All tagged Community
So much of my youth was spent constructing who I wanted to be, my sense of self. With that came the confidence to do the things I needed to do, in order to be what I defined as successful.
But with it also came a series of behaviors (facades? Personas? ) that were designed to protect me from getting hurt, personally or professionally. I was conscious that…
Trevor Noah once referred to our culture as our operating system, one that we're rarely even aware of.
That's an apt explanation of the role and value of culture. It's something that can make us - but just as equally, it can break us.
Tribalism is an idea with which I have something of a love/hate relationship.
I mean, it certainly has plenty of value, delivering significant benefits if you happen to be a member. You’re with like-minded individuals who all have the same professed goal. You share a specific set of values. You speak the same language.
This month's podcast closes out the year with my thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic that's absorbed all of us this year. I'll share my perspectives on how I've assessed this impact and how I interpret its impact going forward.
Today's podcast discusses how the pandemic has reset the equilibrium of what we thought was our "physical-virtual" balance, for good reason. This is likely to endure well after the pandemic is over.
I think it’s ingrained in us, this desire to get things done by ourselves. In many ways, it’s a compulsion, and the bigger, more complex the issue, the stronger the desire to go it alone.
It might be an issue of strategy or one of people; a difficult relationship or a complex initiative. When we’re in its ‘throes’, we absorb ourselves in, well, ourselves.
This month's podcasts focus on people - the teams we work with, the people we surround ourselves with, and how we should think about them. People make all the difference.
Today's episode focuses on the power and value of community. We weren't meant navigate the world alone, no matter what we might think. And the last few months have shown the value and need for human connection, more than ever before.
I had a different post I wanted to put out today but, instead, I felt compelled to share a few thoughts about John Lewis’ posthumous Opinion piece that was published in the New York Times yesterday. Written a couple of days before he passed away, it’s his final message to us all, and it speaks to the underlying ideals and principles that guided him through almost the entirety of his life.
I don’t think there is anything or anyone that operates at one polar extreme versus another. Sure, some folks veer more in one direction than another, but rarely, always and only at the extremes.
But you wouldn’t think so from most of the public rhetoric which, by definition, is driven by a desire for attention and alignment (with a predefined ideology - ours or someone else’s).
If there’s one thing that social distancing has re-emphasized, it’s the power and value of social connection. That community matters - and not only does it matter but it’s, frankly, more important than it ever has been. We’re all experiencing that, regardless of whether or not we’d conceptually bought into the idea before.
In fact, I’ve been heartened by the virtual outreach that I’ve seen everywhere - from family to friends to celebrities, in real life and across social media.
In any business, you have to deal with odds on a day to day basis. Nothing is for certain, so you do the numbers, work out the scenarios and then take a call. Some of those times, things will go better than expected, some will go as expected, and other times, things will be worse than expected.
But however things end up, not taking action is NOT an option. You have to act and do.
We don’t work alone. We weren’t meant to. We’re not wired that way, we really don’t think that way and we certainly don’t get things done purely by ourselves in any practical sense.
