It’s on the idea of personal reinvention, and specifically how do you find and claim your Onlyness. I’ll excerpt a bit here, and let you wander over to Oprah (did I say Oprah? I did!).com to see the full article.

In the search for our purpose, people are often told to look inside themselves. I don’t know about you, but for me, that feels a bit like looking into an abyss. It’s dark, and even though I know some important things are in there, finding anything requires groping around to find the shape and form of clues. Having reinvented what I do several times now, I’ve figured out how to do a search for “what’s next,” one that leads to clarity and momentum:

A. Name Your Invisibles

Several years ago, I was shutting down a company I had grown from scratch to be a several million dollar business. This meant starting over, which I conceptually had no problem with. I was, however, missing clues about what I could bring to a brand-new situation. I made a list of 10 people from varied backgrounds whose opinions I respected. Most of them had known me for some time, but not closely, which gave them perspective. I asked them to help name the things I was good at, or attributes they had observed.

They named many things that were largely invisible to me—things I had taken for granted. For example, many of them pointed out my economics background and how I was often the person who spotted early the little things (the micro, in economic terms) that were signs of bigger trends (the macro). Some insights were positive, like “You honor the dignity of each person” and others less so, like “You are impatient.” Their comments illustrated different aspects of what made me utterly me. You see, each of us is standing in a spot no one else occupies. That unique viewpoint is born of our accumulated experience and perspective and our vision. This is your onlyness—the thing that only you can bring into a situation. You are getting others’ help to see and describe what you naturally bring to any situation, independent of prior roles.

Working with new editors is always illuminating. More on what I learned throught that process, later…

Before that, one request — if there is a natural question that follows this post (like does owning your onlyness lead to loneliness?), post it either here or on Oprah’s site and it will provide fodder for what I write next.

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So some ways you might:

1. Travel. These days when so much work can be done over skype, phone and in one’s pajamas, its often unclear why you need to board a jet plane. But it’s exactly the meta context that makes “live” incredibly important. Remember that over 50% of the US population doesn’t work for “the man”, by being either freelancers or solopreneurs. That means that we all need places and occasions for serendipity to occur. I believe live events take on more importance in the Social Era because we need places for individuals to find and connect with others. And, importantly for our careers, we need to budget both time and monies for this. I allot 20% of my annual budget for what I call “serendipity creation”. Serendipity is what allows for newness — new ideas, new people, and new connections. If you’re always hanging with the same tribe, you’ll always think the same thoughts.

Action item: How will you create more serendipity? And, do you know how much are you willing to budget for it?

2. People. I spend about 40+ hours organizing and pre-planning a trip that takes 3 days. Why? Because I’m teeing up the conversation to be a good one — by sharing what I’m interested in already, why I want to meet, sometimes sending content ahead of time, and definitely studying up on the other person’s interests. Doing all that prep work means we can go deeper into discussion. Drake Baer, a fellow writer, and I met this trip and a few key nuggets from that conversation fundamentally illuminated the work I’ve done thus far, and what I’ll work on next. The setup ahead of time was central to making our time together work. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch of “who are you”, and “who are we to one another”… Once there, I also make sure to choose a great place to meet, and then to confirm the night before that we’re on. All of that sets up the context of a great exchange. I’ll just say that meeting Drake Baer alone sparked an inspiration deluge that will fuel several weeks of ideas. I met about 10 people this trip that filled the brain, aka my journal, with new things to think about.

Action item: Are you intentional about who you need to meet and to set up those meetings with good context setting?

3. Books. So I meet a lot of people who say they are lucky if they read one book a year. On a trip like this, I packed 5 research papers. I read them each twice, and then took copious notes. Then, I went through all those notes to create a summary note to myself on what I learned. That step-by-step process is how I digest information and especially new research in the field of management. Now you could roll your eyes a bit and think, but… Nilofer, thinking (and the resulting writing/speaking) is what you do for a living. But to say that is to miss a key point: in the social era and our modern day economy, thinking new thoughts and connecting ideas / people together is what allows everyone to create value. Reading blogs is all fine and good but most will not enable you to have a trans-formative idea. By its very nature, most blog posts are skimming or representing an older idea. Those creating easy lists will motivate or inspire for a few minutes, maybe even a day. Those creating pithy comments will remind you of something you already know to be true. All good, and fine. But if you are going to be a source for value creation… you need to be thinking. And, fersure, you won’t even be thinking about an idea for long enough time to formulate an opinion, connect it to another idea, or to have your old opinion changed if you’re not reading. Long-form reading of research or of books is about letting you meditate on an idea, to let it ruminate inside you and then to let that shape you.

