The Friday Thing #736

I have this nagging feeling that the images I used in the header of last week's edition negatively impacted the read count of the post. Both images (I switched them for a poorly formed A/B test) felt a bit too stock. Anyway....

The Friday Thing #736 was going to be a long post about transformation (between jobs/careers) using my adventures in snowboarding as a loose metaphor. That one needs a bit more gestation time so perhaps next week. This week's edition may serve as a good entree.

Over the holiday season, I read a post titled "run your own race" by ava. It has really stuck with me as it's something I have been trying to do at work and in life generally over the last few years and I found the substance of the post encouragement to work harder at this. The essence of the post is captured in the second paragraph

Run your own race, as in: you set certain standards for yourself, and you focus on meeting them. When you meet them, you’re proud of yourself. When you don’t, you urge yourself to try harder. You don’t question your standards based on what anyone else is doing. You don’t look over at someone else’s race and think,?I’m doing a bad job because you’re going faster. You just focus on your own pace.

Earlier in my career, I think I would have read this and scoffed as I was often looking for external affirmation and using other people's measures of success to judge my own. Over time, my perspective has shifted from wanting to be the best at everything to being the best version of myself at everything. There are people I know who are far better cyclists than me and instead of trying to be better than them, I am more focused on what I can learn from them. I am surrounded by many, many better writers than me and so I read their work, take notes on what I like about their prose and integrate and adapt from it to build my own style (if I can even call it that). And just this week, I was reminded that I have colleagues who are brilliant at PR execution, and that I have so much to learn from them. These are people in my own team, and I am even though I lead that team, it doesn't mean I am the master of all of the skills within that team. Far from it in fact. But an earlier version of me would have fallen into this trap of thinking I had to know everything to succeed - and that people expected me to. It's as unrealistic as it is obvious...but also an easy trap to fall into.

There are exceptions to the 'run your own race' mantra too - where you really have to dig in and up your game and I have a few places I am trying to do that right now -- but am also conscious that this can't be constant as it's unsustainable as it relates to energy and the ability for my brain to constantly be in this mode. There is a limit to my neuroplasticity plasticity is how I think about that.

The other key paragraph from ava's post for me is this

There’s nothing more powerful than separating signal from noise, spotting a phenomenon no one else has recognized yet. But to do that you need your own separate thoughts.

This has been on my mind this week and I had two of these moments - where I was able to join the dots and see something new that was the result of my own thought process and observations, remixed with ideas from others along the way. Signal amongst the noise is precisely what it is. I love those moments and then love sharing them with others and inviting them to pile on, to build upon, to tweak, adjust and make better. But as ava says, to have them you need that space -- to gather your thoughts and take a few turns of the Rubik's Cube so to speak.

That's all for this week. Run your own race.

Happy Friday...

-Steve