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“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”

We’re standing on one foot, impatiently waiting for the shortcut, the method, the guarantee. Skip the preamble and the analysis–what’s your take? Don’t talk to me about genre and method and history. No time for that. What are we supposed to do right now?

Perhaps the reason we’re struggling is that along the way, we forgot to focus on the questions instead. More answers are only going to insulate us from the questions we actually need to be focusing on.

There are some problems where a useful solution is a win for everyone.

But not many. Certainly not the problems that have been around for a while. If there were a win win solution, someone would have probably found it already.

For significant problems, someone is going to lose in the short run. Leadership is not the act of making everyone happy. It’s the ability to show up and help us get to a place where, on balance, more of us are glad to be.

If you can’t find a win-win, it might be time to find a win-lose where the most people with something at stake end up benefitting. Often, that means that entrenched interests and those that have traditionally come first don’t do as well in the short run.

This is a terrible reason to do something that makes things a little worse for other people.

And a common one, of course.

Much of the time, we’re willing to go out of our way to do work we’re proud of. Unless it would be inconvenient to do so.

One of the reasons our best work is important is that it’s also inconvenient.

Alas, convenience beats just about everything.

[But then, as some people who actually care do inconvenient things, those things become normal, which, amazingly, makes them more convenient for everyone else.]