Five
Keys to Personal Growth in the Great Pandemic Do-Over
Circumstances that you never anticipated are giving you permission to change your life and your business. Take advantage of this moment--and don't forget to forgive.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
If
there’s even the slightest silver lining to the pandemic, it’s clearly that it
has given millions of Americans permission to make radical changes in their
attitudes toward their work, in their behaviors toward their family, friends
and others, and in their philosophies going forward as to what exactly they’re
hoping that life will bring them.
Ideally
these will be changes for the better. Changes that will endure once the world
returns to whatever the new normal may be. But nothing will improve if these
folks just sit around and wait for things to happen to them as
opposed to seizing the moment and making those things happen for them
and their businesses. As Ayn Rand said: “The world you desired can be
won.”
While
no one is entitled to a perfect life, it seems that many of us now possess
once-in-a-lifetime, remarkable and previously unavailable (or at least
unimagined) levels of power and agency to alter our lives -; hopefully in
positive directions -; and to change the ways in which we run our businesses as
well. How each of us emerges from the limbo of the last two years and seizes
this brief window of opportunity will set the course for our futures - both
personal and business. The best entrepreneurs learn to ride and master the
waves they encounter rather than letting the waves carry them away or roll
right over them.
What’s
even more amazing is that the same permissions and prospects apply - in
virtually identical fashions - to both our lives and our companies. While there
may be many more, here are my favorite five.
You now
have permission in your personal life and your professional life as well
to:
1) Face
up to things you’ve avoided or denied for years.
“Necessary
evils” are often just cheap and lazy rationalizations that we employ to keep
doing things that we know are wrong, wasteful or destructive to our mental
well-being or our company’s culture and spirit. As Springsteen says: “It takes
away from your soul when you do what you don't believe in.”
The
truth is that you can’t do good business with bad people. If your best
salesperson is an asshole, now’s the time to bite the bullet and get rid of
that person. It’s not the employees you fire who make you miserable; it’s the
ones that you should fire but don’t. This goes for bad customers as well -
deadbeats, people who treat your team members poorly, cheapskates focused
solely on price and not value. Now’s the time.
2) Forgo
commitments, obligations and entanglements that are no longer meaningful,
valuable or important to you.
This
has been a time for considerable introspection, and we’ve all realized that, in
certain parts of our lives and certainly in parts of our businesses, we’ve been
going through the motions and phoning things in for quite some time. Do you really
need all those club memberships and board seats when you’ve really been bored
out of your mind at most of these events and meetings because you no longer
have the necessary passion, interest or commitment to actively participate and
contribute? You’re just taking up space and dragging yourself to places you
just as soon never be. It’s time to pull the plug, make room for new folks, and
get out before they work up the courage to ask you to leave. You’ll be doing
everyone a favor - especially yourself.
3) Finalize
all those tentative and dangling undertakings and open-ended intentions and
aspirations.
Do it
or dump it. Fish or cut bait. Half-hearted efforts are distractions which suck
time and energy from your forward progress and still leave you unhappy and
unsatisfied. Rand called these “the hopeless swamps of the
approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” Maybe now’s
not the time to master a new instrument or learn some new skill. That boat has
sailed and, while it might have been a realistic dream if we knew the pandemic
was going to last two years, at this moment it’s time to get back to business
and more immediate concerns.
4) Focus
on a few critically important objectives and do those things as well as
possible.
This
shouldn’t be news to anyone. You can’t be all things to all people or spread
yourself and your team a mile wide and an inch depth. In the rush to get back
to business, it’s easy to get distracted and pulled in too many directions. And
it’s especially hard to say “No” to longtime customers who stuck with you
during the toughest of times. But you’re in it for the long run and now’s the time to make the hard choices.
Focus, take small steps first, walk before you run, and stick to your guns.
5) Forgive
people for their youthful indiscretions, uncontrollable passions, slights
(imagined and intended) and other stupid mistakes because everyone - including
you - is entitled to a chance to change.
Everyone
gets one pass and a chance to show that they’ve changed. We need (especially in
politics) a virtual statute of limitations on stupidity. Not merely in terms of
legal or financial accountability, but a practical bar and agreed-upon
prohibition against even mentioning acts of juvenile and unthinking stupidity
that took place more than a dozen years ago or when the alleged wrongdoer was
in college. Frankly, the same thing goes for your own HR people who spend way
too much time looking for warts rather than focusing on the bigger, positive
picture of the person in front of them.
Yearbook
investigations spanning past decades in the faint and sleazy hopes of finding
an embarrassing photo or two should be regarded as the wrong-headed and
hypocritical wastes of time which they have always been. The entire “gotcha”
culture is both the last desperate act of a print/video industry desperate for
relevance and revenues and what seems to be the entire raison d’etre for the
Facebook/Google ad-tech duopoly, which is algorithmically driven by
manufactured click-bait controversies, cheap sensational headlines, and
misleading chyron streaming banners.
A few
obvious and long overdue changes might mean that otherwise entirely competent
candidates for any number of positions in multiple industries (and especially
in government) will no longer be precluded from pursuing these opportunities by
virtue of the media - egged on by the culture cancelers on both sides of any
topic-- seizing upon and spewing overheated exaggerations and phony outrage
about their youthful indiscretions.
We all
need to take a breath and give each other a break from the hate and rampant
ugliness of the Trump years, when there was nothing too low and no lie too
great to say about another person. As a country and as individuals, we can be
better than that.