Welcome to another edition of the Monday Morning Meeting. We’re knee-deep in our move to Cortex and have lots of cool surprises and big announcements coming in the upcoming weeks that we can’t wait to share.

In this edition: why offices still matter, tips for better group decision making, the importance of believing impossible things, productivity hacks, road-trip fun, and robotic slime.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Scott Galloway reminds us about the importance of the office:

The office is where you build relationships and find mentors. And mentors are the people who become emotionally invested in your success. That same Harvard study of call center workers found that, despite greater productivity, working from home decreased the probability of getting a promotion by 12%. Another study found that people who work from home are 38% less likely to receive a bonus. There are usually several people qualified for each promotion. The job will typically go to the person who has the best relationship with the decider. And relationships are a function of proximity. If this sounds unfair, and just bullshit facetime … trust your instincts. The corporate world and small injustices will be synonyms for a long time. This isn’t to say young people shouldn’t have opportunities for remote work. However, the conversation coming is … "OK, but you will make less money." In some cases, it may be worth it. Some.

If you’re an employer, the office is your primary tool for facilitating culture. Holiday parties and post-work drinks aren’t sunk costs — they’re investments in happiness, innovation, and relationships. The greatest driver of retention is if someone has a good friend at their workplace. Without a workplace, your employees have fewer points of contact. Sixty percent of remote workers say WFH makes them feel less connected to their colleagues.

I wonder how the Fair Play card game (used for divvying up household tasks among family members) might work in an office setting?

Take a collective deep breath with your team when your organization is stressed:

Instead, try imagining what a collective deep breath might look like for you and your team. Try pausing, calling out what’s going well, and what needs attention. You’ll find that even when those three necessities are under attack, you have more ability than you might think to replenish them without anyone or anything else. There’s never been a better time to remind yourself of fundamental truths...

• What do you appreciate about your skills and character?

• What can you do each day that’s within your power?

• What truly valuable things do you already have in your life or work?

The more you can fill your own security, control, and approval, the more you can face problems with hope rather than panic and desperation.

In their book Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman suggest a great question to ask to avoid doubling down on failure:

When we find ourselves unsure about whether or not to continue a particular approach, it’s useful to ask, “If I were just arriving on the scene and were given the choice to either jump into this project as it stands now or pass on it, would I choose to jump in?” If the answer is no, then chances are we’ve been swayed by the hidden force of commitment. Making a clean break might feel uncomfortable, but it could be in our best interest.

To make better group decisions, don’t avoid the Groan Zone:

As a group enters the groan zone, people begin to struggle in the service of integration and in releasing their attachment to their own perspectives. To create something new requires mixing, combining, and letting go. This can be a fraught experience rife with confusion, irritation, discouragement, anxiety, exasperation, pain, anger, and blame. It is no surprise that we want to avoid the groan zone, but for a group to discover new things, leaders can help people through the groan zone by engaging two types of thinking: creating shared context and strengthening relationships.

Innovation is all around us — especially from individuals who must innovate to navigate a world that’s not designed for them:

[D]isability is rarely meaningfully engaged, and efforts to build a more accessible world are abandoned in favor of high-tech Band-Aids designed to “fix” an individual person’s interactions with it. Meanwhile, disabled people develop and share hacks—which often don’t require high-tech anything—to MacGyver their way through daily life. I’m talking about ingenious practices that I’ve noted elsewhere, such as using a mortar and pestle to crush pills for a feeding tube that a plastic pill grinder couldn’t handle, or cutting a ring out of the opening of a sock and sliding it up to just below a knee to prevent skin irritation from a leg brace. In contrast to what gets churned out in glossy promotional materials for corporations and tech start-ups, disabled people find creative ways to make their worlds accessible every day.

The best futurists believe in impossible things:

[N]ot everything that is impossible will happen. And while many of the things that “everyone knows” will turn out to be wrong, most of what everyone knows is true! So there is an art to believing in impossible things well. It’s more like being open to possibilities, to listening to what is possible. So it is technically not about believing what is impossible as it is in expanding what we believe is possible.

That expansion requires imagination. But to be helpful futuring, your imagination should be disciplined. It can’t be too far ahead, because then so much will have changed that no one believes it and it will be ignored. The far future will seem preposterous. On the other hand, if it seems too obvious, then it probably won’t happen, because it means nothing changed. We know from past experience that the future will be surprising. How much of what is happening today would have seemed simply bizzare and outrageously improbable 20 years ago.  If you were writing a sci-fi story and it had today’s events, your editor would have rejected it as implausible. So there is a degree of discipline needed in future scenarios, where they must be implausible enough to happen, but not so impossible that we dismiss them.

I’ve just finished Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross and expect to keep coming back to the chapters on screening candidates:

Women partners seemed better than men at detecting deceit or disingenuous founders. The addition of a woman also changes the conversational dynamic of the screening quorum’s post-interview discussion in subtle and profound ways. We are not sure why but find it interesting that one of the most successful and durable talent screeners in the world requires that women be part of the screening process.

Loved this list of simple productivity hacks.

Ten super-useful (and mostly free) websites. Two new ones for me are Excel Formula Bot which uses AI to transform text instructions to an Excel formula and Cleanup Pictures which removes items from any image.

Make My Drive Fun helps you find interesting places to visit on your road trip.

Slime robots?

WONDERFUL WORDS

"You don't learn how to play the piano by reading about it." — David McCullough

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” ― Salman Rushdie

"What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end." — Warren Buffett

"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth." — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you." — Robert Anton Wilson

“The first step to seeing how change really works is to stop looking for the special people in the network and instead start looking for the special places.” — Damon Centola

“It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.” — George Orwell

“The real mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced.” — Michael S. Schneider

Welcome to another Planes, Trains, and Automobiles edition of the Monday Morning Meeting.

Last week’s was composed on a train and arrived in your inboxes as I was driving from Edinburgh, Scotland to the Isle of Skye. This one is getting polished somewhere over Greenland and will land (pun completely intended) a few hours after I do back in St. Louis. I’m so glad to be coming home.

