When you’re about to become a dad, one fact becomes clear very quickly:

With parenting, there is WAY too much information to absorb at once.

I can’t physically take in the amount of data that’s smacking me upside the head at every turn — opinions about baby nutrition; ideas about strollers; opinions about whether we should have a crib,  a co-sleeper, or a bassinet (which, until very recently, I thought was a lesser-known member of the woodwind family); ideas about infant sleeping patterns; on and on and on.

But this isn’t just the world of a father-to-be, is it?

This is the way life is becoming everywhere.

No matter what we’re talking about — if we want to make a good decision at work or learn when the next iPhone is coming out or change our career or find an new recipe for dinner — the entire world is full to the brim on information about it. If we want, there are petabytes of information available on our subject, usually providing any and every contrasting viewpoint on said topic.

(Sometimes even if we don’t want the info it comes anyway, as my wife will tell you about the incessant “mommy book” recommendations she’s getting these days.)

It’s no secret that each of us have instant access to more information than ever before in all of human history — usually from a device that fits in our pocket. I’m quite sure this fact isn’t surprising to you at all. I think, though, if we can start to observe this notion neither as a hassle nor a blessing, but as a megatrend it will help us understand something important — especially if you, like me, are a person who attempts to teach other people something.

Humans are amazingly varied, but in this we are all very similar: we don’t have the capacity to absorb the constant barrage of data pelting us on an ongoing basis. We simply can’t keep up. It’s not even physically possible to notice it all, much less process it in a way that allows us to make sense of things.

This is why our learning experiences must start adopting more “Just In Time” learning methods — giving people the information they need when they need it, and not before or after.

If you are in the “learning/teaching” business, the information deluge megatrend is going to completely re-write the way we work, and why we get paid.

I know a “just in time” method is how my wife and I have decided to approach parenting — frankly, we’ll drown in data if we don’t.

Is it any different for the people you are teaching/training?

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The people who run the world do so because they care to do so.

They are not any smarter than you or me.

They don’t have access to any better information.

They’re certainly not of higher character or moral fiber (if that wasn’t proved to you in 2008-2009, you weren’t paying attention).

They don’t have more grit or resilience.

(If we’re being honest, they may very well have started with more connections or money, but that’s becoming less and less important as it gets easier and easier to connect.*)

And this is why it all comes back to “care.”

The people who run the world — those who make the rules, etc. — do so because they want to do so. The vast majority of us opt out of these decisions because it’s such a friggin’ terrible hassle to participate. We want the world to be better, but if we’re being honest, it’s just such a damned pain in the ass to actually make it better.

If you feel this way, you are not alone.

There are many days when I wake up and think…

“Holy shit, is it really worth the hassle?”

Good question… for my kids and their kids, I’m pretty sure it is. Then I think…

“Can one person truly make a difference?”

On most days I stay convinced that’s the only way it works. Then I think…

“Deep down, do I somehow enjoy banging my head against a brick wall?”

No, I don’t. But if I don’t care, who will?

The thing about making a “dent in the universe” is that you often have to be the hammer doing the denting. We don’t talk about this very much. It hurts, and often times, if we’re being honest, it kind of sucks. But I’m also pretty sure it’s the only way things really change — if we care enough to actually see it through.

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*The money thing is admittedly tricky because of the whole Maslow problem: unless we have our basic needs taken care of, we don’t really think about these “bigger” issues. But “need” is more relative than we give it credit for. Money is horribly distracting — most of us, particularly in the US, do NOT need as much money as we think we do. We think we have to compare ourselves with the people who were born into a higher tax bracket, but of course, we don’t. We don’t REALLY need many of those things. We’ve just convinced ourselves otherwise.

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In our heads, we “get” why diversity is so important in our organizations — in practice, though, diversity is, well… really freaking hard.

Why is this the case?

And why is it so much more difficult for us to capitalize on diversity than it is for us to understand why it’s crucial?

This week I discuss this exact issue over at one of my favorite blogs, Switch & Shift.

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE DIRTY SECRET OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY >>>

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The world we see is dictated by the stories we’ve told ourselves about the world.

