My skillshare course goes live tomorrow
They've beefed up their servers, so if you had trouble signing up last week, today might be worth a try.
The details are right here.
The course is archived, so you can take it at your convenience. I'll be participating in the online Q&A for the students that take it during the first week it's available. Hope to see you there.
How much does it cost you to avoid the feeling of risk?
Not actual risk, but the feeling that you're at risk?
How many experiences are you missing out on because the (very unlikely) downsides are too frightening to contemplate?
Are you avoiding leading, connecting or creating because to do so feels risky?
Feeling risk is very different than actually putting yourself at risk. Over time, we've created a cultural taboo about feeling certain kinds of risk, and all that insulation from what the real world requires is getting quite expensive.
It's easy to pretend that indulging in the avoidance of the feeling of risk is free and unavoidable. It's neither.
Who's left?
The classified section of the Sunday New York Times used to be more than twenty or thirty pages long. Now it's down to one.
Part of this is due to the lack of new jobs in the post-industrial economy, but mostly it's due to job listings moving online. I was fascinated to see some of the jobs in last week's paper, and confess befuddlement at the thinking of those that ran them.
Here's one, from Amazon, for a level II programmer in their New York office. Just a mailing address, no online method for contacting or applying. They're using the newspaper to search for programmers unable to apply online, perhaps the best place to find this sort of programmer, but really, do they want them?
Or the ad from Paul, Weiss, a prestigious big law firm in New York. It's the biggest ad on the page, and goes into a long, long list of requirements for the job--Magna Cum Laude from a famous law school, more than three years with one of their competitors, etc. Which high-powered New York lawyers are reading the last single page of newspaper classifieds?
And my favorite, an equally long ad for Deloitte that instructs the applicant to go to a website and enter a 15-digit code, including several "1"s, some "I"s and a bunch of letters and numbers. Almost unreadable in the paper, and hard to transcribe. More than a billion combinations... why not just enter NYT1124?
Lots of time and money being spent chasing the wrong people with the wrong ads.
My point, and I do have one, is that if your HR department is run by policies that were established a decade ago, worth a new look. And if you are serious, truly serious, that talent is your competitive advantage, please understand that the way you look for and sort that talent is the highest-leverage way you've got to increase what you end up with.
What do we get when we give to a good cause?
Why on earth would a rational person give money to charity--particularly a charity that supports strangers? What do they get?
A story.
In fact, every time someone donates to a good cause, they're buying a story, a story that's worth more than the amount they donated.
It might be the story of doing the right thing, or fitting in, or pleasing a friend or honoring a memory, but the story has value. It might be the story that you, and you alone are able to make this difference, or perhaps it's the story of using leverage to change the world. For many, it's the story of what it means to be part of a community.
The fundraiser, then, isn't taking, she's giving. She's giving someone the chance to buy a story that's worth far more than it costs.
Stories are the way we navigate our world, our chance to make sense of who we are and what we do.
Introducing tote bags or charity auctions muddies the waters, gets us thinking about the value of that thing we bought, not the story itself.
If people aren't donating to your cause, it's because you're not telling a story, or telling the wrong story to the wrong people (in the wrong way). Non-profits make change, and the way they do this is by letting us tell ourselves stories that nurture our best selves.
What kind of media counts?
The Department of Justice has decided, apparently, not to prosecute Wikileaks for leaking information because the prosecutors would have a "New York Times problem." In other words, because Wikileaks worked with a media entity that counts, they have to be treated seriously.
Amazon soon will have more new self-published books for sale than books that went through the old process. Do these self-published books matter? Are the reviews from readers 'real' or should they be ignored?
Many actors would rather do a low-rated cable show that doesn't pay well than appear on a YouTube video that is seen by millions. Because the former counts.
Columnists for famous newspapers look down at bloggers, even bloggers with more readers and impact than they have.
In live theatre, a revue out of town that gets a well-deserved standing ovation nightly doesn't count as much as a Broadway show, even one that's frankly pretty bad.
Of course, television didn't used to count, not if you were a radio star. And cable didn't count, not if you were a network sitcom star...
Sure there are fake reviews, fake followers and fake views. Sure, there's a huge amount of unreadable, unwatchable, unshareable stuff being published in the curationless media of our time. But eventually, the truth will out, quality will be shared (or at least interesting will be shared) and our definition of what counts will change.
The question for you is which line to get on... the line waiting to get picked or the line to start now?