In this edition, the innovations of Guinness, making better decisions, a food-focused icebreaker, flying cars, snakes with legs, and sloth babies.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

I know I’ve been in Scotland instead of Ireland, but I loved this overview of Guinness and how the beer maker has been innovating for over 260 years.

Through a series of key innovations, Guinness was able to stay on top despite (among other things) a famine, mass emigration, two World Wars, a civil war, and the changeover from British to sovereign rule. Guinness is responsible for changes in workplace relations, several foundational advances in the physics of brewing, and even the famous Student’s t-test in statistics. Indeed, Guinness has been one of the key drivers of innovation in Ireland.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading this trip, and re-read Dennis Bakke’s book about building better decision-making into your organization. He suggests no big decision is made alone:

The decision-maker makes the final call but must ask for advice. Deciding who to get advice from can influence a successful outcome. Get advice from people who have:

• Experience. Has this person had experience with this problem? There’s no teacher like experience.

• Position. People in different positions see different things. The decision-maker asks a leader, a peer, someone below them in the hierarchy—and even, if circumstances warrant, experts from outside the company.

• Responsibility. Decisions have consequences—and decision- makers should be held accountable for theirs. At the same time, nobody is right all the time. The most important part of any decision is that the decision-maker fully engages with the advice process, not just that he or she gets it “right.”

• Ownership. When people are asked for advice, they start to feel ownership. Ideally, everyone who offers advice works for the success of the project as if it were their own.

The advice process isn’t just about getting the right answer. It’s about building a strong team and creating a process of communication that will improve all decisions in a company.

Why are great decisions so hard to make? Caroline Webb, in her book How to Have a Good Day tells us why:

Our brain’s energy-saving automatic system doesn’t just filter our perceptions of the world. It also streamlines our decision making by nudging us toward whichever choice requires the smallest amount of conscious effort. If there’s a plausible option already on the table, or one that doesn’t involve thinking hard about the future, or one that resonates with something we heard recently, our automatic system will say: “Fantastic! Let’s apply the ‘most obvious option = best option’ rule. No need to think further.”

How would you respond to this great icebreaker question: Using only food: Where did you grow up? Some easy ones for me: pork steaks, funnel cakes, bratwurst, Ski soda, and Optimist pizza (if you know, you’ll know).

Want to brainstorm better? Work first individually, next in small groups, and then share. Kicking off things in a big-group brainstorm is the one of the worst ways to begin:

Follow-up research tested whether larger groups performed any better. In one study, 168 people were either divided into teams of five, seven, or nine or asked to work individually. The research confirmed that working individually is more productive than working in groups. It also showed that productivity decreases as group size increases. The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.

Doing too much? Here’s what James Clear has to say about limiting our priorities:

Instead of asking yourself, "What should I do first?" Try asking, "What should I neglect first?" Trim, edit, cull. Make space for better performance.

Where is my Flying Car?

[B]ack in the 1950s we thought the future would bring us flying cars, electricity too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. But none of that has happened. What gives? The answer is prosaic: Forecasters in the 50s were wrong. It’s not that the future never arrived—it’s that the future brought us different stuff than we thought we were going to get. Our lack of flying cars simply doesn’t tell us anything about the pace of innovation.

Speaking of flying cars … it isn’t just that we guessed wrong about the future, we actively fight its arrival. Here’s Isaac Asimov on why many innovations don’t arrive to fanfare, but rather stumble against resistance:

I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance—and bitter, exaggerated, last-ditch resistance—to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.

And in case you think this is a recent phenomenon, here’s Niccolò Machiavelli saying the same thing in 1532:

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

Your team’s technology tools might not be fixing what’s broken, but making things worse:

Before expecting whizbang technology to create workplace nirvana, organizations must explore the cultural norms and core operating principles and practices that foster or confound productivity.

In my experience, misalignment and dysfunction arise when three fundamental building blocks of organized activity are not taken seriously: teams, meetings, and communication. Each element is interrelated and highly complementary. For example, a high-functioning team is inherently better at communication and more productive during meetings. In other words, deficiency in one area can derail the others.

Oliver Burkeman (from his book Four Thousand Weeks) tells us to act now:

"Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone's work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.

When we fail to act on such urges, it's rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the prospective recipient deserves it. More often, it's because of some attitude stemming from our efforts to feel in control of our time. We tell ourselves we'll turn to it when our urgent work is out of the way, or when we have enough spare time to do it really well; or that we ought first to spend a bit longer researching the best recipients for our charitable donations before making any, et cetera.

But the only donations that count are the ones you actually get around to making. And while your colleague might appreciate a nicely worded message of praise more than a hastily worded one, the latter is vastly preferable to what's truly most likely to happen if you put it off, which is that you'll never get around to sending that message."

Snakes with legs. Freaky.

Canned email responses for all your email/text response needs include these suggested texts to your boss to make them feel special (especially after they’ve been on vacation):

• You're an amazing boss and an inspiration to me.

• You always go above and beyond for your team, and I really appreciate it.

• You're always so supportive and encouraging, thank you.

• You have a great vision for the company and I'm proud to be a part of it.

• You're always so positive and upbeat, it makes working here a pleasure.

• You're a great listener and I feel like my ideas are always heard.

• You're always fair and just, and I know that I can trust you.

• You're a great mentor and I've learned so much from you.

• You're an excellent leader and I'm proud to follow you.

• Thank you for being an amazing boss, I feel lucky to work for you!

SetJetters is an app that helps you find and visit movie locations.

Keep Asking Why?

