Elise Liu

1. A slice in space that marks our time is a desire path.

2. The aimless feet driving grass back to ground: desire path.

3. You can tell college dorms with the most inter-residential romances by their desire path.

4. The second to the right bathroom stall beckons loudest; don’t use it: desire path.

5. Feng shui calls divine the wind and water. Let it cut through and follow in your desire path.

6. A flotilla of kayaks sets straight out just to hug the lake's safe shore. Call it a weaving, call it a drunken wander--home to adventure, adventure to home—their desire path.

7. Willow trees trawl deep to the veins in riparian loam. Whatever we lack, we desire path.

8. When you are sure, no signpost can stop you. You’ll make your own mistakes on your desire path.

9. How winter smudges out what roads we paved with plans so we have just the ruts of memory to guide us. Snowdrift to snowdrift, our feet break the desire path.

10. How we find our own gorgeousness in the faces of our children. How no one human alone is alive: desire path.

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I'm writing this poem on the bank of Lake Tahoe. Weekends are perhaps better for poems than for essays. But the advice is practical: next time you're in a public bathroom, don't pick the most appealing random stall in the lineup, because other people are more likely to have picked it, too.

This is my 7th day of writing for #ship30for30. If you found it useful, retweet or DM me what so I know what to write more about.

(This post is targeted toward people in business and product functions, but may be useful outside, too.)

I began my career in management consulting - a field famous for long days (70+ hour weeks were typical), high-pressure and arbitrary deadlines, relentless pressure, and constant burnout, especially in how it used up its bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 22-year-old new recruits. (My friends in investment banking had it far worse.)

We were grateful for our luck, so we did what we were told. But “grinding” in my 20s as I was then taught to do led to burnout for me -- and for them. Later, another cycle of burnout happened in my product career.

So when I see viral Twitter and Tiktok conversations about #hustle and #grind culture, I worry about the people caught up in them.

1/ Egoic attachment to hard work = unnecessary suffering.

A successful startup CEO/founder friend recently told me: “Smart, ambitious people who work hard make great entry level employees. It’s the smart, ambitious, lazy ones who make great CEOs."

If you've ever noticed that cleaning the house is more pleasant when also listening to a podcast, or that you'd rather work on a complex new problem than answer the same old question in the 10th email the same day, you know that easeful is not the same as “easy.”

Early in my career, in my commitment to hard work or looking like I was working hard, I was failing to ask the critical questions: Was this work necessary? Was it really my work to do? And could I make it go away in the future?

Ironically, it was laziness that helped me grow from that rut, because it made me keenly interested in how automation, simplification, delegation, and prioritization could help me and everyone around me. It made me lean into flow states that delivered 10x or greater value to my goals than responding to yet another repeated email with the same question (a case that any good PM should tell you is a problem with documentation).

2/ Discomfort is a signal of redirection. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss it.

It’s worth asking why something is a grind—you’re making a lot of phone calls and getting rejections, why do the rejections feel bad? If you’re saying the same thing in meetings again and again but it’s not changing behavior, why not? Pain in our somatic systems is a first signal that something’s wrong:

• We feel unsupported by our environments (physically or relationally);

• We're abandoning our own needs and stretching too far;

• Subconsciously, we don't have hope that more effort matters.
  

If you've felt the difference between your strength when going on a totally optional hike at 1 pm while overheated and dehydrated -- and how you felt after you decided to give up and begin the march back to the car for water -- you're dialing into this set of signals. Our bodies are very good at ignoring suffering when we're committed to what the suffering is for.

So pay attention: why don't you believe in what yours is for right now?

As a panel of successful founders at South Park Commons in SF recently tackled this topic with agreement I find pithy and wise: Success does not feel like a grind. When it's working, you may be working hard, but it feels easy.

3/ Grinding makes you less kind to yourself and others.

Grinding means a bit that you’re doing something you hate, because you think it will be better "one day." But the future just comes from the right now, again and again, and a view upon the future pulls you out of being fully aware of and present with what’s happening right now.

The more I was in a "grind" mode, the less I was present with myself, and the less I was present with others.

Check in with yourself - is grinding making you "difficult," "perfectionist," or "critical"?

Is it making you feel the need to "play hard" after a tough week, or have 2 drinks to unwind after a hard day?

Is it making you resentful of the colleagues who seem to balance work with a full and happy life outside of work, and somehow are doing well anyway, while you bash your head against every wall?

You think they must be cheating the system somehow. You think they must have cracked some code.

They are. They've learned that suffering is redirection -- and to walk around the wall.

This is post #2 in a daily writing challenge, #ship30for30. On Saturday, I wrote about embracing failure as unlock to success; yesterday, I failed to publish this one on time, so here it is late!

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

You should prepare to fail.

I mean it. If I've learned anything from 10+ years consulting and leading teams (at Boston Consulting Group, Meta, and a slew of startups), the work of building is in fact a lot of shots on goal that don't hit goal. Most sales calls get a no. Most products don't meet targets. Most marketing copy bombs.

