Imagine having a five-person team for Tug-of-War. They line up to pick up their side of the rope, and they all face north. Then you tell the first person in the line that they’ll receive $100 if they move thirty feet west; the second person that they’ll receive $100 if they move 40 feet east; the third person that they’ll receive $100 if they move sixty feet southwest, and so on.

The other team of five, facing south, are each told that they’ll receive $100 if they move fifty feet directly north.

Which team will win the match?

Both team captains might have the same goal: win the match. But on one team, the individual incentives are aligned towards that goal. Each individual wins by doing behaviors that lead toward the desired team outcome. If you’re the manager of the first team, you will not win, and it doesn’t matter how well you “manage” otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you threaten, yell, or inspire. It doesn’t matter if you explain how important winning is to the team. It doesn’t matter if you tell the people that they’ll be kicked off the team if they lose. None of it matters at all.

Individual incentives must be aligned towards the goals of the team.

If you don’t get this right, everything else you do as an organization is worthless; you will fail. It seems obvious when thinking about a Tug-of-War match. It gets harder when the organization gets larger, the goals get more complicated, and the individuals get more diverse.

As a leader, this is one of your most important functions, maybe the most important: figure out what people want. If you can align things so they get what they want by moving towards the team goals, do that. If you can’t, they don’t belong on the team.

This isn’t easy, but it’s dead simple. Stay committed to it, and your organization will always be pulling a straight rope.

Imagine a surge protector – a “power strip,” with eight slots where you could plug something in. You’re paying the power bill on this bad boy, and you have plenty of things that need the power.

Someone comes along and asks you if they could plug their phone into the strip. You’ve got room, right? So you say sure, and figure you’re fine with just seven spots. But before you know it, you’re giving slots to a lot of other people, and soon not only are you paying the power bill for everyone else’s electronics, but yours aren’t even plugged in!

You are that surge protector. And you do this all the time.

You take your energy, and you give it to everyone else’s projects. You don’t save enough for yourself. The lesson is really twofold: first, your stuff has to get plugged in first. Before you figure out how many “spare” slots you have, you have to make sure everything you need is plugged in!

Second, if you’re going to let someone else plug their television into your power strip, they’d better at least be letting you watch, too. Maybe even choosing a show here and there. Because that’s your power – and that power is finite.

And here’s another way the analogy works: let’s say you need more slots to plug things in, so you buy a second power strip and plug it into the first. Well, that might work once – but any electrician will tell you that’s not a secret to infinite power. Everything is getting less juice, everything is working more poorly…

…and you’re creating a fire hazard.

So it is with you. You can’t solve this problem by just doing all of their stuff and all of your stuff. You’ve got those eight slots, and that’s it.

Figure out what gets plugged in.

I am certain of very little, but these lessons feel as solid as anything I’ve ever known.

1. Spending a few extra minutes, even if it means making the whole world wait so that you can resolve an interaction with your child in a patient & kind manner, giving them your full attention, will never be a wasted moment.
2. No matter what, when your child says “I Love You,” you say it back. If they’re using it to stall at bedtime, let them stall. If they’re using to soften a scolding for bad behavior, let them soften. If they’re saying it because they just want your attention while you’re working on something else, give them your attention. Make it a principle that love will cut through all else, always.
3. Always answer “Can I help?” with an enthusiastic “Yes!”
4. Trust them. They are competent, and they become more competent the more you trust them. Believe the best in them, and that means specifically doubting your own doubts about them. If you don’t think they’re ready for something yet, train them until they are – but don’t tell them they can’t.
5. You don’t get much time.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone. Whatever you do today, do again tomorrow.

Sometimes when my middle child is feeling impatient, she’ll tell me she doesn’t like to wait. So I tell her to stop.

She’ll look confused for a moment, because (of course), how can she “stop waiting” for something to happen that’s beyond her control?

But “waiting” is an activity. You might not be able to make the event happen any faster, but you can do lots of things besides “wait.” Go outside. Paint a picture. Build a house.

What are you waiting for?

Just because you want to part ways because of some changes, doesn’t mean you necessarily disagree with those changes. You’re not obligated to find fault with a decision before you choose to go another way, and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you do.

Let’s say you’ve been a loyal customer of your local pizza shop for years. One day, they switch to a cheaper ingredient for their pizzas in order to cut costs. This might be a perfectly valid business decision! It might reduce their operating costs and allow them to stay in business or even expand. Most people might not mind the change. But if you mind it – if you find that the pizza isn’t tasty to you anymore – you’re allowed to stop going there.

People often fall into this mental trap where they say something like this to themselves: “Well, I don’t like their pizza anymore, but I get why they did it. If I was the business owner, I’d probably do the same thing. I can’t fault them or be mad, so I guess I’ll keep going there.”

Admit it. You’ve done something like that. With a business you frequent, a job you’ve had, maybe even a romantic partner. You’ve accepted the negative personal consequences of a decision made by someone else for someone else, just because you understood why they made that decision.

You do not have to do this.

You don’t have to find fault with a decision just to part ways. If the decision doesn’t benefit you, that’s enough to move on and change your environment.

“What, so everyone has to make every decision based on what’s good for me personally?”

