Week 22.50 About Time

As we come to the end of the year and flirt with the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, it is only natural to reflect on time. Time has played a significant role in my life this year. I have pondered the journey that has brought me to this moment and my gratitude for spending time with the fantastic people I work with, play with, and love. And I have recently learned that there is a debate about what time is. In short, there is the theory of presentism, the understanding that time is linear, with a past, present, and future. And then there is the theory of eternalism, which is the understanding that there is no notion of time as we have come to know it; that the past, present, and future are equally real and coexist simultaneously. As I think about time, they are both right.?

We experience eternalism with people we love and enter the liminal space that transcends time. We all have these experiences when time goes slow or fast and seemingly ceases to exist. We feel the feeling of eternalism when we are in our space of creativity, flow, joy, or gratitude. It is when we live outside ourselves and are in a deep relationship with others. It is deep and expansive; it transcends our lives. We don't need sleep and don't get tired. Our bodies are capable of supernatural feats. When this happens, time ceases to exist, or perhaps, it exists all at once. I love these times.

We experience presentism when we are in our physical world, aware of the limitations of our bodies, constrained by the nature of our age and what is expected of us, and what we can and cannot do. Presentism reminds us that things expire, they run out, and that there are limits. Presentism is in full force when two-day shipping is too slow, or the deadline is coming up too quickly. Presentism is when we are excited about someone's arrival and sad about their departure. It is how trains arrive "on time" in some places and arrive when they arrive in others. It is how we measure our world of advancing through grades at school, promotions at work, and stages of life.?

We live in both worlds. Our day-to-day needs some presentism to find order, schedule our plans, and make sense of our life. The idea of change over time helps us within the context of trees growing taller, children growing older, and junk drawers growing fuller. But we also live in a world of eternalism when we are in relationships with others and share our mental space, and new ideas seem to appear out of thin air. We experience it when we share our emotional space with people and feel vulnerable, laugh together, go to a play, or a movie, sing songs or have dinner together. We live in a world of eternalism when we care more about the people we are with than the time we are with them.?There are times when presentism is going to be undeniable, like when we have deadlines to meet, school buses to catch, or tasks that cannot wait. And there are those glorious times when, to quote William Blake, time feels like an “eternity in an hour”.

In life and leadership, we have opportunities to live in both kinds of time, and often we have a choice of how we want to live it. When we care more about relationships than transactions, we favor eternalism over presentism. And so, too, when we give ourselves permission to choose creativity over productivity. As we think about how we want to live in this new year, let's commit to living fully in the present when we need to, meet our deadlines and do our work. To straddle the present and eternal when we have the opportunity and enjoy the luxury of time outside of time. Most importantly, let's celebrate and fully embrace those opportunities to experience eternalism and forget about time for as long as it lasts.?

Wishing you love, wonder, gratitude, and a year of eternalism. Scott

Ask Sanyin: How Do I Escape the Specter of My Predecessor? Sanyin Siang

I’m new in a C-suite role and struggling with my predecessor’s long shadow — especially their great results and popularity with employees. How do I get my predecessor out of my head and stop second-guessing my decisions?

Chances are, you are not alone in this dilemma: The past year saw one of the highest rates of executive turnover in decades. Few new leaders start with a blank slate. You are wise to focus on how comparing yourself with your predecessor is affecting your confidence, rather than trying to win a popularity contest against a ghost. In my coaching and advisory work with CEOs and their successors, I’ve consistently found that leaders who transition effectively are able to resist the urge to overprove themselves by trying to show that they are the smartest person in the room. As beloved as your predecessor is, you may be in this seat because they did all they could and have left you a foundation that you can take to the next level, or because now the organization needs you to be the change maker. This is a different phase for the organization, and therefore it requires a different combination of leadership assets. Ponder this introspective question suggested by former Microsoft U.S. CTO and TIAA board director Gina Loften: “What do you and the team that you are building bring to the table that is needed at this point in time?”

Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman

One island of stability in the sea of conversation about the future of work is the conviction that our jobs will become increasingly creative. The World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and nearly every major think tank seem aligned around this hypothesis, offering heaps of data to support it. The trend is not just about delegating rote tasks to automation; it’s also about the accelerating pace of change and the increasing complexity of business, which demand original responses to novel challenges far more frequently than ever. Understanding your strengths as an individual is the first step. Look for places to apply them, and watch out for overuse. At your next opportunity to innovate, push yourself to think in the styles that come less naturally to you. Before you settle on a path forward, challenge yourself to define at least one option for each of the four styles. Creativity is an imperative for our new world of work. Cultivating all four types of divergent thinking at every level will afford greater odds of converting each new challenge into successful innovation.

Focusing up-river in the world of social impact Meg Garlinghouse

I’ve been searching for the right analogy to capture the need to collectively shift our mindset from addressing the symptoms to solving the problems to create a better world for all of us.??The Archbishop Desmond Tutu perhaps said it best:?There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.?These words seem more relevant than ever as companies take public positions on pressing societal issues, and more importantly, explore how they can address the structural issues within their industry to create a more just and equitable world for everyone. There is no question that the role and expectations of companies have evolved dramatically over the last decade.?This is why we – and all companies – need to start focusing even more upriver, where the real impact, positive and negative, begins and becomes cemented in company operations, metrics and culture.?

While I certainly think we still need formal “social impact” teams at companies, what is potentially more impactful is the roles at companies that are making decisions every day related to building and designing products. To truly hold yourself accountable to ensuring your company remains laser focused “upriver” is to inspire every employee across the business to be equally committed to this mindset. It is the researcher who has committed to ensuring that we include individuals from all backgrounds; it is the LinkedIn Learning producer who is creating a course for jobseekers who have been involved in the justice system;?it is the data scientist who discovered that job alerts have an equalizing effect when it comes to accessing opportunity; and it is the product manager who is committed to finding ways to close the network gap. In many ways, these roles have had and will continue to have a much more lasting impact to help us deliver on the promise that “the world is better off because LinkedIn is in it” (thanks Paul Polman )