For years, psychologist and meta scientist Adam Mastroianni has had many people tell him they want to change their lives and simplify their careers.
“It would be great to run a little coffee shop,” several have said.
But to Mastroianni, the real test of whether someone wants to own a coffee shop isn’t for him/her to picture himself sipping a cappuccino in Tuscany, but rather to see if he’s given any real consideration to a series of questions.
“Where will you get the beans? How expensive is the espresso maker you want? What will you do when it’s 6 a.m. and your assistant manager calls in sick?” Mastroianni said.
“This is what you’re going to be doing minute to minute, and you’re going to have to live each minute in order. Would you like that?”
Naturally, many tell him no.
The coffee beans procedure is an example of what Mastroianni considers unpacking, asking critical, relevant questions to get a deeper understanding of our motivations and the larger consequences of a decision.
“You might like coffee shops because you like to be in them reading or hanging out, but that’s not what it will be like to run one,” he said.
It’s one of seven concepts that has particularly stood out to me from interviews this fall.
For this week’s Best of 7, I’ve compiled a list of other ideas, mantras and mindsets that have caught my attention in recent weeks.
2. Reflected Glory.
In 1995, Dr. Ken Kamler was 900 feet from the summit of Mount Everest, just two hours from becoming a part of history.
But the snow on the Southeast Ridge had become especially thick after several intense days of weather, and now, Kamler and the eight other members of their expedition had a decision to make.
“When you decide to turn around, it’s very hard,” he said. “We could’ve summited, but we would’ve had to come down in the dark without oxygen, which borders on suicidal.”
Kamler went on a total of six Everest expeditions, never getting closer to the summit than he did that day. While he anticipated friends and family members would be disappointed he never reached to the top, Kamler said he was shocked to find many simply admired his discipline under tremendous duress.
“If you’re climbing Everest because you want to be able to tell people about it and brag about it, then you’re climbing it for the wrong reasons,” he said.
“What I always like to ask myself before I take on any of these kinds of challenges is, ‘If I could never tell anybody I’m doing this and no one is ever going to find out that I’ve done it, do I still want to do this?’”
If the answer is yes, it’s worth doing. Kamler considers that critical life question “reflected glory.”
3. Get the personal narratives to the truth.
Legendary UNC Women’s Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance didn’t like to interfere with his players’ self-belief. But he also wanted them to develop a level of awareness around their actual abilities and a larger understanding of where they specifically needed to improve.
So, Dorrance created the competitive cauldron, a series of 28 different competitions within his program, to evaluate his players’ skills, athleticism and track other relevant metrics.
“You have to get everyone’s personal narrative to the truth as fast as possible,” Dorrance said. “They’re so packed with B.S., they have extraordinary delusions of grandeur.”
The competitive cauldron was brilliant in that it was almost entirely quantitative, and players had no choice after going through it to accept the reality of where they stood.
In essence, what can’t be measured can’t be improved.
“A part of getting everyone’s personal narrative to the truth is to get them a personal narrative,” Dorrance said.
4. Remember and forgive.
In September, I asked University of Virginia Medical Center cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Curtis Tribble about operations he’d performed over the years that didn’t have the desired outcome.
He said those can be incredibly challenging for doctors, who often feel a sense of guilt at not having been able to do more for their patients.
But Tribble learned to find an absolution of sorts through two strategies. First, remembering the patient and doing everything he could to examine what could’ve possibly gone awry during the procedure; and second, forgiving himself by sharing his discoveries with other doctors to perhaps save somebody else down the road.
“You analyze, and you think, and you wonder, and you ask for advice, and you read about it. Then, you continue that process by sharing with others,” he said.
“If you start with the fact that you’re not going to save everybody, and all of us are imperfect and are going to make mistakes — we’re upset and we should be — but if we learn from it and share what we learn with others, we sort of earn some redemption.”
It was a valuable reminder to me that even when we feel we’ve made an error amid high stakes, we can still find a seed of benefit to be better for it down the road.
It may sting and it may be disappointing, but real long-term growth often starts with forgiving ourselves for short-term imperfections.
5. Duct tape and a lot of duct tape.
Cody Royle has written three books and consults for coaches across a range of sports. A few months ago, he told me something that a sports executive mentor of his had shared with him about seemingly top organizations.
“You think these successful teams have all of their ducks in a row, have this perfect culture, and are living their values. But when you peek behind the curtain of successful teams, what you realize is they’re just held together by better duct tape,” he said.
I take that to mean that it’s easy to be envious of our competitors and particular organizational elements of their cultures if we see just a snapshot.
But even those we admire from afar have flaws, sometimes deep ones. They deal with conflict, controversy, ego-management and so many of the other challenges we routinely face.
What I took from the duct tape quote isn’t that it’s about avoiding these hurdles and making sure they never creep into our own culture, but recognizing that while everyone has deficiencies, the elite teams manage to persevere despite these.
6. What real continuity is.
The vast majority of coaches I speak to put immense value on continuity, which we often associate with having familiar faces in our building from one year to the next.
But Georgia Gwinnett College Baseball Coach Jeremy Sheetinger opened my eyes to the fact continuity isn’t solely dependent on roster retention. It’s just as much about upholding the larger values, systems and cultural norms year to year, then teaching these from the very beginning when a new season starts.
“I have to go back to the letter ‘A’ and culturally teach why we do what we do from minute one,” Sheetinger said. “You have to be intentional, persistent with it and unwavering.”
The ability to teach something seemingly elementary over and over without losing larger enthusiasm is uncommon, but can be a critical differentiator between fleeting triumph and sustained success.
“We teach how you enter our classroom. We teach how you walk through the hallways. We teach how you stop in offices of other coaches and say hello,” Sheetinger said.
7. Prepare, practice, plan.
Air Force Col. Kim Campbell told me this three-word mantra was a critical part of her military training decades ago and helped her remain calm amid chaos after her aircraft was struck by a missile over Baghdad in 2003.
“Any time you’re going to put some effort in to do something, it’s all about preparing — doing the homework, doing the research, seek out lessons learned,” she said.
“Then, practicing, whether that’s actual practice, visualization, having a tough conversation, whatever it may be. Then, planning for those contingencies, thinking about the things that could go wrong.”
It's the latter that I found most intriguing. In the Air Force, it’s a given that not every mission will go as planned, but thinking through the most likely disaster scenarios and what the physical and emotional response will be puts fighter pilots in the best possible position to get through it.
It’s not about averting potential hazards or hoping they don’t appear. It’s about having a plan in place for when they do.