“Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts… Adam (Grant) shatters these assumptions. …Great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise, but rather the broadest perspectives.”
– Sheryl Sandberg: COO, Facebook. Founder, LeanIn.Org.
“You have the right and the power to choose how much potential you have. Self awareness is something you learn. Ability is a gift we already possess..”
“When you choose to do the right thing… your character expands. With each right choice, you develop the strength to make more right choices… more difficult choices… every time you choose to… turn your back on what you know to be right, it shrinks your character..”
– John C. Maxwell, Annual speaker to Fortune-500s and government leaders, Best-selling author NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and teaching pastor.
“Even hereditary traits are malleable.”
– Adam Grant, Originals
As someone who chose parenting as my (current) main obsession /vocation / I don’t know what this is …thing, the constant dance shift and balance between nature vs nurture is something I find very, very interesting. So too the risk-reward or shall we say payback ratio of choosing selfless behaviour over selfishness. Give & Take (yup, that’s Grant’s other big book)…
“…I looked at engineers’ productivity. Medical students’ grades… Salespersons’ revenue. The worst performers were the” Givers”. In medical school, the students with the worst grades were the ones who most agreed (it was important to help others)…” (Is this not truly scary – doctors by definition are supposed to help others, yet top students in this field appear to believe they need to be the opposite. Do you want someone like that in charge of you or loved one’s care? But they’re brilliant, aren’t they??)
– Adam Grant, Give & Take
So y-eah, you need to be selfish. Everyone knows that, right? <shrugs> 😀
BUT SERIOUSLY – that’s not all his TED talk says (below). Adam Grant, organisational psychologist who draws from 38 studies and 3,611 organisations for this talk, goes on to elaborate that Givers may perform the worst on their own individual performance charts, but what the organisation they work for gets back on the whole is always far more.
No surprises re the selfishness though – being a self-serving lone wolf pays the lone wolf on paper, it’s why there are people who keep doing it. Organisations however are compelled to reward these people accordingly because hey, that’s what all these performance reports indicate you should do, right…..?
Leadership coach John C. Maxwell talks about a payoff that is much harder to quantify – strength of character. “Abundance” thinking. You can “share” easier if you think there is always more and better that is available to you. You can share more easily, if you see the payoff you are striving for as not completely dependent on said organisation using the paper performance reports. For Maxwell the “abundance” belief ties with a Christian faith (which in his book he carefully says you can skip the chapter on, but he has to at least tell you what worked for him). That the best is yet to come. Your belief that there is a window somewhere helps you look harder for it, when God appears to close a door.
In addition, I also think you are able to “share” more readily, if you con yourself into believing believe yourself perpetually capable of producing better. Or fine, the flip side: if you gave away all your old tricks, then surely you’d be pressured to come up with some new ones. (Come now. Don’t you want to? Get better at something you enjoy? Learn some new tricks? Is that not just the most exciting thing that tells you you’re still alive and functioning, dammit?)
For real though, this has to do with why I think pitting kids against each other for a quick fix in paper results is risky; for one thing it appears effective. In the short run. Yet being constantly on top vs being willing to risk that top position for a chance to get better at what you do risks being too much of a tradeoff – when the two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. I bet if we weren’t so pressured to produce quick results we wouldn’t do it so much, but going to school nowadays it’s just very, very hard not to feel pressured. Yet that chance at getting better at things, potentially by risking a current “top” position, is so crucial to kids, their brains are so much more capable, so nimble.
Case in point: I learned to ski when I was almost 40. During the <cough> “learning process”, one ski instructor Just Completely Couldn’t Even and totally bailed on me. Both kids however learned at around the age of 4+, zipping and weaving about relatively disgustingly effortlessly, like…. little penguins. The image of how they learnt something completely new vs how I did, bearing in mind there’s a good chance we share some genetic similarity, is forever embedded in my mind. (Besides, in 5 years, in a decade, no one will remember if they came in first or second or fifth or tenth in say, primary school, but the loss of a valuable lesson and chance to erm, grow a few more related neurons that will come in useful when they are adults is one that will potentially cost them, for much longer.)
In Rome, use the Liras… Fine, Euros. Givers in this world “hurt” themselves on paper. I don’t think they’re all nuts, a lot of ’em believe the paper isn’t the “real” payoff, is all 🙂
We build muscle – body, mind, spiritual, character etc muscle – from applying “good stress,” because “no stress” is almost as bad for you as “bad stress” (yes, I really am a big Nassim Taleb fan). Or to quote 7th Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a qualified medical doctor who at 92 years old ran for and won the latest Malaysian General Election couple months ago, having served 22 years as 4th Prime Minister decades earlier:
“If you don’t use your muscles and lie down all the time, the muscles will not even carry your weight… The brain is the same. …If you don’t use your brain, if you don’t think ..don’t read ..don’t write, the brain regresses…”
I’ve met several taxi drivers in their 80s who tell me they used to be police inspectors etc, and they’re driving cabs in retirement to keep their minds sharp. (After 7 years living and therefore cabbing from the same area, we can recognise 2-3 “regulars” – old timers who yes, remember us too. One of em has a heavy Putonghua accent and appears to either be slightly hard of hearing or is just VERY LOUD and the moment we get in the cab and realise he’s the one driving it, we AUTOMATICALLY START SPEAKING REALLY LOUDLY TOO. It’s funny, but the point is someone “that” old makes a point to recite all the places he remembers us going and asks us if it’s any of these.)
