#26 - Balancing Acts
“Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems” - Scott Galloway
Relationships or transactions? Trust or mistrust? Faith or despair? Quit or stay? Life or work? Sometimes we have to make choices. Sometimes, we will accept that the opposites will paradoxically coexist. This newsletter is about finding balance in life’s contradictions.
Jim Collins: Relationships vs. Transactions [The Knowledge Project Ep. #110]
Relationships or Transactions? “People break into two buckets. Some come at life as a series of transactions. And some people come at life as about building relationships. You can have a successful life doing transactions, but the only way to have a great life is on the relationship side.”
Trust or Mistrust? “You need to decide on your opening bid when you are establishing a relationship with someone when you’re interacting with the world. Is your opening bid to assume trust, to assume that someone is trustworthy, and to grant them the full benefits of that? Or is your winning bid to not trust, but the trust can be earned? So many aspects of your life will be affected by which fork you take. That’s a stance on life (…) There is far more upside in an opening bid of trust, (…) as your opening bid affects how people behave. If you trust people, it’s more likely that they will act in a trustworthy way. So it’s a double win. It’s the best people, and they’ll behave in a trustworthy way. The flip side is if you have an opening bid of mistrust, the best people will not be attracted to that. Now, you may have to earn my trust on how good you are at something, right? Or earn my respect for your performance or that sort of thing. But if I’m basically like, ‘I don’t trust you, you have to earn it.’ Well, some of the best people are going to be like, ‘I don’t need to put up with that. I’ll go do something else.”
Faith and Discipline (or Stockdale Paradox) “You must never confuse the need on the one hand for absolute unwavering faith that you can and you will prevail in the end, with the need on the other hand, for the discipline to confront the most brutal facts as they are right now.” - listen here
To quit or to stay? More often than not, I see examples of quitting decisions that are mostly emotionally driven. Some may quit too soon or stay too long for the wrong reasons. Some may feel desperate or, on the contrary, enchanted to rush to the readily available alternative without really appreciating its worth. How can we improve the quality and the timing of quitting decisions to minimise future regrets? Read more to find out
Criteria to define my fulfilling or dream job: Plus and Minus
Plus or Minus? I recommend this brilliant collection of Beep Beep Books - short guides on many career-related topics. They are fast, relevant and … free! This one on Pluses and Minuses of various job/career choices is super-helpful to reflect in a balanced way on your current and future options.
Austin Kleon’s Newsletter
Life or Work? Find your answer and many other interesting ideas in one of the best weekly newsletters out there.
https://austinkleon.com/2021/05/06/the-goldilocks-theory/
Gilbert Garcin: Anything Can Happen
Too Old to Start? Gilbert Garcin started in photography at a tender age of 65. With his unique voice he created a magnificent body of work - surrealist, poetical, philosophical, full of humour and acceptance of life with all its contradictions. Each image is a parable, a story, a universe. In this short documentary (in French) he opens up to share about his creative process. “It’s important to have a desire to say something.”