Only dead fish go with the flow. A nice reminder to swim your own path in life and be true to yourself.

Only dead fish go with the flow

I've read that Steve Jobs used to tell a story to new VPs about a janitor and a CEO. If you were the janitor and were asked to clean an office, it's reasonable to have not cleaned it if you found the door was locked and you didn't have the key. However, somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, the reasons or excuses for why something happened or couldn't be done stop mattering. It probably isn't your fault that the system went down, or that you didn't have access to the office, but as a leader it's your responsibility to make things happen and mistakes are now your responsibility too.

The sketch is not meant to downplay the role or attitude of janitors in any way or say that this is the difference between janitors and CEOs. Here's more on how Steve explains it.

The story is a nice example of the accountability ladder.

I learned this from the excellent Julie Zhou.

Reasons stop mattering

Chesterton's fence put simply is: Don't take a fence down unless you know why it was put up.

It is tempting, in a spirit of progress, to want to do away with old designs, laws, policies, or institutions that no longer help. To think, perhaps, that the people that made them weren't maybe as smart as we are, or seeing things in the right way. Yet institutions, policies, or fences, weren't usually made by accident — they require effort and action, even putting up a fence. Chesterton's fence, after GK Chesterton, is a reminder that before we remove the old and perhaps replace it with the new we would do well to at least understand why the original was put in place.

Once we understand why the fence was there in the first place if we still think it's of no use, then by all means pull it down.

Read more on Chesterton's fence, including its origins.

Chesterton's fence

There's a lot of wisdom in this thought from Joseph Campbell: The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

After all, if it was the easy path, if it wasn't the place we hadn't yet looked because we were afraid, we would have already done it. Perhaps tackling what you're avoiding most is what you most need to do.

The cave you fear to enter

The twin engines of altruism and ambition are a powerful force for positive change in the world.

They need to be balanced. Ambition without altruism and change may not be positive. Altruism without ambition may be nice without impact. But put the two together, for example with a mission-driven business like B-corps, and it can be a recipe for wonderful, positive, and meaningful change — and probably what we need to deal with the challenges of our times.

This lovely concept is from Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent drinks, and I learned it from Holly Tucker's Conversations of Inspiration podcast.

Altruism and ambition

It's an old, old Eastern story about some blind men who encounter an elephant. As the blind make sense of what each feels it's also a memorable illustration of how our own views are shaped by our subjective experience and, as so often, that we don't see the full picture. In various versions the men may argue over what it is, convinced they themselves must be right, or collaborate to identify the elephant together.

Most of our experience is somewhat like this. We rarely see the whole truth. When we stay humble and accept others' experience we give ourselves the chance to learn a little more.

The blind and the elephant

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

In these short lines he touched on an intriguing differentiation between wisdom, knowledge and information. Add data at the beginning and people have proposed various models such as a hierarchy, chain, or pyramid to help understand their relationships.

It's perhaps like a skier who's experienced the data points of snow and conditions in the mountains most days of their life. They begin to observe predictable patterns and then gradually distill these into knowledge of the relationships between the weather and avalanche risk. And over a lifetime of building and applying such knowledge they may develop instincts and behaviours for predicting risk and living with the mountains that may even be called wisdom.

In an unlikely scenario, I once wrote a class paper, that somehow people still find to read, on The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom Chain: The Metaphorical link (pdf). It touches on some of the subtle differences of how we think about each of these, such as how I might complain of information overload, but never of knowledge overload.

Data Information Knowledge Wisdom

Some simple wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut: notice when you’re happy.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”

"So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

More on wellbeing? Here are 5 ways to wellbeing.

If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is

In both a “great! we’re improving kind of way,” and also a “teaching to the test” kind of way. From Richard Hamming’s, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.

What gets measured gets better

Advice indirectly from Nigella Lawson in her husband Charles Saatchi’s book. Also, a pretty direct reading from How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Sketchplanations tagged with wisdom