THE LEAFLET
January 18 2024
write and share, vibe check as feedback, jokes that fail
WRITE AND SHARE
If your stuff is good, you’ll reach folks who will have no idea who you are. The self who generated the stuff will be irrelevant to them. If what you’re sharing could be useful to those strangers, what does your lil ego and its idiosyncratic needs have to do with it? Self-publishing does not need to be self-promotion. And even if it is, I don’t think it really matters. What matters is what people can do with your offering.
A few versions of this that I have encountered in recent years that I really like:
“Here are my takes:”: Seth Godin’s blog. New, pithy, pragmatic stuff every day. EVERY DAY.
“Here are my tools”: the charming, multitalented Myron Krueger’s toolkit for startups
“Here are my inspiring artistic sources”: Maria Popova’s The Marginalian
Read the rest here.
VIBE CHECK AS FEEDBACK
Checking the vibes means sharing an observation of some emotional weather, perhaps quite subtle, and asking your people about that observation. Are they also aware of this weather? What do they make of it? What’s a risky theory they might have about where it’s coming from and what it portends? Anything we need to say or do about it?
This is a gift to your people. It’s a way of creating a small instance of the vaunted psychological safety that so many retreats, consultants, and decks are supposed to deliver.
When you say “I’ve noticed a certain vibe that feels off. I could be wrong about this! And it’s present enough I thought I should mention it. Are you seeing this? What do you make of it?”
You’re also saying underneath that:
I’m paying attention
Your experience of the thing we are doing matters to me.
Feelings are allowed around here, even if they are not bright and carbonated and “productive,” strictly speaking.
Read the rest here.
WHEN SELF-DEPRECATING JOKES DON’T WORK
You may think your self-deprecating humor is winning you points for modesty, humility, not being a jerk. If your joke, however, is about a characteristic that you do not obviously already have in the eyes of your audience (tenure, competence, eloquence), the joke likely only confirms the suspicions of your skeptics. You’re not graciously humble in their eyes; you’re incompetent and dopey enough to admit it.
None of this is generous, of course, and some folks will assume the best or exercise the emotional intelligence to see what you’re really up to.
But why lower your status (and by extension, that of your team and their efforts) with superfluous self-abasement? There are much more effective ways to show your humility: active listening, sharing credit, and drawing attention to shared goals and values are just a few.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Author Kathryn Schulz on our “meta-mistake”:
In this rather despairing view—and it is the common one—our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings. Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.”
Novelist and essayist Anne Lamott on the tools we get:
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.
Novelist Rachel Cusk on power and blindness:
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric