Author Archives: jessicahlawrence

At times, being generous and being productive can feel at odds with each other.

A core part of my job is being generous with my time and sharing it to people who need advice, support, and insight into our industry and organization. On the other hand, as the solo employee of a rapidly growing organization who is responsible for everything from responding to every email we receive to raising the funds needed to deliver on our mission and pay the bills, over the last few months I’ve quickly found the requests for my time outpacing the amount of time I have available.

At one point in December, I reverted to packing 12 to 14 short meetings into one day to try to give support to as many people as possible. It worked relatively well, but the challenge was that the requests kept coming in, while the number of hours in a day stayed frustratingly the same.

A friend recently asked me if all of these meetings and phone calls were really necessary. At first, I was a bit indignant: “Of course they’re necessary! This is my job – I have to support the community. I can’t not help people who need my assistance.”

But then two things happened that made it clear to me that I needed to stop and reassess my now automatic “of course we can have a meeting” response.

The first was an incident in which I had exchanged a multitude of emails with someone to schedule a phone call, only to get on the phone and realize that we only needed to speak for approximately 2 minutes and the questions the person had could have been 100% answered via email.

The second thing that happened was that I got sick. With the flu and all sorts of nasty bugs spreading rapidly right now, I decided that I would try not to share my germs with everyone and would hold no in person meetings. The days on which I had no meetings and few phone calls allowed me to get an incredible amount of work done – work that has a bigger impact on a larger portion of our community than a chain of individual meetings.

What I have realized is that because a meeting seems like an easy solution, a solution in which you don’t have to spend any time articulating what you need in advance and you can just show up, we all tend to gravitate towards that solution first.

And while I do believe significantly in the power of meeting face-to-face, I also have started realizing that a higher form of generosity is not simply giving your time, but helping people articulate what it is that they are hoping you can assist them with and getting them that.

The trick here is that getting to that point doesn’t always have to involve a meeting or a phone call. In fact, productive, efficient generosity should be more focused on zeroing in on the best cure for what ails someone, not the delivery method.

A huge portion of what people are looking for when they ask to meet with me are resources and opinions. They have a problem or they are stuck trying to overcome a hurdle and they are looking for something to help them get unstuck or they have developed something and before they put it out into the world, they want “expert” feedback on it.

The majority of the time, I have realized that I can help people find all of those things much more efficiently without a meeting or a call.

I can see someone arguing that the meeting brings us closer, that it strengthens the relationship, puts a face to a name, and makes it more meaningful to work together going forward. And in some cases that may be true, but it is also true that just as we can’t effectively have 150 best friends in our personal lives, in our business lives we also have varying degrees of connectedness and depth in our relationships.

Adding value through your work isn’t dependent on you having that “best friend” relationship with every contact you come across.

To me adding value comes from providing what people actually need, which is usually a way to get unstuck, a door to be opened, or an arrow to point them in the right direction. And that doesn’t always require a meeting.

Every time I arrive at a conference center, an auditorium, a television station, or wherever it is I’m about to speak in public, I always think of Michelle. In my previous career, Michelle managed PR and marketing for our organization, and helped me through my first live television appearances and my biggest moments on stage in front of a crowd.

I thought about Michelle Friday morning as I took my seat on a panel…and dutifully removed my conference name tag (something she would have run up and whispered in my ear for me to do had a I forgotten).

To me, the fact that I remember these things isn’t just because they are good tips – it’s because of where they came from. I feel lucky to have worked with many people who cared enough to always want to get it right – and who have cared enough about me to help me do the same. The reciprocity of kindness and caring is powerful.