Super-cute sloth babies.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Business schools don’t create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success.” — Josh Kaufman

“Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything.” — Kevin Ashton

“There is no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace, but there is for being the most expensive.” — Dan Kennedy

“In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.” — Benjamin Zander

“Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.” — Mark Manson

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” — Elenor Roosevelt​

“Whoever exchanges happiness for money can’t exchange money for happiness.” — José Narosky

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” — Gustave Flaubert

If an obvious solution from an obvious source could have provided an answer, it would have happened already. Instead, it’s the unlikely approaches—the odd combinations that come from diversity—that often win the day. — Seth Godin

“Despair is a failure of the imagination.” — Wade Davis

Welcome to the Monday Morning Meeting!

I’m writing this week’s vacation edition on a train from London to Scotland and enduring some spotty wifi, but have still found some cool things to share, including the history of innovation cycles, why belonging matters in change, the (un)surprising connection between work and parenting, slow innovation, bad-client bingo, and lots more.

Oh, and if you want to follow along with me on my trip and check out some of my photos, I’m back on Flickr (I’m still avoiding everything Facebook-owned) and am posting them here.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

I love the graphic here: Long Waves: the History of Innovation Cycles.

The Ambition Matrix is a simple way to help you differentiate between ideas that are part of your biz’s core offering or are an innovative opportunity for expansion and growth.

Making one change at a time and starting small seems like good advice for businesses, too.

It’s important to make the change tiny, and let it embed: he suggests making one change every four to six weeks. Having experimented on himself, he also advises addressing one thing at a time, rather than trying to solve work, love, health, or family problems simultaneously. He’s boiled down all his teachings into what he calls one “algorithm…a series of steps that you can apply to make any change, no matter what your situation”:

1. Start very small.
2. Do only one change at a time.
3. Be present and enjoy the activity (don’t focus on results).
4. Be grateful for every step you take.

I had a lot of fun exploring this globe that lists the most notable person born in any given place on the map. Cardinals’ third baseman Ken Oberfell from my hometown of Highland, Illinois was a blast from the past. Go Cards!

Not always an easy read, but profound nonetheless:

Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for. Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we think they have of us.

When we lived in small tight-knit communities, the looking glass self helped us to become the people our loved ones needed us to be. The “Michelangelo phenomenon” is the name given to the semi-conscious cycle of refinement and feedback whereby lovers who genuinely care what each other think gradually grow closer to their partner's original ideal of them.

The problem is, we no longer live solely among those we know well. We're now forced to refine our personalities by the countless eyes of strangers. And this has begun to affect the process by which we develop our identities.

The way you run your company changes how your employees parent at home:

Workers who have more autonomy—control over how they do their jobs, variety in what they do, and the sense that their work is contributing to a common goal—are less likely to use harsh and overreactive parenting styles. “When work promotes autonomy and self-direction,” she writes, “mothers are better parents, which bodes well for children’s development.” The same finding held true for fathers as well.

Another “personal” post that has some business application: To Stop Comparing Yourself to Others, Decide in Advance What Success Looks Like:

If you build your life around always wanting more, you’ll never have enough. The solution is to decide in advance what “enough” looks like. That way, you have a goal to aim for, and also a marker in which you can then reallocate your focus elsewhere.

If you decide what is sufficient, for any resource—money being an obvious one—you’ll make better decisions. You’ll stop comparing yourself to others as much.

Is it time to rethink “best” practices?

The moment an organization calls a practice "best," they're creating an illusion that they've reached an endpoint where there's nothing left to top, Grant says. The bestselling author expressed concern that using this term leads people to stop looking for ways to improve the best practice itself.

Is change management about belonging?

In our research, the top 12% of effective change stories featured leaders who paid significant attention to belonging. What does such attention mean? Intriguingly, we found it meant leading with two counterintuitive moves. On the one hand, these leaders took great care and time to make others feel secure, involved, and attached to meaningful work (think, “In this transformation, no one gets left behind,” “You are important to me; I need you in order to make this work”). On the other hand, these leaders also recognized that change requires “un-belonging,” which means two things:

• Building others’ capacity to detach from past loyalties (to ways of working, to team configurations, to assumptions that no longer suit new contexts).

• Being able to stand at a distance from any strong belief group in order to allow novel solutions to emerge.

Next time you’re hiring for a position and want to weed out bias, check out this anonymous resume builder. Read the research on why they built it, too.

Great BINGO card filled with client red flags.

You make more virtuous decisions when you use pen and paper:

We conducted a series of studies with more than 2,500 participants across the U.S. and China to explore the impact of the medium you use to make a decision, with a particular focus on decisions with some sort of moral component, such as whether or not to make a donation to a charity, or whether to choose a healthy or unhealthy entrée at a restaurant. We asked the participants to make a variety of these sorts of choices using either a paper form or a digital tablet, and despite controlling for all other variables, we consistently found that people who used paper made more-virtuous decisions than those who used a digital device: For example, participants who read their options and made a selection on paper were significantly more likely to give money to charity, choose a healthy entrée, and opt for an educational book rather than something more entertaining.

Hurry slowly to innovate better:

Embrace an old Latin proverb, Festina Lente, which means let your body and movements be quick, but keep your mind at a graceful, reasonable pace. This takes the thoughtlessness and blind impulsiveness out of speed, and translates it into something healthier: skillful quickness. Or in other words, to “hurry slowly”.

It’s the end of the world and we (didn’t) know it.

From the “I knew it!!!” department: food expiration dates don’t have much science behind them.

Paint with music might be fun to share with the kids.

Speaking of kids (not really), here’s your guide to cursing in Shakespearian England.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Treating employees like adult human beings might be common sense, but it is not common practice.” — Jurgen Appelo

“Quiet is good for thinking, and thinking is how you get rich.” — Paul Graham

“Feedback is a gift, but most people don’t know how to unwrap it.” — Angela Duckworth

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." — Mahatma Gandhi

“If you could keep from making appointments, each day had no limits” — Ernest Hemmingway

"Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it." — Jonathan Haidt

“Those who are readily prepared to tell you what is right for you are not your friends.” — by James Hollis

Welcome to the Monday Morning Meeting! I’m heading to London and Scotland later this week for a much-needed vacation, so you’ll (probably) not see a MMM next week.

