Creation, convenience, and community (plus new class offering!)
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I recently came across this essay to Make Something Heavy by Anu Atluru, where she shared a few observations that struck home for me, especially this:
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Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.
Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.
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in our modern day and age, we have underrepresented the value of struggle. I am smarter, better at problem solving, more resourceful, not because a book exists with my ideas in it, but because I wrote it. That excruciating journey is what made me grow. But it's the same for love, friendships, conflict.
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Taking on a difficult challenge is a necessary precursor to transformation, to becoming somebody different. The struggle enables the growth. This doesn't mean that struggling is good in and of itself - you have to choose the right kind of struggle which leads to new skills or identities. But avoiding challenging situations leads to stagnation.
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Our culture has drifted further and further towards letting us avoid such challenges in the form of companies making things easier for us. This greater convenience has advantages - it lets me conserve my energy and attention for my chosen focus areas. But it also creates the temptation to choose the easy option in every moment, even when I know that struggle will be good for me and often even enjoyable (it feels good to become more capable!) e.g.
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- I scroll through a feed or play a game on my phone rather than read a thought-provoking book or write this newsletter.
- I stare at my phone rather than have an in-person conversation, even though I claim that I want to connect with courage and vulnerability.
- I get my phone out to distract me whenever I have to wait even a few seconds rather than let myself experience the world around me, even though boredom often leads to creation.
- I find excuses not to exercise more, especially when traveling.
There's a connected trend here of the destruction of community. Until the late 20th century, people's lives centered around their community. Mobility was limited to the rich, so you were mostly stuck with the community you grew up in. This was difficult for those that didn't fit easily into their birth communities (especially those who were discriminated against), but for everybody else, it created a support network where you could go to your neighbor for a cup of sugar or have a conversation or have them watch your kids.
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But those community interactions were non-monetizable. They didn't contribute to the "economy" because no money was exchanged, and were therefore dismissed as unvaluable because they were unmeasurable (Dan Davies skewers this distorted perspective in his book, The Unaccountability Machine). So corporations raced to replace community support with the convenience of cheap goods and services - why go to your neighbor for help when you could buy it cheaply for yourself?
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We hollowed out our communities by removing this interdependence and instead created a capitalist infrastructure where people could use money to meet their needs rather than depend on community. This was accompanied by the rise of an individualist rhetoric where people were responsible for their own welfare in the form of making enough money to avoid ruin; unsurprisingly, this "every person for themselves" mentality also leads to loneliness. Again, there are some advantages to this trend, especially for those who were excluded from their communities, but we have lost something along the way.
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I recently read Sobonfu E. Somé's book, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, where she shares that in the West African community where she grew up, every relationship was considered part of the community. While my Western individualist upbringing shudders at this idea that my life is everybody's business, especially as a kid that did not fit in with the town where I grew up, there's a beauty to it as well because the community gives as well as takes:
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Community is the spirit, the guiding light of the tribe, whereby people come together in order to fulfill a specific purpose, to help others fulfill their purpose, and to take care of one another. The goal of the community is to make sure that each member of the community is heard and is properly giving the gifts that they have brought to this world. Without this giving, the community dies. And without the community, the individual is left without a place where they can contribute. And so the community is that grounding place where people come and share their gifts and receive from others.
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This is an interdependent view of community, one where the individual both can be their full selves and develop their own gifts, but also wants to freely share those gifts with their community. It is a community of choice, not of codependent need.
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And so we come full circle. People embracing the struggle of creation, the work that transforms us into the person that can "make something heavy", are disappearing in part due to the dwindling of communities that both support and challenge us. Our physical communities could theoretically be replaced by online communities of choice, but the ones I have found feel shallow and brittle, possibly because they generally are also paid communities which feel extractive. Without such communities, it's too easy to fall into consumption mode, surrounded as we are by products designed to "engage" and hijack our attention at every opportunity.
