Posts Tagged ‘Amber Naslund’

This is a poor man’s attempt to deal with a weighty subject that has been put through the wringer in great discussions at Amber Naslund’s excellent blog as well as, today, by David Spinks.  Among, doubtless, many others.

Those of you that read regularly know that I get criticized here.  You probably suspect, if you follow the comments section, that I allow pretty much any comment, no matter how critical.  And you would be right.  I have gotten heat for it from “professionals” that have told me that my blog should be relentlessly positive and cheerful if it’s to be a good marketing vehicle, and for all I know, they’re right.  But I can’t be that way.  I am a positive person, and I have faith that things are going to be okay.  But when I’m sad, I’m sad.  When I screw up, and someone calls me on it, I put that out there with everything else.

Maybe this makes me some sort of hero.  I doubt it.  That’s certainly not the intent.

I tend to be motivated by connection and community, and I believe that those connections cannot come about except in the presence of authenticity.  If I am not willing to be who I really am, then my connections will be false.  This is as true on Twitter as it is at the corner bookstore.  I don’t want people to think that I am perfect.  But, no, that’s not quite right.

I don’t want to present a false image of myself in order to get people to think I am one thing or another.  That’s better.  What they do think of me I want to be their decision based on real things, not my attempt to appear to be something.  This holds, I believe, for my company as well as myself.

In order to do this correctly, there are things I cannot present.  I have strong views on Coke.  I have opinions on the Red Wings.  I occasionally get red-faced discussing Hungarian domestic policy.  Some of those things are not good things to display to the general public, for a number of reasons, but mostly, I think, because that’s not a level of transparency I grant to everyone.  I restrict some things.  We all do.  This can be just fine – depending.

Depends on why.

If you restrict the fact that you’ve had an affair with your married staffer, John Ensign, because it harms your position as a vocal proponent of marital fidelity, then that is pretty much lying.  That’s inauthentic.  You are pretending to be something you’re not.  If you restrict the fact that you think abortion is murder, for another example, but you do so because you know that this is a debate that cannot be had without a level of trust among the debaters, this is not inauthenticity, it is opacity.  Opacity is not necessarily inauthentic.

For me, it’s like this – if you’re trying to be as real as possible within the bounds of what discussion you’re having, then you’re fine.  If you’re covering things up because they undermine your position, then you’re not fine.  In one binary check: is it about you, or about the community?

Authentic is about the community.  In fact, community can only exist among those that are authentic with one another.  A certain level of transparency is required as well, of course, and the more transparent the members of a community are, the deeper and more powerful will be the connections in that community.  But true transparency isn’t required for community formation.  If it were, we would all live in glass houses.  That part of the house that is glass, though, needs to be pretty clean, or the distorted view will eventually break the community apart.

P.S. This means you, buttkissers.  Authenticity doesn’t mean constant sunshine.  It does mean a willingness to tell the truth even when that truth will be hard for someone you care about to hear it.  You can be eccentric, even abrasive, and still be a part of a vibrant community as long as the eccentricity and abrasiveness is authentic – really a part of you – rather than just an attempt to get attention.  We’re not stupid.  We’ll be able to tell.

Amber Naslund, one of my favorite bloggers, and a very nice person to boot, has a terrific post today about visionaries, architects and bricklayers.  Essentially, one is the visionary that sees the building sitting in a place where nothing now exists.  The second is the person that translates that vision into a plan and organizes the troops to build it.  The third is the person that builds.  She points out:

There is beauty in bricklaying. In taking an idea or a problem and laying out all of its pieces and parts, mapping out a solution, and putting it in place, piece by piece. I’d actually be willing to bet that those of us that spend a lot of time bricklaying actually relish the hands-on part of the work, the tangible results that we can see and feel.

But I think the breakdown happens because of our tendencies to put everyone’s responsibilities in a hierarchy instead of a web. Instead of looking at the symbiotic nature of different roles, we’re compelled to rank them in order of imaginary or perceived importance, putting ideas above execution. Visionaries above builders. But is that really the right way to look at things?

We bricklayers depend on the idea people for the inspiration. The visionaries need the architects and the builders to realize their ideas. But perhaps we’re doing a crummy job of letting the bricklayers see and feel the true impact of their efforts. We’re not communicating well enough that their role is mission critical, and as important as the idea generation itself.

Is that it? Why do we all want to be the ones with the big ideas, and why do we somehow think the execution work is less important?

As a card-carrying member of the visionary class, let me say that first, in a small business, one has to learn to do all three tasks well, or one starves.  But second, and paradoxically, the MOST successful businessmen I know delegate almost everything except vision to other people.  I don’t know how to balance that.  If I spend all my time envisioning what our business could look like and be, then I don’t sell any money, and if I don’t sell any money, we don’t eat well.  Contrariwise, as the Cheshire Cat would say, I recognize that I don’t lay bricks well, and I am at best very average at architecting, and there are a lot of people, even people that are right here in the Group, that surpass me every which way at both.

But it’s my name on the door.  That seems wrong, somehow.

Here’s a dirty secret from the “Eyes Only” files of the Dreamer Class: most of us envy the bricklayers at least part of the time.  We envy those that can doggedly pursue a course, a bit at a time, because we know that that is the only way anything of lasting value was ever accomplished.  We know that is how food is grown, babies gestated, buildings built.  We know that we are Ozymandias.

As Ms. Naslund says, we are usually the ones that get the book deals, the ones with our names on airports, the ones that appear on the cover of Inc.  I’m not sure why that is.  But I do know this: one of the reasons I have a family, one of the reasons I have SUCH a family, one of the reasons I have a garden that is larger than my first house, and five fruit trees, and six grape canes and chickens and cats and the whole shooting match is that these things remind me that without the bricklayers – without my willingness to become a bricklayer myself – I will never acheive anything worth remembering.

Bricklayers amaze me.  I married one.  And what she has built dwarfs everything I will ever do.

Back to work.