However, we’ve got an extra-large edition this week to make amends, including a conundrum about the future of face-to-face working, great decision-making razors, decoupling happiness from goals, CIA cats, and some thoughts on B.S.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

We all need a regular reminder that life is too short for B.S.:

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of experience.

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.

People are happier with flexibility around where they work, yet companies, teams, and organizations are happier when people are working together.

So what should we do about this quandary?

I don’t think the answer is restricting flexibility around where people work. That feels like table stakes now for knowledge workers. I think the answer is figuring out how to get people back together more frequently in ways they want to convene in person.

There are many ways to do this and we have seen some good ones.

At USV, we have two days a week where we meet together and as a group with founders (Mondays and Thursdays) and those days tend to be much more popular to be in the office. We don’t require people to come to the office on those days, but we do see that most people opt into coming in those days. We also make sure to order a great lunch on Mondays and Thursdays. We could and probably should add an after-work happy hour and/or sports teams/leagues to make those days even more attractive to the team. The basic idea is to make coming to the office an attractive option a few days a week.

Forget ping-pong tables; execs working on-premises is the new office amenity:

In some cases, the need is not to get the young kids in; it’s making sure the people who can mentor, who are just happy to be remote in their vacation house in Aspen or in the Hamptons, to come in. Because that mentorship is something that is important to the new joiners and also important for the overall development and health of the organization.

Here’s a great list of decision-making “razors” to help you decide things better and faster. Some favorites:

• When faced with two paths, choose the path that puts you in the arena. Once you’re in the arena, never take advice from people on the sidelines.

• If forced to choose between two options of seemingly equal merit, choose the one that doesn’t look the part. The one who doesn’t look the part has had to overcome much more to achieve its status than the one who fit in perfectly.

• If you have a choice between entering two rooms, choose the room where you’re more likely to be the dumbest one in the room. Once you’re in the room, talk less and listen more. Bad for your ego—great for your growth.

Things found in library books.

Your youngest employees might be the key to banishing the bullies from your workforce:

Though the reported rise in bullying is troubling, there is a bright spot: people don’t seem to want to put up with it. As research demonstrates, the record number of people leaving their jobs in the last year was propelled by employees fed up with toxic work cultures. “We’re finally getting to a point that people are starting to believe and understand that you need to respect your employees,” says Morrin. “Companies need to start listening, or else they’re not going to have any employees left.”

It’s also possible that the rise in reports of bullying might not indicate that bullying itself is increasing, but rather that employees are now more likely to call out abusive behavior when they see it.

I’m not just being optimistic. According to Rachel Suff, senior employment relations advisor at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the UK’s professional body for human resources, the institute's research has shown that more and more people are willing to challenge inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Exactly why has a lot to do with what the broader culture values now.

Young adults who grew up with anti-bullying messages in school are entering the workplace and are less willing to rationalize mistreatment as paying dues or dismiss it as a joke.

Here’s a fun presentation trick that uses a little bit of math (but seems like magic) from my friend Josh Routh. You got to read it and give it a try. It works!

As an — ahem — older person, I found this read fascinating: Are older people staying fitter and smarter for longer — or just getting better at hanging on?

It's surprisingly hard to come up with a universal theory for what's happening here. But it's also important to understand, because it presents a few possibilities:

1. Something has broken in how we hire and promote people, and how we choose what kinds of entertainment to consume: we've gotten more fixated on what's well-known, which is narrowing our options and skewing them to whatever was trendy when they got popular.

2. Something was broken before, and has started working now; people retired before they should have, and companies and governments have been missing out on the talents of older workers.

3. There's been some fundamental change in the nature of aging, or of all of these roles, that either increases the relative importance of experience or reduces some of the costs of aging.

And there are definite advantages to older people. The predominant stereotype is that younger people are more flexible and older ones get set in their ways, but there's a very useful counterexample to that: in fields that skew young and grow fast, there's an interesting "sonic boom" effect, where a growing cohort in the industry has never been through difficult times. When those times hit, some people are unprepared, and the most adaptable people are often the older ones, who have seen a cycle or two before. You can try to fake this by reading history, but it's hard to make yourself inhabit the mindset of someone who went through difficulties you haven't personally faced. And what you'll often develop instead is a sort of reverse imposter syndrome: sure, that stockbroker's memoir of the 1930s makes it sound like a bad time, but he probably sensed that things would work out eventually, while you are going through a downturn that might never end. So having experienced people around—and in charge—can moderate some of the swings between mania and depression that someone would go through during their first difficult cycle.

This CIA-modified spy cat didn’t have nine lives.

Should you decouple your happiness from achieving your goals?

If you find yourself saying “I will be happy when I [move abroad, have a baby, receive tenure]”, you are putting unrealistic pressure on the goal to contribute to your long-term mental well-being. Assigning intense expectations to the completion of a goal may leave you feeling disappointed. Rather than using when/then projections, practice mindfulness and take note of what currently makes you happy. Rather than hoping for happiness upon reaching your goal, proactively look at the positives in your life right now.

Speaking of happiness, more reasons to quit social media.

Putting this here for my daughter.

This is another one of those “name a star” scams, but it might be fun to name a black hole after that terrible recurring meeting that feels like it sucks all your energy from you.

Was it George Jetson’s birthday yesterday?

This AI-powered tool will help you restore “scratchy” old photos.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“No matter who you are, you have to remember that most of the smartest people work somewhere else.” — Bill Joy

“Only those who go too far know how far they can go.” — Twyla Tharp

"He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch." — Jean-Luc Godard

“An idea can't be bossed into existence.” — John Hunt

“No man has ever listened himself out of a job.” — Calvin Coolidge

"I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness." — Georgia O'Keefe

“Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.” — Douglas Mac Arthur

“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” — Naill Ferguson

"We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror." — Marshall McLuhan

“When solving problems, the older the problem, the older the solution.” — Naval Ravikant

“Almost without exception, organizations are run by people who want to protect the old business, not develop the new one.” — Seth Godin

Welcome to the Monday Morning Meeting!