Thanks Michelle, for teaching me these things and so much more:

1. Take off your name tag. Even if the conference organizers gave you a nice name tag, no one can read it from the audience and it ends up looking funky in photos (especially if its crooked). Since you’re the speaker, most people will know who you are anyway (and have the time they’ve also got your name up on a screen). 
2. Check your teeth. It sucks to walk off stage and head to the bathroom only to find that you had a giant piece of spinach stuck on your tooth. You can do this in advance in the bathroom, but you can also keep a mirror in your purse or you can if you have an iPhone you can do the trick of flipping the camera as if you are going to take a photo of yourself and check your teeth in the camera.
3. Don’t put your bottled water on top of the podium or table. People will probably be taking photos. If you want some good, solid shots of you speaking, you don’t need to also need to be a product placement ad for Poland Spring.
4. Arrive made up the way you want to look. It never hurts to show up ready to go on t.v. or on stage, even if they end up having someone there to do some touch ups of your makeup. And throw a lipstick, some powder and whatever else you need in our bag just in case.
5. If you’re being interviewed on camera, ask where you should look. Sometimes you’re supposed to look at the camera and sometimes at the interviewer, and it can look strange if you end up glancing back and forth, not sure where to focus.

Thanks Michelle!

You’re standing in the lot at the car dealer getting ready to buy a car. Do you pick this one or that one?

You’re scanning Yelp looking for a place to grab dinner. Do you pick this place or that place?

Not earth-shattering decisions, but still opportunities to get something wrong.

And we don’t like to get things wrong. We don’t like to have the finger pointed at us when someone says “who decided to buy this lemon of a car?” or “who picked this awful place for dinner?”

And the anxiety around picking escalates as the depth and breadth of impact goes up.

Have I picked the right way to phrase this email I’m about to send to 30,000 people?

Have I picked the right presenters to put up on the stage in front of a discerning audience who will write about and talk about what they see?

And if I pick wrong, am I out? Are they going to stop trusting me to pick?

We fear picking because we fear being wrong and because it seems a bit out of our control.

And yet we all know people who seem to be very good at picking, like that friend who always seems to pick amazing restaurants or perfect gifts. Or the radio producer who always seems to find just the right story to feature.

But those people aren’t good at picking because they were born with a special gift.

It’s because they have a knack for paying attention – for noticing things – and for practicing picking.

When you pick something, you have the opportunity to learn from your choice, to notice what happens.

Did that presenter that I put on stage get laughs or no reaction at all? Did that email I just sent out resonate with someone and get positive feedback, or did no one respond?

Once you get in the habit of picking, you have the opportunity to recognize patterns that help you make better choices in the future.

What are the signs, for instance, that someone will make a great presenter or a bad one? I’ve noticed that the presenters who pitch themselves the hardest to get on stage are usually the ones that fall flat (maybe because they’ve gotten used to the hard sell required to sell their product because their product doesn’t sell itself?) It might not be an absolutely certain measure, but in my experience of picking month after month, it is almost always right.

If you want to pick a great gift for a friend, the easiest way is to notice things. Not only noticing how they might react to other gifts, but noticing when they say “ooohhh, I love that!” as you’re window shopping together or when they make mention of how they desperately need placemats.

Noticing consistently makes it immeasurably easier to pick well.

And as much as picking is a practiced art, even people who pick things for a living get it wrong every once in a while. There are TED talks that are duds. The ones that make it to TED.com are the best selections, fully edited to take out the technical missteps or the moment when the presenter forgot what slide she was on.

Even when you have gotten quite good at picking, there will still be anxiety.

If there was no anxiety, there would be no risk, and it is the presence of that risk that indicates that we are in the space of possibility to create something magical.

We no longer leave ourselves any time to think.

No open space in our days.

No white walls or blank sheets of paper.

No time when we aren’t reacting to what just happened and aren’t worrying about what will happen next.

As the amount of time that I spend responding to emails and Facebook messages and Tweets has gone up, I sense very deeply that the amount of creative thought that bubbles up during my day has gone down.

When we leave no blank space, we leave no time to notice things, no time for our synapses to connect, no time to connect the dots and synthesize bits and pieces from here and there. When we can’t do those things, we leave ourselves no opportunity to create and to make art.

We often leave no time to think for the same reason that we leave no time for exercise or any other type of self-care. We don’t do it because it can feel selfish and indulgent. We have work to do. We have people counting on us. We have people waiting for a reply to that email they sent 15 minutes ago. What are we doing relaxing in a yoga class or taking a 30 minute walk? The world needs us, so no, no, we can’t take any time for anything other than actively doing something directly in service of what the world needs right now.

But is that really what the world needs? Does the world really need us to be master emailers who get back in record time? Does the world need us to forgo our personal health and squash all of our creativity just so that we can fit in one more meeting?