From…

• The stories we tell ourselves about people of other faiths
• The stories we tell ourselves about where human beings came from
• The stories North Korean leaders tell its citizens about the outside world
• The stories we tell ourselves about gay people
• The stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be successful
• The stories we tell ourselves about Republicans
• The stories we tell ourselves about Democrats
• The stories we tell ourselves about how we manage our own strengths and weaknesses
• The stories we tell our kids about how to “get a job”

There’s a stark difference between facts and stories, after all.

When someone doesn’t call you back when they say they would, that’s the fact: They didn’t call you back when they say they would.

The story, however, is what we tell ourselves about that fact.

“Oh, they’re pissed at me.”

“I must have done something to annoy them.”

“They’re so disorganized and irresponsible.”

These are stories.

For all we know, they got in a fender bender and had to speak with the police, or their kid got sick at school and they had to go pick them up.

Our worlds are made up of stories — some big, some small — and they define the world around us.

In our day-to-day life, the way we feel about the items on the above list are more constructed from stories than from facts. The majority of the hatred and destruction we see on the news is born out of a terrible, tragic story that people have been convinced is a fact. (Likewise, the joy and beauty around us comes from stories, too — they are just very different ones.)

I think it would be great if we could spend more time pondering the stories we tell ourselves — and we should certainly learn to have more respect for the power these stories wield over the way we live our lives.

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Entrepreneurs never want to pass up a good deal.

We thrive in the shimmering halo of possibility. We’ve learned through experience that one opportunity almost always births another, and that it’s our job to see the things others miss. We are always on the alert for the next Whatever. Our ears are constantly perked and our eyes are open wide. If they aren’t — if we don’t stay available and flexible and receptive and enthusiastic — we miss those things that make us, and our businesses, grow.

Literally, we create real things out of no-thing; this is the only sentence on our job description (if we had one).

As we grow as entrepreneurs, however, a new challenge emerges: learning to say NO to good things.

This is hard, because our experience has taught us to not do this. One of the reasons we were able to create a business from scratch is because we said YES to a million things others said NO to. We saw opportunity where others saw certain abject failure. We refused to relent when others may have quit.

But a never-ending stream of “YES” simply isn’t sustainable, for a couple of reasons:

First, we have to learn to say no to good things when they’re attached to the wrong people.

As your career progresses, you will inevitably come across amazing, potentially world-changing ideas that you want to be a part of. Your honed marketplace instincts will kick in and scream “PAY ATTENTION” — loudly, right in your ear. But as you learn more about the idea or project, you’ll also learn more about the people who are behind it.

Like they say: everybody’s normal until you get to know them.

Ideas that look good (and probably ARE good) on the outside can have not-as-golden insides, and the insides are always about the people.

I am not talking here about scumbags or assholes, by the way. Hopefully your instincts told you to stay away from those people altogether. I am talking about really decent people with really, REALLY great ideas — but who don’t treat you like you should be treated. This area gets rather gray very quickly, and it’s why learning to say NO to these opportunities is so damn hard.

As an entrepreneur we should develop obscenely strict standards for the kinds of behavior we’ll tolerate inside our inner circles, and we should be fanatical about protecting it. All the money in the world isn’t worth spending your time beating your head against a brick wall. Be militant about finding ONLY situations that are healthy and in alignment with the way you deserve to be treated.

Second, we have to learn to say no to good things when they don’t fit our long-range strategy.

When you’ve created something real, people will notice. Recruiters may stop by and say hello, random people will track you down on Twitter and want your attention, and opportunities will present themselves.

First off, this is amazing and we should be forever grateful that there are people who seem to give a shit about what we’re doing. We may work hard to get what we’ve got, but we’re absolutely no better than anyone else, and for someone to seek out our expertise on, well, anything should be a ever-humbling experience.

We should also be very careful.

