The anxious feeling that you’re not pulling your weight amongst your colleagues might be wrong. It’s likely that you are, in fact, doing your fair share of the work, or that, even if you’re not, it’s only for a moment in which you need to attend to other things. In my experience, the people who fear they’re not carrying enough are. It’s the ones who complain about having to do too much who are keeping the team from really soaring.

So check yourself when you get twitchy because you suspect everyone else is doing more work, or better work, than you. Check yourself, and then give thanks that you’re working with people who take care of business. Seriously, if that feeling tells you anything it’s that these are the kinds of people you want to be working with.

 

 

Don’t cushion your words by telling us that they’re tough for you to say, because you’re either lying or shilling for sympathy, and neither makes us want to believe you.

The preacher says, “I have to say some difficult things about homosexuality”mere hours after the Orlando shootings, and what follows is a breezy sermon filled with adjectives like “disgusting” and “gross.” To watch him and his amateur Power Point, it’s the easiest thing this preacher has ever done. He’s clearly lying: there’s nothing difficult about this for him, and that makes him dangerous, because he’s worse than wrong (and ill informed and tasteless); he’s a liar, and we will never believe him.

Yet even if “This is hard for me to say” is authentic, it’s manipulative. You’re shifting the burden of your task as a truth-teller onto your audience, and that’s not fair. If you’re straining under the weight of words that must be said, we’ll see it. We will judge the words on their own merit, though, and not on the basis of our perception of your effort. If you make a show of your effort, forget it.

Don’t lie. Don’t manipulate. Say what you need to say. Trust us.

 

Packers from the moving company are on their way here this morning, and so everything is unplugged except the wifi router. Trash cans are all empty and clean. The place has an echo.

Whenever I move, the purging that comes with packing ignites a spark for simple living. “Why can’t we always live like this?” I wonder. Just a few pieces of furniture, loose items all neatly wedged into clear plastic boxes, roooooom to move around. It’s so, I don’t know, Zen?

Then I hear Meredith upstairs herding those loose items for the third consecutive day, and I realize I don’t have anywhere to place my coffee cup.

Collaboration means sometimes getting stepped on. The more collaborators there are, the bigger the crowd of feet. Getting stepped on is the worst.

She changed the program and didn’t tell you.

He rearranged the space without asking.

They overlooked you in the decisions about set up.

Two things feel important when collaborators step on you, and those are to affirm the value of the work they are trying to do while also asserting the importance of your project. Because collaborations are often at the organizational level, team members pursuing the same goals work on separate projects and call upon the same resources, which is an unavoidable conflict and a sign of organizational vitality (would we rather nobody needed the space?). Even though you are exceedingly considerate, even though you submit room requests on time, things break inexplicably against the priorities of your project.

Take a breath. Prize one-on-one conversations in the service of understanding the values behind the decision, and affirm those values. Then fight like Hell for your project.

Fight fair, of course. Don’t cast aspersions on peoples’ commitment and convictions; don’t yell; don’t trash talk. But make the case.

Richard Schiff used to fight over the script with Tommy Schlamme on the set of The West Wing (start at the 14 minute mark). He started to feel bad about causing conflict, so he quit fighting. One day, Schlamme came to him and pleaded with him to get back in the ring. “I miss our fights,” he told Schiff. “I learn more about what we do and what we’re doing by you challenging me. If you stop, I’m not going to be as good.”

By fighting for your project with your collaborators, you can facilitate learning in the organization. Nobody is served by you rolling over.

 

 

There’s nothing new or different about the appeal of the new and the different. If the status quo is unacceptable, the answer is not novelty but improvement–concrete, measurable improvement guided by compelling values.

New isn’t better, just new. Diverse is better. Experienced is better. Principled is better.

Let’s choose for those criteria.

In the stories you tell about your goings on in the world, are you the villain or the hero? Some people’s repertoires are filled with tales of idiots endured and fools set right, while others’ recite litanies of failure with an unrelenting voice of self-depreciation.

We’re not as great or as ghastly as we’re tempted to put it to others, and we’re not doing ourselves any favors by perpetually casting ourselves in these roles. If the narrative arc of everything you recount proceeds from some moron wreaking havoc to you with a one-liner that saves the day, I don’t believe you. If you’re always the moron, I don’t trust you. I pity you, but I don’t trust you.

Let’s pay attention to the trends in our stories and protect against the contrasting faults both of exaggerating our effectiveness and amplifying our failures.

Work that matters demands difficult choices: this opportunity or that one? More formal education or less? Family or job first right now? Tomorrow?

