The Insider - July 2024

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Welcome to the July edition of the Insider. Do you know someone who would enjoy the Insider? Forward this email to them and they can subscribe here.

Playing it safe

Last year the New Yorker profiled Scott Frank, a screenwriter who built a career rewriting other people’s screenplays. Frank is a rare talent; he charges $300,000 per week to come in and save the day. It’s a good gig if you can get it, but it’s also a prison. Frank has become so busy helping other people achieve mastery of the silver screen that he’s had little time to pursue his own. Another screenwriter put it like this, “There is something so vulnerable and frightening about doing your own thing, because it’s your fault if it doesn’t work. And then there’s this other kind of work, where you’re paid an extraordinary amount of money, you’re the hero before you walk in the door, you’re not even held that accountable, because you have a limited amount of time, and all you can do is make it better.”

The article ends with Frank writing his own scripts from start to finish. It’s a predictable storyline: writer plays it safe for years before finally finding his own voice. Such stories invite reflection in our own lives about where we might be ignoring the call. But they also presume that the only stage to act out our courage and creativity is in the professional domain. Perhaps this is a uniquely American phenomenon; that our other stations in life—partner, child, parent, peer, coach, neighbor, hobbyist—are mere sideshows in the unfolding of our bravery and originality.

The pointy edge of ambition

For the ambitious, it is easy to get swept up in a cycle of endless striving and forget what all that ambition is precisely for. There is a lifestyle-creep to ambition. What was once the desire to achieve something can quickly become an all-encompassing way of being where we must do everything, everywhere, all at once. When ambition becomes embodied instead of directional, we neglect trade-offs. We ignore constraints. We over-extend. We zone out and wake up years later. Ambition is not meant to be an inexorable hunger fanning out in every direction. Instead, it is best as a thin vector with a pointy edge, carefully aimed.

On intolerance

As a manager, your team will notice what you tolerate far more than they will remember what you say. The edges of our tolerance—what we tolerate and what we don’t—influence our team’s ability to stay aligned, self-correct, and drive towards excellence. It is one thing to set clear expectations, but it is another thing to enforce those expectations in consistent and fair ways. Managers tend to make two mistakes:

The edges of their tolerance are soft, and their team quickly realizes that subpar actions don’t have consequences.
Their tolerance is inconsistent and the team is left constantly guessing.

Being an excellent communicator is table-stakes for a good leader, but what sets great leaders apart is designing clear rules where everyone knows what game they’re playing and how to win.

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What I am reading

The story of why strawberries and blueberries have tasted better than ever. How Driscoll’s figured out how to breed, produce, and sell its most flavorful berries. Wall Street Journal.
What the childhoods of exceptional people have in common. The correlation between extraordinary outcomes and non-traditional formative years. Escaping Finland.
Does the future of America look like Phoenix? The city is a microcosm of America and the challenges in faces in the next decade. The Atlantic.
Illegal eel smuggling is a $4 billion per year industry. It is the world’s most profitable wildlife crime, and its epicenter is Maine. The New Yorker.
In only two generations, Americans’ ability to break into the middle class has changed. Race has come to play a smaller role in upward mobility, while economic class plays a larger role. The New York Times.
The problem when cars become computers that need constant updates. The perils of over-technologizing everything. WIRED.

Something personal

Have you ever walked through an aspen forest in the middle of the summer? Something bigger is afoot. Maybe it’s the timing; those few weeks when the entire ecosystem is at its lush, verdant pinnacle. Or perhaps it is the bustling understory of plants that are home to a constituency of butterflies and voles and deer fawns. It could be the dappled sunlight that pierces through the canopy to cast everything in a green-yellow glow beneath. Or maybe, in a culture that prizes individualism, it is the reminder of our interconnectedness; the trees who rise up like regal pillars around us are not individual members, but representatives of one organism that is both seen and unseen, both entirely obvious and completely mysterious. Perhaps it is being welcomed into something so inscrutable and vast that we give ourselves the permission to get caught up in the larger, metaphysical overstory.

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From Colorado,

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