Action item: Make a budget of an hour a week or an hour a day to let yourself grow through books.When will that be? Honor it.

If the industrial era was about building things, the social era is about connecting things, people and ideas. These three action items will enable you to do that. And perhaps even create for a you a real problem: an inspiration deluge.

What will you do to fuel your own ability to connect things, people, and ideas?

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Critics: These are smart people who know something about your field. They are taking a hard look at your work and are not loving it. You’ll probably want to listen to what they have to say, and make some adjustments to your work based on their thoughtful comments.

Lovers: These people are invested in you and are also giving you negative but rational feedback because they want you to improve. Listen to them, too.

Frenemies: Ooooh, this quadrant is tricky. These people really know how to hurt you, because they know you personally or know your work pretty well. But at the end of the day, their criticism is not actually about your work—it’s about you personally. And they aren’t actually interested in a productive conversation that will result in you becoming better at what you do. They just wanna undermine you. Dishonorable mention goes to The Hater Within, aka the irrational voice inside you that says you suck, which usually falls into this quadrant. Tell all of these fools to sit down and shut up.

Haters: This is your garden-variety, often anonymous troll who wants to tear down everything about you for no rational reason. Folks in this quadrant are easy to write off because they’re counterproductive and you don’t even know them. Ignore! Engaging won’t make you any better at what you do. And then rest easy, because having haters is proof your work is finding a wide audience and is sparking conversation. Own it.

And so for those of you that wonder if I have ever read any of my YouTube comments, the answer is No. I suspect but have not given into temptation to see if my TED.com talk has gotten trashed over at YouTube. That’s because I saw what it did to friends who have gone before me.  The people who are (as my friend Brene Brown would say) in the Arena of Life, showing up to fight for what they love… they are worth listening to.

For your own personal mastery, you need to get feedback that is constructively shaping you forward. So, don’t give the wrong people permissions they haven’t earned.  For family, friends, colleagues, or strangers — look at the classification and decide if they have earned the right to criticize, and then decide whether to listen to their point of view.

P.S. So if you happen to see a friend’s video on You Tube, don’t start the conversation about their hard work they are putting out into the world with “those idiots on YouTube…” You are simply not putting your mouth where your heart is.  (And, yes, this happens more than you might imagine and so there is plenty of evidence that this doesn’t bring two people closer together.)

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(image source: TattooArtists.org)

There’s an idea I’ve held inside my brain, like some kind of brain tattoo, indelibly stamped. It’s been there for some 30-years now. It goes something like this: “You’ll feel better when it quits hurting”. I’ve applied this to all sorts of things from business to personal. It came to mind as I was scaling organizations, or launching products on unreasonable schedules, or dealing with people issues. And for sure, it came to mind whenever I was trying to change some personal habit, especially fitness-related stuff. Though I credit it for a certain kind of perseverance and resolve, I realize it also forms a blanket ideology that everything worth having also has to be hard.

To have a braintattoo is to let an idea or construct inform everything.

Tattoos were once considered permanent, but no longer. It’s now possible to remove them, even if partially.

I’m thinking the same must be true for Brain Tattoos. To remove a brain tattoo would be to remove a belief system you no longer wish to inform everything else. Perhaps that belief system served for a time, but it no longer does. Perhaps it is an outdated notion. Perhaps you have grown beyond it.

Certainly I’m ready to let go of the “it must be hard” brain tattoo. But then, I started to wonder if I could choose a tattoo to imprint on my brain, what would it be?

What would yours be?

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But what is it that is said about the people who ultimately change the world?  “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”- Ghandi

Larry Lessig, if you don’t already know of him is one of the original creators of the Creative Commons. Creative commons lets any individual creator manage their rights to content, fundamentally updating the original notion of copyright to be less-lawyer intensive and right-sized for the Social Era. Since then, he’s gone one to support the Sunlight Foundation, aimed at opening up transparency to who is financing what. More recently, he’s been focused on dealing with political corruption, at RootStrikers.

