The same thing happens when you experience a financial success, a social fiasco, or an emotional awakening. When you shoot a basketball, disagree with a colleague, fly into a new city, gaze at a nostalgic photo, or hear the mellifluous tones of a beloved voice, the immense, intertwining jungles of your brain work themselves into something slightly different from what they were a moment before. These changes sum up to our memories: the outcome of our living and loving. Accumulating over minutes and months and decades, the innumerable brain changes tally up to what we call you.

Or at least the you right now. Yesterday you were marginally different. And tomorrow you’ll be someone else again.

So genetic instructions play only a minor role in the detailed assembly of cortical connections. It couldn’t be any other way: With twenty thousand genes and 200 trillion connections between neurons, how could the details possibly be prespecified? That model could never have worked. Instead, neuronal networks require interaction with the world for their proper development.

2. Viktor Frankl offers a compelling narrative of his time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps in Man’s Search for Meaning. His story illuminates why some prisoners may survive psychologically and others may decline. The lessons apply to anyone facing challenges in life. These quotes were most interesting to me:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. – Spinoza in Ethics

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and psychical decay.

Know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body.

Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of live, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which  caused the poet Rilke to write, “Wie vie ist aufzuleiden!” (How much suffering there is to get through!) Rilke spoke of “getting through suffering” as others would talk of “getting through work.” There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confession, “I have wept it out of my system.”

Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument – they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.

I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.

3. Atomic Habits by James Clear was one of my favorite reads in a while. It’s practical for anyone at any age who wants to build or change habits. Here are my favorite excerpts:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.

The word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

How to create a good habit: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.

How to break a bad habit: make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying.

It is the anticipation of a reward – not the fulfillment of it – that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.

Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

With each repetition, cell-to-cell signaling improves and the neural connections tighten. First described by neuropsychologist Donald Hebb in 1949, this phenomenon is commonly known as Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.

The Two-Minute Rule states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

Make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call a commitment device.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

4. In his book Measure What Matters, John Doerr tells the story of goal-setting and goal-alignment at Google and other highly successful organizations. The approach is inspired by the management system of Andy Grove at Intel and here are my favorite excerpts:

In 1968, the year Intel opened shop, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland cast a theory that surely influenced Andy Grove. First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.

The studies found that the “stretched” workers were not only more productive, but more motivated and engaged: “Setting specific challenging goals is also a means of enhancing task interest and of helping people to discover the pleasurable aspects of an activity.”

In the intervening half century, more than a thousand studies have confirmed Locke’s discovery as “one of the most tested, and proven, ideas in the whole of management theory.”

An OBJECTIVE, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.

In Google’s early years, Larry Page set aside two days per quarter to personally scrutinize the OKR’s for each and every software engineer.

Precisely because OKRs are transparent, they can be shared without cascading them in lockstep. If it serves the larger purpose, multiple levels of hierarchy can be skipped over. Rather than laddering down from the CEO to a VP to a director to a manager (and then to the manager’s reports), an objective might jump from the CEO straight to a manager, or from a director to an individual contributor. Or the company’s leadership might present its OKRs to everyone at once and trust people to say, “Okay, now I see where we’re going, and I’ll adapt my goals to that.”

Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals. It’s a distinction with a real difference.

Committed objectives are tied to Google’s metrics: product releases, bookings, hiring, customers. In general, these committed objectives – such as sales and revenue goals – are to be achieved in full (100 percent) within a set time frame.

Aspirational objectives reflect bigger-picture, higher-risk, more future-tilting ideas. They originate from any tier and aim to mobilize the entire organization. By definition, they are challenging to achieve. Failures – at an average rate of 40 percent – are part of Google’s territory.

5. Robert Kegan’s classic The Evolving Self provides an incredible (albeit academically dense) treatise on the stages and purposes of human emotional/social growth and development. Several sections blew me away – here they are:

This shift, I am suggesting, is the consequence of meaning-evolution, which is not a matter of increasing differentiation alone, but of increasing relationship to the world. These “increases” are qualitative and they involve, first of all, a better recognition of what is separate from me so that I can be related to it, rather than fused with it.

All this speaks to the same process, which is essentially that of adaption, a differentiation from that which was the very subject of my personal organization and which becomes thereby the object of a new organization on behalf of a new subjectivity that coordinates it. In Mahler’s terms, we are “hatched out” – but over and over again. And, as we shall see, we are vulnerable each time to a qualitatively new kind of separation anxiety.

