adam brault Hey, i just write here.

Success isn’t a goal, it’s a tool

Accomplishment is an irrelevant trinket, like a merit badge sitting in box of childhood nostalgia.

Sure, shiny is nice, but at the end of the day, success is just leverage to get things done.

It’s a tool that can be employed to more efficiently make the kind of difference you would like to see in the world, whatever that may be.

On the first version of the &yet site, when it was just footloose and freelancin’ ole me, I wrote, “I’d love to hear about your goals and see if I can help.”

That’s not really a marketing line, it’s what I wanted to do for a living—and what I still want to do. It’s really awesome that three and a half years later I still get to do that.

Back to work!

The five stages of cognitive dissonance

An idea is introduced. Legitimate questions and objections are voiced. What follows are the five stages of cognitive dissonance:

1. Defensiveness (and subsequent embarrassment over defensiveness)
2. Internal consideration of original counterpoint
3. Recognition of validity
4. Shame
5. Admission of wrong and reconciliation

Or, at least—upon reflection—that’s apparently how *I* do it.

Joy-induced questions

It’s been really weird to get to live my life for the past three and a half years.

After two years (’06-’07) where I fought a pretty strong urge to just end my life *, I’ve experienced a continuous three and a half year stream of some of the most awesome joy.

Of course, the biggest factor has been all the good things that have emerged in my relationship with my wife Kristi, including getting to be Katie’s daddy. But, in addition, I’ve experienced that joy in business and work, which I wasn’t expecting.

Yes, it’s been a ton of work, but the past few years at &yet have been some of the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything. I certainly don’t deserve that and I’d call 98% of it resultant of the luck of getting to work at &yet with and for some of the most amazing people I’ve ever known.

Baseball sabermetricians talk about regression toward the mean—the idea that bouts of amazing performance or dreadful slumps will get evened out in a large enough sample size—sort of a less fallacious version of the gambler’s fallacy!

When I look at just how *bad* those years were and how *great* the last few were in comparison, I certainly don’t think they’re a yin-yang yo-yo, but I *do* have a lot of questions fo myself that I intend to wrestle with.

A few of the biggest ones, off the top of my head:

1. What elements of the lousy years—learnings, conditions, etc.—created the circumstances within which the next three emerged?
2. What blind spots in the last few years am I missing? (I’d prefer to mine as many points of failure as possible for what they have to teach.)
3. How much of it is really luck?
4. How can I better share what I’ve gained in that time?

These are questions I intend to wrestle with publicly.

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* If that’s the kind of thing you’re struggling with, I am open to talk day or night, anytime. Email me if you want to talk.

The 4 most fascinating quotes I read today seem related.

We face a mounting range of insoluble problems because the DNA of our dominant institutions is based on machine age thinking, like “all systems must have someone in control” and change only happens when a powerful leader “drives” change. Yet, we all know that in healthy living systems control is distributed and change occurs continually. But we are so habituated to the “someone must be in control” mind-set that we fail to imagine real alternatives.

— Peter M. Senge, on the genius of Dee Hock’s approach to “chaordic” systems in building VISA

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We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat, that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened… It is a great word, whose history, I suppose remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, younger brother of another great and often used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.

— Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

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A lack of creativity always looks like some other problem.

— Scott Adams, The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do

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Creativity is just connecting things. 

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. 

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

— Steve Jobs

Finishing: “You are nowhere near here”

I’m a starter and always have been. Maybe you are, too.

It’s my biggest strength, sure, but it’s also my biggest weakness. It often leaves me and my team vulnerable and even holds us back.

Beginning things is an insatiable addiction. I’ve been working over the past few years, trying to train myself into being addicted to finishing instead. But this point, I think, does the best job of that:

To finish, we must always focus on how far we have to go and never how far we’ve come.

Great runners don’t pat themselves on the back when leading after the first leg.

While considering “finishing”, I was reminded of my experiences backpacking and mountain climbing. When tackling an ascent or a long hike, we often have no option but to focus constantly on how far we have to get to the goal rather than how far we’ve come.

When hiking, sometimes there’s no water anywhere but the 12 miles ahead where we’ve marked our goal for that night’s camp. And when climbing a mountain, it’s only when we reach the top that we get the deep satisfaction of having our view of the earth double. 

To keep myself motivated on the trail, there was something I often repeated to myself, while picturing the destination in my mind:

You are nowhere near here.

Again—to finish, we must always focus on how far we have to go and never how far we’ve come.

Here’s why:

1. It’s the distance itself that motivates us to get back to work!
2. In addition, keeping our eyes fixed on the gap between where we are and where we want to be helps us focus our creativity and intellect on ways we can close that gap quicker.
3. Thinking of the goal and our distance from it helps us prioritize our time and cut out what’s unnecessary. What’s more, focusing on how far we have to go keeps us from starting too many things we shouldn’t be taking on. Life becomes easier to balance, as a result.
4. Keeping our eyes on the goal keeps us motivated and more likely to push through the day-to-day discouragements and distractions.
5. Most importantly, either we are doing this, or we aren’t—and if we’re doing it, we better get moving, cos daylight’s burning!

I wanted to find a way to continually reset my mind on the distance ahead rather than the progress behind, so I made this iPhone wallpaper as a reminder: