When germ theory was first introduced to doctors, they weren’t just skeptical. They were offended to the point of hostility. The suggestion that infections in surgical patients could be caused by germs on the doctors’ hands was an absolute insult. Their hands were clean, obviously! They were medical professionals who knew how to wash their hands, and to insinuate otherwise was dire slander.

Nowadays, we know better. Not only do we know that germ theory is correct, but we know that scientists like Louis Pasteur weren’t insulting the doctors. To point out that you have microscopic bacteria on your hands that you couldn’t have known about isn’t an example of fightin’ words. It’s a fact of the universe, and it was offered up in the sincere hope that the knowledge would help people overcome it. Once we know that our hands have infectious diseases on them that we can’t see but that can nonetheless threaten a patient’s life, we can take steps to eliminate those germs and protect the patient. Having germs on your hands doesn’t make you an unclean wretch. Only refusing to take responsibility once you know the truth should mark you as an enemy of progress.

Of course, I say “nowadays we know better… with germs. Sadly, we’re doing the exact same thing today in another sphere. Replace “doctors” with “leaders” and replace “germs” with “unconscious bias, heuristics, and mental noise” and you have a good approximation of the state of leadership today.

All humans have these “mental germs.” It’s a fact of our evolution, our psychology. It’s not an insult to say that a human is susceptible to recency bias any more than it’s an insult to say that humans are susceptible to having germs on their hands. But like the doctors of the 19th Century, the leaders of the 21st tend to get awfully mad when you suggest it.

The point, of course, isn’t to offend. When I run a training course on the halo/horns effect, I’m not telling leaders: “You shouldn’t be a manager of people because you, specifically, keep making this stupid mistake, dummy.” I’m telling them specifically how to overcome a dilemma that every single human has. I’m telling the doctors how to get rid of the germs.

Some doctors, of course, were more concerned with their status as gentlemen than they were with the potential harm to patients. And some leaders are more concerned with their position than they are with effectively leading people. I feel your pain, Louis.

We all want to believe that our minds, in their natural state, are as unbiased and rational as the doctors believed their hands were clean. But true responsibility to those under your care requires that you acknowledge that they need active sterilization in ways that don’t occur to you naturally. If you shirk that responsibility, then I am saying that you shouldn’t be a leader. If those are fightin’ words, so be it. I’m fighting for the people who count on you.

A small job done well is better than a big job done poorly, or not at all. Don’t judge your accomplishments by what you set out to do, judge them by what you actually did, and by how you did it. There are many small jobs, but only small people resent them.

Nobody can undermine you like you can. Self-sabotage is the most effective kind of sabotage there is. A shocking amount of progress and success can be had just from figuring out where you’re shooting yourself in the foot and stopping.

Imagine driving somewhere, in big rush. You’re in a hurry, so you think: “The best thing to do is get out of my own car and push it, to add speed.”

There’s a… sort of logic there? Pushing something generally does make it move, after all. But you’d be completely wrecking yourself. You’d give up steering for physical effort, and you’d lose the ability to add mechanical effort as well. Everything you wanted to do was best accomplished by you being a force multiplier. By directing the efforts of powerful resources instead of being a far less powerful one yourself.

This is what people often do as leaders. They “get out and push” and the whole thing moves more slowly. They create bottlenecks, they let the whole thing start veering off the road, they get themselves disconnected from the process. It’s a mess.

Stay in the driver’s seat. Recognize when the panicked impulse to push is misguided, which is pretty much always. Don’t undermine yourself.

Get to the hard stuff quickly. Don’t delay a punishment or a trial. Face all things at your most brave, and bravery is eroded by time more swiftly than any other feature or emotion. If you are ever shot by a firing squad, may they shoot you in the front.

Happy New Month, and happy St. Chalie’s Day.

Today is Superkid’s birthday. On the day he passed, those closest to him talked about what we wanted to do to honor him on this day. Chalie was a lot of things, but more than anything else, he loved people and he wanted them to be happy. He worked so hard to bring people together, to find common ground, to help people move past the things that kept them apart.

And so that’s what we’re doing today, and what I’ll make my new month’s resolution, too. To forgive people, to seek to be forgiven, and to get over the things that keep us apart. I love you, Chalie, and I miss you. And I’ll keep trying.

The day before the worst day is the worst day. When you’re in it, you can be in it – there is an active place for what you need to do and feel. The night in the garden, there’s nothing.

It’s my view that a major barrier to people realizing their most altruistic tendencies is a lack of confidence in what will help. We know there are problems in the world, but often they seem so vast or so challenging that we’re paralyzed, not out of a lack of desire to help, but by ignorance in the face of such seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

If you’ve felt this way, I have a wonderful thing for you to do: Keep your eyes open for those who seem to have found a way to move the needle on a problem you care about. And then, pile on.