As your business grows, very well-intentioned others will attempt to pull you in a thousand directions. You’ll get invited to job interviews and nonprofit boards. You’ll be asked to guest post on blogs, share people’s content, and help friends-of-friends. I’m sure many people have opinions on how to handle this; my current policy has three parts:

1. First, be nice to everybody.
2. Second, be straightforward and don’t bullshit people.
3. Third, have a larger strategy that helps you know when to say NO.

The first two are hard, but not complicated. The last one is not-so-hard once you have it, but it’s really complicated to get there, which is why I want to talk about it a little more.

For me, a larger strategy starts by getting crystal-effing-clear about the “noble cause” of your career. Start here:

• What’s the big problem in the world that you’re on a life’s mission to solve?
• When you think about the state of the planet, what pisses you off more than anything else?
• What is the one thing you’d like to be known for?

These are a few of the questions that helped me find my noble cause (which, if you’re curious, is: to improve the wellbeing of people by creating better places to work).

Without this “noble cause” I wouldn’t have a clue what to say NO to. I’d end up fracturing my attention in a million unproductive ways. (It’s hard to stay focused even with this, honestly. When your “problem to solve” is appropriately large, it leaves you many ways to get there.)

I’ve also found that, for me, family and health and balance are a crucial part of my “life strategy,” and that my sincere desire for those things also helps tremendously when having to say NO. Whatever your equation is, find a way to get your long-range target on the wall, and use it to filter out the stuff that won’t help you hit it.

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Additional recommended reading: “Is Giving The Secret To Getting Ahead” from NYTimes.com

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Image by Happystock (Shutterstock).

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I looked at the clock: it said 4:53 am.

I rolled over, as one does in the middle of the night, and noticed my wife gone. This isn’t a rare occurrence these days, as the baby in her belly often wakes her up by practicing early morning ninja moves, or sometimes her crazy husband has a silly dream and ends up pointing a sharp elbow directly into her face (this only happened once, I’m sure). Point being, she understandably gets a bit uncomfortable and many times migrates her sleeping patterns to one of the two full-size couches in our living room or dining room. (Yes, we have two couches in our 500 square foot apartment, but that’s a neurosis to explore another day.) This time was different, though; her pillow had stayed behind.

Girl doesn’t ever leave her Tempurpedic pillow.

I found her on the couch with her laptop, posting an update about our 32-year old friend, Will, who’s currently in a hospital at UCLA, dying of cancer.

Now as of this moment, Will is still here. We just saw him last night. We looked him in the eye and told him we loved him, and he responded the same. But I say “dying” instead of “living”  because there seems to be a clear difference between the two, doesn’t there? At some point you’re climbing the mountain, and at another point you’re going down the other side. What’s crazy to me is how we all completely missed the crest this time, with Will — it came and went so quickly as to not even really be noticed.

Most people, it seems, get to have their mountain crest late in life. Some time when your body gets old and more tired than it is today, you’ll walk over that peak and begin the descent. At some level, we understand this — although most of us try not to think about it too much. I don’t think anyone in our circle thought this was happening to Will when he was diagnosed with cancer less than 5 months ago. I certainly didn’t. He was young and healthy and, frankly, one of the finest human beings you would ever have the pleasure of meeting.

To be fair, we don’t yet know for sure that Will has crossed his final crest. We happen to be the type of people who believe in miracles, and cling as firmly to hope as one would a broken piece of a ship in the middle of a dark ocean. Despite this, we also recognize that right now, the Will we know is more gone than he is here, and that coming back from this — while certainly not impossible — would have to be generated by some Power truly extraordinary.

So in this moment, now 5:04am, I am reminded that no matter what kind of faith you believe in, or if you don’t believe in anything at all, in the issue of the mountain it doesn’t really matter. We are all borrowing time from somewhere else. Something otherworldly connects our beings to this life, and whatever that thing is, it is attached to our physical forms with a strong and fragile thread. No matter what you “believe,” the reality of the mountain of your life is true, and unless you’re the first person to avoid it, you’ll have a crest, too. If you are fortunate, you’ll get a long, slow, gradual, mostly-disease-free descent, and it will start when you’re much older.

