Seth's Blog : “I don’t like your work”

“I don’t like your work”

That doesn’t mean I don’t like you.

The difference is critical. It’s impossible to be a productive professional if you insist on conjoining them.

Here are two useful things to consider:

1. There is plenty of disliked work from people (and things) where I don’t even know the creator. I don’t like Wagner’s operas, and I never even met him. If it’s possible to dislike something without knowing the person behind it, I hope we can embrace the fact that they’re unrelated.
2. If we need everyone to like our work in order to feel grounded, it means that we’ll sacrifice the best of what we could create in order to dumb it down for whatever masses happen to be speaking up. Which will make it more average (aka mediocre) and thus eliminate any magic we had hoped to create.

If someone cares enough to dislike our work, the best response is, “thank you.”

Thank you for taking the time to consider it, thank you for caring enough to let me know…

You can choose to listen (or not) to the rest of the feedback, but all you’ll learn is how one person reacted to something you built.

Seth's Blog : To vs reply vs bcc

To vs reply vs bcc

How much of your inbox activity is initiated by you? What percentage of your email threads started with an email you wrote?

And how much is spent replying to others?

And finally, how often are you bccing or being bcced?

I hope we can agree that the percentage for the third category should be close to zero.

But for the first two, the simplest way to change your day is to dramatically alter the percentage of the first two categories so that you’re adding way more value for others. In whatever way works best.

Seth's Blog : The minimum viable audience

The minimum viable audience

The smallest group that could possibly sustain you in your work…

If you could pick the members of this audience, who would you choose? Their dreams, their worldviews, their energy, all up to you.

If you could pick them and needed to delight them because you had no one else available, would your product or service improve? If you had no choice but to ignore the naysayers (they’re not in the group) or the people who don’t think they need you or your work, would that force you to stop compromising and start excelling?

Two things happen when you delight your minimum viable audience:

1. you discover it’s a lot larger group than you expected
2. they tell the others

On the other hand, if you aim for mass (another word for average), you’ll probably create something average. Which gets you not very far.

Seth's Blog : The invisible limits

The invisible limits

Words like חמץ and kx’āhã don’t appear in English. These words, like thousands of others, include sounds that aren’t part of the normal spoken range of the language. We don’t have difficulty saying or hearing these sounds, they’re simply sounds we have rules against.

The question is: Is the alphabet we use missing those sounds because we don’t use them, or is it that we don’t use those sounds because we don’t have letters for them?

If you can’t see it, you can’t say it. And that goes for more than words.

Seth's Blog : Where are you headed?

Where are you headed?

Traffic at work isn’t just a metaphor. It’s real. We get stuck. Surrounded by people who are just as stuck. It can seem like progress is at a crawl.

And then, we see a different way. Someone finds a lane we didn’t even know existed. Quickly, they’re joined by a few others, a cohort that’s making a difference and moving precisely where they want to go.

All around us, there are people want to protect their status quo, while others are on a path to level up. Some careers are about checking boxes while others set people up to draw the boxes.

This blog, of course, is for people who want to do work that matters. It might be a more difficult route, but it’s worth it.

The work of leveling up involves pushing past perceived limitations, understanding that they’re not real.

And it involves surrounding yourself with people on a similar journey.

“What’s required here?” is the question we were taught to ask. This is the loyal employee and the reliable cog, meeting spec.

“What is the opportunity here?” is a totally different question. It’s about contribution and forward motion, not simply compliance.

For people in a hurry to learn and contribute, the range of learning options online is a boon. You can learn more, and more quickly, than ever before. The options range from straight video courses (some of which are really quite expensive, some of which are nearly free) to intensive interpersonal community interactions. Some involve fun topics and well-known celebrities, while others are dry video monologues offered in exchange for a continuing education credit.

Nearly three years ago, we started the altMBA. Our goal was to find people who were already enrolled in the journey of leveling up and making a difference–and so we created an intensive thirty-day workshop that would help them do better work.

The altMBA is not like the other online courses you might see offered from various websites. We have a coach for every ten students, with group work, daily video calls and most of all, peer-to-peer projects. There are no gurus, no video lectures, nothing to memorize.

It’s easier to take (and make) a straight video course, but I’m not sure it can deliver the results worthy of your time.

One of the key choices we made is that we don’t have tests or a fancy accreditation. That’s because these enforcement tools separate the student from the process, turning it into something adversarial. The question, “will this be on the test?” is a question about how little can I do, and about compliance.

On the other hand, if you’re enrolled, then no enforcement is necessary. If you’re enrolled in the journey, no one has to hassle you. Instead of seeking to do less, you seek to do more.

The altMBA was created to help people see more clearly, make better decisions and engage with their soft skills, the ones that truly matter. This is a cohort of people who have decided to leave their imagined limitations behind.

With the altMBA continuing to thrive, we’ve taken some of what we’ve learned from the process and expanded it into a new learning paradigm, online seminars we’re calling workshops.

Unlike the altMBA, these new workshops don’t have a high coach ratio, organized learning groups or peer-to-peer projects. Instead, we’re building online communities with dozens of video lessons, lessons that each participant can turn into a chance to improve their own projects. In a typical workshop, there are hundreds of thousands of page views every few weeks, and a post is made very few minutes, 24 hours a day.

Real people, interacting with each other because the journey is worth it. Seeing in others what they know they have in themselves.

These workshops are far more tactical than the altMBA, but they still end up challenging people to ask themselves (and each other) the really hard questions.

We’re calling these the Akimbo workshops. They include The Marketing Seminar, The Podcasting Fellowship and several others. And we only offer them to people who are already headed in that direction. It’s voluntary education, it’s for people who have decided to get on the bus and get to where they’re going.

I hope you’ll check out both the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops. Because if you’re ready to level up, we’re ready for you.

Seth's Blog : How big is your unfillable hole?

How big is your unfillable hole?

It doesn’t really matter, does it?

All of your bad habits (and some of your good ones) exist to fill that hole, or to protect it from being seen.

And as long as our mission is to fill the hole, and as long as the hole remains unfillable (and after all this time, if it’s not filled yet, good luck with that) it doesn’t really matter how small or trivial or unmentionable the hole is.

It still drives us.

The first step to living with it is to acknowledge it.

You can’t make it go away.

But you can learn to dance with it.

Seth's Blog : Dissolve it

Dissolve it

The best solution to a persistent, apparently non-solvable problem is to make the problem itself obsolete.

Go around it.

Cease to need it to be solved.

Redefine your process or goal so that the problem is no longer permitted to slow you down.

An unsolvable roadblock might be better called “reality.”