Mid Year Performance Review

And by mid year I mean my 7 month review.

Why 7 months and not 6?

Because summer is crazy with three kids and no nanny.

This last week, two of the three kids were traveling so I had time to reflect on the year so far.

I looked back on the goals I set for the year.

I have goals around being a better parent.

Goals around being a better investor.

Goals around changing the way I react to things.

Goals around socializing more and spending more time on existing relationships as well as building new relationships.

One of the goals I shared in more detail earlier this year was to write more.

I had set a goal of writing 2 published essays per week this year.

So I should be at 65 essays.

I have written 9.

🙂

What happened?

I lost motivation very quickly.

The first problem was the pieces were taking a long time to write.

I was happy with the finished product but I had not anticipated correctly the amount of time each would take to write.

If I knew they were going to take that long, I would have set a better goal.

The good news is 9 is greater than 0 so I did learn some things.

Second, I told myself I was writing for myself.

I knew it wouldn’t work if I was writing for others.

I wanted to write for myself to improve my clarity of thought on things I found interesting.

But I was clearly writing for others.

How did I know?

I was watching the view count.

I was hoping for comments.

Why isn’t writing for others ok?

It is.

Just not for me.

I read to learn.

I use that learning to change.

For me, people who read without behavior change are consuming entertainment.

(We will ignore for now that entertainment is a very good way to start laying the groundwork for change.)

In that sense, if you read the news with no desire to change your opinion, you’re not trying to learn or improve.

You’re probably just entertaining yourself.

Often by either reinforcing your existing views or by novelty.

Both of which are perfectly fine.

I am not, however, interested in the entertainment business.

I am interested in the change business.

People changing is what makes things change.

And improvement only comes from change.

I believe we all live in an amazing age.

We owe our amazing lives to previous generations who lived and died to give us those things.

We have freedom and knowledge and medicine.

And we owe future generations an even longer list.

We need to keep the good stuff, get rid of some of the bad stuff and add some new stuff.

For those of you who completely lose your sanity over presidential elections, bad change is part of the process.

There is no such thing as only good changes.

Now the reality of change is that it is insanely hard.

REALLY REALLY REALLY hard.

Let’s start with the easiest form of change.

An individual changing.

It’s not that I don’t believe people can and do change.

It’s just not the default case.

And if it isn’t the default it won’t happen very often.

Think about 10 people you know.

How many of those people have changed significantly in the last 2 years?

Last 5 years?

Last 10 years?

Probably not a very large percentage.

Why don’t people change?

The powers shaping them are greater than their power to overcome those forces.

What powers shape them?

First up, genetics.

Genetics shapes us all.

If you don’t believe me, you probably don’t have 2 or more children.

Two kids from the same parents often are very different regardless of what you try to do as a parent.

Having 2 or more dogs from the same exact lineage is an even more obvious case.

Gem and Moxie couldn’t look more similar and behave more differently.

Genetic diversity is a feature, not a bug.

And it’s always working.

Always.

Next up you have their environment.

Where they live. What they do. Who they interact with.

People feel a lot of social pressure to fit in.

They usually do not want to stick out.

(Well some people want to but that’s another essay).

Our move to Sacramento and then our move to Cleveland was all about realizing that by changing the environment we could have a huge effect on the kids.

Most of America is a low change environment.

You can wake up 10 years later being the same and you’ll be perfectly accepted.

But not everywhere is like this.

People in high performance environments are expected to learn to always be improving.

If you ask that same question to people that live in successful high change environments, their answers are going to be MUCH higher.

At Amazon I would say it was not uncommon to see 20% of the people had changed a lot over a 2 year timeframe.

That’s how Amazon or Google or SpaceX or Tesla do the things they do.

Who did not change much?

The people that were laid off.

The people pool at these top companies is constantly growing and improving.

There is a third force on people and that is their habits.

Habits are worthy of their own article.

I do believe people can change if they want to.

But it’s hard and you have to really want it.

So spending a lot of time writing articles that wasn’t going to change anything was a good fit for me.

Now just because I did not write a lot of finished essays, didn’t mean I didn’t write a lot.

What I did write were many different 1st, 2nd and 3rd drafts.

In fact, the total number of draft topics and the number of finished essays was right at the 70 number.

Going forward my goal for the remainder of the year is to write 2 published essays a month (down from a goal of 8).

If I hit that I would end the year at 19.

And my other goal is to keep working on figuring out how to turn more drafts into something shareable.

Ideas do get sharper when you force them through more drafts and that’s good for me.

And publishing is still a worthy goal because you can never really know when someone learns something that changes them.

And enough change at the individual level produces change at higher levels.