When I imagine a founding executive of a growing firm today, I picture them in an isolated room. Not a padded cell. There's no latex involved. But a room. Full of doors and all the doors are closed. Various threats are graffitied on the doors. Invectives like ADAPT OR DIE show up more than once. One door says "For a good time call...Nevermind" with the words "good time" scratched out before a second script scribbles "Nobody is having a good time."
My friends who lead companies and communities (hello, friends! I know you're reading this as we speak...) aren't having the best of times. They're being told by a very loud media apparatus that their lives are full of options. That we are in an era of massive technological advancement and therefore new doors are presented to them every day. They have at their finger times a "thought partner" that should be able to spur them on any task. They have efficiency and optimization systems in droves. And yet... tires spin in the mud of missed traction.
A slot machine of false premises masking whispers of opportunity.
Some of this is, of course, is the AI effect. I talked to one leader a few weeks back who has self-starter team members working across a half dozen different AI platforms. None of them talk to each other. Some of them are non-compliant. And more than one of them is being fed customer data without an update to the privacy policy. Whoops. Total chaos in the name of progress.
Some of this is the fundamental uncertainty of the western economy right now, too caught up in hype cycles, too shackled with inflation, too dependent on the whims of a failing political system. A problem set far beyond the scope of this email, but buy me a drink and I might dangerously wax not-so-eloquently...
At the heart of it is a very human vulnerability: the fear of the unknown and a speed of change that makes it almost impossible to trust your instincts. To even feel out what the next right move is.
My teenage son, who is in a similar emotional spot but with much different stakes, is going through it too as he navigates the maze of college selection and preparation. I sent him this today to remind him of what matters, maybe you need this too:
I know for me, when I'm finding msyelf in the closed hallway of half-baked good ideas (one way of looking at the room with a million doors), I know I need a second voice. Not to tell me what to do, but to invite me back to myself and to the work I'm here to do.
A conversation is a series of permissions. It's a way of building momentum of saying "yes" to each other and along the way, building trust with ourselves. The farther I go in a good conversation, the more I find I like myself in it and my ideas get sharper, more vivid, more trustworthy. Not because the person compliments me endlessly (although, c'mon, I'm not immune to a little flattery) but because they ask me a hundred versions of "Tell me more about that."
Leaders are not being honest with themselves about the degradation of self-trust. They are being hollowed out by the sparkling lights of the online attention casino, extracting more and more from them with every click. I see it everywhere.
The lie is to believe that "if I only had more time, more attention to give, more focus, more efficiency, then somehow I could gain the mindshare to open the right next door." Oh how I wish that were true. We'd all be doing much better off than we are. The wages of efficiency is more pressure. Always. Speed doesn't accelerate the joy of success, it accelerates the pace of expectation. What is really needed is not more attention to give, but more attention given. We are attention starved—surveilled but never seen, transcripted but never heard.
We need good conversation, almost more than anything else, from someone who can draw us back to our inner compass, and the decisive truths we are avoiding.
Jacob Warwick, one of the leading compensation negotiators in the country, was on my podcast a few weeks back. We had a good time. We stirred up some good controversy. In return he wrote a post today called "What Nick Richtsmeier Made Me Say Out Loud" about the power of our conversation to get him to his truth.
I wanted to give my community, you all, an inside view on the tools I use over and over again to get people talking. Not so they'll say some shocking thing. I'm not the media. But so that they can, as Jacob did, find their way to their own truth, and have the clarity of their next move.
It's all on today's episode of Damns Given: Be Worth Talking To: How to Ask Better Questions in an Attention-Starved World. The first of our now, multiple times a week, mini episodes answering your questions about how run a most Trust-Made venture in a Trustbroken Era.
Video: YouTube
Audio only: Apple | Spotify
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