In this week’s edition, getting employees back into the office, why your organization struggles with priorities, the benefits of keeping a brag doc, Luck’s Razor, the Wizard of Oz in 4K, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Why do successful leaders love questions?

[Q]uestions are data. Leaders who want to leverage this data should focus less on answering everyone’s questions themselves and more on making it easy for the people they are talking to—their employees—to access and help one another answer the questions that have the biggest impact on the company’s overall purpose.

You don’t have a prioritization problem, you have a strategy problem:

Prioritization shouldn’t be hard. It’s only made hard by skipping critical steps and jumping straight to attempting to prioritize a long list of ideas, features and backlog items. The next time you’re confronted with prioritizing a long list of features and ideas take a few steps back and consider whether these ideas align to your current goals and strategy — don’t have them? Then invest time into setting one. It’s much easier to prioritise a handful of goals, and then a handful of opportunities within that goal, as opposed to attempting to prioritise 100s of backlog items.

Want employees back in the office? Give them a good reason and back it up with action:

Employers should explore not only why they want people in the office, but whether bringing people into the office is achieving those goals. If the main reason to bring people back is to collaborate with colleagues, for example, they need to set terms that ensure that happens. That could mean making people who should be working together come in on the same days.

Employers need to be realistic about how much in-person work really needs to happen. Rather than making people come in a few times a week at random, where colleagues pass like ships in the night, they could all come in on the same day of the week or even once a month or quarter. And on those days, the perks of coming in have to be more than tacos and T-shirts, too. While fun, free food and swag aren’t actually good reasons to go to the office.

Speaking of remote work, it can be terrible for new hires and new teams:

First, remote work is worse for new workers. Many inexperienced employees joining a virtual company realize that they haven’t joined much of a company at all. They’ve logged into a virtual room that calls itself a company but is basically a group chat. It’s hard to promote a wholesome company culture in normal times, and harder still to do so one misunderstood group Slack message and problematic fire emoji at a time. “Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office may seem trivial, but in the aggregate, they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook,” write Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, the authors of the book Out of Office. Many of the perks of flexible work—like owning your own schedule and getting away from office gossip—can “work against younger employees” in companies that don't have intentional structured mentorship programs, they argued.

Second, remote is worse at building new teams to take on new tasks. In 2020, Microsoft tapped researchers from UC Berkeley to study how the pandemic changed its work culture. Researchers combed through 60,000 employees’ anonymized messages and chats. They found that the number of messages sent within teams grew significantly, as workers tried to keep up with their colleagues. But information sharing between groups plummeted. Remote work made people more likely to hunker down with their preexisting teams and less likely to have serendipitous conversations that could lead to knowledge sharing. Though employees could accomplish the “hard work” of emailing and making PowerPoints from anywhere, the Microsoft-Berkeley study suggested that the most important job of the office is “soft work”—the sort of banter that allows for long-term trust and innovation.

Forget Occam’s and Hanlon’s Razors. Make decisions based upon Luck’s Razor instead:

Occam’s Razor states that if all other factors are equal, you should choose the most simple option. Hanlon’s Razor states that if all other factors are equal, you should attribute bad behavior to stupidity rather than malice.

And then there’s what I call the Luck Razor. If all other factors are equal, choose the path that feels the luckiest. 

And when you find some of that luck, make sure to capture it in a running brag doc:

Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”.

This is a really helpful collection of more than 50 guides on internal operations for startups, small, and midsize companies.

I’m going to be asking this question in more of our sessions:

If you have a ten-year plan, what's stopping you from doing it in two?

Go listen to this hauntingly beautiful a cappella version of the Beatles’ Blackbird.

These Wizard of Oz scenes remastered in 4K look amazing.

Nothing matters.

Love these NSA Security Posters from the ’50s and ’60s.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“I would rather be over-prepared for an imaginary monster than underprepared for a real one.” — Gene Doucette

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.” — Chinese Proverb

“Failure is not the outcome--failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail." — Sara Blakely

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings." — Robert Benchley

"Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece." — Nadia Boulanger

“If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.” — Howard Zinn

After last week’s big news, we’re back to “regular” programming here a the Monday Morning Meeting. In this week’s edition, an ask for Thinksgiving Business Partners, why to track anti-metrics, the cost of toxic superstars, why simplifying complex problems doesn’t always work, things you’re allowed to do, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

AN URGENT THINKSGIVING REQUEST

Nonprofit interest in Thinksgiving has been off the charts, and we expect nearly 100 deserving nonprofits to apply by the time applications close for them tomorrow. However, we can only help that many nonprofits if we have enough Business Partners to pair them with.

If you know a business (or even a large, institutional nonprofit) who’s looking for an amazing professional development and team-building activity that also can move the needle for a nonprofit in our region, please apply. Here’s a one-pager with all the details, and you can express your interest here.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

Got a difficult challenge? Focus, don’t simplify:

A complex problem cannot be simplified. If you can simplify it, then it isn’t a complex problem. You may choose to focus energy on a key leverage point, or establish one or more enabling constraints. To make progress, you may choose to selectively ignore things, blur your vision, or think in broad strokes. These approaches will reduce cognitive load and will feel simpler. But they don’t leave us with a simple problem.

Imagine two people:

• Person A acknowledges the complex problem and focuses

• Person B doesn’t see the complex problem and simplifies

Who is more likely to make progress? My money is on A. 

A and B’s approaches may seem very similar—at least at first glance. Focus looks like simplification. Simplification looks like focus. But when things go wrong, and unexpected things happen—as they tend to do—Person B will make bad decisions. They’ll pick bad strategies and tactics. When they communicate their assessment to other team members, they’ll spread the lack of context awareness. 

