Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men, and anyone else that's interested.
Posts tagged with #Culture
My sons,
Time is the only resource in life that you can never get back. Each of us has 24 hours in a day, and once those hours are used up, we can never recover them, can never replenish them. Our days are numbered, and while we cannot control the quantity, we can control the quality.
Unfortunately, our world has created a system where most of us have generally surrendered in the fight and have accepted low quality days for the large majority. We have created a culture that is so hyper focused on achievement, on attaining things - titles, promotions, cars, houses - that many of us go through life trying to maximize the number of things we get done in a day in order to keep it all afloat. That in turn causes us to be exhausted and to have limited time resting and recovering, which in turn leads to a very poor quality about our days.
Understanding this should cause us to endeavor to slow down, to reduce the number of things that we attempt to get done in any given timespan. Not only will we have a greater capacity to pay attention to the task at hand, but we will get more done because we will not have to redo, backtrack, and regain our focus dozens of time per simple task.
The well-quoted adage telling us that “less is more” is pertinent here, albeit in a slightly modified form. Here, we must “go slow to go fast”.
Too fast
It is a beautiful thing in life to dream big, and to run hard after your dreams. One of the greatest things of our modern culture is that we encourage people to dream and to work hard to turn those dreams into a reality. It’s wonderful. Really.
Until it’s not.
Our world has taken dreaming too far. We have turned those dreams into obsessions, turned those fanciful could-be thoughts into goal-oriented must-be ones. As with many things, we have taken this beautiful, uplifting, and life-giving thing and have put it in an incorrect place thereby turning it into an unhealthy, identity-defining, stress-inducing obsession.
In his thought provoking book The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd posits that not only have the majority of us bought into this success-focused path for life, but most of us do not even believe there is an alternative path that will lead us to a great life! Achieving our big dreams is no longer a grand and lofty wish but rather a measure of our value.
A result of this mindset is that leisure no longer feels leisurely. We think of leisure as a means to an end. We run so that we can achieve a marathon. We go to parties so that we can network. We read so that we can be profitable in our endeavors. We stay home for the weekend so that we can rebuild the house. We take vacations to recover so that we can be even more productive at work.
We do not enjoy simply for the sake of enjoying!
We’ve gotten so used to running fast that many of us no longer feel comfortable at a slower pace. We don’t know how to exist if not at a breakneck speed. We cannot fathom a Saturday without 18 things on our to-do list. We even think that our default after dinner activity should be work. 8 hours of sleep a night is not only never attained, it’s never even attempted!
And as a result, we are empty, we are drained. Physically, mentally, emotionally.
Always on, always available
The advent of the internet was supposed to be a beautiful thing. Having the convenience of the world’s information at your fingertips was supposed to make our life unambiguously better. More information should lead to better, more informed decisions. Better decisions should lead to more efficiency and effectiveness. More efficiency should lead to more time and more margin.
But this has not happened.
Instead, we have simply filled the time that efficiency and effectiveness have bought us with more things, more inputs, more information intake. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that increasing the amount of information we consume comes with no costs. This is false. It comes at the cost of exhaustion. Nothing in this world is free. By increasing our information consumption, by increasing the hours we spend on communicating, writing emails, producing documents, we have inadvertently increased our fatigue. All of the things that require depth are suffering - relationship, connection, deep learning. We are pulled to the surface. We are not our best selves.
Slowing down to speed up
When we keep our minds and bodies in a constant state of fatigue, we simply cannot be our best, cannot perform at peak performance, cannot reach our full potential. We need the time and space to relax, to rest, and to recover.
So how do we do this? How do we slow down and allow ourselves to recover in this frantic, always connected, always competitive world that we find ourselves in?
A few ideas.
- Create a distraction free space. One of my favorite things about working on the Kindle is the hyper focus the team has on building a distraction free device. If we want to slow our lives down, we need to take a page from their playbook. Create a space in your life that is distraction free. Whether this means creating a room in your house that has no digital devices, finding a spot at a local park that has a dead zone in reception that you can visit, or simply dedicating a nook in your room that is your focus space, we all need an environment that supports us slowing down.