Each new balance sees you (the object) more fully as you; guarantees, in a qualitatively new way, your distinct integrity. Put another way, each new balance corrects a too-subjective view of you; in this sense each new balance represents a qualitative reduction of what another psychology might call “projected ambivalence.” In the imperial balance (stage 2), you are an instrument by which I satisfy my needs and work my will. You are the other half of what, from the next balance, I recognize as my own projected ambivalence. In the move to the new evolutionary grammar of stage 3, I claim both sides of this ambivalence and become internally “interpersonal.” But stage 3 brings on a new “projected ambivalence.” You are the other by whom I complete myself, the other whom I need to create the context out of which I define and know myself and the world. At stage 4, I recognize this as well, and again claim both sides as my own, bringing them onto the self. What does this mean for my inner life?

Stage 2 is a “theory” of impulse; the impulses are organized or ordered by the needs, wishes, or interests. Stage 3 is a “theory” of needs; they are ordered by that which is taken as prior to them, the interpersonal relationships. Stage 4 is a kind of theory of interpersonal relationships; they are rooted in and reckoned by institutions. Stage 5 is a theory of the institutional; the institutional is ordered by that new self which is taken as prior to the institutional.

The capacity to coordinate the institutional permits one now to join others not as fellow-instrumentalist (ego stage 2) nor as partners in fusion (ego stage 3), nor as loyalists (ego stage 4), but as individuals – people who are known ultimately in relation to their actual or potential recognition of themselves and others as value-originating, system-generating, history-making individuals.

The self seems available to “hear” negative reports about its activities; before, it was those activities and therefore literally “irritable” in the face of those reports… Every new balance represents a capacity to listen to what before one could only hear irritably, and the capacity to hear irritably what before one could hear not at all.

These two orientations I take to be expressive of what I consider the two greatest yearnings in human experience… One of these might be called the yearning to be included, to be part of, close to, joined with, to be held, admitted, accompanied. The other might be called the yearning to be independent or autonomous, to experience one’s distinctness, the self-chosenness of one’s directions, one’s individual integrity. David Bakan called this “the duality of human experience,” the yearnings for “communion” and “agency.”

It would be as true to say that every evolutionary truce is a temporary solution to the lifelong tension between the yearnings for inclusion and distinctness. Each balance resolves the tension is a different way. The life history I have traced involves a continual moving back and forth between resolving the tension slightly in the favor of autonomy, at one stage, in the favor of inclusion, at the next.

If you want to understand another person in some fundamental way you must know where the person is in his or her evolution.

Why is the stage of a person’s evolution so crucial to understanding him or her? Because the way in which the person is settling the issue of what is “self” and what is “other” essentially defines the underlying logic (or “psychologic”) of the person’s meanings. Since what is most important for us to know in understanding another is not the other’s experience but what the experience means to him or her, our first goal is to grasp the essence of how the other composes his or her private reality.

In Winnicott’s view the “holding environment” is an idea intrinsic to infancy. In my view it is an idea intrinsic to evolution. There is not one holding environment early in life, but a succession of holding environments, a life history of cultures of embeddedness. They are the psychosocial environments which hold us (with which we are fused) and which let go of us (from which we differentiate). The preschool child is embedded in her impulses, but this takes living form in the triangular dynamics of the family; the school-age child is embedded in the psychological construction I call the “needs,” but this confusion is exercised in the role-recognizing cultures of the school, the peer gang, and the family as an institution of authority, and so on. What Winnicott says of the infant is true for all of us, even for you at this moment. There is never “just and individual”; the very word refers only to that side of the person that is individuated, the side of differentiation. There is always, as well, the side that is embedded; the person is more than an individual. “Individual” names a current state of evolution, a stage, a maintained balance or defended differentiation; “person” refers to that side of the self embedded in the life-surround as that which is individuated from it. The person is an “individual” and an “embeddual.” There is never just a you; and at this very moment your own buoyancy or lack of it, your own sense of wholeness or lack of it, is in large part a function of how your own current embeddedness culture is holding you.

Evolutionarily there is a sense in which the infant (and the person throughout life) climbs out of a psychological amniotic environment. Some part of that world in which the infant is embedded nourishes his gestation and assists in delivering him to a new evolutionary balance. I call that part the embeddedness culture, that most intimate of contexts out of which we repeatedly are recreated. I suggest that it serves at least three functions. It must hold on. It must let go. And it must stick around so that it can be reintegrated.

How we respond to a person in anxiety is a fundamental question because it raises for us the question of who we believe the person to be. Who is he or she most fundamentally? When we respond not to the problem or relief of the problem but to the person in her experience of the problem, we acknowledge that the person is most of all a motion, a motion that neither we nor she can deny without cost, and a motion which includes experience of balance and imbalance, each as intrinsic to life, each a part of our integrity, each deserving of dignity and self-respect. When we respond to the person in her experience of pain rather than in order to relieve the pain, we testify to our faith in the trustworthiness of the motion of evolution, to our faith in the trustworthiness of life itself. At the same time that we enhance the “good-host” quality of the embeddedness culture – providing careful attention, recognition, confirmation, and company in the experience – we do not tighten a grip by creating a dependence on the host to solve or manage the experiences of disequilibrium. When we respond instead to relieving the pain, we communicate a basic lack of trust and move from holding the infant to holding onto the infant, an impediment to the process of separation.

