Who do you work for? (And who works for you?)


I always took the position that my boss (when I had a job) worked for me. My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way.

Of course, that also means that the people I hire are in charge as well. My job isn’t to tell them what to do, my job is for them to tell me what to do to allow them to keep their promise of delivering great work.

If you go into work on Monday with a list of things for your boss to do for you (she works for you, remember?) what would it say? What happens if you say to the people you hired, “I work for you, what’s next on my agenda to support you and help make your numbers go up?”

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Don Quijote didn’t ship


 
Society makes heroes out of entrepreneurs and adventurers that tilt at windmills and succeed. Napster slays the music industry! Twitter comes out of nowhere!

The thing about taking on the biggest giants is that most of the time (so often as to be all of the time if you’re willing to do some rounding) you fail. You don’t just fail at the end, you often fail long before the end.

Yet the dreamers persist. These are usually the garage entrepreneurs, people with little market success behind them, those working without a track record or significant resources. People forget that Google was backed with millions of dollars from the biggest VCs in the world when they took on Yahoo.

I know, I know, I’m supposed to be the guy who says, “go for it!” but the fact is, most of the time the choice to take on impossible odds, to challenge the entrenched monopolist is the work of the lizard brain. After all, if you dream the impossible dream and go after the thing that can’t possibly work, you don’t have to worry about being criticized, you don’t have to worry about the responsibility of shipping or serving your customers. After all, it was impossible.

Tangling with the largest possible opponent, when you are severely overmatched is a way of giving in to the resistance, of not actually shipping.

My best advice: win little battles. Get in the habit of winning, of shipping, of having customers that can’t live without you. Once you’ve demonstrated you know how to do the art, then go after the windmills.

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All you need to know…


is that it’s possible.

Mike sent me a great story about an ultra-lightweight backpacker:

“Wolf was carrying a super-small pack which weighed 14 pounds including food and water. When asked how he got his pack weight so low, Wolf would reply, ‘All you need to know is that it’s possible.’”

One of the under-reported stories of the internet is this: it constantly reports on what’s possible. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something that you decided couldn’t be done. By calling your bluff and by pointing out the possibilities, this reporting of possibility changes everything.

You can view this as a horrible burden, one that raises the bar and eliminates any sinecure of comfort and hiding you can find, or you can embrace it as a chance to stretch.

Most organizations forget to ask the question in the first place.

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Will you miss them if they leave? (Call for linchpins)


If you know someone who does great work, who brings passion and humanity with them instead of leaving it at the door of the factory, I’d like to help you celebrate them. Read on for three ways you can do that–fast and free.

Here are the three options, from most involved to least.

1. If you live in New York City or can get here easily
The folks at Vook want to talk to you. Vook creates augmented ebooks with video on the iPad, iPhone and other platforms. They had terrific success translating Unleashing the Ideavirus, and now they want to do it with my latest book, Linchpin as well.

It will contain video of people like you talking about Linchpins who matter to them, who have overcome the resistance and shipped their art to the world. If you know someone like that and are able to appear on camera at their New York studios, drop a line to rachel@vook.com and tell her who and what you’d like to celebrate.

2. If you’d like to submit a video but don’t live in New York

If you visit the Facebook page they’ve built, you can easily upload a video you shoot yourself. The best videos are simple, short and shot on a neutral background. Don’t merely tell them who the linchpin is, but tell everyone why–what’s their art, what fear do they overcome, how do they contribute. Talk about what do they do, or why do they do it or when did they realize that they could make this dent in the universe.

[To upload videos to the Vook Facebook page, you must "Like" the page and then you will have the option to upload videos directly to the page wall.]


Smallermosaic 3. If you have a photo of your Linchpin

I’m going to be updating the inside of the cover of my book. I’m looking for pictures to include, and all you need to do is email it to this address according to these instructions. (Please read carefully before hitting send!) The new cover will be out before the end of the year.

Thanks!

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Sentences, paragraphs and chapters


It’s laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you’re building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy–that’s insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

[And for those in need of subtitles, this isn't a post about your next novel. It's about your business, your career and your life.]

Four people tell you that there was a typo on the third slide in your presentation. A generous and useful editor (hard to call them a consultant), though, points out that you shouldn’t be doing presentations at all, and your time would be better spent meeting in small groups with your best clients.

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