No, of course not. But neither do you. That pizza place shouldn’t cater to you, specifically. Your preferences are your own. But you don’t have to cater to them, either. If an arrangement between multiple entities no longer works for all those entities, the arrangement can dissolve. It’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s wrong, but sometimes things just run their course.

When you choose one fork of the river and they choose the other, that’s just life. The river will have many forks. Take the paths that make you happy.

Today is the last day of school for my children. It’s a fairly significant milestone for all three of them: the last day of elementary school for my oldest; the last day of kindergarten for my middle, and the last day of preschool for my youngest. Due to how the schools in my town are structured, it’s also the last day all three of my kids will be in school in the same building.

Of course, things could change – I don’t have a crystal ball. Maybe they’ll restructure the schools again; wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe we’ll relocate or pick a different schooling option at some point. But even if none of that happens, this won’t be the last Last Day.

Things are always changing, and another way of saying that is “things are always beginning and ending.” So sure, as a father I’m going to get a little misty-eyed at the inexorable passage of time and the growth of my children. But there are plenty of last days left – and plenty of first days, too. And all the days in between. It’ll be many years before my last Last Day.

This is really just an in-between day. And like so many of those, on this one I am proud of my children. They are growing up brave and kind and clever, and I could not ask for more.

I am endlessly interested in what truly motivates people’s actions, especially when their actions don’t align with their stated motivations.

People are propelled by many things – tribal status, safety, ego, and a host of others – but since these motivations are so good at burrowing deep within our brains and disguising themselves as something else, we’re not nearly as attuned to them as would be helpful to us.

People will say “I’d do whatever it takes to get a job,” and then do maybe 5% of that, for example.

So, my first lesson: whenever someone says “I really want to do X,” remember that their true motivation was to say “I really want to do X,” not necessarily to actually do X.

Some level of motivation is also connected to what we want to believe about how the world works. People often seem to mean “I would do whatever it takes to do X, in a world where ‘whatever it takes’ is exactly the stuff I think should work.”

In other words, “whatever it takes” rarely seems to include “Change my worldview to better reflect the realities that I face.”

The broader lesson here for you, my friend, is that you actually can learn a lot about a person’s motivations by listening to what they say. But that doesn’t mean that they’re doing the same thing.

I am a very optimistic, silver-lining kind of person. I look for the good in events and circumstances, whether that’s a different interpretation, a potential upside, or a cheerful laugh at the experience. Sometimes, when all else fails, I’ll look at a negative with the view of “well, that’s just the price I pay for [some other good thing].”

I like being optimistic, but I’ve noticed a slight trap in that way of thinking. My optimism sometimes prevents me from looking for ways to improve!

If the seat of your car has a broken piece and it jabs you in the back as you drive, you could shrug and say “Well, that’s just the price I pay for the luxury of driving and all the convenience that brings. Given the choice, I wouldn’t get rid of all that just because of a little poke while I’m driving.” And look, great! That’s a good attitude in general. But also… you can fix the broken part.

You’re allowed to just fix the broken things, even if the total bargain is net positive. It’s not ungrateful, it’s not pessimistic. It’s just you making your world better.

If you have a job and there are things you don’t like about it, you can shrug and say “Well, that’s just the price I pay for having stable employment.” And some of that stuff probably is – you might not be able to fix everything. But you can make improvements, renegotiate, or do anything else you like.

Optimism is wonderful; I strongly encourage it. I still strive to improve.

There is an enormous difference between creation and ideation. Being able to create something and being able to decide what to create may be related in a sense, but they’re far from the same skill.

I’ll give you an example. I happen to know an incredibly talented illustrator who works in the comics industry. His art is superb; he can bring the wildest ideas of the imagination to vivid life. In every sense of the word, he’s creative – but he’s also never come up with an original drawing. He honed his craft re-drawing other people’s creations, and now he makes his living drawing art requests from writers. If you can imagine it, he can draw it – but when he just free-form sketches, he inevitably just draws Spider-man over and over.

Every pose different, every line perfect – but always Spider-man.

There’s the difference. We often look at creative people who nonetheless work best with solid direction and say “You’re so creative, why don’t you come up with something yourself?“

That’s a mistake that we’re making. We slip two different concepts under the umbrella term “creative” and then lament when someone isn’t both of them. Many brilliant painters through the ages painted only what they saw – that doesn’t mean they’re not creative. And many people have come up with incredible ideas that changed the world but needed other people to help execute and create the reality of what they’d imagined.

There is no requirement that any given person be both things – or even one, for that matter. Be careful what you assume about a person’s talents.

I’ve noticed a particular kind of communication gap, and perhaps you’ve noticed it too. It seems as though there are two kinds of people in the world: people for whom every statement is an expression of emotion, and people who sometimes just say stuff to transmit or obtain information.

The problem is that people in that first camp often think that there is no second camp. They believe that every statement that anyone makes is an expression of emotion, and that can lead to some serious misinterpretations of people’s moral character.

Not everything that someone says is an expression of a deeper emotion, feeling, or even opinion. But if you believe the opposite, then questions like “Why did you buy that book,” sound accusatory, and statements like “I think we should move in a different direction with this project” can seem downright threatening.

Of course, some people are accusatory or threatening or whatever else. But if you never think otherwise, chances are that you’re the one with the skewed worldview.