The mother who can hold her infant unanxiously when the infant is itself anxious is giving her child a special gift. She is holding heartily at the same time that she is preparing the child to separate from her.

Ultimacy is the issue in every shift. Phenomenologically, it seems that our way of making meaning is, to us, not merely an adequate way of construing the world, but the most adequate construction; and it is this feeling that makes the crisis-inducing discrepancy so threatening. It raises the possibility of making relative what I had taken for ultimate.

We live in a time when separation is virtually celebrated as a sign of growth in adulthood – notably in marriage (that is, divorce) but also, more subtly in movement into and out of communities, work roles, and a host of commitments persons make. It is possible that this phenomenon is a function of our inability to work out the anger and shame attendant on evolutionary development in the context of the relationship or environment that provoked it. It is possible that we turn to the new community and new relationships with a relief that “here, only the new me will be known,” and that these new others, in their not knowing, will help me leave my old self behind.

Long-term relationships and life in a community of considerable duration may be essential if we are not to lose ourselves, if we are to be able to recollect ourselves. They may be essential to the human coherence of our lives, a coherence which is not found from looking into the faces of those who relieve us because we can se they know nothing of us when we were less than ourselves, but from looking into the faces of those who relieve us because they reflect our history in their faces, faces which we can look into finally without anger or shame, and which look back at us with love.

Just as a person is not a stage of development but the process of development itself, a marriage contract is not, ideally, a particular evolutionary contract but a context for continued evolution. If it is not, the marriage may give out a the same time the evolutionary truce gives out. The reconstruction of a marriage is an enormously difficult feat, and, as is the case with all such evolution, it requires a support that is more invested in the person who develops that any given organization of self which the personality has evolved. If one partner enters and constructs a marriage from the interpersonal balance, for example, and then begins to emerge from this embeddedness, the marriage itself becomes, or needs to become, something new. What may have been a context for exercising and celebrating a way of making meaning oriented to affiliation, nurturance, and identification might have to become something more like a context for loving which preserves, supports, and celebrates a kind of mutual distinctness, independence, or cooperation of separate interests. But if one’s spouse cannot be recognized (known again) along with the rest of the world, either because of the spouse’s own difficulties (our transformations can be the discrepancy which threatens meaning in those closest to us), or because of our own inability to work through the shame and anger which confuses persons with the now-repudiated construction of meaning (I see my spouse as having colluded in my dependence and subservience), then the epistemological separating of self from other may be accompanied by the actual separation from real people and places in my developing life.

This summarizes what is common to depressions – they are the self’s experiencing of assault, either assault from the outside (“threat-to”), in which the self anticipates its defeat; or from within (“questioning-of”), in which the person, dislodged from self, is caught in the imbalance between the old self’s repudiation (as subject) and its recovery (as new object).

The counselor only seeks to protect the choice that presents itself in the disguise of these problems. These “things” which are carried so painfully, so shamefully, represent a resource to client and counselor alike. They are chances for growth as portals to growth-work. Accordingly, the counselor is trying to hold the door open to them in his choice to resonate to the experience that having such a problem may entail, rather than to help solve the problem, or try to make the experience less painful.

No matter what the content of “the problem,” there is something similar about all clinical problems: they are all about the threat of the constructed self’s collapse. What permits a person faced with this sort of problem to move beyond or under the problem is a sense that the self will still hold together, will keep defending itself against the threat even if “I” start attending elsewhere.

6. Ego Is the Enemy, by Ryan Holiday, proved to be a thought provoking tour of historical leadership – both good and bad. Here were the segments of the book that most resonated with me:

This probably all sounds strange. Where Isocrates and Shakespeare wished us to be self-contained, self-motivated, and ruled by principle, most of us have been trained to do the opposite. Our cultural values almost try to make us dependent on validation, entitled, and ruled by our emotions. For a generation, parents and teachers have focused on building up everyone’s self-esteem. From there the themes of our gurus and public figures have been almost exclusively aimed at inspiring, encouraging, and assuring us that we can do whatever we set our minds to.

One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get our of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.

The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.

What is your purpose? What are you here to do? If what matters (to you) is you – your reputation, your inclusion, your personal ease of life – your path is clear: Tell people what they want to hear. Seek attention over the quiet but important work. Say yes to promotions and generally follow the track that talented people take in the industry or field you’ve chosen. Pay your dues, check the boxes, put in your time, and leave things essentially as they are. Chase your fame, your salary, your title, and enjoy them as they come.

