Author: Andrea Grassi

It’s hard to not talk about what’s happening with Twitter, but aside from the facts, I think this story tell us something more on how we see leaders. 

To me, this traces back to the idea that we want leaders to be indestructible, bold, strong.

This single idea of strong, the idea that the leader will always have the answer, that the leader will always be the one imparting “orders” is very Hollywood like. It’s as if we do expect a hero from a movie to come out of the screen and do the hard work.

People do make mistakes, any person can fail. This is true. In the overall idea of a fictional leader we do expect them to not fail, we confuse that boldness with a guarantee of success, which is not.

Their courage, their stake against the status quo, made some of the most famous leaders in the world who they are. But that doesn’t make them perfect or infallible. 

“Past performance is not indicative of future”, this is true for people too. 

Yes, many leaders did make a difference thanks to their instinct, thanks to their vision, thanks to their skills. This is not to say that we shouldn’t trust them at all, but we should be aware that a leader is a human, like us. 

They can suffer from the same biases we do, they are not immune to those. 

It’s hard to know what will happen to twitter. Maybe this is a good move afterall and everything will turn out great. But, personally, I feel we’ve been intoxicated far too long by this idea of “Bold Leaders”, forgetting all the long history of modest, introvert leaders, that made a big dent in the world (if you’re curious, the book Quiet, by Susan Cain, have some examples on this).

I decided to take a look at the “I am not your guru” documentary of Tony Robbins out of curiosity and I was both impressed and reassured.

Impressed by his ability to craft such experience for an enormous group of people, but more importantly watching it reminded me of how it is important to “dive” into concepts before discarding them.

I have always been a learner. I learn things, I try things. When there’s something you I test it and my knowledge grows with these experiences. I know so much more today thanks to the way I am. Some people are often surprised by this, but it’s not really a special skill, rather I have a quite high tolerance for the unknown, for the chaos, for the new things.

Imagine a child on a beach, his father nearby. The child never went into water, let alone swim.
His father asks him to try and enter the water.
The child puts his feet in it, the water is cold, he comes back.

How much did the child discover of water? How much will he know?
Nothing.

When we try new things our default is to be scared, to reject the new, to discard. It’s both our instinct and our brain that tell us this.
But to know something you need to go deep. You need to be immersed, you need to stay in that water for long.
You don’t need to become skilled, but you need to spend time in it. To feel comfortable, to be able to say “I like this, while I don’t like that”.

If your answer is “I don’t like that” you’ve probably not gone deep enough because in each new thing there is something good, interesting.
The whole experience might not be your thing but you should be able to discern what you like and what you don’t like.
And when I say “Like”, I mean it. “Like” like “If it was only this I could do it for my whole life”.

I believe learning is this. Diving into something, loosing track of where you started and maybe coming back, or maybe go forward with something new, something you found along the way that you didn’t have before.

When we’re kids, we dream big.

“I want to be an astronaut”, we say.
Those are words, but there are some inclinations that we have when we are kids.Skills, one might say, that we didn’t build per se, but that we always owned.

Traits.
Are those traits still with you?

I’m not talking about passions you inherit from others, like loving to dress because in your family someone is always well-dressed, or liking to bike because your father went always biking.

I’m talking about imagination, drawing, kindness, playfulness, shyness, being an extrovert, etc.
Traits we didn’t have *because* we were emulating someone.
Traits we had because we liked or because they were always there.

How many of them are still there, how many were a foundation to the person you are today?

I always thought that we are defined by our experiences, that life changes us (in good and bad ways), but even though I still agree with this, I believe some of those traits were a guiding light in what we would eventually become.

Those were our trajectory.
They would pave the road in front of us.
Those were the bricks, we are the building.

I’ve always been fascinated by the people who are certain of the future.

They know which outcome will happen thanks to an action.

I was never like this. In my entire life I always guessed the outcome and even if I was often right I was never one of those people who was sure that their guesses would prove correct every time.

This might be mostly because I was always a possibilist, someone that takes into account that things change, things are unforeseeable, how people react can not be known for certain.

To my knowledge future can always hold for us something we can’t imaging. Both in personal and professional life. Things can go extremely well or wrong depending on topics we didn’t include into our vision.

That’s the main discussion topic around black swan, masterfully described in the book by the same name by Taleb. Amazon was unforeseeable until it happened, same goes with netflix. You might guess some of it, but rarely to which extend that will happen.

That’s the beauty of life, we know just a little and we can’t know it all.

I’ve been on stage quite some times in the past​, mostly for improv shows.

I remember the thrill before stepping onto the stage, the pressure and the excitement when we played all together.

Improv teaches you how to handle the unexpected and enjoy the process. To me it was very stimulating, a creative process, and I loved every bit of it.

When I look back at those times I can’t help thinking about what it took to perform some emotions on stage.

Specifically: Rage and Joy.

Rage is such an easy emotion to express. It’s quick, it’s cheap. You might say that expressing rage without shouting is more difficult, and it would be true, but at the same time we can’t deny that we can instantly get into a “rage” mood with little or no effort.

Joy, on the other hand, is extremely complex. People see it you’re faking it, all the time and it’s also hard to represent on a stage.

In the book “The art of learning”, Josh Waitzkin listed some examples of how high-performance people (we’re talking of Olympics athletes for example, so the top 1% probably) entered their state of mind before a competition, being it a creative state of mind or a focus/skill one.

One of the techniques is to find an anchor that recalls your memory into a moment when you had that state. The anchor can be anything, a song, some moves to do, whatever, but it must be a real anchor. It must be something that each time strongly evokes that moment.

I believe this is part of the reason we can easily evoke rage. We have strong anchors because rage often relies on of internal inputs that don’t change, while joy also relies on external changes that we do not control.

Internally, rage is fueled by our prejudice, misconceptions, misunderstandings, the way we see and expect the world.

These things hardly change over time (unless you truly want to change them). Also we can easily recall every raging moment because it’s so strong and it permeated our body.

We underestimate joy and that is also the reason why we don’t have as many strong joy moments as the rage ones. Also, we don’t have many anchors so we can’t find an straightforward way to get to that state of mind.