We are in an amazing age where we have every technological and connection tool necessary to contribute something unique and interesting to the world. And yet those same tools – when allowed to rule every waking moment of our days – threaten to ensure that we could make it through life without much to show for it but a pile of sent emails and a clean inbox.

I think we want something different. And we can get there, if we just allow ourselves some time to think.

*******

I’ve been thinking about all of this for a while. Staring a bit longingly sometimes at photos of rural Ireland or country roads upstate – thinking about space and time to let the mind wander. And then I stumbled across this post Scott Belsky published a couple of years ago that got me thinking even more – check it out for some of his insight and ideas on how to get some of that thinking time back.

There are many people in the world who are more famous, more accomplished, and more powerful than I am at any given moment. 

And I’ve realized that there have been times when I’ve let that stop me. It has stopped me from asking them to join us at a dinner party at our place or join me for coffee. It has sometimes made me hesitate in asking them to speak at something I’m organizing or attend an event. 

But I re-learned an important lesson recently when I reached out to a well-known author and thought leader to ask her to speak at a conference I’m organizing. As I was typing my email, the voice in the back of my head kept saying “Who are you to be asking her? She’s famous. She’s not going to want to participate. This won’t be important to her.”

I hit send anyway. And waited. 

And then something unexpected happened. She wrote me back. And it was not a rejection.

Instead she said this: “So great to hear from you! I had actually be meaning to reach out to you. I love what you’re doing.” 

Right. 

The exact opposite response of what I expected. 

And all I needed to do was ask. 

Lesson (re)learned.

When I look back at the artifacts of my past, a good portion of what’s there is a bit of a graveyard of unfinished projects and unfulfilled good intentions. From the time years ago that I checked out Spanish books from the library in our town determined to teach myself Spanish (which still has never happened), to the Tumblr I started more recently to document me finally learning to cook which I think has all of three posts and has been dormant for months, to all of the plans I’ve had for the organizations I’ve led that I’ve talked about and shared but was never actually able to ship.

At times, I feel a bit embarrassed by that graveyard of unfinished things, especially when I’ve talked about them publicly, proclaiming my intention to do them and yet never actually get them done. I don’t know if it’s my Northern New England upbringing (as a colleague who grew up in Maine suggested recently), but I can’t stand not keeping my word and not following through, even if the promises I’ve made are to no one in particular and no one really cares if I get them done or not.

I think it also has a bit to do with our how our society in general handles failure to stick – it’s a subject that often comes up in whispered conversations about other people’s downfalls, about how they keep proclaiming that they’ve finally found their “thing” and that they are finally following their passion, only to see them make the same proclamation about something else a few months later.

On the other hand, I see the ability to decide to quit as a highly undervalued skill. People try to stick with everything, and then get nothing done. And too many people also stick with things for too long that make them miserable when they could be doing something that not only makes them happier but in being happier also makes it more likely that they will share something of value with the world.

So where does that graveyard of unshipped ideas stand? Are we failing if we don’t follow through on everything?

The truth is that we all have more ideas then we can possibly ship. And in an Internet age, we share our ideas – those light-bulb moments when we feel like a fire has been lit under our butts – earlier, more publicly, more broadly, and more often, then we have before and often before we have actually built or shipped anything.

And although at least sometimes we think that sharing that idea publicly will push us to actually ship, that form of motivation doesn’t always work. Because in the end the limits of time compel us to choose to focus on one idea over another, on shipping one thing over something else. If we proclaim on Tuesday we are going to start a woodworking business making reclaimed tables and on Wednesday we proclaim that we are going to start a baking business, we most likely can’t do both.

There is really nothing wrong with letting select ideas die. That in fact, needs to happen, to allow you to focus enough attention on one thing to get it to the point of shipping. What matters is not letting every idea die, not letting everything end up on the cutting room floor because you are too afraid to actually push something forward, make it public, and ship.

And maybe there’s something to be said for scaling back the amount of time you spend talking about an idea and replacing that with actually doing something. If you’re motivated to make a chair, then make one. Telling the world “look what I’ve made” is very different from saying “look at my new idea.”