Notes from ‘Make Your Mark’
‘Make Your Mark’ is another book in the 99U series from Jocelyn Glei (of which I had previously read ‘Manage Your Day-to-Day’), and I’m a big fan of each of these little books.
This one focuses not on a practical aspect of business, but instead the concepts within the world of work that are come to be considered distasteful or passé. That should not be so, this book argues, again and again — so how does one get over this obstacle that seems far too easy to stumble over? Perhaps a method is to create a drive in life that supersedes it all.
An example of this is given in Bill Thomas, a physician passionately dedicating his life to changing the field of ‘eldercare’. The book spends some time delving into a talk which he gave and a conversation had after:
He laid out a vast and ambitious plan for how America could transform the experience of growing older, of what it means to be well, and of how we care for people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. He argued that the medical system, the elder-care system, and the nursing home system have to evolve: “Aging should be conceived of as an era of continual growth and renewal, rather than a period of decline,” he said. He had absolute clarity in every part of his argument, and his energy was both motivating and mobilizing. When I talked to him after his session, I asked, “Bill, how do you describe your purpose in life?” He answered, spontaneously and effortlessly, “To bring respect back to elderhood in America.” In eight words, he captured his entire life’s work. Bill reminded me that the first step in living your purpose is to distill it. This very act sets an accurate compass heading. It shapes your choices, tells you what is important, and helps you separate the merely interesting from the truly crucial.
How can you love every step of the business you’re creating, if you don’t know exactly what it is that everything’s driving? How can you continue to care about the work you’re doing, when you have no concept of the end-goal? You can’t, and people get lost without that continual push towards the thing that matters. It not only means that people stop, but it means that business and the products of businesses are lackluster. Speaking of products:
Product is a clinical term for a passionate endeavor. As Steve Jobs, the “product guy” par excellence, put it: “Every good product I’ve ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.” Captured in that statement are the twin ideals that guide all great product development: an unstoppable enthusiasm for bringing something great into the world and a relentless focus on usability.
Hidden within this pithy (and excellent) Steve Jobs quote is a truth about business and ‘doing’ that I find quite profound. Not only should you make something that you want to see exist within the world, but there are real dangers that come with making something for a market that you don’t fully understand, or even worse, making something that you think is for ‘everyone’:
Be wary of the creator’s tendency to add more and more features and options. Grand visions must be boiled down to be effective visions. While the intricacies of your product may fascinate you, it’s quite possible that they complicate the product and frustrate your users. All too often, great products gain an edge through their simplicity in the beginning (which is usually a matter of expediency), only to become overly complex or bloated as they are evolved. I call it the “Cycle of Simplicity Loss,” and it plays out like this: Step 1: Users flock to simple product. Step 2: Simple product adds features and evolves, taking users for granted. Step 3: Users flock to a different — more simple — product.
Indeed, when you don’t make something passionately, focusing in on decisions that please you, you end up attempting to please everyone and instead pleasing absolutely no one. It just doesn’t work. Here’s another good analogy:
When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process. The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that’s willing to learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is that you can’t climb the entire route perfectly. You have to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you’ll have to turn around, and that you’ll have to recover. You also have to maintain your sense of purpose. For a long time, it may feel like you’re on the wrong path, but you must have the resilience to forge ahead. You just have to keep moving uphill.
It’s better to do work that’s hard, ‘dangerous’, and might fail than it is to do work that you just don’t care about. You can pick the easiest project of all, but if you’re not engaged, it will fail.
A total aside — the book includes this very interesting factoid about Yahoo that I had simply never heard. On its name:
When Yahoo first began in 1994, it was called “Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web.” Even when the name changed to Yahoo, the original acronym stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” In the infancy of the web, when the number of websites was manageable, it made sense to group them into hierarchical buckets that you could dive into and explore further: Arts and Humanities, Reference, Science, Government. Back then, the most successful businesses were the ones that did the best job of collecting and organizing the content across the Internet.
Random!
Continuing, another good question to ask when you’re starting a new endeavor — is the thing that I’m creating going to change the way people live in some way? This is more likely than not true for most successes at this point in time:
Entrepreneurs and creators alike are figuring out that their products are more than the materials and designs that go into them. At their best, the products we love become a part of the fabric of our lives. They become part of the stories that we tell ourselves about how we want to work smarter, dream bigger, and build a better world. They evoke an emotional connection — and a vocal, engaged, and loyal community naturally emerges.
A final word of interest on the subject of ‘managers’. This is a word that has become less and less favorable over the years, and simply shouldn’t be the case. A story:
Chuck asked if I ever wanted to be a manager. I dismissed the idea with a wave of my hand and said that managers were useless. That I’d rather focus on something important. I said this to a man whose success in management had paid for the rib roast I was eating and the wine I was drinking. But Chuck reacted in a characteristically good-natured way. “Really?” he said. “I’m surprised by that.” Then he said the thing that changed my life: I’ve always thought that the hardest and most valuable thing in work is to get a group of smart people to work together toward a common goal. It blew my mind. As soon as Chuck framed management as something that’s very hard and very valuable, I started to think about it differently. This was like telling a certain type of coder that Haskell is hard, a certain type of gamer that Dwarf Fortress is hard, or a certain type of athlete that CrossFit is hard. I just couldn’t let it go.
I appreciate those few final sentences, and I enjoyed the entire book. A very worthwhile read.
