All That’s Left to Say This Year – Part Two
By Alex Gertsburg, Esq., Co-Managing Partner
Years ago, I made a decision to be an active lifelong learner.
That decision manifested in a number of specific action steps. There’s a mandatory do-not-pass-go step in my morning checklist called Growth Lesson, so that I can read or learn one new thing every day before I leave the house. I have a ready-to-go list of hyperlinks to Blinkist and books and podcasts that are guaranteed to provide at least one good nugget every day. I try to cultivate what Zen practitioners call “Beginner’s Mind” (Google it! Pretty fascinating) in most interactions and endeavors. I approach these interactions as though I don’t know anything, and my job is to learn from them. Etc.
Here’s a list of my favorite lessons from this year:
- The best investment you can ever make is in your closest relationships. You can choose most of those relationships, and you should be intentional about them – you are, in fact, the average of the people you spend the most time with. I truly believe that. Choose them or they’ll choose you, and then strengthen them with every interaction you have.
- The second-best investment you can make is in your experiences. Every dollar spent on a gadget or a machine or a piece of plastic or metal has 10x ROI when that same dollar is spent doing something awesome, or crazy, or boring, with good people who put a smile on your face.
- Cultivate a skill in spotting and evaluating (or devaluating) your stories, your thoughts, your thought patterns, and your biases. This theme came up repeatedly this year for me, starting with the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, then Leadership and Self-Deception, and then a months-long deep-dive into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (my current rabbit hole… super-powerful stuff).
- Avoiding confrontation is not a bad thing. I started this year committed to the notion that all ideas and thoughts should be shared unfiltered in a healthy relationship, whether working or personal. “Get it out” was my mantra. My thinking has evolved from that; there’s an asterisk there now. First, see No. 3 above. Not all thoughts are helpful thoughts. Second, not all thoughts are equally helpful or equally useful. Third, sharing and expressing does not have to be confrontational. In fact, it’s going to be much better received if it’s not. Timing, word choice, finesse, and sometimes just letting it go, are powerful communication skills.
- Keep vigilantly revisiting your habits. Know what you’re doing automatically, without thinking about it (like checking your phone, or interrupting people). Figure out whether they’re useful or harmful, and learn ways to tweak them. My go-to resources for habit change and habit formation are James Clear, BJ Fogg, Katy Milkman and Charles Duhigg. They’re ninjas with this stuff.
- Keep looking for ways to slow down your thinking. Here’s a great article from Deloitte about it. Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow is the bible for it. We go through life and business blindly most of the time, using fast twitch “System 1” heuristics thinking. Evolutionarily speaking, it’s the way we’ve evolved, and it conserves energy. It’s not a good recipe for personal growth and business growth, though. Slowing down is more effective for that.
- Know when you’re caring too much about what other people think of you. We are a self-obsessed animal. We walk around believing that everyone is thinking about us, but almost no one is. We’re convinced we’re always being judged, but that’s just the voice in our heads, judging ourselves. I’ve found that most of the time, people are thinking about themselves. (This year, I realized that one way I was letting this notion hold me back was in my writing. I was so worried about what folks would think about it that I’ve spent way too much time editing and polishing work that I was endlessly preparing for publication. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull the trigger and release portions of it . . . subscribe to it here if you like.
- You can never stop improving your empathy muscle. There are endless ways to do it. This is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Daily readings and reminders; mindfulness practice; better listening. When all else fails, simply remembering that the person in front of you is a human being doing the best they can with what they have, that they have experienced joy and shame and suffering, and that they are worthy of love in the same way we all are. Whereas anger is the poison that destroys the vessel that carries it, love and empathy are the medicines that save the giver, the receiver, and the world. Different ripple effects, guaranteed.
- Acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go. This was the biggest one of the year for me. You get to a point where, in order to succeed, you had to fail a lot. You had to take a lot of risks. You had to put yourself out there. You had to invite embarrassment and ridicule. It can so easily build up and turn into long-time resentments and negativity, both inward and outward. But then one day, if you tilt your head just right, you realize that you’re in a great place, that no failure is durable, that it all turned out okay. You won the genetic, historic and geographic randomness lottery.
Hard to see that when you’re holding on to the past, or to anything, too tightly.
You’re one of the luckiest people on the planet.
Hope you had an amazing ’22, and here’s to an even more spectacular ’23!