His TED2013 talk at TED was, well, a stunning talk, one of my top 5 that I’ve been waiting to share…and it went live on TED.com today. Although it’s focused on the US, the issues it raises apply far more broadly.

“I get this sense of impossible, but I don’t buy it,” Lessig said. “This is a solvable issue. Think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the twentieth century–racism, sexism, or the issue we’ve been fighting this century, homophobia. Those are hard issues. You don’t just wake up one day no longer a racist,” he describes lyrically. “This is a problem of incentives. Change the incentives and the behavior changes.” When Connecticut first adopted the system, 78% of elected representatives gave up on large contributions within the first year.

Lessig closed with a story that I have been incredibly struck by. He said that he had kids, and he imagined a doctor saying ‘your son has terminal inoperable brain cancer. There is no doubt he would die, and there’s nothing you can do.’ He then asks … Would I do nothing?  Would I just sit there? Of course not. I would do EVERYTHING I could do because this is what love means. “The odds are irrelevant. You do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned.”

And the note I made to myself that I want to pass on to you:

What is it you love SO MUCH that you are willing to fight for it?

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Well, not easy, really. Maybe the better word is conditioned. Through each achievement (or like, or tweet), there’s a rush of dopamine in the human system, that signals, “things are good”. Which creates a biofeedback loop to keep doing more of the same. As in, as soon as one milestone is done, to rush off to the next one. And to make sure that to-do list, project, or whatever does equally well (perfection, calling!) to make sure the rush happens, again.

I certainly feel the call to that “rush”. Not only has my 2nd book, Social Era, been named one of the best Business Books of 2012, it has become a best seller. Which gave a rush to want to do the next book. Then, I got invited to do a short talk at TED Long Beach, and the press coverage was amazing. Which made me wonder, “when will I be back, and what could I do better.” It was crazy how much work went into that project and yet I wanted to mount that horse again. And, now having a Harvard Magazine feature piece … with my name right there on the cover. It would be oh-so-easy to turn my attention to the next big thing.

Sarah Green, my editor over at Harvard Business Review, and the co-creative partner of the Feature wrote this to me,

I think she’s capturing what is going on with so many people. From the freelance economy where people are persistently having to hustle for work, or the ever-present connection via Social Media, there are many distractions that you or I have bought into. It seems like we are collectively trying to show ourselves, “I’m okay”. Yet, if we are always needing to do to be worthy, then we’ve bought into a lie. The lie is to believe that we’re not already good enough, just as we are. And that lie becomes a trap. One that puts on a treadmill to do more, own more, pursue more … all in the goal to prove we are enough. What we become are doing beings, not human beings. Like whirling dervishes, and deeply unhappy ones.

Savor this Moment. Remember why you did the work in the first place, the purpose. Stop chasing the next gold star. “Just…” Be at peace with the now.

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That nugget of rather direct insight was delivered over a lunch conversation by a best-selling (and incredibly talented) author. At first, I thought what he was talking about was the media-related, buzz-generating kind of thing where the goal was to get someone to click on an article. I thought he was saying to figure out how to be more popular, to get more web traffic, to build the author platform. And I wanted to gag because I could picture the headlines of Inc Magazine (online) where nearly every post starts with a digit, as in “9 Ways to [fill in this blank]“.

But, on deeper reflection and a year of practice, I realize what he was trying to tell me is this: have a point of view. Meaning, know what it is that you, the writer, are aiming for the audience to believe, or do.

And I only really got it in the big way when I read this piece in the NYT by Wendy Button, last weekend, entitled Please Take Away My Right To A Gun.

The other day, the president, and the vice president announced their plans to curb gun violence in the wake of the shooting in Newtown, Conn. I agree with all of their measures. But I believe they should be bolder and stop walking on eggshells about what to do with people like me, the “mentally ill”.

The headline put the mental illness issue on the table, front-and-center, through story and facts but ultimately a remarkably clear point of view that the reader knows, even before he or she dives in. Having a headline with a point of view means the headline isn’t just capturing a nugget of the full idea, but rather, it is the very spine of the idea — providing a certain strength and backbone to every word selected and crafted to share the idea.