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What has worked for you to engage with the struggle of creation? What have you done to build community and avoid the stagnation of convenience? I'd love to hear your ideas, as even though individual practices can't fix systemic problems, sharing our experiences can remind us that we are not alone - perhaps we can find community with other aligned strugglers.
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Next class starting in September!
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At the start of your career, you progress by becoming a better problem solver. You develop your expertise, you fight fires, you make things happen by doing it yourself, and doing that faster and better is what gets you more scope and promotions.
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But eventually your scope will grow to the point where doing everything yourself becomes challenging. Most of us cope with this by working harder and looking for ways to become more productive or efficient, which works up to a point unless you burn yourself out as I did. After that, though, your career will stall unless you learn to get high quality work done through others.
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My Maven class, Scale Your Leadership with the Executive Mindset, is a distillation of what I've been sharing with dozens of my executive coaching clients as they take on greater scope and learn to master working through others rather than doing more themselves. If you want a taste of what I'll be teaching, check out the recording of my webinar on How to Grow Your Executive Influence and Get Things Done (the questions were particularly spirited so I encourage you to fast forward to the 25 minute mark to check those out even if you've heard the talk before).
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The next cohort of the 5-week class starts on September 4th. As a special thank you for my newsletter subscribers, you can use the promo code GRATITUDE to get 25% off the course price by signing up with this link. I'd love to see you there!
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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Why do people who use LLMs extensively rave enthusiastically about their conversations? LLMs are patient listeners who start any response with positive encouraging feedback, and then build on whatever you said. They are basically playing the "Yes, and..." improv game constantly, which provides constant validation for the user. LLMs show that influence starts with listening to and validating what others say first. If you do that, you don't need your own ideas for others to listen to you.
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Articles and links I've found interesting on the topic of creation:
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A soda. A snack. Her childhood stuffed giraffe, whose fur was patchy and singed, whose seams had burst. A silver bracelet with a charm that said “Family.” A plastic hair tie.
911.
My daughter has died.
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- Flounder Mode: Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work, by Brie Wolfson. As an unrepentant generalist, it felt good to read that "Kevin Kelly would say it’s good to have an “illegible” career path—it means you’re onto interesting stuff." Here's how Wolfson summarizes his approach, which resonates with me:
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Kelly’s version of doing his life’s work seems so joyful, so buoyant. So much less … angsty. There’s no suffering or ego. It’s not about finding a hole in the market or a path to global domination. The yard stick isn’t based on net worth or shareholder value or number of users or employees. It’s based on an internal satisfaction meter, but not in a self-indulgent way. He certainly seeks resonance and wants to make an impact, but more in the way of a teacher. He breathes life into products or ideas, not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to advance our collective thinking or action.
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- As a companion piece, Kevin Kelly's post on the joys of co-creating with AI is called An Audience of One: "From now on, the default destiny for most art will be for an audience of one, and it will abide in the memory of those who generate it. While some of this co-generated work might find its larger audience and some very tiny fraction of it might even become a popular hit, its chief value will be in the direct, naked pleasure of co-making of it." Echoing the initial quote above, I love this focus on how the act of creation changes the creator, rather than on the output it creates for an audience.
- I'm a big fan of the writing of Charity Majors, and loved this personal retrospective about her career. She escaped a home-schooled fundamentalist upbringing to find a fulfilling career in technology, and is now building a company where others can do great work, continuing the above theme of community:
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We’ve spent the past few decades ripping down institutions and drifting away from them. But we haven’t stopped wanting them, or needing them.
I hope, perhaps naively, that we are entering into a new era of rebuilding, sadder but wiser. An era of building institutions with accountability and integrity, institutions with enduring value, that we can belong to and take pride in… not because we were coerced or deceived, not because they were the only option, but because they bring us joy and meaning. Because we freely choose them, because they are good for us.
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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In the Dolomites (the Italian Alps), you get spectacular views from easy access roads/trails, and you can stop every couple kilometers at a hut to get food and drinks (and beer!). Perfect for day hiking with kids, although I dream of coming back someday for longer multi-day hikes.
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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