- Carve out analog time. This may mean creating a routine on a Saturday morning where you leave your phone at home, or a dedicated physical book reading time with your kid in the evening, or even going for a scheduled walk with a friend without devices, we need to have boundaries of analog time where we slow down.
- Leave your phone charging in the next room. One of the worst things our digital lives have done to us is to have brought all the noise and distractions of the outside world into our most private spaces. This is especially true before we go to bed and right when we wake up. The time before bed sets the tone for your sleep. The time right when you wake up sets your tone for the day. Can you really afford to have both of those critical times be driven and determined by your digital devices?
I know these things are counter-cultural. I know these habits will be hard to build. I know you will have a million and one excuses not to do any of these. But if we’re serious about getting our time back, serious about recovering our mental health, serious about seeing the world in bright, vivid colors again and enjoying the fine details in life, then we’ve got to force ourselves to slow down.
My sons,
I got my first iPhone a little over a decade ago. The iPhone 4S. It was beautiful. Crisp, clean lines. Beautiful form factor. Super rich and bright screen. Blazingly fast for its time. And full of all sorts of useful apps, games, and utilities. Arguably my favorite iPhone I’ve owned (and I’ve owned pretty much all of them since then), although that might be because back then you could take off the back plate and replace it with an aftermarket one, and I had a beautifully crisp white back plate with a Decepticon logo on it (thank you Richmond night market!).
That first iPhone changed my life. I now had the mother of all Swiss Army knives in my pocket and could text, surf the web, watch movies, play games, respond to emails, manage my calendar, and oh so much more.
That day also marked the day I joined the decades long war for our attention that I’m pretty sure we as a race are losing.
The optimist in me wants to assume positive intent, that the creators of our modern mobile ecosystem had set out to build a powerful and useful set of experiences that made it ever more convenient to access our ever connected world. The realist who has read articles of executives at some of these companies pushing for revenue at all costs, employing social scientists and psychologists to study and exploit the addiction-building centers of the brain, isn’t quite so sure.
Regardless, whether we know it or not we are in the fight of our lives. It is not a physical fight that brings about death at large scale, but it does bring destruction at far greater scale than traditional wars have. It is a fight for our attention, our intention, and our focus. And it is a fight whose casualties are relationships, mental health, and living lives of purpose and meaning. It is a subtle fight, one that we’re mostly not even aware of, and it is a fight without a single, identifiable, nuke-able enemy. C.S. Lewis writes that
“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.“
Welcome to the attention economy.
A world of distractions
Since the dawn of commerce, shrewd business people have always tried to drum up business by inserting themselves at opportune moments to capture the attention of passersby. Whether it was the mead vendor at a medieval fair, the jade jewelry stands set up outside ancient temples, or the smattering of random knick knacks any path to a checkout counter is littered with, we have always been bombarded with upsells and distractions.
For most of human history however, those distractions required one to intentionally engage, to physically put oneself in the presence of those distractions. Home had always been a sanctuary. The advent of the modern television changed all that, and for the first time in human history, distractions were invited into the home.
It then became a short hop to someone discovering that you could make tons of money by distracting people with the right thing at the right time. And from there, we were off to the races. In the early days, ads were designed to get you to buy things - no longer. We now live in a world where an ad is just designed to get you to click on whatever the link is. Some ads are for companies selling products. Some are for self help gurus selling you a life style change. Some are for radicals selling you subtle idea shifts. As long as someone is paying for the distraction attractor, companies will continue to find new ways to exploit that and distract us.
I worked on the Kindle team for a number of years, and we measured things like long form reading (ie reading books), reading of published content as opposed to ad hoc (is social media), and trends among young people and children, and the stats are mind blowing. In the US, the percentage of teens who read books for fun dropped from 27% to 14% in the last 10 years. Only 37.6% of adults read a single short story or novel the whole year!