Passion is about. (I am so passionate about _________.) Purpose is to and for. (I must do ___________. I was put here to accomplish __________. I am willing to endure __________ for the sake of this.) Actually purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

How do you carry on then? How do you take pride in yourself and your work? John Wooden’s advice to his players says it: Change the definition of success. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” “Ambition,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “means tying your well-being to what other people say or do… Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”

Warren Buffett has said the same thing, making a distinction between the inner scorecard and the external one. Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of – that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

7. I recently finished a book I’ve been meaning to read for several years: Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Here are my favorite excerpts:

The artists in your life are gift-focused, and their tenacity has nothing at all to do with income or job security. Instead, it’s about finding a way to change you in a positive way, and to do it with a gift. There’s a strong streak of intellectual integrity involved in being a passionate artist. You don’t sell out, because selling out involves destroying the best of what you are.

What! Are you saying that I have to stop following instructions and start being an artist? Someone who dreams up new ideas and makes them real? Someone who finds new ways to interact, new pathways to deliver emotion, new ways to connect? Someone who acts like a human, not a cog? Me?

Yes.

Why is it that a common, safe, and important task is so feared by so many people?

In Iconoclast, Gregory Berns uses his experience running a neuroscience research lab to explain the biological underpinnings of the resistance. In fact, public speaking is the perfect petri dish for exposing what makes us tick.

It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception. Public speaking brings all three together. Speaking to a group requires social intelligence. We need to be able to make an emotional connection with people, talk about what they are interested in, and persuade them. That’s difficult, and we’re not wired for this as well as we are wired to, say, eat fried foods.

Public speaking also triggers huge fear responses. We’re surrounded by strangers or people of power, all of whom might harm us. Attention is focused on us, and attention (according to our biology) equals danger.

Last, and more subtly, speaking involves perception. It exposes how we see things, both the thing we are talking about and the response of the people in the room. Exposing the perception is frightening.

In a contest between the rational desire to spread an idea by giving a speech and the biological phobia against it, biology has an unfair advantage.

The problem with reassurance is that it creates a cycle that never ends. Reassure me about one issue and you can bet I’ll find something else to worry about. Reassurance doesn’t address the issue of anxiety; in fact, it exacerbates it. You have an itch and you scratch it. The itch is a bother, the scratch feels good, and so you repeat it forever, until you are bleeding.

The idea of sitting with your anxiety appears to be ludicrous, at least at first. To sit with something so uncomfortable isn’t natural. The more you sit, the worse it gets. Without water, the fire rages. Throughout, you remain placid. The anxiety is there, it’s real, but you merely acknowledge it, you don’t flatter it with rationalization or even adrenaline. It just is, and you embrace it, like a hot day at the beach (or a cold day in Minnesota).

Then, an interesting thing happens. It burns itself out. The anxiety can’t sustain itself forever, especially when morning comes and your house hasn’t been invaded, when the speech is over and you haven’t been laughed at, when the review is complete and you haven’t been fired. Reality is the best reassurance of all. Over time, the cycle is broken. The resistance knows that the anxiety trick doesn’t work anymore, especially if you’re friendly to the anxiety. Pretty quickly, the anxiety cycles start to diminish and eventually peter themselves out.

Don’t ask me to tell you that everything is going to be all right. I have no idea, for starters. And my palliative opinion actually will make your anxiety worse in the long run.

Now, we go looking for something to distract us. That’s the culture of the Internet, combined with the culture of the white-collar cubicle worker, combined with fear.

You don’t want to take initiative or responsibility, so you check your incoming mail, your Twitter stream, and your blog comments. Surely, there’s something to play off of, something to get angry about, some meeting to go to. I know someone who goes to forty conferences a year and never seems to actually produce anything.

And you can repeat this process forever. Forever. It never ends.

Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art – that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.

For five hundred years, since the legalization of ursury and the institutionalization of money, almost every element of our lives has been about commerce.

If you did something, you did it for money, or because it would lead to money. Sure, you still don’t charge your kids for dinner, but you also don’t encourage your kids to sweep up at the supermarket for free. Why should they? It’s someone’s job.

Example: I’m going downtown by cab from the airport. There are forty fellow travelers in the cab line. If I call out, “Anyone want to share a cab to the Marriott?” people look at my funny. They don’t want to owe me for the ride, don’t want to interact, don’t want to open themselves up to the connection that will occur from taking my gift of a ride. They’d rather pay for it, clean and square, and stay isolated. It’s hard to imagine two Bedouin tribespeople isolating from each other with such enthusiasm.

Real gifts don’t demand reciprocation (at least not direct reciprocation), and the best kind of gifts are gifts of art.

The boss gives you an assignment; you do the work. In return, she gives you money. It’s an exchange, one not so different from shopping at the local store. You, the customer, are the boss. You exchange your money for an item on the shelf, and both sides win.

