John Cutler: commitment

Transcript context

…So those are clearly some of the things on your mind as you're kind of in this period of reflection. I'm curious if you are going to keep writing and keep your newsletter up, maybe publish more books and then just broadly, how do you make time, while you have a day job, to write? Because a lot of people always wonder that. I'm curious if you have any pieces of advice. I'm obsessed with the writing, obviously, and I think a bit of background about me is I was pretty involved in music and song writing and it was similar kind of thing, I just liked writing lots of songs. I like that there's a certain buzz you get when you're creating. And in the case of music, it'd be like you record the demo and you get it out there. I think what people have correctly picked up on is because I have a full-time job, sometimes it'll be Thursday night and my kid's finally asleep and it's one in the morning and I'm just like, "I've got to write this post. " And so sometimes it comes off as being a little bit rough or even accentuating the fact that I don't give them an answer because it's like two o'clock in the morning now and I don't want to give them an answer. I want to go to sleep to do these things. So I think one of the things I'm going to hope to do is maybe be more deliberate about trying to provide at least maybe some mental models for dealing with the mess. I mean there's things like that out there. There's this thing [inaudible 01:23:57], which is a way to understand the systems and decision-making problems have, are you dealing with a clear system, a complicated system, a complex system, or a chaotic system? And I like things like that because that helps do two things I like. One, I want to give people something actionable to be able to address what they're doing, but it doesn't remove the complexity in the particular situation. So I have role models in that. This guy, Simon Wardly does this kind of mapping, which I think is great. There's these other techniques that I want to try to lean into and maybe develop some of my own that sort of help people have something actionable and embrace the mess, if that makes sense. So for example, I recently wrote about something called the leadership, the Pyramid of Leadership, self awareness. And it's a simple model, but it goes deep how I want it to go deep. So the idea is that at first we know nothing about ourself and then the next level is that we start to become self-aware, but believe the whole world is wired just like we're wired. And then you go up to the next level and you believe that the world thinks different things, but you still think your way is the best way to be able to do that. So an example is, I remember talking to an executive and they're like, "People only stay because of their managers and because of their money. That's it." And I said, "Everyone?" They said, "Yes." "Do you believe that?" "Yes, because everyone believes it. It's a physical law of light." And here I am like, "Oh my God, I joined a company because the mission of the company or whatever." id, "Yes." "Do you believe that?" "Yes, because everyone believes it. It's a physical law of light." And here I am like, "Oh my God, I joined a company because the mission of the company or whatever." So they're kind of stuck down on that second level where they believe that, "Yeah, the world thinks different things, but I'm absolutely right." And then as you get up to the top, you become a little bit more aware that there's other valid views and then at the top you're sort of like, "No, you don't dishonor yourself and throw away who you are, but you realize that this is a huge asset in the world, that there's diverse views that you can bring together to do really, really amazing things." So that's an example of some writing I've even done recently where I'm kind of like, it's a complex topic, but I try to make it more actionable to do that. So that's one whole thing. The other thing too is leveraging all the crap that I have. I think it's like 700, 800 posts, maybe 900.…

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