Today is Meredith Clayton’s last day at Kaiser Permanente, the medical practice where she has worked as a full time pediatrician since 2010. For six years she has cared for a census of patients in two different clinics. For four years she has invested in the practice as a partner. Flu season in and flu season out, Meredith has thrown herself into caring for children and teenagers (and, just as often, their anxious and demanding parents)–vaccinating them, diagnosing them, listening to them, filling out their forms, conducting their school physicals–all while raising a daughter and supporting a spouse with his own full time career.

She’s choosing to leave that practice today for an uncertain professional future, because I followed an opportunity to Chicago. For the first time since her parents took her and her siblings to France at age four, Meredith is moving for something other than the dictates of her calling: college, medical school, clinical rotations, residency, second residency, job. It’s not by-the-book, and it’s not at all easy, and I’ve been slow to recognize the bravery in it.

Her colleagues have wished her well while questioning her sense with befuddled muttering about weather and rather less befuddled muttering about income; it’s clear she’s going to earn less, and there simply is no other medical provider like the one where she’s working now.

Nobody is expected to do what Meredith is doing. It’s something a person has to choose, and that choice is tortured by doubt, anxiety, love, and devotion. My gratitude for Meredith’s choice is a pittance. My resolve to honor her choice by excelling in this opportunity and finding us a thriving footing will only go so far.

Meredith’s commitment is of the type that shapes a person, a career, a marriage. These are so weighted with uncertainty, so brimming with promise, so mixed up with guilt and conviction. The contradiction of it all is more than a person can bear most days. But to be without that contradiction is not the path she chose (and re-chose, and is choosing again). Today that path deposits her at a turning point she wasn’t seeking and prods her to answer questions she hasn’t been asking.

It may work out beautifully for her career. And yet, it may not.

This is not a time for a pep talk. I thought it was, so I’ve been giving one for months. It’s peppered with language of “possibility” and draws deeply from a spring long tapped by the Tony Robbinses of the world.

Enough of that. Today feels like a moment to take off my hat and observe the dignity of Meredith’s work and choices, and to admit that I don’t have the power to engineer the perfect outcome. I can only receive her accompaniment as a gift, and then work and pray for her flourishing in this next chapter.

And so I do. Here’s to Meredith Clayton.

 

Yesterday I wrote about blogs, my favorite reading tool for them as well as a few of my favorite reads. Today: the best blog posts.

A blog post is a particular product that has advantages and constraints unique to it. It’s easy, easy, easy to publish, whether you’re using a free wordpress.com or blogspot.com site, Tumblr, Medium, or hosting it yourself. After your initial set up, you can literally publish anything you want in a matter of minutes. That’s the advantage.

The constraint  is that it’s online. That’s where people will read it, so it has to follow online reading rules, the first of which is Keep It Short. I can’t stick with posts that are longer than about 500 words, no matter who’s written them. You could do a lot worse than Murphy’s, for starters. Libby, too, does this really well. Jan is the best at it.

There’s a world of permission in 300-500 words.

I’ll add a second rule: don’t cross-post stuff. I want to read an insight or observation you have tailored for this medium, today, not the thing you wrote for some other occasion and are just pasting in the blog composer now. Link to that other thing (please!).

Other readers will have different criteria for a blog post they want to read. These are mine.

I read blogs. This one is my favorite.

Many of my friends have blogs that I read. The first three of my friends’ blogs in my feed this morning are this one and this one and this one. People I’ll never meet write terrific blogs I follow, too, like this one by a venture capitalist and this one by a Canadien obesity medicine doctor.

The best blogs publish regular content exploring something the author cares about. It’s that simple.

Today’s post is about blogs.

Seth wants you to read more blogs. He reads 50 a day. Okay. But how? And which ones?

Google Reader used to be the go-to way to find and subscribe to lots of blogs, but Google shut that service down a few years ago, leaving a gaping hole in peoples’ reading habits. Feedly sort of popped up to take Google Reader’s place, and it’s a terrific little service; it works on desktop and mobile, has an attractive interface, and makes subscribing easy. There are web browser extensions that make it even better.

There’s also Blogtrottr. This one takes a bit more work, since you have to go to the website and drop in the url of the blog you want to follow. But once you’ve done that the service sends all that blog’s content to your email inbox on a schedule you choose (immediately, once a day, etc.). It works with many websites, even ones that aren’t blogs, strictly speaking.

WordPress is my favorite blog reading tool, though. I like that posts are displayed in a nice size and that any graphics in them display right on the feed. Most of the time you can read entire posts without having to click to an external site. It’s not perfect, though. It actually succeeds at fewer feed subscriptions that either Blogtrottr or Feedly; some sites you want to subscribe to, like Vox, it can’t find the feed.

So here’s my resolution: to read blogs. Doing that will require trimming my subscription list of sites that aren’t blogs. You can visit a website like Vox easily enough, because it’s ubiquitous and publishes to lots of channels. But the best blogs do one thing really well, which is to share actionable takes on subjects the blogger cares about.

I want more of that.