Of course, if the store charges more than the competition, you’ll switch and buy from someone cheaper. As the boss, that’s how you maximize what you get for your money. And the store? If they can find a customer willing to pay more for their product, they’ll go ahead and sell it to someone else.

So, what’s missing?

The gift.

If you give your boss the gift of art, insight, initiative, or connection, she’s less likely to shop around every day looking to replace the commodity work you do, because the work you do isn’t a commodity.

If the store you visit gives you the unmeasurable and unrequired gift of pleasant service, connection, respect, and joy, then you’re a lot less likely to switch to the big-box store down the street to save a few dollars. You enjoy the gift, it means something to you, and you’d like to keep receiving it.

In the case of personality, most psychologists agree that there are five traits that are essential in how people look at us: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

Here’s the thing: these are also the signs of the linchpin. Work, great work, has been transformed in just a hundred years from doing things that involve heavy lifting to leveraging and enhancing your personality. If you hope to succeed because you are able to connect and work with other people, then that will require you to improve your personality in each of these five elements.

Do you know someone who is more open to new ideas or more agreeable than you? More stable or extroverted? More conscientious? If so, then you better get moving. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of focusing on using a spreadsheet or a time clock to measure your progress, but in fact, it’s the investment you make in your interactions that will pay off.

Thus, the individual in the organization who collects, connects, and nurtures relationships is indispensable.

If you made a list of the top ten things you’d have a new employee practice, where on the list would you put “be comfortable with other people,” or “engage people in a way that makes them want to talk to you,” or even “be persuasive”?

It’s easy to take a development day to go to a conference that purports to teach you the latest techniques in chemical handling. Far more critical for the linchpin-in-training is figuring out how to project enthusiasm and get people to root for you. Dale Carnegie understood this, but the technocrats running your organization have forgotten it.

“If only” is a great way to eliminate your excuse du jour. “If only” is an obligator, because once you get rid of that item, you’ve got no excuse left, only the obligation.

I could see the situation more accurately if only…

I could lead this group if only…

I could find the bravery to do my art if only…

8. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink provided fascinating research indicating it’s often not how or what but when. You might enjoy some of these excerpts like I did:

The biological Big Ben is the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, a cluster of some 20,000 cells the size of a grain of rice in the hypothalamus, which sits in the lower center of the brain. 

In short, all of us experience the day in three stages – a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order – recovery, trough, peak.

Figure out your type, understand your task, and then select the appropriate time. Is your own hidden daily pattern peak-trough-rebound? Or is it rebound-trough-peak? Then look for synchrony. If you have even modest control over your schedule, try to nudge your most important work, which usually requires vigilance and clear thinking, into the peak and push your second-most important work or tasks that benefit from disinhibition, into the rebound period. Whatever you do, do not let mundane tasks creep into your peak period.

In 1995, two social psychologists, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, put forth what they called “the belongingness hypothesis.” They proposed that “a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation… and that much of what human beings do is done int eh service of belongingness.” Other thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, had made similar claims, but Baumeister and Leary set about finding empirical proof. The evidence they assembled was overwhelming. Belongingness, they found, profoundly shapes our thoughts and emotions. Its absence leads to ill effects, its presence to health and satisfaction.

Feelings of belonging boost job satisfaction and performance. Research by Alex Pentland at MIT “has shown that the more cohesive and communicative a team is – the more they chat and gossip – the more they get done.” Even the structure of the operation fosters belongingness.

9. Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud provides a insights needed for leading a healthy, high-performance team… and a healthy, high-performance self. Here are my favorite excerpts:

In the end, as a leader, you are always going to get a combination of two things: what you create and what you allow.

In an organization that is attending, inhibiting, and remembering, people are forced to grow. There is a focus and there are clear standards of performance, with clear expectations that come from reality. But in organizations where no one is driving attention, inhibition, and remembering, noncontributors can safely hide, drift along, and sometimes stay for years and add virtually nothing to the mission.

Everything we do is either relational or goal directed – or, ideally, both. Basically, we are ‘lovers and workers.’ We have relationships and we do things. We connect and we accomplish tasks. Care and drive. Be and do. Love and work. The love requires a positive relational tone and the work requires drive, expectations, and discipline.

An integrated leader does both at the same time in a way where on affects the other. He provides a positive state of being and tone while aggressively accomplishing things with people. The problem in leadership is when we do one without the other. When we care about people but are not giving them boundaries that lead to aggressive accomplishment – things like structure, goals, and measures of accountability – we fail them.

So the trick here is to give people the direction, structure, and accountability that drive good energy, but to do it in a way that does not create stress. And to do that, you have to watch your ‘tone.’ You can give feedback without engendering fear and stress.