And yet the total reading our world is doing has drastically increased. In the US alone, social media usage tripled in the last decade, going from an average of 53 minutes to 151 minutes per day.
Clearly the distractions are winning.
Attention brings richness
What we fail to understand is that the thing that gives a rich quality to our days is our attention. It is the thing that gives depth of color to our world. It is required for building deep connections. It is required for learning. It is required for having thoughtful conversation, for being keenly aware of new surroundings, for experiencing food, music, architecture, for having a sense of wonder about life.
When we save our attention, when we thoughtfully apply it to the things that resonate with our values and our purpose, we experience a depth and quality to our interactions that is sorely missing in our world today.
Unfortunately we have a finite amount of attention resources. Those resources are used replenished when we sleep, but most of us don’t get enough sleep. This causes us to be in the perilous situation where we don’t have enough attention resources at our disposal.
There are many times where this is necessary - learning a new activity, starting a new job, being thrust into a crisis situation - these all require us to draw large amounts of capital from our resources, but this is not a long term sustainable place to be. Our brains need time to recover from exhaustion; our attention needs time to recover from overuse.
It turns out that doing things quickly and rapidly wears out our attention, while doing things slowly allows us to recover. Doing things slowly has the double benefit in that while it nurtures our ability to maintain our attention, it also ensures that are unable to fit other attention-draining fast-paced activities into our day. That truly is the secret to why monasteries are places of nurturing and healing for the soul - not the humming or the orange robes, but the culture of slowing down to get things done well.
Managing our attention
So how do we make some adjustments here? How do we make small changes and tweaks that will allow us to have more attention at our disposal, and will help us be more in control of where that attention goes?
- Be aware. First and foremost, we need to be acutely aware of where our attention goes. There are some useful tools like Screen Time for us iPhone people that will help us tally up how often we’ve used our devices, and what apps we’re spending time on.
- Build a plan to address FOMO. Fear of missing out is a real thing. But the reality is that most of the things we fear missing out on aren’t really that big of a deal. We live at the forefront of the age of AI - whatever plan you build to address your FOMO should include AI agents and tools to summarize and analyze the things you’d be afraid of missing so that you can have peace of mind.
- Build a community of like minded individuals. Find others who are out to reclaim their attention, and build community with them. There is safety in numbers, there is value in walking together and keeping one another accountable, and there is great freedom in building a community of like minded individuals who are gracious to our realities that we will all miss things, and that’s okay.
Whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we like it or not, we live in an attention economy. The fight is no longer for our dollars alone; it is for our attention, our eyeballs, our time, our thoughts. It is a fight that has an unseen but sneaky enemy. It is a fight we are currently losing. But it is also a fight we can win, together.
My sons,
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about culture - team culture, family culture, friend group culture - and how much it impacts our lives. In his book Wanting, Luke Burgis explains how much of what we think we want is not actually intrinsic to us but is rather a product of us mimicking those around us, mimicking the culture we have. If that’s the case, culture is an incredibly important thing for us to think through.
What is culture?
Culture is not what we desire to do. It is not a set of principles or values that we print out and put on the walls to inspire our teams. It is not “the way we’ve always done things”, nor is it what our founders had in mind.
Culture simply put, is the way we do things today.
That means culture changes with each new day, with each new person that joins the team, with each new adjustment to the daily norms that we introduce. It means that culture shifts and grows as we do.
Culture is the way you spend an extra 10 seconds to say “hi” to everyone on your way in. It is the way we gather everyone on the team to go to lunch everyday. It is our willingness to speak up in meetings, our courage to express our opinions, and our trust knowing that those opinions won’t be slammed down by our peers. It is how we utilize documents or presentations, what our expectations are of instant messaging and email, and how much information we share with or withhold from our partner teams.
And it is what every new person gravitates toward when they join us.
