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By Mark Truman, on August 10th, 2011%
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or fill out the subscription form to the left. Thanks for visiting! When I was in college, my engineer friends turned me on to a web comic called XKCD. It’s mainly about math and science, but it’s surprisingly sweet and easily accessible. It’s humor is genuine and rich, satirizing our human foibles with a smile.
Last month, I discovered that a group of people had set up a website entirely for the purpose of tearing the author of the comic down. They claim they were are offering critique, but their comments are simply hurtful and ugly, displaying only disdain for the work of another human being.
Remember always that this is the world in which we live. It is literally impossible to produce something without engendering a sense of hatred in someone.
Yet, you should also remember that the hatred is meaningless. It isn’t about you or your creations. It is a reaction to the threat you’ve created, the idea that each and every person has the potential to produce something meaningful.
Haters are gonna hate. Don’t let them shake your resolve.
By Mark Truman, on August 3rd, 2011%
Over the last few years, the number of resources available over the internet has skyrocketed. Today, we have access to amazing amounts of knowledge that can catapult us to the forefront of any field we want to lead. We can snap our fingers and make magic happen.
There is no reason to do anything less than your best work. There is no reason to sit in your cave and wait for the world to stop changing.
It’s time to make something happen. There is no excuse.
By Mark Truman, on July 27th, 2011%
You can’t.
Even if you think you know it all, you’re going to miss the fine nuances that required your presence at the meeting.
Sometimes you don’t really have a choice. You’ve got other stuff on your brain, and the meeting you’re stuck in is 99% wasted time.
But don’t think that you can stop paying attention and still catch that last 1% that matters.
By Mark Truman, on July 18th, 2011%
You have to stand your ground to make a difference. Advocating for the things you believe in, repeatedly and often, is the only way to make a movement a reality.
Yet, sometimes the people who oppose you are jerks. They stop listening when you talk, blatantly ignore the facts on the ground, and claim that you’re the one causing all the problems.
You can’t win against these kinds of people. Do yourself a favor, and stop fighting the people who will burn everything down to make a point.
You’ve got better things to build with your time.
By Mark Truman, on July 15th, 2011%
We are often told to keep our distance from our causes. If you want to really help people, they tell us, you’ve got to keep from losing yourself in the work.
But it’s impossible to stay disinterested because you’ve already lost yourself in the work. That’s why you’re doing the work in the first place.
So throw that caution to the wind. Get involved, deeply involved, and figure out how to change the world.
You can work out your boundaries later.
By Mark Truman, on July 4th, 2011%
It’s worth remembering, on the Fourth of July, what makes America truly great.
It’s not military prowess or economic power. It’s not our popular culture, which gets exported all over the world, or our political system, which has been copied since its inception.
America is great because we are the most diverse country on the planet.
America proved a long time ago that diversity is an asset instead of a liability. When other countries focus on purity and homogeneity, we’ve celebrated our differences and welcomed their outcasts.
It hasn’t always been smooth, but it’s a consistent theme in America’s history. Time and time again, we have triumphed over adversity because of our diversity.
And that’s why we must continue to work to make diversity a priority. Not because some groups deserve a handout, but because we are all stronger when people of a different race, creed, or gender help us see past our own limitations.
When you go back to work tomorrow, make a special effort to bring the right people to the table for every meeting. All of them. Anything less is un-American.
By Mark Truman, on June 17th, 2011%
People worry a lot about time when they start projects. They convince themselves that each and every new thing on their plate puts them in danger of being overworked and stretched too thin.
But time isn’t the limiting factor. Care is. And you’ve only got so much “carepower.”
The truth is that you can only care so much. You will make time for the things that matter, but you can’t force yourself to generate enough carepower to deal with projects that you really don’t care about.
The question, therefore, is not “Do I have enough time?” It is instead “Do I care enough about this to make it a part of my life?”
By Mark Truman, on June 15th, 2011%
Do you want to get fired up?
Do you want to be chomping at the bit, ready to tear into a new idea?
Do you want to feel like your work matters?
Then go find those who need a little motivation. Remind them why they matter, and share with them what you’ve learned. Help them move further down their path.
And by the time you hang up the phone or get back from lunch, you’ll be ready to crush your own projects just to keep up.
By Mark Truman, on June 1st, 2011%
We tend to think of our beliefs as empirically true. After all, it would be foolish of us to decide that we follow some ideology without testing it out in the real world.
This leads us to believe, however, that while reasonable people can disagree with us, they do so only at the margins. They might not completely see eye to eye with us on everything, we say, but they certainly don’t disagree about the facts.
In reality, reasonable people do disagree about fundamental assumptions in any serious conversation. They have different values, different experiences, and different motives that lead them down a path that can all too often lead us to describe them as “unreasonable.”
This is silly.
The key to judging the reasonableness of others isn’t to see how much they agree with you. Instead, you’ve got to take a look at how they respond to the new ideas you put forward, and how they go about explaining their own ideas. Reasonable people do so respectfully, with intellectual rigor and humility. Crazy people spout nonsense.
Crazy people are all too common. Ignore them. But don’t assume someone is crazy because they propose ideas and concepts that are more than marginally different than your own.
By Mark Truman, on May 30th, 2011%
When you first started working, your boss simply wanted you to be competent. Or at least not so incompetent that your organization was better off trusting a goat to get coffee every morning instead of you.
As you’ve worked your way up the ladder at work, you’ve learned new skills. Now you have a lot more to offer an organization that hires you, and you don’t worry about being replaced by a coffee delivering goat.
Some of the growth you’ve experienced has probably resulted from giving up some of your bad habits. I, for example, used to be chronically late. Each and every activity was a struggle against the clock. That didn’t work when I started tutoring kids, and I realized that I was wasting the time of my students. I had to get a schedule and stick to it.
Changes like these didn’t fundamentally alter your personality, but it has made your time working on projects a lot less about you. In fact, your training over the first few years of working has probably been more about taking care of your rough edges than anything else. Now you can fit in to a team and do the job you’re assigned without driving everyone else crazy.
But that isn’t the final step in your evolution at work.
When you start leading at an executive level, you need to remember that you were hired because you are you, not in spite of it. Leading an organization means you have to drive it. You have to set the tone, establish a course, and push the whole organization forward with nothing but the force of your personality.
For that, you’re going to need whatever rough edges you have left. You have to stop thinking that you can “just do the job” and start realizing that whatever makes you tick needs to be what makes your organization tick.
Your values, your ideas, your personality. These are the reasons the organization chose you to lead it.
Don’t suppress them in the name of doing a good job.
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