And, of course, having a point of view isn’t limited to writing.

Leadership, too, must have a point of view. This can shape entire organizations, whether it is about enabling unbelievable design (Apple), or educate the change agents (Singularity University) to enable your people to contribute their all (Valve), to enable happiness through great service (Zappos), or to allow anyone to contribute and share ideas that matter (TED). To have a point of view is to know why you’re there, to be able to signal your purpose and organizing principle so clearly that the “reader knows”, even before he or she dives into the details. It attracts talent, it creates allies, and it focuses the work.

When you have point of view about what matters to you and why, your chances of “changing the world” rise exponentially. Great entrepreneurs often affirm their point of view, repeatedly. Caterina Fake (of Etsy, Flickr, Findery fame) believes that technology can connect humans to be more social with one another. Ev Williams (of Twitter, etc fame) believes in power of simplicity of tools that enable deeper understanding. Reid Hoffman (of Linked In fame) believes anyone, quite possibly everyone can be the entrepreneur of their own life but they need a network to achieve success. For me, and my work, the belief is that the future is not created, the future is co-created. Hence, my intense desire for deep inclusion, to effect a better economic future. This is a truth: when you know yours, it magnetically attracts resources to you: you find your tribe, get the opportunities presented to you and so on.

In writing, having a headline means you eliminate everything that is extraneous to that headline. In policy, it means you understand the tradeoffs between different ideas so you keep leaning in the direction you wish. In leadership, it means knowing why you care, and allowing people to work with you based on that purpose.  In life, it is to know what ideas you are fighting for.

My friend over lunch, he was asking me to be more clear in my point of view so that the clarity of my ideas would shine through. I pass that onto you with that same wish for your work.

(p.s. I’m double posting this over at LinkedIn since I’m also writing for them lately. Feel free to comment where ever you wish).

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Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person: first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Some of those experiences are not as “perfect” as we might want, but even those experiences are a source for what you create. For example, the person whose younger sibling has a disease might grow up to work in medicine to find the cure. The person who is obsessed with beautiful details might end up caring about industrial design and reinvent how we all use technology. The person who has grown up under oppression might end up advocating for freedom of speech and thus advance the condition of his country. This individual onlyness is the fuel of vast creativity, innovations, and adaptability.

Someone can be (for example) only woman in a crowd, but this is not her onlyness. In this case, she is unique because of the context. Onlyness may be present in that story, but onlyness is not a relative thing. It more about what makes that person unique based on their own story, or their “through-line” of their own story, their own narrative. I am trying to point out the inherent source of each person.

Embracing onlyness means that, as contributors, we must embrace our history, not deny it. This includes both our “dark” and our “light” sides. Because when we deny our history, vision, perspective, we are also denying a unique point of view, that which only we can bring to the situation. Each onlyness is essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without it, people are simply cogs in a machine – dispensable and undervalued – and we’re back to the 800-pound gorilla approach in organizations (and our economy). With it, gazelles [employees, community members, and partners] are singularly unique and able to contribute meaningfully.

Now, this fall I gave a great many talks, and I learned a lot in the process. This talk that follows is on Onlyness and is — by far — my FAVORITE (and quite possibly the best — if I put my humility aside for a second) talk I’ve ever given. Not only is the topic one I care about deeply, it resonates because it speaks to a universal truth. Which is this:

It’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can contribute.

And until we celebrate onlyness, we are not honoring the person. And, until you unlock your onlyness, you are not fully alive. And, collectively, until we honor onlyness, we are limiting ourselves, our organizations and our economies.

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Yesterday, I shared with you the “big” news that I’m speaking at TED at their Long Beach event a short 40 or so days from now.

The topic of my talk may surprise you. It’s not on business models of the future, or why collaboration matters, or about the need to dissolve us v. them architectures that prevail. The mainstage talk I have been asked to give is on something I’ve come to love and want to share with others: walking meetings. I wrote up the first pass of the idea to share it and see what questions / comments / suggestions ended up being asked. And OH, WOW am I glad I did. The comments section in one short day is chock full of great nuggets that will inspire the next generation of this idea.