An intentional culture
The thing with culture is that it can happen “naturally” (aka accidentally) or it can happen intentionally. Intentionality is better.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing many different types of leaders at work, each with a wide variety of skills and competencies. I’ve seen leaders that are hyper intentional about the culture of their teams, and I’ve seen leaders who simply accept whatever culture their team has as long as the leader is able to work in the manner that they prefer.
The leaders who had a firm understanding of the type of culture they wanted to cultivate on the team were not only more well-liked (turns out people like it when their leaders care about their experience), but their teams had more longevity. Regretted attrition rates were lower, team loyalty and ownership was stronger, and willingness to collaborate was noticeably higher.
Some of this is obvious - a leader that cares about culture naturally values people who care about culture as well, thereby building a virtuous cycle of people who are intentional about the environment, habits, and practices of the team.
Less obvious for instance, is the reality that leaders that cared about culture typically cared to see the impact of the culture they’ve created. They engaged themselves in inclusive behaviors, in learning from the team what’s working and what isn’t, in getting feedback, and in having dialogue and discussions with the team. These leaders cared about culture, and spent time actively crafting, refining, and sharing. They led by example, both in their communications and in their behaviors.
What makes a good culture?
There are a number of dysfunctional behaviors and norms that have permeated themselves into our world, with some much less obvious than others. Unfortunately for our world, there are still some very overtly dysfunctional cultural habits in the workplace today. Things such as blatant disrespectful and discriminatory behaviors towards women or clear minority groups unfortunately still happens today. Less obvious are things like CYA (cover your ass) cultures, cultures where bosses take credit for their team’s work, or hierarchical cultures where subordinates don’t speak up unless spoken to.
Healthy cultures on the other hand tend to balance productivity with fulfillment. Healthy cultures are ones where people can come as their authentic selves and do their best work together. They are cultures which enable and empower while keeping strong expectations and a high bar. They are cultures that elevate people and stretch people, allowing them to grow and develop, not just as workers but as people.
My SVP says it incredibly well. He says he builds teams of passionate and relentless people. I love that.
We want to create a culture where passionate and relentless people thrive. People who are incredibly passionate about what they do, about the mission that they’re on, about the impact that they have on the world, and about their craft and their role in achieving that impact, but at the same time are relentless in their pursuit of excellence, in their dedication to their craft and their learning, and in their desire to build the best thing for their customers, whoever those customers may be.
There are a few things that are essential to create a culture that fosters these behaviors.
- Open communication. The most critical ingredient required for great teams is open communication. Any culture where a diverse set of passionate and relentless people can thrive deeply requires open communication. This is because people are different. When you’ve got a lot of strong people together with poor communication, inevitably one person ends up steamrolling the rest without listening to others and you end up with an adversarial and mistrusting culture.
- Strong opinions, weakly held. Another key part of great team cultures is the ability to have weakly held opinions, to be convincible. The world is big. The amount of information, knowledge, and wisdom out there is astronomical. To think that one individual has it all, is always right, and knows best is not only improbable and naive, but just down right stupid. We therefore need to build a culture that recognizes that great ideas can come from anyone, anywhere. Have opinions, yes, but be willing to be convinced of other viewpoints as well.
- Regularly revisiting cultural norms. Great teams need to regularly revisit their cultural norms and reevaluate whether adjustments need to be made. Our world changes - new technologies develop, the business landscape changes, societal trends shift - and if our teams wants to stay relevant, we need to change along with it. In order to ensure we do that well we’ve got to regularly revisit our norms to decide if the patterns and practices that have served us well in the past will continue to allow us to excel in the future.
Whether we like it or not, whether we’re conscious of it or not, and whether we have input into it or not, culture affects each and every one of us. It is the set of norms that we automatically take on whenever we enter the sphere of any group that we’re a part of, whether that’s work, friends, church, or even family. The more awareness and thoughtfulness we have the more we’ll be able to help craft and shape our cultures to be healthy and empowering places for all of us.