It is better to avoid a toxic employee than to hire a superstar:

They compared the cost of a toxic worker with the value of a superstar, which they define as a worker who is so productive that a firm would have to hire additional people or pay current employees more just to achieve the same output. They calculated that avoiding a toxic employee can save a company more than twice as much as bringing on a star performer – specifically, avoiding a toxic worker was worth about $12,500 in turnover costs, but even the top 1% of superstar employees only added about $5,300 to the bottom line.

How are you tracking your organization’s Anti-Metrics?

[E}stablish "anti-metrics" that you measure to track unintended consequence. Anti-metrics force you to consider whether your incentives are fixing one problem but creating another. Anti-metrics will tell you if you're winning the battle but losing the war.

This probably isn’t too surprising, but the office has changed forever:

To speak of the high-performance office is to imagine the workplace less as a particular kind of environment, and more like a Swiss Army knife, a versatile and easy-to-use tool placed at the disposal of the workforce for its own ends. Working from home, while convenient and comfortable, is a one-dimensional experience; those who missed the office did so for the sense of culture, community, and focused endeavor they once found there. The high-performance office promises to combine the best aspects of both, using digital and physical infrastructure to turn the office into a workshop for co-creation and collaboration.

This is a fantastic list of things you’re allowed to do. My two favorites:

• Write on a post-it note affixed to a greeting card rather than on the greeting card itself, so the recipient can throw away the post-it and reuse your card.

• Ask for free upgrades or coupons: At checkout you can just ask “Do you have any coupons I can apply to this?”

Here’s another list (referenced in the post above) about “Barbell Strategies” that includes this creative idea to get more out of your reading:

Instead of reading a chapter a day, where you can’t consolidate the points made in the book due to the distractions of everyday life and the drawn out period of absorption, spend two weeks every few months on a reading retreat. You’ll go through a book a day, and you’ll spend your free time thinking about what you read, allowing you connect all the ideas in the books you’re reading

From the “It’s not you, it’s them” department: 95% of your buyers aren’t in the market right now.

Has your business recently made a significant purchase, like a new phone system, engaged with a new payroll software vendor, signed a contract with a salesforce IT support company - or perhaps even bought new carpet for the office? If you have, then you’ll know that you’re not in the market for those items now, nor will you be for quite a while. The time between purchases for many goods and services is quite long. Corporations change service providers such as their principal bank or law firm around once every five years on average. That means only 20% of business buyers are ‘in the market’ over the course of an entire year; something like 5% in a quarter – or put another way, 95% aren’t in the market.

The original Devil’s Advocate:

Centuries ago, Devil’s advocate was an actual job within the administration of the Roman Catholic Church. Whenever the Church considered declaring somebody a saint, the Devil’s advocate — also known as the advocatus diaboli or the Promotere Fidei (Latin for “promoter of the faith”) — would argue against the candidate’s nomination.

The move to remote has left many employees without a best friend at work.

Those early-career friendships have become something of an endangered species. For some young people, including those who work in industries like tech and law that have yet to fully return to the office, work life now means taking video calls from bed. They have yet to meet their co-workers in person — let alone form the relationships that feel most consequential at the start of a career… and for those who have spent decades working in an office, something has been lost in the transition to remote work. Way beyond the business case for work friends is a hunger for the type of relationships that transform everyone involved.

Is your smartphone ruining your memory?

In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task, one group got instant messaging before it started, one got instant messaging during the task, and one got no instant messaging, and then there was a comprehension test. What they found was that the people getting instant messages couldn’t remember what they just read.

I love these simple illustrations of complex topics and ideas.

The Ai Promise Collection allows users to submit a personal promise in the form of a photographed note.

Emmanuel, don’t do it!!

Finally, the dumbest thing I found online this week (and I may have just spent 30 minutes on the site): Pointer Pointer

WONDERFUL WORDS

"The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard." — Amelia Earhart

“Do not wait to strike until the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.” — William Butler Yeates

“Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed. The rest will need to be fixed.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg

“What is strategy, if not a plan for a large group of people to execute a simple idea? It’s a type of collaborative design. You start with one reality, imagine a better one, and design a path to it.” — Marty Neumeier

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell

“You are what you love, not what loves you.” ― Charlie Kaufman

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life, but "I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."​ — Joseph Campbell

“If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world’s demands and your own ambitions.” — Jocelyn K. Glei

This is the 200th Edition of the Monday Morning Meeting, and we’ve got HUGE news to share to match the milestone. I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

Regular readers of the MMM know that I try not to be too “sales-y” in this newsletter, but this week I’m being selfish and sharing three things we’ve been working on for months that will transform our business.

I promise we’ll get back to regular programming next week.

FILAMENT IS MOVING TO CORTEX

This may be one of the worst-kept “secrets” in St. Louis (since we began these conversations early in the pandemic), but the deal is finally official and we’re taking over the space formally known as Innovation Hall in the Cortex Innovation Community!

Here’s more from the press release that will go out this morning:

“The opportunity to move to Cortex has been a dream of ours and allows us to better serve St. Louis’ innovation community by delivering our unique meetings and retreats as well as additional programming and services aimed at Cortex businesses and the St. Louis community at large,” says Filament Founder Matthew Homann. He continues, “That programming includes our award-winning Thinksgiving initiative that pairs big companies and nonprofits for a day, creative innovation-focused events, and training that can help everyone make their meetings matter.”

Established in 2002, the Cortex Innovation Community generates and supports a total economic impact of more than $2.1 billion across the St. Louis region and currently hosts over 415 companies that employ about 5,800 individuals. These numbers are expected to grow exponentially within the next ten years, and Filament is proud to be a part of that. 

Cortex CEO Sam Fiorello is excited about Filament’s move, “As a driver of inclusive economic growth in our region, we believe that Filament’s presence will not only be valuable to the businesses and employees that call the Cortex Innovation Community home today but will also help us advance the ambitious goals set out in our five-year strategic plan for driving even greater equitable economic impact in our region going forward.”