As the person in charge of setting emotional boundaries, your job is twofold. First, do everything possible to create ‘good fear,’ the positive performance anxiety that activates healthy stress. The drive that says, ‘If I get with it, I can get something good and avoid something bad.’ Second, diminish destructive fear, which is communicated through tone, lack of structure, and the threat of relational consequences – anger, shame, guilt, and withdrawal of support. People need to know that you are going to be ‘for’ them, even when they don’t do well.

To what degree have you become a victim of negative thinking? Has the market or any other force caused you to begin to experience any of the ‘three P’s?’

Personal, Pervasive, or Permanent

Research has revealed time and again that a belief that one will be successful is one of the strongest predictors of goal achievement. Great leaders build this belief into their people, teams, and culture. They believe that they can do it, and when things get though, they find a way. They exert what I call ‘optimistic control,’ even in environments where there are many negative realities that they cannot control.

If learned helplessness is about losing the initiative and the grit to persevere, optimistic control is the opposite.

Neuroscience has shown that the more experiences we have of being in control, the better our higher brains function. It is when we are affected by things outside of our control – and cannot regain a sense of being in control of anything that will make a difference- that we hit a real brain slowdown.

We make investments when we trust that someone’s intent is for our good. We trust when they have the character patterns to make us believe that they will behave in a certain way that we know is ‘characteristic’ of them. We trust them when we know they have the capacity to pull off whatever we are depending on them to do. And lastly, we trust when they have a track record of good results and positive behavior.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that everything in the universe is running down, running out of energy, and becoming less organized and more disordered. But an important aspect of that law is that it only applies to a closed system, meaning that it applies to things that are left unto themselves and shut off from outside intervention.

You can have fears without being ‘fearful.’ ‘Fearful’ is when you let your fears make your decisions for you, so… don’t let fear make your decisions for you! Having fears is normal. Being ‘fearful’ is dysfunctional. Fearful leaders – that is, those who respond out of fear – are the worst leaders, period.

10. The Soft Edge, Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, by Rich Karlgaard provides a helpful playbook for retaining a competitive and sustainable advantage. Here are my favorite excerpts:

Lead with integrity. Trust your people. Provide a true, meaningful purpose. And make it safe to experiment and speak up.

The “Soft Edge” elements are: Trust, Smarts, Teams, Taste, and Story.

Salespeople who make more calls will almost always outperform salespeople who make fewer calls. But here is the key point: this happens not just because the act of making more calls mathematically raises the chances of success. It turns out, making all those calls has additional benefits. The most frequent callers, by facing up to the gritty task of making a call, put themselves on a faster learning curve. They more rapidly learn what works and what doesn’t. They more rapidly learn techniques to overcome rejection. Thus their success yield will improve – that is, double the calls, triple the sales. The act of making lots of calls also develops self-regulatory skills such as self-discipline, delayed gratification, and, maybe most important, self-regulated learning.

The last thing a doctor would do with such a money-making asset was share it or give it away. But the Mayo brothers saw it differently. In 1889, they started the world’s first private integrated group practice.

Research has shown that we demonstrate pronounced neuroplasticity – the ability to change cognitive structure – and neurogenesis – an ability to generate new neurons – throughout our adult lives. Both types of neural modification occur through learning a new skill, whether it’s juggling or playing golf.

Exercise also improves cognition. Do it outside, in a setting scientists call an “enriched environment” – say, riding a real bicycle on a twisty road – and the benefit will be compounded. Add a social aspect to your exercise, and now you’ve turbocharged your cortical remapping and neural generation.

“With storytelling the thing that we love is watching someone transform,” said Nancy Duarte. “The classic three-part story structure is that there is this likable person who encounters these roadblocks and emerges transformed. I think that storytelling creates that tension and release that is so important to create change.”

11. The Lost Art of Closing by Anthony Iannarino unlocked something big for me. It’s the clearest path to sales and influence informed by the way people make decisions today. The book provides a step-by-step process and excellent language for gaining commitments to partnership that drive productive change. Here were my favorite excerpts:

The six key components of the right mindset are confidence, caring, persistence, speaking from the client’s mind, embracing concerns, and realizing it’s not about you.

The best advice I can give you for responding to an RFP is to call the purchasing people and push back, telling them all the things in their request that are going to prevent them from achieving the results they are pursuing.

It is important to control the (sales/influence) process and not let the buyer skip commitments. This is the best way to serve your prospective client as a trusted advisor and create a preference for you, your company, and your solution.

It’s your responsibility to know what commitment your dream client needs to make and why they need to make it. It’s your responsibility to understand what value is being created for them by agreeing to move forward.

In human relationships, fast is slow and slow is fast. Trying to go fast and get what you want when you want it betrays your self-orientation, creates friction and resistance, and slows things down.

The goal of your first meeting should be to explore the dissonance and define it as a problem worth solving.

You need to begin exploring change by sharing your insights and your point of view about your prospective client’s business, their risks, and their opportunities.