Now lets look at selfishness. When you still need to use the “on paper” tests in an organisation therefore, Adam Grant charges that it’s in the incentive of the organisation to figure out how to reward givers just so they don’t end up firing them for apparent non-performance. (And I should change my name to No Free Lunch Mum because Sarcastic Mum is so often taken.) It is therefore in the organisation’s best interests to make sure their givers don’t decide to crawl into the cracks in the walls and hide burn out.
“The negative impact of ONE taker… is usually double or triple the effect of one giver, on an organisation…”
“…Most of us.. are Matchers…. One favour for another.. An eye for an eye..”
“Let even ONE taker into the team and you will see that the givers will stop helping… Effective team hiring and building… is therefore not about bringing in the givers, it’s about weeding out the takers… ..Matchers usually go along with the flow..”
In other words,
Change the situation, have a better chance of bringing out better in people.
Epilogue: The “Social Experiment”…
I’ve always believed everyone has the capacity to be good or bad… What’s interesting is that in times of real strife are when we often find amazing acts of selflessness, but in times of plenty, many more people are selfish, self-absorbed. Why is that, I wonder?
“We stopped checking for monsters under the bed when we realised they were inside us.” – the late Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight
I’m not saying everyone should dance around in clown makeup (sorry, HN!), but…
In the scene below, The Joker rigs explosives on two ferries. One ferry is filled with civilian passengers, the other houses prison inmates. Each ferry is given the detonator for the other ferry. The ferry that blows the other one up gets to live. If by midnight neither has acted, The Joker blows them both up.
On Upstanding Citizens Boat, passengers start yelling how the inmates on the other ferry already had their chance (it’s interesting they get a character who looks vaguely like Soccer Mom to say that), what are they waiting for, those inmates have the other detonator and could blow them up first, etc etc. They decide to put it to a vote. The tally is:
140 against, 396 for blowing up Inmate Boat. “Those men… chose to murder and steal… it doesn’t make any sense for us to have to die too.”
Except, they hesitate. Because then they realise the inmates haven’t blown them up either.
On Inmate Boat, one of the inmates tells the commanding police officer, “You don’t know how to take a life. I do. You can say you were overpowered. Give me the detonator. I will do what you shoulda done 10 mins ago.”
Then he throws the detonator out the window. Upstanding Citizen Boat rather predictably comes closer than that to blowing up their “rivals in survival” 😀 …..but ultimately doesn’t do it either.
Altogether now. Can we all say, “BATMAN ISN’T REAL*.” 😀
Everyone has a capacity to be good or bad… A lot of how good or how bad depends on how everyone else around them is That is the true danger of having “Takers” around us.
*Batman may not be real, but Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker was… Heath Ledger was a teen heartthrob who came to fame in (of all things) the dubiously named 10 Things I Hate About You, loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: Pretty, bubbly, popular younger sister every boy in school wants to date. Prickly, sharp-tongued older sister everyone’s scared of. Possessive (long-suffering :D) dad who comes up with the “inspired” condition to keep his daughters safe: Popular younger daughter may have a boyfriend…… when her scary older sister finally decides to date 😀 This leads to the younger sister’s suitors hiring Heath Ledger to go out with the older sister.
(Scary older sister turns out to have a much more sensible head on her shoulders – her reason for not dating any of the “eligible” boys in high school is that they’re all idiots she fell for one such idiot, realised her mistake and pulled herself out of the hole, thereby committing “social suicide” because he was one of the most popular boys in school. Popular younger sister eventually is revealed to have become incredibly self-centred and selfish, made worse by all the shallow attention.)
But get this: Ledger was actually trying out for the role of Batman when he was given the role of The Joker instead. Before Ledger, have you ever known a “Joker” to outshine a “Batman”? Batman got da gadgets. Da whole playboy billionaire alter ego shielding brooding hero persona. Yet Ledger totally owned his role as the Joker, deeply frightening veteran actors like Michael Page in his portrayal of the brilliant but psychotic villain, becoming the only actor in a superhero movie to win an Oscar. Just think what the Batman franchise would’ve been like, if Ledger had failed to see what a blessing in disguise, what an amazing opportunity The Joker was.