AS IS ALWAYS TRUE, I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. (I know I probably don’t need to say it because — perhaps with this many years of blogging history– it can be assumed, but I don’t want to ever take you and it for granted. The reason I write is to learn and share WITH you, not to do a 1-way flow AT you.)

***

I find myself, probably like many of you, spending way too much time in front of my computer. When I do face-to-face meetings, my colleagues and I typically met around some conference table, sometimes at an airport lounge (nothing like getting the most out of a long layover), and quite often at coffee shops (hello Starbucks!). But that means that the most common denominator across all these locations wasn’t the desk, or, the keyboard, or even the coffee. The common denominator in the modern workday is our, um, tush.

As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not okay. In that way, I’ve come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation.

Of course, health studies conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around. After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%. Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. You might already know that the death rate associated with obesity in the US is now 35 million. But do you know what it is in relationship to Tobacco? Just 3.5 million. The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.

And so, over the last couple of years, we saw the mainstreaming of the standing desk. Which, certainly, is a step forward. But even that, while it gets you off your duff, won’t help you get real exercise.

So four years ago, I made a simple change when I switched one meeting from a coffee meeting to a walking-meeting. I liked it so much it became a regular addition to my calendar; I now average four such meetings, and 20 to 30 miles each week. Today it’s life-changing, but it happened almost by accident.

My fundamental problem with exercise has always been this: it took time away from other more “productive things.” Going to the gym to take care of me (vs. companies, colleagues, family) seemed selfish. My American-bred Puritan work ethic nearly always won out. Only when I realized I could do both at the same time, by making exercise part of the meeting, did I finally start to get more exercise. This is one of those 2-for-1 deals. I’m not sacrificing my health for work, nor work for fitness. And maybe that’s why making fitness a priority finally doesn’t feel like a conflict. It’s as easy as stepping out the door and might require as much as a change of shoes.

And, yet, it’s true that some people will turn you down. Probably 30% of the people I ask to do these kinds of meetings say that they are not fit enough to do a walking meeting. I had one person tell me afterwards that they got more active for an entire month before our meeting, so as to not embarrass themselves on their hike with me. I don’t judge the people who won’t do a hiking meeting, and in most cases will choose to do another type of meeting with them (lunch or whatever) but I am also reminded of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis’s research from their related book, Connected. They observed that obesity spreads according to network effects; if your friend’s friend’s friend who lives a thousand miles away gains weight, you’re likely to gain weight, too. And if that extended friend also loses weight, even if you’re not in the same city, you’re likely to lose weight, too. My goal is to be someone who socializes the idea that physical activity matters, and that we each matter enough to take care of our health.

And after a few hundred of these meetings, I’ve started noticing some unanticipated side benefits. First, I can actually listen better when I am walking next to someone than when I’m across from them in some coffee shop. There’s something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before us, and us working on it together.

Second, the simple act of moving also means the mobile device mostly stays put away. Undivided attention is perhaps today’s scarcest resource, and hiking meetings allow me to invest that resource very differently.

And, finally we almost always end the hike joyful. The number one thing I’ve heard people say (especially if they’ve resisted this kind of meeting in the past) is “That was the most creative time I’ve had in a long time” And that could be because we’re outside, or a result of walking. Research certainly says that walking is good for the brain.

I’ve learned that if you want to get out of the box thinking, you need to literally get out of the box. When you step outside, you give yourself over to nature, respecting its cycles and unpredictability. It keeps me more awake to what is happening around me by experiencing the extreme heats of summer, or the frigid power of winter. It makes me present to the world around me instead of being insulated from it.

To keep this commitment — to myself and to others — I’ve marked off certain times on my calendar for these meetings. I block off two morning appointments (when I can take a shower afterwards) and two end-of-day appointments for hiking meetings. I try and schedule these slots before scheduling “regular” sitting meetings because it means I have no excuse to not move that day and it helps me be more awake during the day or less zombie-like (and still-thinking-about-my-inbox) going into the evening. On the rare days when someone bails on a hike last minute, I typically still head out for the time, and I find myself hearing even my own voice more clearly.

***

As is the norm for the pieces I first write at Harvard, please help me by contributing your comments on the original posting site (or in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/sitting_is_the_smoking_of_our_generation.html). Thanks!

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