This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention.
The theme of this newsletter is from Ben Horowitz’s book What You Do Is Who You Are. In particular, “Who You Are” is not static. I don’t get to earn the merit badge of “decent” or “anti-racist ally” or “family man” and keep it forever - I earn that description by acting in that fashion every day and week, and consistently living up to that virtue. And my answer to the question How Will I Measure My Life? will be shown by which virtues I choose when there’s a trade-off to be made.
If I am not spending my time in alignment with my stated values, where I spend my time reflects my actual values - if I am spending more time reading crap or playing on my phone than being with my family or doing anti-racist work, that expresses who I am at this point in time. It’s a challenging perspective, as it forces me to clarify my own values and reflect on why I am not living up to my stated values.
Blog: I’ve read several books that I wanted to share, and even though I say I love writing and sharing my thoughts, I haven’t been doing so. So in the spirit of having my actions express my stated identity, I wrote up my experience of a few books.
What You Do Is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz - the former CEO and current VC wrote this book to help leaders create and sustain the culture they want. By consciously choosing organizational values and consistently acting on them, a leader can create a culture by which their team makes aligned decisions. But you create the culture for your team by your actions, not your words. What you do matters; as I wrote recently on LinkedIn, Do the work, and do it in public.
Me and White Supremacy, by Layla F. Saad helped me to deconstruct the many ways in which our culture reinforces white supremacy, by asking challenging reflective questions to help me confront my own contributions to that culture. The line that struck me was “allyship is not an identity but a practice”; in other words, I can’t be an ally, but can only seek to practice allyship consistently. What You Do Is Who You Are.
The Art of Leadership, by Michael Lopp - I have been a fan of Lopp’s blog Rands in Repose for many years, and in this book, he translates the soft skills of leadership into "Small Things, Done Well", a set of concrete practices that he illustrates with stories that resonate. His capstone chapter is simply “Be Unfailingly Kind”, and you can see how all of the other practices are an expression of what a leader can do to live up to that aspiration.
How do you listen? Do you listen to argue and win, to fix or problem solve, or to learn? And what might change in your relationships if you tried a different mode?
Shifting how you feel about asking for help - since most people love helping others, can you think of asking for help as giving others the joy of helping?
Links:
If you haven’t seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s phenomenal speech decrying cultural sexism, take the 11 minutes to watch it. It relates to this edition’s theme in her point that "Having a daughter doesn’t make a man decent. Having a wife does not make you a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.” Representative Yoho doesn’t get to declare himself a decent man - consistently acting with decency is what makes a man decent.
The skills product managers need to become a director, VP or CPO, by Nikhyl Singhal - this article does a good job of laying out the different mindsets and skills needed on the way from being a rising product manager to becoming a product executive. I like how Singhal articulates the way in which decisions move from being made based on the mastery of details to being made based on the trust of the people with those details, and the way you have to shift what you do to change who you are for each role.
An interview with Tim Ferriss - while I always respected Ferriss’s ability to game the system, I didn’t like his attitude. As I described in my review of The Four Hour Work Week, he gleefully exploited the existing rules for his own advantage, rather than trying to make things better. So it’s fascinating to read that “Whereas Ferriss was once in search of answers to questions about how to do more (and do it more efficiently), he says he’s now focused on going inside and helping you get comfortable being with yourself.” Rather than using external metrics of success, he now advocates for “really truthfully feeling whatever is present”. What a shift!
A note to all my fellow white folks trying to get a quick anti-racism education - just a reminder that we are late to class and it’s on us to catch up, not on others to coddle us or compliment us just for showing up.
I continue to be here to witness, to listen, to learn, to amplify, and to support. Just reach out (eric at toomanytrees) if you want to share, or need a virtual shoulder to cry on, or just need to vent. I also welcome feedback on how I could do better - suggestions welcome.
Thanks for reading. See you in a couple weeks.