Thinking About #2 ... Pride, Continuous Improvement and Self-Improvement
Sharing a number of things I've been thinking about lately. Getting them out of my head. This time is about the difference sides to pride, continuous improvement, and the common sense of self-help.
This post is part of my “Thinking About Series”. This is a semi-regular post where I get all the thoughts bouncing around my head onto digital paper.
Pride is so easy to get wrong
This podcast got me thinking in all kinds of directions and also helped clarify something I’ve been trying to unpack about social media. I spent most of the last 10 years slowly disconnecting from social media. Recently, I’ve come back on LinkedIn and I’ve noticed that it has impacted how I think about things during the day. I’ll think about “how should I post about this?” regularly throughout the day.
It will even influence what I consider doing as I will think “will this make a good story to post?”. It’s fascinating because I’m not posting about what I do each day yet still get these thoughts. I’ve been thinking about why it happens and I’d settled on something around the status-signaling, recognition-seeking and related topics. There is something about posting things that get likes/reactions and comments that shifts my thinking.
Then I listened to this podcast and it made much more sense. As I will have some amount of pride/accomplishment in the things I’m doing each day, on some level I’m keen to post about it to try and keep that feeling going/building. It also explained to me why so much trolling junk is posted online, it’s a way to artificially boost that same feeling “look what I’ve done and how much people recognize it!”. This isn’t the only answer to this topic, but it gave me an insight and perspective that I hadn’t considered before.
This same topic got me thinking about how do we cultivate this feeling of positive pride in our children. There is this challenging line between encouraging and complimenting children for a job well done (or ignoring it) and helping them cultivate a feeling of self-pride for accomplishing things that they do themselves.
I even had an example of this during the last week where my team won a Idea Sprint/Hackathon. It was fascinating to feel these same things play out - the desire to be recognized by more people and to keep that initial feeling going. Likewise, observing how other people expressed their feelings to winning and not.
Why don’t we learn about Continuous Improvement in School?
Recently, I’ve been on something of a Lean, PMP, Continuous Improvement habit. And its gotten me thinking about why we don’t teach more of the ‘how to learn’ and ‘how to manage projects’ in school. Even this book is an excellent explainer for how to study at school, but I spent my entire school time figuring these things out through trial and error. Why is that?
I’ve always been interested in the thinking around productivity and lately have started certifying my skills/experience. I completed a Google Project Management Certificate, I’m working on my Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, written about my experiences with project planning and productivity tools internally (a post for another time) and my issues with Agile.
While all of these approaches can become obnoxious when applied without thinking the broad principles around problem definition, stakeholder needs, communication, planning and documentation are universal principles of doing well in life and work.
We have build these amazing educational systems and institutions around the world yet we don’t seem to think it’s important to teach people how to learn. I wonder if this is because so much of how we learn and how we work is experienced-based learning. Once we graduate, we figure that we just ‘figured it out’ and as we start work we also ‘figure things out’ as we work. This is amazing and horrifying. Amazing as it demonstrates how flexible and innovative humans are by default and horrifying that we don’t take such a critical skill more seriously.
As I look back at my career, I’ve been equally guilty of this. Hiring people and expecting them to manage projects well ‘by default’ and asking people to learn ‘by trial and error’. I wonder at how much more would have been possible for myself and others if I’d spent more time learning from best practices and experimenting with how to apply them rather than rebuilding everything from scratch.
The self-improvement industry of common sense phrased differently
I go through phases every few years where I’ll suddenly read a lot of books around a certain topic. Some blocker or frustration will lead me to explore a topic in more detail. During these times, I’ll come across books like “the subtle art of not giving a f*ck” and “Atomic Habis”. And I normally don’t get much from them, but I wonder as they are popular and many people I meet swear by them. This has gotten me thinking about what is it that these books offer. “If Books Could Kill” helped me unpack this topic further.
Within this genre like “The Subtle Art…” I prefer books like “4,000 Weeks” which include more supporting science and research. However, there is something appealing about books that seem edgy. What really got me thinking (and self reflecting) was how the podcast covered that sometimes these books are able to give basic, straightforward advice that everyone knows at the right time and in the right way that it just sticks. And given that these books are often short, fast to read and limited recall, it makes sense that the one or two quotes that just stick are what we take away.
I found this breakdown of atomic habits the most interesting. About half a year ago I went on a habit-building push. I downloaded a bunch of apps, started turning everything into a habit quest on Habitica, and tried searching for “apps like Duolingo for [stuff]” for pretty much everything. During this time I was recommended to read Atomic Habits but I couldn’t get past the introduction. I got interested in the topic and what is the background. Atomic habits are actually just another in a string of novels, books and research around building habits: sometimes called micro-habits, tiny-habits, etc…
What I’ve found fascinating about this is the tear down in “If Books Could Kill” that someone struggling with a life issue is going to struggle with the small habit formation as well unless they can tap into some additional source of motivation.
Much of the coverage of this topic seems to be popular because it sounds easy and appealing to people struggling to change or start habits that they desire or associate some social value with. Yet as the podcast covers and my own experience, the small habits approach, apps, books don’t help unless there is some underlying motivation. And if you have that underlying motivation, the apps/etc don’t really matter any more.
This is where my thinking brought me back full circle that all these self-improvement books aren’t about explaining some hidden secret. Instead, it’s best to see these books as attempts to phrase the same thing in a different way that somehow clicks for people who care about the topic.
If only the authors of these books recognized that point and wrote the books more clearly in that manner. But I doubt the authors appreciate that. They likely see what they are writing as a secret formula because so many people around them seem to struggle with something that comes easily to the author. Yet it isn’t really that. Everyone understands the same approaches. Few of us have the time, attention, money, focus to put in the effort.
Conclusions
I’ll continue to explore these and other topics in future “thinking about” posts. Do let me know your additional perspectives and we can continue to explore.