Category / proactivity

by Nathan Coumbe

What skill have you developed in the last five years?

For most of us, I’d bet it’s something like this:

“In the last five years, I’ve gotten really good at reading and sending emails and instant messages. But also, I’m really good at going to meetings.”

Not exactly skills you can sell when you’re looking for your next gig, are they?

For those of us who don’t make or sell tangible products for a living, skills are all we have to trade for money. But the nature of knowledge work means more of us are developing fewer skills the longer we’re in our careers.

We’re spending more and more of our time talking about work rather than doing work. We’re building fewer things and completing fewer projects.

AI is only exacerbating the problem, as we outsource more of our making and thinking to AI chatbots (and getting worse outcomes as a result).

Without projects that we do ourselves—without making things that challenge us to learn—we’re deskilling ourselves. And as a result, we’re making ourselves less marketable in the workforce.

The best time to develop a new skill was five years ago. The next best time is today.

by Nathan Coumbe

We’re disconnected from work because work is disconnected from life

One reason I think so many of us are feeling disconnected from work is that work itself is disconnected from our lives.

For most of human history, work was literally and directly tied to living our lives. We hunted and gathered to feed ourselves, our families, and our tribes.

After the Agricultural Revolution, we worked the fields and raised animals to directly support how we lived. At the same time, the idea of markets developed, and we began selling the surplus and byproducts of our work. But the selling itself was still directly tied to the work we’d done previously.

Then the Industrial Revolution hit, and humans went to work in factories. And for the first time in our history, our work was separate in every way from our lives.

We left our farms and our cottage industries (aptly named). We stood at assembly lines for 10 or 12 hours a day, away from our “tribe,” moving or assembling widgets that had nothing to do with our day-to-day.1 We didn’t make the parts, build the factory, or come up with the ideas for what we were making.

But it was also physically separate from the rest of our lives. No longer did we work fields on or near our homes or in little shops in the town square.

Instead, we commuted away from home to work in an alien environment in the most anti-human way possible, literally putting our lives on hold for our shift. And the only things we had to show for it were little bits of paper or metal at the end of the week.

And once the Information Age hit, the disconnect became absolute. Now, most of us are completely disconnected from production altogether. We often don’t “make” things anymore. We administer, we meet, we talk about work through digital (no longer tangible) communication methods. And occasionally, we do something like sort of feels like actual work.

Few of us are close enough to the end product of what’s made, sold, and consumed to actually feel what it is we’re doing.

And now we have generative AI, and we’re steadily offloading what’s left of our work to a little homunculus that does everything for us.

So where does this leave us?

We’re heading toward another revolution, but I think it’s different from what all the AI pundits predict.

I think this disconnect is going to become so severe that we’ll push back and seek to return to the roots of human production.

More of us will step out on our own, or join together in small groups to make things that matter for people who care.

I think this AI revolution will end up becoming a revolution of meaning.

  1. Sure, Ford made sure that every American eventually had an automobile of their own. But it’s highly unlikely that you would have made the very same car that you, yourself, were driving. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

What does the community need?

Benjamin Franklin knew how to make things happen.

He founded the first post office in the (future) United States, its first subscription library, and even established the first fire departments and police force.

He created what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania and the nation’s first learned society (The American Philosophical Society) to promote useful knowledge for the good of the citizenry.

He was able to do this by constantly asking, “What does this community need?”

It might seem like this question is harder than ever to answer. So many of the things we need have already been created.

But even in the digital age, humans need new creations.

Maybe the community isn’t the one you live in, like it was for Franklin. Maybe it’s one you can create online.

Maybe the needs are less tangible than they were for Franklin. We have fire departments and schools, so what do we need now?

Perhaps it’s connection. Or understanding. Or a group. Perhaps it’s a new tool or process.

The needs may be less obvious than they were, but they still exist. And remember, the needs Franklin solved were probably not obvious in his time either, even if they are now in hindsight.

by Nathan Coumbe

You can’t control the weather. You CAN wear a coat.

