What assumptions are you making?

• Somebody I worked with for a few months at Google emailed me and asked if I could make an introduction to one of my LinkedIn connections. I was happy to forward his request along, as I like to connect people. But how many people don't even ask because they assume I'm too busy or wouldn't be interested? Right now, I'm inadvertently biasing towards helping the confident (and the privileged) because they are the ones making asks of me, creating a rich get richer scenario. How do I encourage others to ask more of me?
• There are a list of marketing tasks for the book that I've been procrastinating on since launch. I don't want to do them, but felt like I should because they'd be helpful. My wife said "Why do you have to do them? Hire an intern!" Soon after, my friend Victor announced that students from the Stanford design school were looking for short-term projects, and I'm hoping to hire one to go through that list for me!
• I had a list of work tasks that I had to do last week. But we took a long weekend in Tahoe as a family to celebrate my daughter's birthday, and I didn't get to the tasks until Tuesday. And it was fine - the deadline was only in my own head, even though an inner voice was trying to guilt me all weekend.
• Somebody asked me recently what it would take to 10x my coaching business. And I dismissed the question as impossible. But what if it weren't? What if I took the question seriously, envisioned it, and started taking steps towards that future? I even know what the first step is, and I've been avoiding taking it, which then makes that future impossible in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hopefully this awareness leads to an announcement in the next newsletter or two :)

• I created an Instagram account at @eric.toomanytrees to share my insights in video format, starting with a clip from the No More Mondays podcast I did with Angie Callen. If you're an Instagram user, please follow using this link.
• I appeared on the Books That Built Me podcast with Shar Banerjee to discuss Viktor Frankl's classic, Man's Search for Meaning. We discussed how we can use the ideas of the book to make meaning of our day-to-day experiences and even suffering; those of you who are parents may appreciate my rant about how the experience of parenting would be considered torture in other contexts.
• Michael Trugman interviewed me for his podcast, Mike's Search for Meaning, available on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It's a long one (2 hours!) as we covered a lot of ground, diving deep on many of my influences, as well as a bit of impromptu coaching around Mike's desire for greater recognition and how he might be holding himself back from that.
  
• Please consider writing an Amazon review for the book if you haven't already. Special offer: I would love to get your feedback if you review the book. Email me and we'll find a time to chat.

• What conversation are you having? One insight I took from the book Difficult Conversations, by Stone, Patton and Heen is that such conversations often intermingle three different conversations of facts, feelings and identity. When we can identify and separate those threads, our conversations will be more productive.
• What happens if you step back? If you're in a situation with somebody "difficult", experiment with stepping back to let them take the lead. You might find that they do exactly what you were hoping for, and with greater enthusiasm because it was their choice. Note that while this advice came out of a coaching session with an executive, it also applies to me parenting my kids.
• Where do you want to invest your energy? Rather than play the zero-sum game of time management, I find it helpful to think about energy management instead. There are activities that energize me, where I get more energy out of doing it than I put into doing it. There are also activities that drain me, where I need time to recover afterwards. Investing more of my limited time into energizing activities gives me more energy to spend on other activities.

• I appreciated Siderea's thoughtful reflections on the new CDC guidelines around Covid, which are basically treating it as a cold, no isolation required. She identifies the embedded assumption, that "we fundamentally believe that it's just the order of the universe that the work we must do to provide for ourselves must perforce be deadly or disabling. ... Fundamentally, our society sees humans as expendable – that is, we exist to be expended, which is to say spent. Even if somebody else doesn't spend us, we're supposed to spend ourselves."
• A more radical essay is Sophie Lewis's claim that capitalism depends on the hidden labor embedded in the family. By treating caretaking as work that should not be paid, we created the myth of the self-sufficient nuclear family, which is only self-sufficient due to the burden carried by mothers. If we remove that assumption, we would create a very different society, one where we are all responsible for caretaking either by doing it ourselves, or by paying those that do it.
• I loved this article from Ted Lamade at the Collaborative Fund to Find the Savages. The assumption of many companies is that to compete, they have to hire the best people, and that those people only come from Ivy League universities or their equivalent. He shares the story of "Rick", who found that students from those schools were entitled and unmotivated. So "Rick" looked elsewhere, recruiting students from other schools that had shown initiative and leadership while excelling academically. Unsurprisingly, those students from "lesser" universities drastically outperformed the Ivy Leaguers.