Imagine you care about the plight of abandoned or unsheltered animals, but doing anything meaningful about it seems beyond your reach at the moment. You work full-time so you can’t volunteer at the shelter, but your income is stretched too thin across too many bills to meaningfully donate money, either. What can you do?

You can find those people who are volunteering at the animal shelter, and you can help them. They’re making some sacrifice in order to give their time, and you can’t. But you can make them a snack the night before, and drop it off in the morning before work, along with a note that says how much you appreciate their work. For people volunteering to solve a problem like that, a little gesture can mean the absolute world. It can mean the difference between whether they have the emotional resilience to volunteer again tomorrow or not. It can mean the energy they need to save one more animal this week.

Transferring the burden of helping off of the shoulders of the helpers is as meaningful as working on the problem directly. And it can often be done differently, allowing for people with different life circumstances to all contribute. Including you.

How would you answer if I asked you: “Is my pizza late?”

You might ask me how long I’ve been waiting. I tell you it’s been 35 minutes. So what’s the answer?

Hopefully, you’re thinking that you still don’t have enough information, because that would be correct. The next question should probably be something like: “How long did they tell you it was going to take when you ordered it?”

If they said 25 minutes, then yeah, it’s late. If they said 45 minutes, then it’s not. And if they didn’t say, then it isn’t late.

Now, if they didn’t say, that’s its own issue and they could probably improve their communication. But it still doesn’t make the pizza late. Of course, there’s an amount of time that a pizza could take that would likely be “late” even without a clear expectation upfront. If you ordered 3 hours ago, that’s probably late. But how about an hour? On a busy Friday night? The point is that without clear expectations, there’s a wider range of reasonable disagreement over what “late” is.

Which also means you have a bigger chance of being the jerk if you accuse your delivery driver of being late when the pizza gets there 40 minutes after you order it.

This is a common human error: we ask for something or give a direction and we don’t attach a time expectation to it. In our heads, we have one, but we don’t communicate it. Then, when the ask doesn’t manifest in the time we imagined, we get salty.

Don’t have salty pizza. Be clear about the clock, and you’ll deal with far fewer late arrivals.

Anything you cannot compromise on is a weak point. Your non-negotiables are your biggest vulnerabilities.

There are two lessons here:

1. Minimize your non-negotiables. The more things you refuse to be flexible on, the weaker your overall position in life, your career, your relationships, whatever. You’ll always have some; make them count.
2. Protect your position. If there’s an aspect of your life that you simply need to be a certain way, then you need to take extra steps to ensure that, above and beyond what you’d need if it was just a “nice to have.”

Think about someone with a peanut allergy versus someone who just doesn’t like the taste of peanuts. The person with the non-negotiable is more vulnerable; the wrong salad can put their life in danger, and so they might miss out on delicious meals, etc. They also have to go above and beyond to ensure their meals don’t have peanuts – they eat at restaurants less, check more thoroughly, carry emergency meds, etc.

Now apply that to anything in your life. If your current salary at your job is a “non-negotiable,” then your position is vulnerable. You’ll put up with more that you don’t like rather than walk away for a lower salary with more satisfaction and happiness. So you need to protect yourself: If you truly can’t make a dime less, then you’re in a bad, vulnerable spot. If your current income is matching all your bills exactly to the dollar, think how vulnerable you are! You either need to reduce your bills (if you can – things like medical conditions or other factors can make that difficult), or find more income, even if it means giving up leisure time, etc. Otherwise, you’re so utterly exposed to even the tiniest hiccup totally destroying you. One stray peanut and your throat closes up.

So minimize the things that you can’t negotiate on, even if that means adopting a more flexible position overall – driving a used car instead of a new one so you don’t have to be as reliant on nothing ever disrupting your career progression is a wise choice! That way you can minimize the number of vulnerabilities you have to defend with outsized effort.

Avoid the peanuts, try the asparagus.

Have you ever had that moment where another person uses exactly the correct kind of language for the setting, and manages to do it in such a way that leaves no doubt as to the venom behind their words?

We live in a culture where the actual words someone says are often given far more weight than their intent, their meaning, or even their actions. We police “bad words” said even in benign or educational contexts while people use double-speak and entendres to bully coworkers or students.

Don’t be that person. Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Be polite, but choose the words that match your meaning, and adjust your intent to do the same. Someone who doesn’t speak your language but hears your tone should come away with the exact same impression as someone who reads a transcript of your words with no tone at all attached. And the actions you take should match both.