It’s your job to paint a picture, to make a better outcome not only visible in their mind’s eye but attainable.

Still, you need to ask, “What else would you need to make this exactly right for you?”

I begin with, “We can help you get the outcomes you need, but our price is going to be higher than what you are paying now.”

Since the beginning of time, people with leadership responsibilities have surrounded themselves with trusted advisors, counselors who could help them make decisions and guide them to the future.

“Who you are” matters more than “what you do,” especially when it comes to change.

12. The HBR classic The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins truly is the authoritative guide to leadership onboarding. Below are my favorite excerpts. In the book you’ll also find helpful questions and checklists for acclimating and leading change in organizations of all types and stages.

Common traps for newly hired/promoted leaders are: sticking with what you know, falling prey to the “action imperative”, setting unrealistic expectations, attempting to do too much, coming in with “the” answer, engaging in the wrong (technical) type of learning, neglecting horizontal relationships.

How do you build a productive relationship with a new boss? Here are the basic don’ts: don’t stay away, don’t surprise your boss, don’t approach your boss only with problems, don’t run down your checklist, don’t expect your boss to change.

Here are the do’s: clarify expectations early and often, take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work, negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning, aim for early wins in areas important to the boss, pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects.

It’s valuable to include plans for these five specific conversations with your new boss about transition-related subjects in your 90-day plan: the situational diagnosis conversation, the expectations conversation, the resource conversation, the style conversation, and the personal development conversation.

In planning for your transition (and beyond), focus on making successive waves of change. Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results.

It’s crucial to get early wins, but it’s also important to secure them in the right way. Here are some basic principles to consider: focus on a few promising opportunities, get wins that matter to your boss, get wins in the right way, take your business situation into account, adjust for the culture.

To nudge your mythology in a positive direction, look for and leverage teachable moments. These are actions that clearly display what you’re about; they also model the kinds of behavior you want to encourage.

Try to identify the sources of power that give particular people influence in the organization. Here are examples: expertise, control of information, connections to others, access to resources, personal loyalty.

Understanding people’s motivations is only part of the story. You also need to assess situational pressures: the driving and restraining forces acting on them because of the situation they’re in.

There is a lot of good social psychology research showing that we overestimate the impact of personality and underestimate the impact of situational pressures in reaching conclusions about the reasons people act the way they do… Think about how key people perceive their alternatives and choices.

Apply classic influence techniques such as consultation, framing, choice-shaping, social influence, incrementalism, sequencing, and action-forcing events.

As you frame your arguments, keep in mind Aristotle’s rhetorical categories of logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is about making logical arguments – using data, facts, and reasoned rationales to build your case for change. Ethos is about elevating the principles that should be applied (such as fairness) and the values that must be upheld (such as a culture of teamwork) in making decisions. Pathos is about making powerful emotional connections with your audience – for example, putting forth an inspiring vision of what cooperation could accomplish.

13. The provocative book Deep Work by Cal Newport challenges today’s multi-tasking, open work space, social media approach to work. He effectively cites research that suggests the most successful people are able to cut out typical distractions to really focus. My favorite excerpts are:

Skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. 

This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits – effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.

***

There are at least two big reasons why this (a culture of connectivity that makes work too easy) is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier – at least, in the moment. If you couldn’t count on this quick response time you’d instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term).

The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox – responding to the latest missive with alacrity while other pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive. If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard.

**Additionally, I’ve run across this phenomenal site for tips on email etiquette and email management.

14. Peter Block offers thought provoking insights on the trend toward being a human “doing” in his book The Answer to How Is Yes.  Here were some of my favorite quotes:

Therapist Pittman McGee states that the opposite of love is not hate, but efficiency.  While being practical is modern culture’s child, it carries a price and we are paying it.  The price of practicality is its way of deflecting us from our deeper values.

I would suggest that it is the tension between “What maters?” and “What works?” that is out of balance.  If this is true, then working at home or even spending more time with our families will not resolve the issue of work/life balance.  Resolution lies in becoming more balanced between engaging in what has meaning for us and doing things that are useful and practical, or in a sense, instrumental.  Being fully alive is to be in balance wherever we are.

The task of the social architect is to design and bring into being organizations that serve both the marketplace and the soul of the people who work within them.  Where the architect designs physical space, the social architect designs social space.

Matching the role to the conditions for acting on what matters, the social architect has three design criteria: 1. Is idealism encouraged? 2. Is intimacy made possible? 3. Is there the space and demand for depth?

The fact that we are living in an engineer-economist dominated world creates a bias toward more control than freedom, more practicality than idealism, barter rather than intimacy, and greater speed more than depth. The choice to think of ourselves as social architects is an activist stance- radical in thinking, conservative and caring in action.

