
from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-addresses-trump-immigration-order-in-employee-qa/?ncid=rss
I got to the gate just as they closed the door and the plane began to back away.
It was thirty years ago, but I still remember how it felt. I think we’re hard-wired to fear these painful moments of missing out.
Deadlines don’t cause death if missed, but sometimes we persuade ourselves that it’s almost as bad. As a result, marketers and others that want us to take action invent cliffs, slamming doors and loud buzzers.
We put a rope at door, a timer on the clock and focus on scarcity and the fear of missing out. And as a result, consumers and students and co-workers wait for the signals, prioritizing their lives around the next urgency.
When everything is focused on the deadline, there’s little time to work on the things that are actually important.
When we build our lives around ‘what’s due’ we sacrifice our agency to the priorities and urgencies of everyone else.
More important is the bigger issue: Time is running out.
For all the things you might want to experience, not merely the ones that are about to leave the gate.
Time is running out for you to level up or connect or to be generous to someone who really needs you.
Time is running out for you to become the person you've decided to be, to make the difference you seek to make, to produce the work you know you're capable of.
Set your own buzzer.
We focus on them and elevate them on our priority list.
Sometimes, we invent a fake problem and give it great import and urgency as a way to take our focus and fear away from the thing that's actually a threat. These fake problems have no apparent solution, but at least they give us something to fret over, a way to distract ourselves and the people around us.
And sometimes, we pick a fake problem that has a convenient and easy fake solution. Because, the thinking goes, we're taking action, so things must be getting better.
Short order cooks rarely make change happen. And denying reality doesn't make it go away.
It's fashionable for designers and marketers to want to reduce friction in the way they engage with users.
And sometimes, that's smart. If someone knows what they want, get out of their way and help them get it. One-click, done.
But often, what we want is traction. The traction to find our footing, shift our posture, make a new decision. The traction to actually influence what happens next, not merely slip our way toward a goal of someone else's choosing.
The digital sign at the train station near my home could show me what time it is.
It could tell us how many more minutes until the next train.
Or it could announce if the train was running on time...
Instead, it shows me today's date.
What am I supposed to do with that data?
Or consider the typical hotel bathroom scale. Accurate to plus or minus five pounds, it's worthless, because it doesn't help the user know how much weight has been gained (or lost).
In this case, the absolute number doesn't matter, it's the trend over time.
Information is data with a purpose and a context.
We're not having a lot of trouble with the "diverse opinions" part.
But they're worthless without shared reality.
At a chess tournament, when the newcomer tries to move his rook diagonally, it's not permitted. "Hey, that's just your opinion," is not a useful response. Because, after all, chess is defined by the rules of the game. If you want to play a different game, begin by getting people to agree to the new rules.
In physics, it doesn't matter how much you want a ping pong ball to accelerate faster, your opinion isn't going to change what happens.
It's tempting to race right into our plans to solve a problem, but too often, we wrap our version of reality tightly into that proposed solution, without thoughtfully getting buy in on the reality before launching into the solution we're so eager to describe.
Shared reality is the foundation on which we can build trust, make promises and engage in a useful discussion on how to achieve our goals.
The best time to experiment in the kitchen is if you don't have 11 guests coming for dinner in three hours.
Or, at the very least, be sure to have some decent frozen pizzas on hand, just in case.
We often sign ourselves up for long, involved entanglements, and a good thing, too, because they can enable us to produce real value.
But our promises matter, and there's no need to raise the stakes at the same time that we're figuring things out.
Professionals leave themselves an out.