Entrepreneurship is not a job

You don’t apply. You don’t get a salary. No one picks you.

Bragging about how much money you’ve raised or what your valuation is a form of job thinking.

Entrepreneurship is a chance to trade a solution to someone who has a problem that needs solving.

Solve more problems, solve bigger problems, solve problems more widely and you’re an entrepreneur.

It’s tempting to industrialize this work, to make it something with rules and bosses and processes. But that’s not the heart of it.

The work is to solve problems in a way that you’re proud of.

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“Is judgment involved?”

No judgment, no responsibility.

No responsibility, no risk.

There’s a fork in the road. If you seek out roles without responsibility, you might just find a sinecure.

This is the hot job for undifferentiated job seekers at the placement office, the job where a famous company will tell you what to do all day.

Alas, those are the jobs that will be deleted first. The jobs that come with little in the way of respect or stability. These are the jobs that big companies automate whenever they can, or create enough rules to avoid any variation if they can’t.

The other choice is a job loaded with judgment calls. One where it’s extremely likely you’ll make a decision you regret, and get blamed for it. One where you take responsibility instead of waiting for authority.

It turns out that those are the best jobs of all.

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“So busy doing my job, I can’t get any work done”

Your job is an historical artifact. It’s a list of tasks, procedures, alliances, responsibilities, to-dos, meetings (mostly meetings) that were layered in, one at a time, day after day, for years.

And your job is a great place to hide.

Because, after all, if you’re doing your job, how can you fail? Get in trouble? Make a giant error?

The work, on the other hand, is the thing you do that creates value. This value you create, the thing you do like no one else can do, is the real reason we need you to be here, with us.

When you discover that the job is in the way of the work, consider changing your job enough that you can go back to creating value.

Anything less is hiding.

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Can we talk about process first?

It’s so tempting to get straight to the issue, especially since you’re certain that you’re right.

The challenge is that organizations and relationships that thrive are built to go beyond this one discussion. They are built for the long haul, and this particular issue, while important, isn’t as vital as our ability to work together on the next hundred issues.

So yes, you’re probably right, and yes, it’s urgent, but if we can’t agree on a process to talk about this, we’re not going to get anywhere, not for long.

If the process we’ve used in the past is broken, let’s fix it, because, in fact, getting that process right is actually more urgent than the problem we’ve got right now. Our meta-conversation pays significant dividends. At the very least, it gets us working together on the same side of a problem before we have to be on opposite sides of the issue of the day.

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The narcissism of minor differences

Really?

You’re arguing about that trivial difference between us?

Substantive disagreement is rarely the issue that splits tribes, destroys thriving groups or wastes time at meetings. Instead, it’s our desire to carve out a little space for ourselves in a group that seems to agree on almost everything.

The work is too important to sidetrack about the things we disagree on.

Point out this narcissism when you see it and move on to the important stuff, to amplifying the things we agree on.

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But what if this was your only job?

Okay, I know you have competing priorities and that your organisation has grown and that maybe this isn’t the most important thing on your agenda any more…

The thing is, your competition might actually act like the thing that they’re doing is their only job. They might believe that in fact, treating this customer as if she’s the only person in the world is worth it. That fixing that squeaky door, addressing that two-year old bug in the software, or taking one extra moment to look someone in the eye and talking to her with respect is worth it.

We don’t become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose. Instead, we start believing that the entire project is our job, not this one thing, this one thing we used to do so brilliantly.

The day the organization installs the, “your call is very important to us…” message is the day that they announce to themselves who they are becoming. Customers rarely care about your priorities.

Getting bigger is supposed to make us more effective and efficient. Alas, the way to get there isn’t by doing what you used to do, but less well.

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The people who started Staples didn’t do it…

because they love office supplies.

They did it because they love organizing and running profitable retail businesses. They love hiring and leasing and telling a story that converts prospects into customers. Postits are sort of irrelevant.

You shouldn’t become a middle school math teacher because you love math. You should do it because you love teaching.

I hope Staples has a senior buyer who actually does love office supplies. I hope that textbooks get written by people who love, really love, the topic they’re writing about. It’s easy, though, to fool ourselves into believing that going up the ladder means we get to do more of the thing we started out doing.

It’s often the case that the people we surround ourselves with (and the tasks we do) have far more to do with job satisfaction and performance than the subject of our work.

