Grant Baldwin’s Blog

I’ve been reading a fascinating book called, The Starfish and The Spider, which is about the power of leaderless organizations.

Take for example Wikipedia or Craigslist. These are two great organizations that are essentially run and directed by the users themselves. People who have bought and sold things on Craigslist get a sense of the community that is created there, and part of the appeal is that the company hasn’t sold out to advertisers but maintains a simple look and feel and allows the users to direct the flow of the site. Wikipedia is basically an online encyclopedia that is written by and enforced by the users of this online community. People police themselves and are free to edit and add to any entry as they see necessary.

The book examines why these systems work and they pointed out a simple principle that is so true:

Everyone wants to contribute, and everyone has something to contribute somewhere.

What a great thought! I paused after I read that and began to consider those ideas for myself. What do I have to contribute and where am I going to make that contribution? And the same question is true for you…

What are you contributing?

We’re all busy. We all have a lot going on in life. We all live at a very fast pace.

But regardless of how busy you are, we also all have a capacity.

There is only so much that you can do.

If you took a glass and filled it to edge, that represents how most of us live life. No room for margin or error. We live at capacity.

We continue to say ‘yes’ to things that really we can’t handle, because we’re already at capacity.

Here’s a simple idea: If your glass is full, then you can’t add anything to it, until something is first removed from it.

You must say ‘no’ before you can say ‘yes’.

Are you living life at capacity?

At a lot of events I speak at, the participants fill out some type of evaluation form regarding what they thought of my talk. Usually I don’t get to see these, but today in the mail, I received a stack of these forms from a recent event I did. As I read through them, I would say that 98% of them were overwhelmingly positive, but then there was maybe 2% that thought my talk should have been more humorous, less humorous; more stories, less stories; more motivational, less motivational.

As I read through these and saw some of the contrasting statements, I wondered if everyone was even hearing the same talk! Why would one person say I was too funny, someone else said I wasn’t funny enough, and others say it was perfect? Go figure! But I guess I was reminded of two simple lessons.

1. You can’t please everyone all the time. You’re always going to let someone down no matter what you do. You will never have a 100% approval rating.
2. If you have a 100% approval rating, you’re doing something wrong. Yes, you read that correctly. If you’re doing a great job at what you do, you will always rub someone the wrong way. While I enjoy hearing how much students or leaders enjoyed a talk I gave, I also like to see those that disagreed and disapproved of some part of it. To me, that means I’m doing something right.