Forget GROWTH, focus on BETTER
Why do we celebrate the “Fastest growing company”? Why are we excited by the “fastest growing economy”? We talk about growth as if it were something that is always good. What a silly rule-of-thumb. Is there an award for the fastest growing cancer? Andre the Giant grew fast and large. And he was lost early. Why ‘grow’ when we can be ‘better’ instead? What if you GROW your audience but at the cost of quality? What if you GROW your business but distance yourself from the customer, and tank the culture? What if you GROW your economy but life, in trying to keep up with rising costs, becomes
What was the best day of your life?
What was the best day of your life? If you’re struggling to bring something to mind, don’t feel bad. I’m drawing blanks myself. Maybe it was a retreat I did at school in 2011 that opened me up to self-awareness. Maybe it was one of the days I spent in Nepal in 2018. Or maybe it was when the St George Illawarra Dragons won the 2010 Grand Final, after so many years of near misses. Actually, something is coming to mind. It was my 21st birthday. 2nd October, 2015. Originally I thought I didn’t want the hassle or attention of a big party. But I changed my
The Glossary Exercise: Words that mean too many different things to different people.
Charity Wealth Success Career Work Happiness Depression Comfort Freedom God Investing Take a second and ask - what do these words mean to you? I find these words to be some of the most significant words, concepts and ideas in our culture, but equally, that people all have a very different idea of what each term means and refers to. This becomes a problem when we are having a conversation and assume that our conversation partner uses the same definition we do. It makes sense to 1) write your own glossary of these words, as well as 2) figure out the glossary of someone else you are in dialogue with. Take note of the following
Who’s responsible for the Culture?
It was a Sunday afternoon in Sydney, I was sitting in a group of my closest friends and I was not saying a single word. They were talking about life at their workplace - a big, global company, and concentrating on all the negatives. Some crazy things had been going on. Conditions and pay had changed due to the COVID-19 outbreak globally, and there was a scandal in the news that implicated everyone in the company. You see in this scandal, everyone in the company had cheated on a compliance test - everyone from management down to the juniors and grads. I sat there
An Audience-of-None
It was August 2010 and I was teetering with nervous excitement. It was the opening night of our school play - an Oscar Wilde classic called The Importance of Being Ernest. I was playing a female character and cross-dressing for the role, starring as the dithering ‘Miss Prism’. My dream at the time was to take the world by storm by writing stories, acting in them and making films. So on this night, I felt the penultimate excitement of my debut, the first time I was really performing live. Before call time, I snuck out from the dressing room to the dark, empty
Don’t ask HOW Musk does it, ask WHY
Everyone always begins with HOW. But HOW is not nearly as important as WHY. Everyone starts out with the wrong word, and the wrong question. WHY does this happen? Human nature. We want to get where we are going faster. We want to learn what they learnt better and faster, so we can do more. Examples. Sir Richard, HOW do you do it? Everyone asks, HOW has Richard Branson started so many companies? That’s not nearly as useful as asking WHY Branson does what he does. Interestingly, the WHY will unlock the HOW. Elon