There’s obviously a fine line between bravery (or as Seth calls it “guts”) and stupidity, and your options are more limited when you’re not in charge, but nonetheless, his blog today has a useful point.
Years ago, I received the best professional development advice I’ve ever gotten: always GAG once a year. The acronym means “go against the grain”–in other words take on a challenge you are really not sure you can do successfully. Obviously, you will need to be able to “fail gracefully” if you’re not as successful as you’d like, but nonetheless, that’s a good piece of advice.
And here is Seth’s take on it:
Your competitive advantage
Are you going to succeed because you return emails a few minutes faster, tweet a bit more often and stay at work an hour longer than anyone else?
I think that’s unlikely. When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more showing up and more following instructions) you’re racing to the bottom.
It seems to me that you will succeed because you confronted and overcame anxiety and the lizard brain better than anyone else. Perhaps because you overcame inertia and actually got significantly better at your craft, even when it was uncomfortable because you were risking failure. When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options and then go ahead and ship work that scares others… that’s when you succeed.
More time on the problem isn’t the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.