My hope for you, and me, and all the people I love dearly is for that crest day to happen very far away from today, because let’s be honest: there’s much about this life that is pretty f*#&ing awesome. With every molecule in my being I want this to be true for Will, too — that this experience is just a blip on a much longer life; the deepest valley on a longer path.

My wife just finished her writing and returned to bed. She doesn’t have to be up as early as I do today, so I help make sure the blankets are snug around her, which she loves, I kiss her head, and take my laptop to one of our couches.

It’s 5:12am now.

I guess I was just reminded by this most terrible situation that we all get a mountain to climb. One of the trickiest parts of the journey is that we just don’t know when we’ll cross our peak, how long our path down the hill will be, or how much of the descent we’ll have control over. Until that happens, I suppose all we can do is do our best to pick the right mountain (which we have WAY more control over than we often think). We may as well enjoy the scenery as we walk, right?*

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*I’m pretty sure this is a continual work-in-progress, by the way. We can constantly learn more about what kind of mountain we ought to be climbing, who we ought to be climbing it with, and what we should be looking at along the way. My friend Will did this better than just about anyone I’ve ever met, and I hope he’ll come back and walk the path with me for many, many more years.

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I know health insurance in the US is complicated for just about everyone. I will say, though, if your health insurance is provided through a company you work for, I hope you’ll pause for a quick moment of gratitude — you are blessed, perhaps more than you know.

Let me explain.

For those of us who own our businesses or are otherwise “self-employed,” we are completely on our own for health insurance. We have to find it, apply for it, buy it, pay for it, and fight with it on a regular basis. And at every single (often grueling) stage of the process, it is exponentially more of a pain in the ass than it is through an employer.

Insurance for my wife and I is delightfully complicated, because I own my business and she works in television. Many people who work in the entertainment industry have access to great health insurance through their unions — her position of Associate Producer, however, happens to be in a black hole of unions. There just isn’t one for AP’s. (Weird, I know.) This means she has to be on a show/network that allows her to claim “non-affiliate” benefits. If the show/network says “NOPE!” she’s completely out of luck (here’s looking at you, Nickelodeon). If the show/network says “YES,” she can qualify — but only after she “banks enough hours” to do so.

She was able to do this last year, and got us pretty amazing benefits for a 6-month period, from Sept 2012 – Feb 2013. This was very nice, and particularly special as we happened to get pregnant during that window. Being the proactive folks we are, we researched all our options and decided that when her insurance ended on March 1, it would make sense for her to continue on COBRA through the summer to have the baby, and as of March 1 I would go back to a “cheap” catastrophic-only coverage type of plan until she gets us more “real” health benefits in the fall.

Well, it seemed like a good idea.

It turns out that once you’re an expectant father, you immediately get placed on the “high-risk” insurance list. (Apparently, getting your wife knocked up is considered a preexisting condition?) While part of me was flattered to be so intimately included in the birthing process (that would be sarcasm), most of me was flabbergasted — it seemed like it should somehow be illegal to deny coverage based on “impending father-ness.”

The reason for this, I learned (thanks to a good friend in the insurance industry), is that during the first 30 days of new baby’s life, if something were to happen to mama’s insurance, daddy’s insurance would HAVE to pick up the tab. So, instead of taking on this additional liability and risk, the health insurers just deny you outright.

Lucky me.

Fortunately, we were able to get me on the COBRA plan as well, and while it doesn’t remotely resemble anything cheap (it’s roughly 2.5x the cost of the cheap plan I wanted), on the upside, I am able to load up on prescription nose spray again.

Let us rejoice.

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The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation with violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace.

It destroys her own inner capacity for peace.

It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

– Thomas Merton

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A couple of weeks ago, it seemed like everywhere I looked online I saw an article about Marissa Mayer’s new policy at Yahoo about not allowing employees to work from home. (If you missed it, you can read the actual leaked internal memo here.) After all the ruckus began, I had conversations about this with a number of friends, and a few even asked whether I would blog about it.

Why, yes, I think I will.