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What’s your job?

Not your job title, but your job. What do you do when you’re doing your work? What’s difficult and important about what you do, what change do you make, what do you do that’s hard to live without and worth paying for?

“I change the people who stop at my desk, from visitors to guests.”

“I give my boss confidence.”

“I close sales.”

If your only job is “showing up,” time to raise the stakes.

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Just the good parts

“I want to be an actress, but I don’t want to go on auditions.”

“I want to play varsity sports, but I need to be sure I’m going to make the team.”

“It’s important to sell this great new service, but I’m not willing to deal with rejection.”

You don’t get to just do the good parts. Of course. In fact, you probably wouldn’t have chosen this path if it was guaranteed to work every time.

The implication of this might surprise you, though: when the tough parts come along, the rejection and the slog and the unfair bad breaks, it makes sense to welcome them. Instead of cursing or fearing the down moments, understand that they mean you’ve chosen reality, not some unsustainable fantasy. It means that you’re doing worthwhile, difficult work, not merely amusing yourself.

The very thing you’re seeking only exists because of the whole. We can’t deny the difficult parts, we have no choice but to embrace them.

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How You Can Benefit From All Your Stress

You are stressed — by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever-increasing workload, and your life in general. If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you’re feeling — worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life.

This might sound a little crazy, but what if it’s the very fact that we assume stress is bad that’s actually making it so bad for us? And what if there were another way to think about stress — a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new researchfrom Yale’s Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage.

Let’s take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress?

Generally speaking, it’s the experience — or anticipation — of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activation of the sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”), inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”), and the release of adrenaline and cortisol. But what does all of that do? In short, it primes the pump — we become more aroused and more focused, more ready to respond physically and mentally to whatever is coming our way.

Kind of sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But wait, you say, can’t chronic stress make us sick? Can’t it take a toll on our immune functioning?

Yes…but there is plenty of evidence that stress can also enhance immunity.

Well then, you point out, can’t it leave us feeling depressed and lethargic?

Yes… but studies show that it can also create mental toughness, increase clarity, result in greater appreciation for one’s circumstances, and contribute to a sense of confidence built on a history of overcoming of obstacles (which is the best, most long-lasting kind of confidence you can have). So stress is bad, and somehow also good. How can we make sense of the paradoxical nature of stress?

I’ll bet right now you are saying to yourself, it’s the amount of stress that matters. Low levels may be good, but high levels are still definitely bad. (i.e., What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger….but too much stress is probably going kill you.)

The problem with this theory — which was once the dominant theory among psychologists, too — is that by and large, it doesn’t appear to be true. The amount of stress you encounter is a surprisingly poor predictor of whether it will leave you worse (or better) off.

As it turns out, your mindset about stress may be the most important predictor of how it affects you. As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress. Some people — arguably most people — believe that stress is a bad thing. They agreed with statements like “The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,” and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that “Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth” had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.

In their studies, Crum and colleagues began by identifying stress mindsets among a group of nearly 400 employees of an international financial institution. They found that those employees who had stress-is-enhancing mindsets (compared to stress-is-debilitating) reported having better health, greater life satisfaction, and superior work performance.

That’s already rather amazing, but here’s the best part — your mindset can also change! If you have been living with a stress-is-debilitating mindset (like most of us), you don’t have to be stuck with it. A subset of the 400 employees in the aforementioned study were shown a series of three-minute videos over the course of the following week, illustrating either the enhancing or debilitating effects of stress on health, performance, and personal growth. Those in the stress-is-enhancing group (i.e., the lucky ones) reported significant increases in both well-being and work performance.

Yet another study showed that stress-is-enhancing believers were more likely to use productive strategies, like seeking out feedback on a stress-inducing task. They were also more likely to show “optimal” levels of cortisol activity. (It turns out that both too much and too little cortisol release in response to a stressor can have negative physiological consequences. But with the stress-is-enhancing mindset, cortisol release is — like Baby Bear’s porridge — just right.)

Taken together, all this research paints a very clear picture: stress is killing you because you believe that it is. Of course, that doesn’t mean you aren’t juggling too many projects at once — each of us has limited time and energy, and people can and do get overworked.

But if you can come to see the difficulties and challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than as your “daily grind,” then you really can be happier, healthier, and more effective. Maybe you don’t need less stress — you just need to think about your stress a little differently.

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