TWH#S5: What I Read This Week

The Sunday Edition #5

Welcome to another TWH Sunday Edition. 🤝

This week’s edition is a bit different. Instead of 5 posts, I’m sharing with you some of my favorite book highlights I’ve re-read this past week. The bold emphasis on each quote is mine and is there to let you know what really resonated with me personally.

In the meantime, if you like this edition, it’d be awesome if you hit the ❤️ button, too. And consider subscribing to the Hagakure if you haven’t already. 🙂

Without further ado, please kick back and enjoy. ☕️📚

---

When it comes to coaching other people, our research shows that excavating and articulating an individual’s personal vision is crucial. More than resolving immediate problems and more than trying to help someone achieve a set of prescribed goals or meet certain standards, uncovering a person’s hopes and dreams is the key that unlocks positive emotions and intrinsic motivation—and propels that person to genuine, lasting change.

Our point is this: to help other people, we have to focus on them, not on our vision of how we think things should be. We have to understand them. To understand them, we have to talk to them and discover their views of the world, their situation, and how they feel. It’s true— to effectively coach or help anyone, we need to find out what the other person is feeling as well as thinking. Sadly, what the other person is thinking is often assumed, especially by people in professional helping roles.

She first built rapport with him by inquiring about his professional and personal journey and being interested to know his story. She also asked about his desired outcomes for their coaching engagement, summarizing those in a document to anchor their process. In subsequent sessions, she prioritized his goals and agenda for their time together and regularly asked what he was taking away from their conversations to help him reflect. And while she asked a number of questions designed to help Sean connect with the best of who he was as a person and a leader, she spent the majority of time actively listening and serving as a mirror back to him of what she heard.

---

Extreme Programming (XP) is about social change. It is about letting go of habits and patterns that were adaptive in the past, but now get in the way of us doing our best work. It is about giving up the defenses that protect us but interfere with our productivity. It may leave us feeling exposed.

Everything in software changes. The requirements change. The design changes. The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is our inability to cope with change.

Just as the customers steer the content of the system, the whole team steers the development process, beginning with its current set of practices. As development continues, the team becomes aware of which of their practices enhance and which of their practices detract from their goals. Each practice is an experiment in improving effectiveness, communication, confidence, and productivity.

Designing software is not done for its own sake in XP. Design is in service of a trust relationship between technical and business people. Weekly delivery of requested functionality is the cornerstone of that relationship. It doesn’t matter what the theoretical best way to design might be. The convenience of the designers is lower on the priority list than maintaining the diverse relationships that create value within the team.

---

Appreciating our agency over inertia’s impact teaches us how to shape it into a positive force. When we develop productive (rather than destructive) habits or routines—e.g. exercising first thing in the morning, eating the same nutritious breakfast, taking the same hyperefficient route to work each day—inertia is our friend, keeping us grounded and committed and consistent.

Remember this the next time you wonder why it’s taking you so long to identify a job or career that fully engages and fulfills you. You need years, not months, of experience to develop the knowledge base, the work habits, and the relationships that will enable you to slice the loaf down to a single sliver of expertise that is yours to own. And, to further torture the metaphor, you have to let the loaf bake fully before you can slice it.

The most accurate observation, from a woman I’ve been coaching for a dozen years, was more mundane. My gift, she said, was not getting bored by repetitive activity, such as delivering my message more than one hundred times a year with the same level of enthusiasm. “Lots of people understand motivation,” she said. “Not many can stay on message.” Until she said it, I’d never regarded that ability as anything special. My only response was “Thank you.”

“Authentic empathy,” he says, “is doing your best to be the person you need to be for the people who are with you now.” (…) If I could have only one index card to carry with me for the rest of my life, so I could look at it any time of day as a reminder of how I should behave to achieve an earned life, this would be the message I would write on it:

“Am I being the person I want to be right now?”

And while we’re at it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more beautiful book summary than this one:

Visual synopsis of “The Earned Life” by Dani Saveker

---

From an evolutionary perspective, the brain is masterful at either/or thinking, and it doesn’t like the nebulousness of both/and. From the earliest times, the brain has had to quickly determine if something was safe or dangerous. The brain focuses the eyes on the foreground or on the background. Where there’s work to be done, we have to decide whether to do it now or do it later. The brain craves predictability, either to keep a few steps ahead or simply to be able to focus mental energy on something more important. Seeing things in opposition is hardwired into our brains, which makes it completely logical and understandable that we would have to work harder to hold a both/and mentality.

The fact that we have no word for the nut and bolt together means that we can only about, or make sense of, them as two distinct objects that sometimes join together. This dilemma is incredibly limiting. What do we call a leader that harmonizes competion with collaboration? What do we can it when an organization balances decentralization and centralization? Structure and flexibility? Some would argue that not having words for these states means that we are incable of seeing and understanding them fully.

Because the group has harnessed the tension and turned it creative, a virtuous cycle is begun. The system can being to experience the benefits of both poles, leading to higher morale and commitment. The trust and respect built during the process deepens communication and relationships, which can lead to better results in areas that have nothing to do with the polarity at hand and make the system more prepared to quickly solve problems in the future with less turmoil.

---

You are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental effects when you were younger. You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future.

You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.”

Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.

I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.

The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.

—

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Edition. Thanks for reading The Weekly Hagakure! And if you liked this, please consider hitting the ❤️ button and sharing the post.

Subscribe below for free to receive new posts and support my work. And until the next edition, I wish you a great week ahead. 🙌

Thanks for reading The Weekly Hagakure! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.