Just take the win already

I’ve been reading business books since the early 90s. Stuffed with cliches which unfortunately I would ignore until I found myself in the exact situation the cliche was trying to warn me about. I probably got them wrong more often than I should have, but a few stuck.

Don’t break into jail. I’ve done this one so many times. Everything’s oh-so-fine and I go running straight into the one situation that will start a problem where there wasn’t one. Nobody asked me to and nobody needed me to, but I couldn’t leave it alone. Now I’ve got a fire to put out that didn’t exist ten minutes ago.

Say less. So many times I tried to fill the silence and it just created problems. I’m a recovering nervous-talker. The silence felt uncomfortable so I’d keep talking, keep explaining, keep adding context that nobody needed. Better to just think, listen, and say less.

When you’ve sold, stop selling. A special flavor of “say less.” You’ve convinced the leader to fund the project, or the customer’s going to go with your proposal, and then you keep talking. You introduce a new angle or a caveat that wasn’t there before, and now the person who was ready to say yes is thinking about it again. It’s a newbie thing, mostly, but I’ve done it myself.

Not everything is urgent. I used to get demoralized with how slowly the wheels of corporate life turned. Approvals taking weeks, meetings to schedule meetings. But the slowness sometimes killed work that shouldn’t have been done in the first place. Some request that felt urgent on Monday just evaporated by Friday. Embrace the float.

Say it, forget it. Write it, regret it. This one isn’t from a business book, but rather, from Dorinda Medley of Real Housewives of New York City and Berkshires fame… I think about this one often with Slack, text messages, and email. You fire off a frustrated message and it’s there forever, screenshot-able, forward-able, quotable in some HR meeting two years from now. But I care less about the paper trail and more about the fact that in-person discussions have more peace-making power. You can read expressions, tone, humor, and so much that gets lost in the letters.