If someone frequently messes up a particular task, it can be frustrating for everyone. If they mess it up not as badly one day, that’s a huge accomplishment! The steps toward true mastery don’t just go from failure to minor success to major success. There are usually a dozen or more incrementally less worse failures along the way. And we should praise that!

If you, especially as a teacher or guide, express the same disapproval toward the not-as-bad failure, you’re discouraging the very process that will lead someone out of that swamp. Losing a game by three points is way better than losing a game by ten points, even if you still lost. Not everything has to be indexed against a win. Just making less of a mess is wonderful.

Being present is an act of defiance. So is making a friendship bracelet when you’re scared. This is not the end of the story, not the end of your story. It’s the middle, and the middle is where the ending is written. Be present in the middle. Make friends, and friendship bracelets. Let people make friends with you. There is a long way to go before the end, yet.

There is such a thing as overexplaining. But the likelihood that you’re doing that, instead of not nearly explaining enough, is very slim.

Learning comes not just from knowing facts, but understanding the connections between them. You already have the connections – you know the context. So it’s easy for you to see how the facts fit together. But for other people, they’re seeing those jigsaw puzzle pieces for the first time. You need to provide not just knowledge, but the coordinates for that knowledge. You need to map the facts.

If you’re not bored by your own explanation, then you probably aren’t explaining enough for someone learning what you know for the first time.

One of the advantages of working in a field where I help a lot of people deal with a lot of problems is that sometimes, their challenges mirror my own.

Handling your own challenges is thorny. You’re close to the point of myopia. Your emotions cloud judgment. It can be difficult to work through the details of a plan in this context.

But others? I can be dispassionate and objective, energized and strategic. I can ask questions without assumptions. And then when I’m looking at the finished product, I realize…

…dang, that might just work for me, too.

It’s critical to get your feedback from a variety of sources. The longer you solicit your reviews from the same panel, the more danger you have of simply adapting to that one specific audience.

A small sample size is a bad idea for any data collection. There’s no guarantee that the feedback you’re getting from a tiny group is valuable! You may have stumbled upon a niche faction that loves (or despises) everything you do, which means you’ll settle into a rut. You can’t improve without broadening your horizons.

Get out of the bubble, and expose your work to unusual feedback. Go as broad as you can, even if you’re searching for a target demo that’s much smaller. You can find it within the feedback you receive, but that initial feedback will be invaluable.

Sometimes you want something, and it’s available on the cheap. That’s a great deal, but you might be able to do better. If you manage it right, you can get people to pay you to take it.

When I worked in my first major sales office, all the sales managers had a rotating duty to field a certain number of interviews. Since that was, in the short-term, time spent away from the revenue-generating activities you’d be getting commission for, most sales managers didn’t want to do it. I happened to love doing interviews, and I saw the long-term potential of being the one with the most influence over how new hires got distributed. So I absolutely wanted to do more of them while everyone else wanted to do fewer.

It seemed like a win/win, so when someone asked me if I wanted to do an interview with them, I said, “No thanks.”

Why? Why turn it down if it was exactly what I wanted? Because I knew I could get more opportunity out of the deal. I knew the other managers really didn’t want to do those interviews. So when I said, “No thanks,” I didn’t say it vehemently. I considered it, waggled my head back and forth a bit, and pretended to roll it around a bit. In other words, I landed on ‘no,’ but deliberately gave the impression that I wasn’t too far from a ‘yes.’

So then the haggling began. I let them ‘convince’ me to take on the roster of interviews, but only in exchange for the ‘draft picks’ of new hires (essentially giving me total control over which new hires went onto my team, instead of having to pick in turn) as well as a few choice territory swaps. Within six months, I had the highest-performing team in the company. Which also made me the highest-paid sales manager.

Other people’s desire to be rid of something is a powerful force. If it’s something you want, don’t ever forget it.

The human ego is a powerful force. The best technique I’ve found for taming it is simply to hitch it to the right wagon.

Playing a team sport? Well, you can attach your ego to “individual performance,” and then suddenly you’re at odds with your very teammates. Overcoming the ego is hard. Much easier is attaching it to “winning the game.” Go ahead and feed your ego, then! Brag about how good your team is, how powerful your synergy makes you on the field. Become laser-focused on that, and let your ego thrive.

