I Shipped My Pants Off
A month of living life the Seth Godin Way. A first person account of the altMBA.
About a week into my altMBA course was right around the time my team members probably thought I was suffering from a stroke, or a breakdown, or had been invaded by bodysnatchers.
That’s because I sent this out-of-character email:
The copy team is sllllaaammmmed, but they’re holding it together and getting the work done and done well, and they’re keeping their sense of humour as they work — always recommended.
So. It’s going to be a good week.
And — feelings alert — I’ll close out this weekly email with a little bit of inspiration. Again, hold back on your desire to make fun of it in private Slack messages and just sit with this concept for five minutes. How can this idea drive you this week? What will you do differently because of it? Think about a moment in your life when you decided to lead and how that made you feel and how it impacted the others around you. Can you sustain that every day? I think so.
You see, I’d been inspired by he-on-high-marketing-guru Seth Godin.
The altMBA is an intense, accelerated, online workshop designed by Godin. It runs for a month, and includes a lofty reading list, assignments due every 72 hours, and an immersive learning style focused on constructive feedback, peer-to-peer reviews, and delivering things on time.
Here are my key takeaways:
1. I’m Not Really that Busy (And Neither Are You, Probably)
You have more time than you think. I work full time. I travel for work. I volunteer. I (try to) have a life. I could not fathom how to add more to that roster.
But the truth is large swaths of my time are spent aimlessly swiping through tweets and watching Gwen Stefani’s Instagram stories. For one month all “mindless” time was refocused to “school time”. I (on average) worked on altMBA work from 7pm-9pm Monday-Thursday, and then for the majority of the day on Sunday. Sure, it was busy, but I still had time to go to the gym, make — and, most importantly, eat — dinner, walk my dog, and go out for dinner with my husband on Friday nights. (Truthfully, my husband did all grocery shopping and most meal preparation for the month. Making sure this sentence is in here just in case he reads this post.)
I read much less fantasy YA and watched a lot less Netflix than I’d like. But somehow I survived this hardship. If you have to make time, you do. You cut out what’s unnecessary and you just get to it. And the more I filled my days with productive moments, the more capacity I had to get it done. Conversely, the more hours I spent watching Netflix, the more slothful I became.
2. Don’t Just Think About It, Do It, Do It, Do It
This program was all about “shipping” your work — getting out of your own head and your own way and publishing your work for peer review whether or not you believed it was the very best thing you could produce. Now, in my day-to-day life, when I get hung up on a piece of work (like this very post), I just say “ship it”. There’s a time to brainstorm and tear things apart and put them together. And there’s a time to just finish it and move on.
Shipping is fraught with risk and danger.
Every time you raise your hand, send an email, launch a product or make a suggestion, you’re exposing yourself to criticism. Not just criticism, but the negative consequences that come with wasting money, annoying someone in power or making a fool of yourself.
It’s no wonder we’re afraid to ship.
It’s not clear you have much choice, though. A life spent curled in a ball, hiding in the corner might seem less risky, but in fact it’s certain to lead to ennui and eventually failure.
Since you’re going to ship anyway, then, the question is: why bother indulging your fear?
In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run. — Seth Godin
3. Being (Okay-ish) with Silence and Tension
I am a person who can fill any silence with nervous chatter about Kim Kardashian’s addiction to contouring, why tacos are the perfect food, and basically anything in-between. It’s my inner-middle-child, my need to fill spaces and please people, I suppose. But throughout the course we were pushed to engage in difficult conversations (using tools and tips provided in the class). And part of facilitating those conversations, means being ok with things being awkward. And with saying nothing. Letting someone else work through things on their own. This task made me sweaty, but it’s a good one.
4. Understanding Worldviews
In what was probably my most personally-revealing bit of homework, we were asked to argue against one of our own beliefs. We were told to go deep, to use the first person, to not superficially outline an argument for a different point of view, but to really dig into the emotional motivations for that view. Taking on this task forced me to get out of my own head and honestly consider where someone else could be coming from. Why would he/she be so different? Throughout the month we were challenged to stop and think about worldviews. Where were we coming from? Where were others coming from? What was sparking their behaviour? What was a trigger? Where could there be common ground? This is a practice I’ve been attempting to apply to my work and life. If we’re all just yelling at each other about our own opinions, then we never really get anywhere. And taking the time to stop and think about what’s driving someone who’s opposing us makes us more understanding, empathetic and ultimately more capable of being able to come to a resolution with that person.
“Everyone else makes bad decisions, is shortsighted, prejudiced, subject to whims, temper tantrums, outbursts and short-term thinking.
Once you see it that way, it’s easier to remember…
that we’re everyone too.” — Seth Godin
5. Don’t Stop
When you dip, I dip, we dip. Throughout the course heard a lot from Godin about “the dip” a.k.a. the dreaded time just after you’ve sprinted to the finish line. That dip in energy, in drive, the desire to pack it in, to just stop. Don’t do it. Too frequently in my personal and professional life I’ve sprinted like mad toward a goal and then just sort of… felt done. But we’re in a marathon, my friends. And so you/me/we need to keep going. When you dip, you look for inspiration and support from friends and colleagues. You just. Keep. Going. Am I talking about maintaining a ceaseless, frenzied momentum? No. I like Netflix too much. What I’m talking about is a personal commitment to just getting things done. To getting back to it after you’ve had a quick break. To continuing to push, to create, to think big.
6. Leading from Any Chair
And finally, the piece of advice that moved me most in this course came from the reading material, specifically “The Art of Possibility”, a truly beautiful book I recommend to everyone now (seriously, I do, I’m sure it’s very annoying). In the book, readers are encouraged to “lead from any chair”. After all, the art of making a piece of music come to life does not belong to the conductor alone. Any of us, no matter our vantage point, can contribute, can lead, can make a difference.
And so I wrapped up my month worn out, but excited by how much time I’d discovered I had. The possibilities I felt coursing through my synapses. The inspiration that I felt radiating from my keyboard and into my work, my personal projects… my life. By the end of 2018, I plan to have the rough draft of an industry-type book ready to go in partnership with a friend and colleague, for example, and I’ve put in place lofty — but achievable — business goals for my department.
But before I hit the next “go” switch, I read six YA novels and watched the entire first season of Imposters on Netflix.
Steph heads up the Content Team at VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