The development partner for Cortex, Wexford Science & Technology, LLC, is also optimistic about Filament’s future in the Cortex Innovation Community.  Travis Sheridan, Wexford’s Senior Vice President and Chief Community Officer says, “Filament represents a new form of active innovation engagement within Cortex. Coming out of the pandemic, we are all challenged to find new ways to work better and work differently. Filament provides us with programming to accomplish both. More importantly, we need to create opportunities to amplify new voices, surface new perspectives, and deliver new outcomes. I look forward to seeing the community respond to this new innovation offering.”

Once we get situated and finish some minor build-out, we’ll be launching a bunch of new programming during our first “Filament Week” from September 12-15. In the meantime, we’ll be splitting our time between the new space at Cortex and our great space downtown.

Speaking of downtown … we’ve got our space leased for about 15 more months, and have a new offering we’ll be unveiling soon called “Retreat Week’ for companies who’d like to gather their newly-distributed workforces for a week-long, in-person retreat that includes a bit of facilitation, a dedicated concierge, pre-planned activities, and a super-cool workspace for their team.

That said, if you might be interested in our fully-furnished space downtown for other reasons, let us know. We’d be open to subleasing it if the opportunity is right.

MORE BIG NEWS: MEET KEANNA DANIELS

Regular readers of the MMM know we’ve been looking for a Lead Engagement Strategist for quite some time. After an exhaustive search, we’re proud to welcome KeAnna Daniels as the newest member of the Filament Team! That’s her, second from the right, above.

"After a six-month search, we’re overjoyed we found such an amazing partner in Ke,” said Filament Founder and CEO Matthew Homann. “She’ll make us smarter in so many ways, and I can’t wait for our clients to be inspired by her enthusiasm, insight, and boundless creativity."

KeAnna is a passionate entrepreneur dedicated to helping and developing her community. She most recently served as the President and CEO of KMD Empowerment Consulting, LLC and Project Manager at Parallax Advanced Research.

As Project Manager, she focused on developing new, innovative programs to reach residents in Dayton, Ohio neighborhoods and suburbs, as well as students from area colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. She brings to Filament a great deal of knowledge in accelerating innovation and driving collaboration through strategic partnerships.

“I am most excited about working with a stellar team who will compliment me and my skills and vice versa,” said KeAnna. “I’m also excited about leading organizations and people in manifesting their desired outcomes and goals.”

She is a graduate of Washington University with an MSW in Social and Economic Development and Management and a graduate of Miami University with a BS in Social Work and Entrepreneurship.

LAB:LAB FOR INNOVATION LAB LEADERS

We’re hosting a two-day event in late September called LAB:LAB for leaders of corporate, nonprofit, and governmental innovation labs that combines a peer-driven summit, problem-solving workshop, and collaborative retreat.  To nurture a unique problem-solving environment where conversations among peers can thrive, attendance is limited to 25 non-competitive organizations, PowerPoint presentations are banned, and no vendors are allowed at the event.

Each organization can bring up to three attendees - a senior innovation lab leader, a lab team member, and a critical stakeholder who supports, funds, or manages the lab.

Last month, I sat down with Stephen Wurth, Purina’s Retail Innovation Center leader to chat about LAB:LAB:

“As an innovation lab leader myself, I know firsthand what it feels like to constantly wonder how our space and strategy unlock value for the organization. These are crucial for continued investment and leadership support,” says Purina’s Stephen Wurth. “LAB:LAB aims to unearth all of the amazing ways organizations drive value with their labs and inspire one another based on best practices and shared learning—but it doesn't stop at inspiration; it includes actionable outcomes that we can go back to and immediately apply in our day-to-day work.”

Watch the full conversation here, and check out the LAB:LAB website.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

OK, I couldn’t go an entire MMM without sharing just a few cool things I found last week.

Some advice on boosting your mental energy:

Energy compounds on itself. If you start the morning by getting something done (a workout, an important task, writing) then you’re going to have a higher baseline energy day overall. It’s as though the initial thing gives you a persistent ‘boost’ throughout the day. Doing additional things becomes easier. Without this boost, there’s a good chance I get nothing important done that day.

Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop. On the other hand, procrastinating, spending all day scrolling Twitter, or staying in bed all day reduces the amount of energy you have to spend; this means you are less likely to get anything done.

Corporate retreats: from boondoggle to necessity?

"Retreats have often been perceived as junkets that just let people blow off steam and have fun," says Edward Sullivan, CEO of the executive coaching company Velocity Group. But in the age of hybrid work, "retreats have gone from 'nice to have' to 'must have,'" he adds. "They're critical to the culture-building at a company because it's the time when we come together and create that connective issue as a team."

One Hundred Tips for a Better Life includes these gems:

• “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out. 

• Don’t buy CDs for people. They have Spotify. Buy them merch from a band they like instead. It’s more personal and the band gets more money.

• Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.

• Noticing biases in others is easy, noticing biases in yourself is hard. However, it has much higher pay-off.

• If something surprises you again and again, stop being surprised. 

• Don’t confuse ‘doing a thing because I like it’ with ‘doing a thing because I want to be seen as the sort of person who does such things’

• Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. If you dislike poetry, or fine art, or anything, it’s possible you’ve only ever seen the crap. Go looking!

• If other people having it worse than you means you can’t be sad, then other people having it better than you would mean you can’t be happy. Feel what you feel.

Sentence Rephraser gives you alternative ways to say the same thing. Kind of like a thesaurus for sentences.

A condiment packet gallery?

In praise of pointless goals.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“You don’t see the world as it is – you see the world as you are.” — The Talmud

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” — Melvin Kranzberg

“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say.” — Krista Tippett

After a week off for Juneteenth (with another coming next week for the Fourth of July) we’re back! In this week’s MMM, a call for Thinksgiving volunteers, a great LAB:LAB video, why your company’s “business case” for diversity might turn off prospective hires, the importance of loving 20% of your job, asking why less, the Zeigarnek Effect, and more.

