Work Less and Do More

I wore jeans, fluorescent shoes (see my Facebook page http://bit.ly/gidg for a picture), and a T-shirt to the HBS Club of Boston presentation on “Emerging Billion-Dollar Trends.”

Nothing happened.

People I knew talked to me. The presenter hugged me. The guy sitting next to me chatted. A couple of venture capitalists entered the conversation I was part of and were as courteous as they ever are. I had a perfectly fine time.

No one seemed offended, taken aback, disrespected, or dismissive. My worst fears simply didn’t materialize along any dimension. (I suspected  they wouldn’t. When I noticed how much emotional energy I had invested in being afraid it would be problematic, that very investment was a clue that irrational emotional crap was almost certainly overreacting to a real world situation. The fact that many other people have the same fear does not in any way make the fear more real.)

I am going to a business presentation tonight and am coming straight from my writing haven to the event. I wear jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers in the Haven. I’ve noticed that the thought of going to the business presentation dressed like that is scary to me. Scary. What’s up with that? What am I actually scared of, just from wearing different clothes?

I try to be concrete with my answer. “It would be bad for my reputation” is the kind of thought I have. But what does that actually mean? Do I think I would lose business? Do I think people would say “That Stever, he wears jeans so he must not be any good at what he does.”? Getting concrete makes it clear to me that my fears are rather absurd in a lot of ways. I’ve decided to dress casually tonight just to see what happens–both with the other people, but more importantly, in my own head as I play mindgames with myself.

Would you wear jeans and a T-shirt to a business event? Why or why not? If you’d be scared to, what do you actually think would happen?

My agent just read my current book draft. She says I have way, way, way too much content. *Urp!* I need to trim down the quantity and make it flow much more smoothly.

Hey, I went to one of those schools that was like “taking a drink from a firehose.” If you don’t have water squirting out your nose, there wasn’t enough content, right?

I’m collecting beliefs about time management and making daily progress. Could you share your beliefs with me? These are simply the “conventional wisdom” that you now take for granted. These beliefs may or may not be true, the key element is that we no longer question them.

Here are some of mine:

• I haven’t enough time to get everything done.
• I need large blocks of uninterrupted time to work.
• It’s possible to have consistent, high levels of productivity day after day.
• If I’m not frantically doing stuff, I’m not working.
• I should do things my boss asks for first, even if it means slipping other schedules.

I follow lots of people on Twitter, many of whom I followed reflexively after they followed me, before it got infeasible to do that.

I’ve noticed there seem to be a few different kinds of twitterers:

• Redirectors. People whose tweets mainly serve to point me to other interesting articles, videos, and websites.
• Tipsters. People whose tweets actually contain tips or useful information.
• Personalities. People whose tweets reveal something interesting about them, so I get intrigued by them as a person, and possible also intrigued by their content.
• Marketers. Lots of self-promotion and/or product promotion. 
• Randoms. People who tweet random facts about their life that are not revealing or interesting. “Am walking down Street.” 
• … have I missed any Twitterer types? 

My podcast is where I share tips (let’s get real: the amount of content I have to generate to keep two newsletters, two blogs, a podcast and a book going is unreal. I can’t add Twitter to that load, too).

On Twitter, I’m trying to be a Personality, more than anything. I tweet about things that interest me, and also that affect me in emotional, personal ways. It’s been an interesting journey, since I started on Twitter purely as a way to stay social with my friends. Given the podcast and upcoming book, my presence has evolved into a complicated mix of trying to stay personal and yet build a community that can become the basis for some kind of career (workshops? media presence? information products?).

Since I have no grand plan, I’m just meandering on my own trying to connect in a personal, rather than informational, way.

Do you have any thoughts on my Twitter/Facebook presence? Is there anything you would like me to do differently that would make me more worth following, and/or build a stronger connection of whatever type between me and the Get-it-Done Guy/Stever Robbins community?

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the fundamental unknowability of the universe. I’d like to include a tip or two in my book on the topic, but truly, I’m at a loss. So I’m turning to you, in the hopes you can share some ideas.