Attach the concept of “winning” to the right things, and your ego can be a driver, not a detriment.

A tale as old as time itself. My oldest child, The Beanstalk (Age 13), just scolded me for administering a punishment to my middle child, The Squish (Age 8) that was less severe than the punishment she received for the exact same infraction when she was that age. And she’s 100% correct! I laughed and laughed because it’s such an old complaint, but she’s got me dead to rights.

Neither The Beanstalk nor I think The Squish deserves a harsher punishment. So instead, The Beanstalk got reparations in the form of Hersey Kisses – the very item she was punished for sneaking 7 years ago.

And I took them out of The Squish’s stash.

Your goal is to do less.

Since the dawn of civilization, we’ve collectively put our minds to the task of how to do less and accomplish more. The wheel and the fulcrum turn a smaller amount of physical power into a greater amount of output. And from there, we kept going.

The amount of civilization we’ve built around us is literally impossible with simply the physical capacity of our bodies. But we didn’t stop there – we designed mental fulcrums as well. Calculators and computers and sundials and even the written word were all ways of magnifying our mental output. Those are tangible, but organizational systems might be even more important. Ten smart people with no way to organize their combined efforts won’t have anywhere near as much impact as the same ten people with the right frameworks.

So the right inter-social frameworks are emotional fulcrums. They let groups do more, with less.

That’s your goal as a leader – how can you hold fewer tasks directly, but magnify the impact of your group more?

To start, remove your ego. The group doesn’t depend on you. It depends on systems. The skills you have, if you’re trying to amplify a group, are actually in the worst place if they’re only in your head. Your goal is to get them into everyone else’s.

Who else can do what you did before? Who can you train, or simply empower, to take over those tasks so you can amplify the results in another way? Don’t look at your people like cats to be herded. Look at them like a vast untapped source of potential, waiting only for the right fulcrum to release them.

When you create something for others, you often have to manage the reality of having two audiences. Those two audiences don’t necessarily align in what they want to see, either.

For example, imagine you work for an advertising firm, and a car company has hired you to create their new ad campaign. Well, you’ve got at least two audiences here (we’ll talk about the third later): The intended market for the cars, and the executives of the car company.

The executives of the car company want to sell cars, sure. But they also want to see an ad that makes them feel prestigious and boosts their ego. That’s not a knock on car company executives; everyone wants that. And that desire can conflict with the desire for an ad that sells cars most effectively; the ad campaign that makes them feel the best isn’t necessarily the campaign that will sell the most cars.

Your job, annoying as it might be, is to appeal to both audiences. If you create a campaign that will sell the maximum number of cars but it doesn’t appeal to the c-suite, you’re going to have a very, very tough time selling it. Sure, you’re the expert. Sure, they hired you because they knew you were the expert. But as soon as they disagree with you, suddenly they’re all experts, and what do you know, anyway?

The savviest among them might say “Look, I hate this, but I love money. And I’m not the target market for our cars, so it doesn’t really matter if I hate it. What matters is that the market analysis says our customers will love it, so we should do it.” In reality, maybe one person in ten has the self-awareness to think that way. Don’t count on it.

You have to find that middle ground, even if that means weakening the actual end result. The best campaign that never airs sells exactly zero cars.

And of course, there’s always that third audience, the one I alluded to earlier. You see, you have to make a campaign that appeals to your client and their customers… and your future clients. The third audience is comprised of all the people you want to impress – for your own prestige and status! See, I told you no one is immune.

Super Bowl commercials are often touted as the pinnacle of advertising, but lots of them fail to achieve their official objective, which is generating more revenue than they cost. But the advertising industry loves them; they give each other awards for them whether they sell anything or not. In the same way that the Oscar for Best Picture doesn’t go to the movie that made the most money, advertising awards are given to insiders by insiders. If you want to win an Oscar, sometimes you have to not make the movie that will sell the most tickets, and that dynamic applies pretty much everywhere.

For all creatives, the advice “Know Your Audience” is incomplete. It’s “Know Your Audiences.”