I’m Matt Homann, the founder of Filament, and I’m glad you’re here!

THINKSGIVING VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

The next edition of the Monday Morning Meeting will be all about Thinksgiving. Here’s a video that tells more about it and here’s a one-pager with an overview of how the program works. If you’re interested in volunteering, we’d love some help! Fill out this form to stay in the loop!

LAB:LAB FOR INNOVATION LAB LEADERS

In late September, we’re hosting a two-day event called LAB:LAB that’s a mix of workshop, summit, retreat, and conference for innovation lab leaders and their teams. The idea began in a conversation with friend and client Stephen Wurth who runs Purina’s Retail Innovation Center (The RIC). Stephen and I sat down to chat about LAB:LAB. Check out the video here.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS + INSPIRING IDEAS

About to kick off a meeting and you don’t have a facilitator to help? Here’s a great Twitter thread with a simple game plan anyone can use.

Maybe you should stop making the business case for diversity and just say it is important to you:

Translated into percentages, our statistically robust findings show that underrepresented participants who read a business case for diversity on average anticipated feeling 11% less sense of belonging to the company, were 16% more concerned that they would be stereotyped at the company, and were 10% more concerned that the company would view them as interchangeable with other members of their identity group, compared to those who read a fairness case. We further found that the detrimental effects of the business case were even starker relative to a neutral message: Compared to those who read neutral messaging, participants who read a business case reported being 27% more concerned about stereotyping and lack of belonging, and they were 21% more concerned they would be seen as interchangeable. In addition, after seeing a company make a business case, our participants’ perceptions that its commitment to diversity was genuine fell by up to 6% — and all these factors, in turn, made the underrepresented participants less interested in working for the organization.

You don’t have to love your entire job, just 20 percent of it:

There's absolutely no data at all that says the most successful people only do what they love. It sounds good. ‘Find what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.’ There's no data backing that up at all. What you do find though, is that the most successful people in any role that you would care to study find certain aspects of what they do that they love. They don't love everything, but every day they find certain moments, situations, or people, where they find the love in what they do. That is a much more achievable and realistic aim than saying, ‘Find your passion and do all that you love.’ Research from the Mayo Clinic suggests that 20% is a really good threshold. When you actually look at what percentage of the data about how much people find things that they love, it's 20%. Above 20%, there's no actual increase in resilience. A little love every day goes an awfully long way.

Find “red threads” in your work:

All of us have things that we're really really good at that we hate. We've all got some stuff where, because we're diligent or organized or luck or intelligence, we're good at it, but we hate it. That’s not a strength. We should call that a weakness. The proper definition of a weakness is any activity that weakens you even if you’re good at it. So in a sense, these loves of yours, those thickest patterns of synaptic connection that lead you to pay attention or time flies by when you're doing them. I actually call them your red threads. If you think about the day, it’s a fabric of many, many different threads. Some are white, some black, some are gray, and some are brown. They lift you up a little down a little, but some of them are red. If you can look for these red threads, these are the building blocks for the things that you love to do. Those things that strengthen you, activities that lift you up. Those are your strengths. And if you want to grow in life, if you want to make a great contribution, you will grow most when you are playing to your particular strengths which are those red threads.

When doing user research, maybe you ask “why” less:

When moderating a focus group for a grocery store chain that wanted to find out what motivates people to shop late at night, [Naomi] didn’t ask participants what would seem like the most obvious questions: ‘Do you shop late at night because you didn’t get around to it during the day?’ ‘Is it because stores are less crowded at night?’ ‘Do you like to shop late because that’s when stores restock their shelves?’ All are logical reasons to shop at night and likely would have gotten affirmative responses had she asked. Nor did Naomi simply ask why they shopped late at night because, she told me, ‘Why?’ tends to make people defensive — like they have to justify themselves. Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: ‘Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.’“

An interesting stat on the return to work:

Just 4% of employers are making all their workers come back into an office five days a week, according to a recent survey of human-resources leaders from the Conference Board, while 45% are asking some employees to return full-time.

Related: is workplace loyalty gone for good?

Make decisions matter less:

I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. When something does go wrong, it doesn't cost you or your customer an exorbitant amount. It isn't ridiculously expensive. When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.

Be brave enough to suck at something new.

If you’re constantly worried about the tasks you’ve not finished, you’re suffering from the Zeigarnik Effect:

Zeigarnik carried out a series of experiments on the relationship between tasks and memory. She concluded that it’s possible for the human memory to distinguish between tasks that have been completed and those that are still left to complete, and that we tend to remember unfinished tasks better. This phenomenon became known as the Zeigarnik effect.

According to Zeigarnik’s research, an unfinished task will remain prominent in our minds because we know that we have left it incomplete. Zeigarnik explained that each task we start produces a form of psychological tension.

If we’re interrupted partway through the task by a phone call or meeting, the tension of the task remains prominent in our minds. This means that when we return to it, the information is still present. The psychological tension, and our recall of relevant information, will therefore only fade once the task is completed.

Start even if you can’t finish. It may feel more productive to wait until you have enough time to complete a task in its entirety. However, the psychology of unfinished tasks suggests that it’s better to start working on a task, even if you can’t finish it in one go. Once started, you will feel more inclined to finish the job at the earliest opportunity.

A list of the internet’s best learning resources.

Explain Like I’m Five is a great subreddit with lots of simple answers to complex questions.

And if you’re still here:

According to research, our attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. In fact, scientists reckon we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds.

WONDERFUL WORDS

“Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never receive.” — Shawne Duperon

"On the ground, a rock is just a rock. But when moving at high speed through the atmosphere, a rock becomes a meteor—alive with fire and burning bright. People are not so different. Without activity, we are lifeless and dull. When moving fast and taking action, we come alive." — James Clear

“When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it." — Sasha Aickin

“Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” — Nathanial Hawthorne

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it." — Margaret Thatcher

“In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness...don’t expect it to be easy or free.” — Jeff Bezos