When we’re doing something we’ve done before, or trying to do the same thing others have done before, we have many tools: we can set goals, we can break the goals down into subtasks, we can do research, look at statistics and trends, and try to predict the future. This is the thrust of our education (MBA education, at least), and is generally accepted wisdom.

Some things in the world are risky. They’re unknown. For example, should I accept the job offer from company X? With some careful framing of the question, a few phone calls, and some due diligence, I can at least get a good idea of what it might be like to work for company X. 

Other things in the world are uncertain. They are fundamentally unknowable. Either they’re completely new so the human race lacks the past experience to know them, or the outcomes are so dependent on so many different things that for all intents and purposes, they’re unknowable. Some unknowables: (in 2003) Will the iPod catch on in the marketplace? Will my current job lead me to the next career step I want? Will global warming cause serious problems for the human race? What will I be doing in my life five years from now?

We sometimes mistake the uncertain/unknowable for the risky/unknown. We believe that saving for retirement is a good thing and we invest using prudent risk models, which is essentially believing that economic future is risky and unknown, but we can control the risk (and thus, it’s knowable to some degree). Then the economy collapses the very year a person retires, and it turns out that while certain market aspects were unknown, the actual result of “saving for retirement” (which must include consideration of the market conditions at the time of retirement) turns out to be unknowable and uncertain.

How do you approach the unknowable in your life? Do you try to plan? Do you get scared and avoid it as best you can? Do you throw yourself into the future with wild abandon?

What are some of the things you believe about how predictable and controllable your life is, and how your approach to life differs (or doesn’t) for the known, the knowable, and the unknowable?

I’m working on a segment for the book about asking for help. I’ve noticed that I just don’t ask for help nearly enough.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• I don’t want to admit to myself that I don’t know the thing.
• I don’t realize that I need help, even though I’m not making any progress.
• I only have a certain number of “silver bullets” and don’t want to use them up.

What are some of the things you think that get you not to ask for help?

There are many places in my book where I change names to protect the innocent (or guilty), or where I am just telling a made-up story and need a character name.

I’ve been going through my list of gender-neutral names, in an attempt to let readers indulge their own stereotypes instead of my own, when I realized with a shock that all the names are American names, typically of the white, middle-class, variety. There wasn’t a Vinod or Hiroki or Sjooki among them. I’d like to fix that!

If you know any, could you share with me some names from different cultures, languages, and ethnicities? Please let me know the name and the ethnicity/language it comes from, plus what gender the name is. Gender-neutral names preferred but not necessary. Thank you!!

As you know from listening to my podcast, I like to use unbiased language whenever I can. That’s language that is as free from gender assumptions as possible.

The APA has explicit guidelines for how to do this. You can find them here: http://is.gd/prz4 in the section titled “Unbiased language.” Watch it before reading my critique. It’s only about 1.5 minutes long.

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I have been slogging through editing my pre-first-draft for several weeks now. It’s been hellish. You see, I wrote the first 150 pages of the book using dictation software. The theory was: I can speak extemporaneously and create excellent, well-thought-out, coherent speeches. So why not just record those and turn them into a book? It seemed so simple.

There’s just one problem. What works in a speech doesn’t work in print. You can’t organize things the same way. You don’t have voice tone and inflection, so spoken jokes fall flat on the printed page, and you miss great written jokes that don’t translate to spoken word.

But even worse, when speaking, you create a narrative that kind of hangs together. Speech is very forgiving. Once it’s down in black and white, however, it became obvious that I repeated sentences, overused certain expressions, and wasn’t very coherent at the level of the chapter or section.

The transcription went fast, but the editing (which really amounted to rewriting) went very, very slowly. Combined, I suspect the two took longer than composing directly at the keyboard. Certainly, editing the transcription has been more like trying to swim through quicksand than anything that might resemble a joyful, creative act.

But now… the editing is fast and easy, like a hot knife through a butter sculpture of Barbra Streisand. Life is suddenly good again!