THE LEAFLET
February 01 2024
values as equity tools, clarity > authenticity, polygon rejections
VALUES AS EQUITY TOOLS
Most folks on a team, especially new to a team, are wondering some version of these two questions:
How can I be great?
How can I belong?
In a values-driven place, values can answer both questions. You’re great by embodying the values; you belong by speaking of them, with them, in reference to them.
A place like this has much simpler internal politics and economics. Values are usually written in less than a page and often less than a paragraph. They are accessible. You don’t need tenure, privilege, or particular identity markers to understand them or to get to see them.
In addition to their other benefits, this accessibility makes them tools of equity, too.
Read the rest here.
CLARITY > AUTHENTICITY
Reasonable, empathetic leaders often seek authenticity as a marker of their legitimacy and success. They optimize for it (or try to) in their internal communications. This, I think, is an error.
Optimize instead for clarity. This way, even if your word or tone isn’t trusted, you have still deposited and documented the truth. Something true.
Doing this over and over again can earn you a reputation for authenticity. You’re good for your word; what you say matches the facts people have or can get.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the other way. Reaching over and over again for authenticity won’t get you clarity. It may even deny you (and your people) clarity instead.
Read the rest here.
REJECTIONS ON THE JOB MARKET
This can feel personal - like a wound. You can reasonably ask yourself what it means about you, your story of yourself, what you imagine as your reputation and value.
My experience of many rejections (received and delivered) is that the rejection says way less about you, the candidate, than it does about the rejecting entity and its context.
The thing you can control: being the most colored-in version of the weird little polygon you are. In interviews, hopefully they’re asking and you’re showing your sharp edges and bold hues. If you’ve done that and they don’t pick you, your most useful analysis probably isn’t rugged self-criticism. It may be more dispassionate reading of the context.
There’s a place where your shape and shine lock in tightly. That earlier place that said no may have been doing you a favor, preventing lots of friction and dulling on both sides.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Philosopher Joe Carlsmith on our most basic condition:
Our most basic condition, presupposed almost by the concept of epistemology itself, is one of vulnerability. Vulnerability to that first and most fearsome Other: God, the Creator, the Uncontrolled, the Real. And the Real, absent further evidence, could be anything. It could definitely eat you, and your babies. Oh, indeed, it could do far, far worse. Scout-mindset admits this most basic un-safety, and tries to face it eyes-open.
Poet Marie Ponsot on passion:
Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.
Theorist Roland Barthes on jealousy:
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric