Bursts of Color - Winning & Losing
When our team is winning (at work, school, home or even our city or country), everything feels easier. We feel like fish in water, and life's ordinary challenges aren't a big deal. The flip side is often true too.
Following are two books and a blog post about winning that stuck with me... and are presented here without further comment.
Winning Lifts Everyone
From Winning by Jack Welch:
Winning in business is great because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and more opportunities everywhere and for everyone. People feel upbeat about the future; they have the resources to send their kids to college, get better health care, buy vacation homes, and secure a comfortable retirement. And winning affords them the opportunity to give back to society in hugely important ways beyond just paying more taxes - they can donate time and money and charities and mentor in inner-city schools, to name just two. Winning lifts everyone it touches - it just makes the world a better place.
When companies are losing, on the other hand, everyone takes a hit. People feel scared. They have less financial security and limited time or money to do anything for anyone else.
The Secret of Success = Enduring Failure
From High School and CNN+ by Scott Galloway:
I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president, and I lost all three times. Based on that track record, I decided to run for student body president where I — wait for it — lost again. Amy Atkins turned me down for the prom, and I was cut from the baseball and basketball teams. Then I was rejected by UCLA, the only school I could afford to attend, as I could live at home.
However, I never lost my sense of enthusiasm. I appealed the rejection, UCLA admitted me, and by my senior year of college, I was president of the Interfraternity Council. Weak flex, I know, but it felt important at the time. I graduated with a 2.27 GPA, but that didn’t stop me from getting a job in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley (applied to 23 firms, one job offer) or getting into graduate school at Berkeley (applied to nine schools, rejected by seven).
In sum, the secret to my success is … rejection. Specifically, my willingness to endure it.
The Power of Creating Small Wins
From The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen:
If you study the launch of products with network effects, you'll see that one of the common threads is that they often start small, in a single city, college campus, or in small beta tests at individual companies.
My advice: your product's first atomic network is probably smaller and more specific than you think.
It was similar for Uber, whose networks we tend to talk about as "San Francisco" or "New York," but in the earliest days, the focus was on narrow, ephemeral moments - more like "5pm at the Caltrain station at 5th and King."