THE LEAFLET
September 7
motorcycles, scarcity, and subject lines
MOTORCYCLES
One of the first things they teach you in motorcycle class, after “always wear a helmet” and “never drink and ride,” is how to turn. The most important turning technique is to look at the place you want to go rather than the obstacle you want to avoid. This sounds obvious. It is, however, something every beginner resists.
If you focus on the destination instead of focusing on the obstacle, your head, shoulders, and arms all tilt toward the destination. This turns the bike toward the destination, too.
Narrating the positive draws your attention and your people’s attention to the positive - what you want replicated, what gets you where you need to go. What you want “posited” over and over.
Read the rest here.
SCARCITY
Abundance can make you sloppy. Scarcity can make you move. The teams I’ve enjoyed and admired most seem to zip around with some version of the belief that “there’s no [time] to waste!” You could replace “time” with any other resource.
The point is the team has decided, likely because a leader decided, that the scarcity of something critical is, in fact, a beautiful constraint. They embrace a specific and chosen form of scarcity. They believe in that scarcity, feel duty toward it, develop disciplines in service to it. It becomes a defining feature of the place, the work, and the beliefs that bind them.
A culture builds up around that constraint. The tendrils of the jasmine wend around the chain links. Come springtime, there’s a blossoming wall of perfume instead of a mass of weeds on the ground.
Read the rest here.
SUBJECT LINES
Email subject lines and posts on the top of Slack threads are places where you can costlessly take advantage of priming. Frame your subject lines positively, even and especially in cases where you’re solving something urgent or complicated.
In tricky situations, that email thread is going to re-appear in inboxes many times as teammates discuss different approaches, toss in wisecracks, find the dead ends before the daylight. Each time the thread reappears, so does that subject line. Someone who reads “let’s solve this together! We can do it.” over and over is likelier to bring an open, builder’s mindset to the problem than someone who reads “ugh what a nightmare - THIS again.”
Your subject line primes your people. It’s a miniature factory of positivity or negativity.
Read the rest here.
Keep going, keep growing,
Eric