Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

action

A decision made

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Decision-making can be quick, pragmatic, slow, careless. You can hear all the arguments or not. You can do the analysis or rely on intuition. You can mix these approaches.

In any case, if you’re the one deciding in the first place you’re likely to benefit. It’s difficult to undo a decision made. That’s a positive and a negative depending on where you stand.

If you’re going to burn the boats, it’s a risky bet with upside if you’re right. If you achieve first-mover advantage, it’s hard to beat, at least for a while. And in both cases, being wrong will quickly be forgotten and being right (or lucky) is sure to bring reward.

So the lesson is to look for opportunities to decide – rather than to simply react to a decision someone else has made.

Boring people

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Seek out the boring people. The ones who slug it out, doing the work. The people who bring big impact even in small spaces, who aren’t vying for credit, and who show up every day to do it over again even as they go unnoticed.

Boring people know how the sausage is made because they make it. They know what it feels like to do something well. It is their point of pride. They could take it apart and put it back together again.

Boring people are different than the people phoning it in. A boring person is doing a job most people ignore. The phoners are doing a job that everyone ignores.

The conditions for a boring person to excel are: the identification of a problem, the permission to fix it, and constrained resources.

When you stop and marvel at how something works, chances are a boring person figured it out. Not because they’re especially smart, talented, or wealthy, but because they had to even though it was hard. And because everyone else knew someone boring would do it if they just waited.

How hard is it really?

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That thing you’re avoiding, how hard is it really? What is the actual activity that you need to undertake?

Sending an email? Having a conversation? Raising your hand? Doing a little math?

Certainly these things aren’t hard. No one is asking you to push a boulder up a hill.

And even if they did, could you find a way to start? A lever and fulcrum. A group of allies and a meeting time.

It’s easier to predict an outcome of failure so that we have an excuse not to act than it is to actually act. And slowly, over time, the action we’re not taking slips away. And we wonder how we wound up like this.

It’s unlikely that what you’re avoiding is actually that difficult. And it’s equally unlikely that whatever outcome you’re imagining will be accurate.

If you do nothing but make excuses, you can be sure of an outcome that won’t be your idea (unless you’re very lucky).

So what are you waiting for?

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.

In the middle

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As long as we can remember, we’ve been in the middle of something. Often we’re hoping for the future to bring some outcome or arrival that has some finality to it. Or we may be lamenting about the past; things we wish we would have done or wish we could get back.

This will always be the case. There is never a moment of your life when you’re not in the middle of something.

It’s the hoping for the future and lamenting the past that we can decide to turn off when it doesn’t serve us. That may make it a little easier to decide what to do next.

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?