Photo by Chu Chup Hinh.
Who do you want to be in 2019?
A side effect of the work we do is that we get a lot of invitations for coffee when people are contemplating a change. They want help thinking through options, or figuring out what matters to them. Sometimes they really just want a rubber duck. We try to take as many of these as we can.
But no month packs our calendar like December.
There’s something about staring down a holiday break and a new year that loosens people. That makes it easier for them to elevate, and see what isn’t working in their current situation. That doesn’t mean quitting, necessarily (though both of us left our last few jobs at the beginning of a year), it just means re-assessing. What do you want? What’s working and what needs to be different? And then, when you have those answers, re-negotiate your spot in the world.
By the next time we send this newsletter, it will be 2019. That’s two weeks. Lot of thinking can happen in two weeks. Don’t let us force it, but if you’re itching to do some of that thinking, here’s what we tell the folks at coffee:
- Figure out what you care about and what you don’t
- Describe what the next thing needs to look like, what needs to be different, even if you don’t know where that thing will be or if that thing exists
- Write it all down
- Start putting together a plan to shrink the distance
It’s daunting. We know. But if you get as far as the first 3, you’ll have started something important. We’re rooting for you.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s Reading
Ellen DeGeneres Is Not as Nice as You Think
I grew up in Baltimore and while I have a faint twang (made worse when I’m tired or drinking), my parents weren’t from there. Even after decades of living locally, my parents never really managed to be locals. As a kid, I would say I didn’t like someone at school and they would chime in from across the house in surround sound. “Be nice,” they’d say. “No one ever leaves Baltimore. All the kids you’re going to school with now will still be here when you’re adults.”
This may have hastened my interest in leaving Baltimore. I didn’t want to have to be nice to people I couldn’t stand.
My parents were mostly right.
On the one hand, treating people like they will be around for a long time is a decent rule of thumb. Tech is a such small town. If we’re working together now or we’ve worked together before, there’s a good chance we’ll work together again. It pays to be nice.
On the other hand, we have way outsized expectations of girls when it comes to being nice. We socialize girls to be nice. We expect them to put the needs of others ahead of their own. We encourage them to smile, even when they don’t feel like it. And we’ve set up a dynamic where likability and seniority are in perpetual conflict.
The New York Times wrote a long piece about Ellen DeGeneres. About why she feels boxed in doing daytime TV where nice is part of her shtick. About the expectations other people put on her. About how a 60-year old woman who earns nearly $100m a year doesn’t feel like she’s allowed to have a bad day.
And there’s a voice on each shoulder throughout the piece. There’s Ellen’s wife, telling her to retire from the boxed-in-never-really-real-emotionally-stunted-daytime-persona. And then there’s Ellen’s brother, who basically tells her that the masses need and opiate and she’s it. This push/pull drives the entire piece.
As I read the Ellen piece, the thing that stood out was decision-making in the extremes. One thing versus another. A conflict between her personal self and her public self.
This push/pull shows up for a lot of people. The balance between what you want and what other people want for or from you.
How many voices are invited to that conversation for you? And whose voice carries the most weight?
What Johnathan’s Reading
Two VCs talking about failure:
- Arlan Hamilton – None of this is easy
- Charlie O’Donnell – Failure is always an option
If you wanted to turn survivorship bias into a career, it would be somewhere in venture capital. The financial structure of VC – raise larger and larger sums by telling a more compelling and bankable story – is optimized for telling lots of stories about winning and few stories about failing. And the VCs themselves, pressured to attract the best deals and the best investors, tend to make themselves into very shiny philosopher kings (and very very occasionally queens). So it’s nice to see two VCs talk honestly about the parts that are hard.
In Getting to Yes, the authors talk a lot about having a BATNA. It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. It means knowing what happens if this deal falls through. If this job falls through. If this sales meeting, or this transfer, or this hard conversation with your manager falls through. It’s an exercise to help you think through plan B. If The Thing doesn’t happen, what is the next best outcome you can get to?
It’s a good exercise. I think some people feel like thinking through a BATNA means giving up. I guess because it contemplates a world where The Thing doesn’t happen, and Winners Should Never Contemplate That, or some garbage. It doesn’t work that way. At least, it hasn’t for me. What thinking through a BATNA does is get rid of the fear. Fear is the mind killer. Once you see that your BATNA is (in many cases) pretty okay, you can go back into the negotiation/interview/sales meeting with a clear head.
Anyhow – I hear Arlan talking about grit, and perseverance, and having people in your corner. And I hear Charlie talking about BATNAs. And I thought those were both pretty great things to be thinking about heading into the new year.
