THE LEAFLET
January 04 2024
reps for rizz, when to overdo it, meeting holy trinity
WANT RIZZ? GET REPS.
Work and life are better when you see people as adaptive, resilient, indomitable forces. When you invest your emotional and practical energy in sponsoring growth instead of spotting talent.
I think it’s worth calling out the importance of growth mindset for a quality that even the most growth-oriented folks assume is a talent. The rizz. Charisma. The ability to compel and inspire a crowd of 1 or 100 with personal magnetism.
When someone delivers inspiring remarks that bring a team to tears, it’s so seductive to assume that they are possessed of, even possessed by, some magic force that the rest of do not have and cannot acquire.
In work on political campaigns and in public schools over the last 15 years, I have come to believe that even the rizz is the fruit of reps.
Read the rest here.
WHEN TO OVERDO IT
My earlier, not-hitting-the-goal self took pride in a certain intellectual remove. I could explain away bad early results or maintain a cool agnosticism while waiting for more data.
In sprints, that cool patience spelled doom. I’ve since realized it isn’t that helpful in less urgent contexts either. I was expecting patterns to change without serious, deliberate interventions.Year over year, I find new cases where that expectation seems empirically weak and practically dubious.
If your goal is crucial, not just nice to have, pause your judicious calculations. Consider what it would take to “overdo” it - to surpass the goal with a generous margin. Then do that. You can come back later, victorious, and get smart about efficiencies, optimization, cost-benefit. Having smashed a goal, your team, even your very worn out team, will have more energy for that streamlined, optimized next go than the crew that didn’t quite get there.
Read the rest here.
MEETING HOLY TRINITY
I love Ben’s prompt: ask yourself, if we canceled this regular meeting altogether, what would be lost? If nothing, go ahead and cancel. If something, dedicate the meeting to that thing. Design the whole meeting to deliver it.
When I’ve run this exercise myself in recent years, I’ve found that the thing I’m designing for is usually one of these three:
Connect: get people to know each other - their stories, values, interests - more deeply. Or renew existing connections.
Construct: build something together. A new plan, a prototype, an understanding of oneself and one’s work.
Clarify: make sense of current facts, needs, and decisions in light of our team’s purpose, values, and strategy
It’s hard to overdo this one. It’s easy to pretend to do it with “updates” that convey lots of facts but don’t reckon with purpose, values, and strategy.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks on memory and perception:
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne on our duplicity:
We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.
Author and critic Louis Menand on righteousness:
Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric