Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Development

Sharing

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Sharing is hard. It exposes a point of view, a piece of context, that not everyone will want to receive. Not everyone will understand what you share and agreement is not yet met. You will almost certainly be misinterpreted.

Sharing is vulnerable. You’re admitting the things you don’t know while revealing what you’ve been focusing on. You’re asking people to listen to your idea. People always have opinions about new ideas.

Sharing is uncomfortable. You won’t be sure if your timing is right. You may not know who to share with first. You definitely haven’t thought of all the questions you’ll get and how to answer them.

Sharing is important. The only way to know if your idea works is to share it. The only way to gain allies is to share your perspective. Progress can only happen if we share.

Building trust

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It isn’t that your idea is bad. It isn’t that your personality is wrong. It’s not your clothes.

If people don’t know you, they don’t know where you’re coming from. They haven’t experienced working with you. They’re not familiar with your expertise and they don’t know why they need it.

So when you see an opportunity to make a connection, don’t squander it. Attention is rare and valuable and when you treat it as such, people respond positively. That doesn’t mean it’ll be an instant win. An instant win shouldn’t be your goal anyway.

Your goal should be making a small but meaningful connection. It may not seem like much, but it’s a first step on the path to building trust, and that path can lead to great things.

Play your own game

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Even though it’s possible for a professional basketball player to play baseball, you don’t typically see them doing so.

They spend their careers developing a way to play one game that is uniquely their own. Trying to translate that to another sport leaves them without an identity and at the beginning of a journey where every other player has a years long head start; even Michael Jordan was a rookie in a double-A league when he played baseball.

If you’ve spent years becoming undeniable at what you do, honing skills and building relationships while collecting useful experience, it’s ok if you want to try to play a new game.

Just don’t be surprised when people catch you making rookie mistakes.

(H/T JP)

The ceiling and the walls

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Most people know about the ceiling, but whether you realize it or not, the walls are there too.

We don’t hear much about the walls because we’re often looking up, hoping for height, when perhaps a little breadth might do the trick.

The ceiling may be high, and the walls are harder to move. But hard isn’t impossible, and the walls can still close in on you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you can design your room however you choose – after all a beautiful space that people appreciate will do more for you than one smeared in frantic, haphazard colors of protest.

But if your ceiling is low, and your walls are close, and then someone starts to critique your design, the second thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to live in someone else’s house, you can build your own.

Try it

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We hear a lot of stories about success, most of them condensed so they fit into a convenient, episodic, narrative we can easily consume. Most have distinct beginnings and endings. All of them have hindsight bias.

In reality, we can’t possibly understand the totality of these experiences. There are emotions and details that are omitted for one reason or another. Rather than beginnings and endings, all of these people decide to try something and then make choices in the middle of the resulting situations.

There are many times at which the answers are not clear no matter whose story is considered. There are times when what seems obvious in hindsight started as a hunch, perhaps being followed stubbornly against the wisdom of others.

If you erase luck and privilege, and decide not to glaze over details, you’ll uncover a lot of average people simply trying something they’re interested in, navigating uncertain circumstances, and largely being surprised at the result.

If you’re reading this you have at least some luck and some privilege. Maybe it’s time to just try it.

What to do next?

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If you’re lucky enough to wake up in a new day you have to decide what to do next. You keep on deciding until the day ends. As days add up, so do the actions we take and the decisions we’ve made.

Over time we spend significant amounts of our lives doing things – some we’re really proud of, some we’re probably less proud of. Sometimes we choose to do the easy thing or the fun thing, while other times we do something challenging, or new.

Making decisions and taking action can help you start to ‘look like’ something different. For example, if someone spent 3 years working at a Starbucks, you could probably observe them on any of those days and they’d ‘look like’ a barista. Not just in what they’re wearing, but in what they’re doing, talking about, who they’re spending time around, and so on.

If one day our barista wakes up and decides to spend one less hour at Starbucks that day, and one more hour calling a congressperson about why Los Angeles shouldn’t host the 2028 Olympics, they may start to ‘look like’ an activist. At first this would be an hour of their whole life. And then 2. And then 3. And then – well, you know how to count.

We can see how, slowly, a decision and some action can start to reshape a person. They may not like this activism and choose to spend an hour on something else the next day. Or they may decide to double their hours. Either way, the decisions add up, and momentum builds. One day they may not ‘look like’ a barista much at all.

Too often we think about change as binary – on or off. Today I am a barista, tomorrow I am an activist. But that’s not quite right, because most of the things we do need patience, and practice. Most things worth doing take time. We need to decide to see ourselves as something new, and for most people it’s hard to see how you’d jump from barista to activist, and much easier to spend the next hour doing something a little different.

The next time you are expecting a binary outcome, remember it is unlikely you will feel completely different just by doing something new once. Instead, simply change the answer to the question: what to do next?