Seth Godin wrote on Medium that knowing what the weather forecast is give us the illusion of being able to control it. 

Of course that’s not true. 

We seek control in our lives and settle for these illusions without actually being able to do anything about it. 

You can’t control whether or not it’ll snow, but you can prepare by putting on coats and boots.

You can’t control whether or not it’ll rain, but you can stick an umbrella in the car just in case. 

You can’t control whether or not a post you write will go viral. But you can write the post and ship it. And if it doesn’t, you can write another one tomorrow. 

In short, if you want to control something, you can control yourself. Your actions, reactions, words. 

But that’s all you can control. 

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by Nathan Coumbe

If you want to be a teacher…

Teach. 

Make videos. Write blog posts and articles. 

Host a workshop or a live social media “conference”.

Teach what you’re learning and you’ll get better at it. 

It’s a practice. And you don’t need permission.

(Though it helps if you know what you’re talking about.) 

The same holds true for just about any other practice or identity you wish to adopt.

“Just do it” isn’t a slogan reserved only for Nike.

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by Nathan Coumbe

The silent woods

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

“The woods would be silent if no bird sang but the best.”

If all of us waited around until we believed ourselves to be the best at what we did, the world would stand still.

Stop waiting to be the best—heck, stop waiting to get better—and start doing something instead.

“Better” will come with action.

by Nathan Coumbe

The first thing to do when you get laid off…

I lost my job yesterday – nothing to do with me. Something happened with the company, and I was one of the casualties.

There’s nothing I can do about it but to accept the reality of the situation and figure out how I’ll respond, rather than react, to this setback.

And the first thing I did?

I went for a walk.

Even though I really didn’t want to. I did it anyway – and I felt better for it.

When something like this happens, the best thing you can do is to get in some movement. Any form of exercise will do:

  • A long walk
  • A few laps at the pool
  • A great strength session

Get the heart pumping, the blood flowing to your brain, and the endorphins storming throughout your body.

There’s another thing you need to do, too—take your daily dose of motivational vitamins.

I love to listen to Seth Godin and Zig Ziglar on a daily basis – the same messages over and over again until I can repeat them verbatim. Why?

Because when I start repeating what they say—when I can finish their sentences—it means I’ve changed the way I talk to myself. Their messages of hope and success become my thoughts on the same topics.

So, if you’re about to lose (or already have lost) your job, take these two steps immediately.

  1. Get in some exercise (and do something physical EVERY SINGLE DAY)
  2. Take your daily motivational vitamin

By the way, here are two great recommendations from Seth & Zig to get you started:

P.S. Check out my cute little video talking about this very topic.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your dying day

We are all mortal, which means all of us will die someday. That’s obvious.

But there are a few questions we don’t know the answer to, such as…

How long will that be?

How miserable will our dying be?

But there are some other, less depressing questions we can ask as well. And they happen to be questions we can answer on a daily basis…

How did I make life less difficult for others?

How did I influence things for the better?

Better to focus on what you can act on rather than worrying about the unknowns.

by Nathan Coumbe

You are already successful

There is one particular Buddhist philosophy I’m particularly fond of:

Define success as what you already have right now.

So what do you already have that makes life worthwhile?

A loving spouse or partner?

Healthy relationships?

A car that runs?

A roof over your head?

A job that keeps you fed?

It’s even possible for those that have little or nothing. Because as the Stoics would say, you still have your mind—the one thing that cannot be harmed…

That thing that lets you make choices… Or take action.

Some of us—living in war zones or on the street—have lost everything. Even a sense of hope or safety. That cannot, and should not, be minimized.

But where there’s a mind, there’s a spark of potential.

by Nathan Coumbe

Choices

Almost everything that’s ever happened in your life has been the result of a choice.

A lot of it has happened because of your own personal choices.

But even those things that have happened to you completely and totally outside of your control have usually resulted from a choice…

Someone else’s choice in that case. And it created circumstances, good or bad, that affected you.

Interesting, and quite sad, to think about.

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