Specifically for product managers, though, I mean:

• Your product should plan to fail.

• Your strategy should plan to fail.

• Your company and team should plan to fail, and for that failure to be unequally distributed due to dumb luck.

• You--as an individual human being--should plan to fail

What do I mean by this? Let's dig in:

Your product should plan to fail.

Servers crash. Bugs happen. This is the whole point of resiliency: when something breaks, can we "fail intelligently" to keep the impact of what's happened manageable?

During development, planning to fail also means figuring out what really matters. If you ask: “If this feature made the difference between getting this product out by X deadline or not, would you accept it without the feature?” Come to think of it, if X deadline slips, can we survive?

In day to day product development, tradeoffs are choices we make between greater and lesser failures. Put another way: if the bike rides, everything else is a bell or whistle. But if the bike crashes, you should have a helmet on.

Your strategy should plan to fail.

In tech research and development, let's not forget the research side: product bets are opportunities to clarify what your customers want. Sometimes, they don't want it.

This patently obvious corollary to "build an MVP and test it" is still regularly forgotten by product organizations who culturally fail to fully integrate what it means. When my PM friends discuss “toxic work cultures,” this is what it usually comes down:

• Gaslighting: "Oh well, that wasn’t our goal anyway."

• Grinding: Is it safe to share when hypotheses are disproven, or important to keep trying (fix the data, do more, don't acknowledge what happened)?
  

Your company and team should plan to fail, and for that failure to be unequally distributed due to dumb luck.

In fact, every company will fail -- in small workaday ways -- many, many times to reach goals (OKRs! KPIs!) it has set. In a brittle mentality toward failure, that leads to blame-games on a human level.

Planning for failure on a team and company level means, for example:

• Planning for failure to be unequally distributed in how you design your performance systems and incentives.

• Praising people who fail openly for the lessons they can teach others, instead of punishing them for "being wrong"

• Hiring and spending conservatively, because lean times in the industry always come (Meta, Google, and many startups are facing the music on this right now)-- and having a plan to take care of your people if they do

On a personal level: Do you feel safe in your company drawing the short straw on a bug, a reorg, or being assigned a bet that doesn't pan out? If not, leave--this is your life you're talking about.

You--as an individual human being--should plan to fail

You’ll get rejected from most of the jobs you apply for. Most of the people you meet won’t change your life. If you try to write a lot, most of what you write won't be read.

Most of life is spent outside a happy path -- it is constant redirection. This has always been true of the human condition. To really recognize this, and be okay anyway, means doing stuff that you’d be happy to do even if they didn't "succeed"--work you love, with fellow humans you trust and respect.

When I was starting my career 10+ years ago, I was single-mindedly focused on success: what could I do to be right? How could I pick winners? It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that a fairly successful career looks like a lot of little failures much of the way through.

I want to spare you that same mistake. Defang failure, and nothing holds you back from trying. Prepare for failure, both logistically (buy insurance! live below your means!) and emotionally, knowing that you've embraced the worst of what your journey could give you, and every day is upside. We all end up in the same place--that ultimate failure: dead.

Why not enjoy the present moment, and the game of life you're playing, every moment you show up to play?

A few weeks ago, I paid $500 for a cohort-based commitment mechanism (and some classes) on how to write 300 words a day, every day, for a month, from a rather gimmicky program I found on the internet. How did this highly-skeptical, occasionally-published, prizewinning Harvard graduate come to that decision?

In a word: because while I can write, I don't write.

The large language model included in my Pro account on Typeshare says that my atomic essay on procrastination should suggest that I should:

1. Set realistic standards and understand that perfection is not attainable

2. Break tasks into smaller steps to make them more manageable

3. Prioritize progress over perfection

4. Practice self-compassion and embrace imperfections

So my home is full of affirmations, my Tumblr of half-complete poems, and I bless my imperfect work daily. Still, I have never managed to beat my own monsters here, falling off my #100endings commitment well before it was done, and never starting them in the first place.

I feel a bit about this problem what some people must feel about the weight loss guidance "Just eat less." In case: here are some more strategies I've tried:

5. Eliminate distractions through boredom

6. Set up an ideal distraction-free (snack-free) work space

7. Shared and visible accountability with friends

8. Bullet journals and apps with colorful rewards for success

9. Performance-enhancing nootropics

So why not take another page from the weight loss industry?

10. Pay for commitment mechanisms

Note: I have never won a DietBet.

Anyway, in the next 30 days I'll be writing micro-essays on some things that I'm noodling about right now. In the spirit of authenticity and transparency and embracing imperfections, I don't quite know what they are, but I do know some of the outlines I've been avoiding completing for months (or years) now are on such topics as:

• When ambition is good

• Why your CEO is wrong

• The opposite of meta and the nature of irreducible problems

• What HS debate taught me about corporations

• How to stay epistemically humble

• Queerness as culture

• All pain is psychosomatic

• Don't drink oat milk
  

  Other than the last one, they are incomplete and their headline titles are probably bad. Follow me for more hot takes on some cold bevs!

#ship30for30