More thoughts on accountability

• Create more value for the company. For a business to be viable, it needs to make more money than it spends, so help your company do that by either creating more value for customers (which will lead to greater revenue) or by focusing your efforts on what's most important (which will lead to greater cost efficiency).
• It can be a good sign when you are criticized. When we receive critical feedback, we often get discouraged by the explicit message that there are gaps in our performance, and ways in which we could improve. But such feedback can be an investment in your development, where the implicit message is "I believe you can do better, and I want to help you get there."
• What is your strategy for handling requests? Most of us have experience with strategic planning, a process to allocate scarce resources (e.g. budget, headcount, engineering time) among various priorities. You look at your list of priorities, you decide what's most important, and you accept that you can't get to everything. You can apply the same concepts to planning your own time. If you can't get to all the tasks being requested of you, consider which requests are the most important, as you would in considering features for a new product release, and accept that some people will be disappointed.

• Anil Dash writes about the central idea of systems thinking that The Purpose of a System is What It Does. Without recognizing that harsh truth, "people double down on investing in broken institutions, and organizations select leaders who become defensive and reactive to any challenge to the institution." Instead, Dash asks us "to reflect on the systems around us now that we are cursed with the horrible truth that all of them are working correctly. Ask yourself, how do you get the power to change the system so that it wants something else, so that it can only inevitably do the right thing? Is there a reasonable path to that power? Or does that system need to be dismantled, so that it can be replaced by a system whose purpose is to do the right thing?"
• Diana Smith shares how the Beatles song "You say you want a revolution" requires accountability. Smith is the author of the book Remaking The Space Between Us, where she discusses how our political system is not as polarized or as hopeless as the news paints it to be. When people from different backgrounds actually engage in conversation, we agree more than we disagree. In this article, she shares that "In the midst of news awash with what we do on our worst days, I turn to music to recall what we are capable of doing on our best days." I had never listened to the Beatles song closely to hear these lyrics that ask each of us to take accountability for our own thoughts.

• There's been a silly man vs. bear question on the Internet recently, which apparently spawned from this viral Tik Tok video where a man asks eight women if they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear, and seven out of eight women said they’d prefer the bear. Many men on the internet have been outraged by this video, and started man-splaining to women how great men are and the dangers of bears, rather than acknowledge the reality that far more women are hurt by men than by bears. I appreciated Laura Killiingbeck's reflections as somebody who literally made that choice to leave society and go bikepacking through the Alaskan wilderness. She describes what she has to do if she encounters a man that sets off her alarm bells: