# PP #37 | The Pitfalls of Best Practices, Living Culture, and Playing Hard Games
How Best Practices Can Hold You Back, Living vs. Defining Culture, Paradoxical Truths in Challenging Arenas
The Pitfalls of Best Practices
In every pursuit, there are gurus preaching best practices and the "right" way to do things.
Best practices have two major pitfalls:
They rob you of creativity and vision
By becoming attached to them, you become fragile (you make it a problem if you can't adhere to it - ie no meditation = bad day)
Advice can be helpful for achieving a specific end. But more often than not, it obscures the way of doing what’s best for you personally.
Don't let the "right" way crowd out your way.
And please, don't make "no best practices" another best practice 😉
Living Culture
Culture isn't a nicely edited mission, vision, and values statement.
Culture is how you and your team do things.
These days, we overindex on defining culture and underindex on living it.
If your team culture isn’t what you’d like it to be, don’t schedule a meeting to discuss it. First, make sure that you’re living that culture yourself.
Be the model for how to operate. As a leader, the way that you operate becomes the culture.
Live culture first. Communicate it second.
It’s Supposed to Be Hard
In a recent piece, Morgan Housel discusses an interaction between David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld:
In 1990, David Letterman asked his friend Jerry Seinfeld how his new sitcom was going.
Jerry said there was one frustrating problem: NBC supplied the show with teams of comedy writers, and he didn’t think they were getting much good material from them.
“Wouldn’t it be weirder if they were good?” David asked.
“What do you mean?” Jerry asked.
“Wouldn’t it be strange if they could all just produce reams of hilarious material day after day?”
Recalling the conversation a few years ago, Seinfeld laughed and told Letterman: “It’s supposed to be hard.”
Of course it is. There is no world in which even the most talented comedians are consistently good.
Many things are governed by that truth.
Every investor knows, or should know, the truth about money management: More than 80 of professional investors underperform their benchmark (more depending on how you calculate it)…. About 1% of college basketball players make it to the NBA.
Most meaningful things in life call us to play in challenging, competitive arenas.
80% of investors underperform the market. 1% of college basketball player never make it to the NBA. 75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors.
It makes sense. Great returns emerge as incentives to take on great challenges. If it wasn’t challenging, there wouldn’t be such great returns!
The fact that it’s hard is also what makes it meaningful. It’s what attracted you to that path in the first place.
When many of us choose to step into those arenas, we lose sight of the fact that we’re playing games that probability tells us we’ll lose. The result is that when we struggle at them, we make it mean that we are inadequate .
Many of us use this sense of inadequacy to drive us to be better. In order to be driven to win, we must make it bad when we fail.
This need for inadequacy ultimately detracts from our ability to be effective, and distracts us from the real problem. In making ourselves “bad”, we inevitably become emotional and compromise our ability to see clearly.
The opportunity is to hold two paradoxical truths at once:
You are playing challenging games and are therefore likely to perform poorly
If you play assuming that you can win and wholeheartedly dedicate yourself to that, you drastically improve your chance of winning
By holding both of theses truths, you can drive for improvement and victory while accepting that you will have great challenges along the way, dropping any need to punish yourself when you struggle.
This is akin to Buddhism’s parable about the second arrow of suffering.
Picture yourself walking through a forest. Suddenly, you’re hit by an arrow. The first arrow is an actual bad event, which can cause pain. But it isn’t over yet. There is a second arrow. The second arrow brings more pain and suffering. Can you avoid the second one? The second arrow represents our reaction to the bad event. It’s the manner in which we choose to respond emotionally. I recently talked to a friend of mine who was at home with her sick family. She, her husband, and their two young sons were all sick with COVID and in various stages of sickness and recovery. She noticed her reaction to being ill — it felt wrong and unfair, she was a runner and shouldn’t have been stuck with this virus. Her sons, however, were playing when they had a little energy and resting when they felt unwell. They took the illness in stride and responded to how they were feeling at the time. They didn’t enjoy being sick but didn’t beat themselves up mentally with talks of what should and should not have been. They were dealing with the first arrow, not the second one.
The first arrow is the objective event that causes pain: the “no” from an investor or prospective client, the employee quitting, the senior leader you spent months recruiting deciding not to join.
The second arrow is your reaction to the event. It’s the meaning that you make, the negative stories you tell about yourself, and the emotion you inject into it.
The second arrow is you taking the objective event and torturing yourself with it. “If I were a better Founder/CEO/Salesmen/Recruiter this wouldn’t have happened! This means that I’m not good enough, that I’m bad.”
By fixating on the second arrow, you torture yourself while robbing yourself of your ability to tend to the actual wound.
The point is this: when you get knocked down while playing a hard game, perhaps it’s not a sign that you suck, but that the game is hard.
And perhaps, rather than asking yourself how you managed to suck so bad, the better question is how you can quickly recover and better avoid getting knocked down next time.
Read: https://collabfund.com/blog/its-supposed-to-be-hard/
Questions
Where are you adhering to best practices to the detriment of your vision and creativity? Are you allowing the need for best practices to lead to suffering?
Where are you discontent with your team, family, or community culture? Where are your gaps in embodying that culture yourself, and how can you address them?
In what areas could you afford to acknowledge your playing a hard game? Are there any features of that game that you’re not acknowledging are hard, thus making up stories about yourself and shooting yourself with the second arrow?