15. The book Integrity by Dr. Henry Cloud has much less to do with ethics and mostly to do with being a fully integrated leader.  While the book is dense with psychological detail, it’s a readable overview of how great leaders think and behave (and how they avoid derailing).  Some of the best excerpts are:

The most important tool ultimately is the person and his or her makeup, and yet it seems to get the least amount of attention and work.

People who try to help others by talking them out of what they feel are usually no help at all.  It is also the reason why research has for decades proven that you can help desperate people immensely by giving them no answers at all, and only giving them empathy.

That is the supreme essence of trust, not being “guarded.”

In successful people’s lives, there is no time when they “have time” to do things that are future-oriented.  The present is always too busy.  Therefore, they do not wait until they have the time.  They make the time, first.  Then they do what the present calls for. 

16. Anyone wanting more creativity, authentic communication and self-expression should read If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland.  She provides a refreshing and inspiring guide to writing in any creative capacity.  Here are some of my favorite quotes:

I hate traditional criticism.  I don’t mean great criticism… but the usual picky, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, yet results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, extinguishing vision and bravery.

Through writing you will gradually learn to become more and more free and to say all you think; at the same time you will learn never to lie to yourself, never to pretend and attitudinize. But only by writing and by long, patient, serious work will you find your true self.

Art, music, literature is a sharing; that a live, alternating current is passing swiftly between teller and listener; that a listener (even though imaginary or transcendent) is absolutely essential in the process.

17. Tim Keller & Katherine Leary Alsdorf have authored a compelling perspective on living your faith in the context of work, from the perspective of being Christian, in Every Good Endeavor.  They immediately acknowledge that living out your faith at work unfortunately “seems relegated to small symbolic gestures, to self-righteous abstinence from certain behaviors, and to political alignments on the top cultural and legal issues of the day.”  My favorite excerpts were:

Every Christian should be able to identify, with conviction and satisfaction, the ways in which his or her work participates with God in his creativity and cultivation.  Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development. 

One of the reasons work is both fruitless and pointless is the powerful inclination of the human heart to make work, and its attendant benefits, the main basis of one’s meaning and identity.  When this happens, work is no longer a way to create and bring out the wonders of the created order, as Calvin would say, or to be an instrument of God’s providence, serving the basic needs of our neighbor, as Luther would say.  Instead it becomes a way to distinguish myself from my neighbor, to show the world and prove to myself that I’m special.

We either get our name – our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness – from what God has done for us and in us, or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves.  When you see how much you are loved (by God), your work will become far less selfish.  Suddenly all the other things in your work life – your influence, your resume, and the benefits they bring you – become just things.  You can risk them, spend them, and even lose them.  You are free.

18. The successful entrepreneur Gary Keller recalls the advice of Jack Palance in City Slickers that the secret of success is pursuing “one thing”.  The book The One Thing is a quick and entertaining read with practical advice for focusing on our top priority in life and work.  My favorite excerpts were:

When you see people who look like “disciplined” people, what you’re really seeing is people who’ve trained a handful of habits into their lives.  

Habits take an average of 66 days to acquire… and those with the right habits seem to do better than others.  They’re doing the most important thing regularly and, as a result, everything else is easier.

People who visualize the process perform better than those who visualize the outcome.

The single most important difference between amateurs and elite performers is that the future elite performers seek out teachers and coaches and engage in supervised training, whereas the amateurs rarely engage in similar types of practice.

When the things that matter most get done, you’ll still be left with a sense of things being undone – a sense of imbalance.  Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results.

Productive people get more done, achieve better results, and earn far more in their hours than the rest.  They do so because they devote maximum time to being productive on their top priority, their ONE Thing.  They time block their ONE Thing and then protect their time blocks with a vengeance.

19. Brene Brown’s ability to make topics like “shame” and “vulnerability” relevant to the workplace have opened new conversations about being human in a professional context.  Her Ted talk is excellent as is her book Daring Greatly, which discusses to how be more Wholehearted in a culture that rewards performance, productivity and perfection.  Here is my favorite excerpt:

Daring greatly is not about winning or losing.  It’s about courage.  In a world where scarcity and shame dominate and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive.  Uncomfortable.  It’s even a little dangerous at times.  And, without question, putting ourselves out there means there’s a far greater risk of feeling hurt.  But as I look back on my own life and what Daring Greatly has meant to me, I can honestly say that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous and hurtful as believing that I’m standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen.

Thought Leaders I’m Following

1. Andre Lavoie and his company Clear Company are at the forefront of the intersection between corporate strategy and talent management.  They are re-defining what it means to have a transparent, aligned and engaged organization.

2. The Good Leadership Breakfast is a monthly breakfast hosted by Paul Batz that creates an environment of authenticity and learning.  I always leave the breakfast feeling more grounded and connected.