I find the whole situation to be fascinating, for three reasons:

1) ORGANIZATIONS ARE ABSURDLY COMPLEX

First, no matter what side of the argument you find yourself on, there are articles to support your side. Looking for research that supports that working in the office will boost productivity? No problem! Want the opposite data that says working from home is the better way to go? Here you go. Welcome to the world of data — where, “If you have a stubborn opinion, we can justify why the position you want to take is the only right one!”

This is interesting, because the real situation — what’s actually happening inside Yahoo — is certainly more nuanced than any outsider can appreciate. Any organization made of human beings (which is to say, all of them) is much more complex than we want it to be. We’d like it to be easy — ideally, we could spout some anecdotal truths, throw around some nice research statistics, wave our magic wands, throw fairy dust in the HR person’s face, and fix the damn problem already. But this really isn’t how life works, is it? Like anything worth having, a great organization takes a lot of frickin’ work. There’s no way around it.

2) THIS KIND OF POLICY IS USUALLY STUPID

Second, as mentioned in the point above, this kind of policy is usually stupid — and please notice that I’m not saying “Yahoo’s policy” or it’s “always stupid.” There may well be very good reasons for making this decision within Yahoo (reference Point #1), and I don’t want to comment on that. What I do want to talk about, however, is any leader who would potentially take the Yahoo example and use it as a blunt instrument to support their own un-human agenda.

Generally speaking, whenever we codify a policy that takes decisions away from smart people, it’s usually going in the wrong direction. (There are some great thoughts on why this is the case in a Wired article here.) Here’s the way I think about it: the majority of our work is going in the direction of greater ambiguity, which means that we’re expecting our employees to habitually use their brains to make better decisions on behalf of the company. We are giving them this message — “Be smarter!” — while at the same time, with a policy like Yahoo’s, telling them we don’t trust them to know how or where or what to work on. This sends the opposite message, namely: “You’re too dumb to know what to do!”

This terrible contradiction is perhaps the greatest oxymoron of the way management works, and somehow it’s still popular almost everywhere… which leads us to Point #3.

3) THERE’S A MUCH BIGGER PROBLEM WE’RE IGNORING

Third, while I understand the vitriolic and hyperbolic nature of media, I’m still frustrated that a story like this can “blow up” while there are tiny organizational wars being fought everywhere that don’t seem to ever get attention on a larger scale.

For example, in my experience of having worked with many different kinds of companies, the vast majority of organizations still don’t have any workplace flexibility at all. THAT’S what we should really be upset about. In fact, in some organizations there are actually policies in place that explicitly prohibit flexible work.

What, you’re not shocked about this!? Yes, I know you’re not — and that just proves my point that we’ve become far too adept at ignoring larger systemic issues. After all, it’s much easier to point our fingers at Ms. Mayer or Yahoo and say, “I can’t believe you’d do this!” than to take a good look at how archaic our own policies might be, isn’t it?

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I had the pleasure of presenting a virtual class entitled “The Magic of Strengths-Based Coaching” to the ICF (International Coach Federation) a couple weeks ago. Over 140 coaches attended from around the world!

Here was the gist of the class:

Research shows that the most effective leaders in the world share one surprising trait: they know their strengths and they work “in” them almost all the time. By attending this session, you will discover a fresh perspective to share with the clients you work with, and learn why a focus on “what’s right with people” is surprisingly counter-intuitive and also, perhaps, the most important insight you can provide someone who desires to live an exceptional life.

Coaches will deepen and stretch their knowledge of several ICF core coaching competencies, including:

• How to create greater personal awareness for coaching clients, particularly in the areas of enduring personality strengths and natural sources of energy
• How to design better action plans for coaching clients by aligning individual goals with unique personal motivators and, therefore, achieving more success
• How to manage progress and accountability for coaching clients by integrating action plans with personal strengths, thereby developing greater resilience to meet objectives

If you missed it, you can listen to the recording here. While you listen, I recommend opening the visual presentation here, and following along with it as you listen to the recording. I give cues throughout to make it very simple.

ICF-LA does great stuff like this all the time (and the host, Paul, is seriously one of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet). If you’d like to register for one of their upcoming teleclasses, just go here.

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