These three kinds of strategy are separate but related. Doing any one in isolation produces an inferior result.

Business strategy, without thought about how it comes to life in people’s hearts and minds, tends to be a PowerPoint deck that sits in a drawer.

Marketing strategy that doesn’t accurately synch with the underlying business and brand is like putting lipstick on a pig.

If you’re researching one or more of these disciplines for the first time, you’ll quickly uncover a lot of complex jargon, interesting frameworks, and experts who disagree profoundly about basic terms.

If you’re a typical leader, you don’t want the deep dive or—particularly when it comes to brand strategy—a magic carpet ride. You want definitions you can use… ones that are simple, contemporary and immediately practical.

Here are mine.

Business strategy

Business strategy is essentially about opportunity.

Its language is that of mechanical physics and geography: opportunity spaces, blue oceans, leverage, positioning, power.

It involves seeing what’s not there, and applying physical and financial capital thoughtfully to make it happen.

Good business strategists excel at effectual reasoning. They see the world around them in terms of deeper systems and patterns. Steve Jobs of course is a perfect example.

Brand strategy

Brand strategy is essentially about relationships.

It involves cultivating ideas, aligning group efforts, executing powerfully, and building trust with diverse stakeholders.

It includes internal relationships (“culture”) and external ones (“brand”). As any good VC will tell you, this soft stuff is actually the hard stuff.

The technical term for the soft stuff is human capital, and according to at least one recent study of the S&P 500 it accounts on average for 80% of a business’s value.

That’s a striking finding and worth repeating: human capital—not starting conditions, financial reserves, or technical expertise—accounts for the vast majority of a business’s value.

A strong and intuitive understanding of how to optimize human relationships is vital to any organization’s long-term success.

Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy is essentially about communication.

It includes what an organization says and how it listens. Who it speaks with and where.

Good marketers, like any good strategist, focus on negative space—in this case, on what’s unsaid.

Marketing includes many sub-specialties: inbound marketing, outbound marketing, analytics, general storytelling, communications design, advertising, PR, etc.

But in each permutation it’s always about deliberate and effective communication.

# # #

The framework above is a simple one, but I find it works well for small organizations and youngish ones trying to put a dent in the universe.

I find it particularly helpful for reframing brand strategy, which too often is lumped in with marketing, or dismissed as something mystical and fluffy.

More on that in my next post…

Most assume that in-person sessions are better, but that isn’t necessarily true.

In-person sessions can be uniquely powerful, but as a coach and coachee I’ve been iteratively surprised over the years at how effective phone-based coaching can be.

If you’re looking for a coach, but are skeptical about whether phone-based sessions are right for you, here are some thoughts to consider.

Coaching in person: the pros

As we often hear, over 70% of communication is non-verbal. And the bulk of that is neither fully conscious nor fully visual.

In an in-person session, coaches can demonstrate support, acceptance, and engagement through their physical presence and body language.

They can model deep presence and equanimity.

They can observe the coachee’s body language moment to moment.

Nothing fully replaces the immediacy, the richness of in-person communication. Hence the expression: “I need to speak with you in person.”

Coaching in person feels more real… and gives both the coach and the coachee more data to work with.

Coaching in person: the cons

That said, more isn’t necessarily better, and just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s more effective.

Coaching is designed to transform a person’s mental maps into patterns that are more effectively in line with their goals.

Only the coachee can do this, one insight and one action at a time. The coach can create context, but is as best a guide.

A principle of good coaching is that the coachee does most of the work.

Some coachees will consciously or unconsciously seek the familiarity of in-person communication to push responsibility onto the coach.

This can manifest in many ways, such as extra time spent on pleasantries at the start of sessions, or showing up less than fully present.

Coachees are also often traveling or dealing with work communications up until the very last minute before in-person sessions, and so their brains are abuzz with information. Settling the mind and deeply engaging are then more difficult.

The coach also has challenges to manage to that are unique to in-person sessions.

She will have to invest in travel time and/or the overhead of maintaining a physical office.

She will have to watch more carefully for any tendencies to get caught up in the coachee’s emotional energy or stories.

She will have to manage more artfully taking good notes without breaking eye contact or seeming less than fully attentive.

A good coach is capable of all these things. But these extra efforts cost time, money, and energy.

This is why most coaches charge more for in-person sessions.

Coaching over the phone

Delivering quality coaching over the phone has some constraints, but those constraints create some unexpected positives.

Without visual information and embodied energy, coaches and coachees have less data to process. But there are still millions of pieces of data to attend to every second.

When I’m coaching someone via phone, I find myself paying extra attention to breathing, pauses, and what’s unsaid. The restricted data stream in some ways makes me more focused.

Without my own body language and presence to help communicate, I choose my words with extra care. Coachees frequently do the same, so communication is generally clearer, insights sharper.

For phone-based sessions, coachees must take responsibility for being fully present. They must create systems to eliminate work, environmental, and digital distractions beforehand. As a result, they tend to show up very focused.

Since our shared memory is built entirely out of words, over the course of multiple sessions we’re both more able to notice and examine patterns of language.

For the coach, phone sessions are efficient and convenient to schedule: coaches can be anywhere in the world, so long as they have systems in place to be fully present. Most coaches charge less for phone-based sessions.

Beyond the phone

Some coaches attempt to combine the benefits of in-person and phone coaching through video calls.

I use video calls extensively for consulting work, but personally I’m not yet a fan of them for coaching.

Compared to in-person sessions, I miss the non-visual, embodied energy in the room as a source of information. Compared to audio-only sessions, I miss the restricted data stream and the ability to isolate thoughts and words.

I used to do a fair bit of (non-coaching) work in Second Life, and imagine that virtual environments might become highly effective for coaching. For my business neither the need nor the technology is quite there, but I suspect that will change in the decade ahead.

Though phone coaching has many advantages, one pattern is consistent: the majority of my coaching relationships begin in some way in person.

Seeing and talking with someone in person gives coachees maximum information so they can build comfort and familiarity with a coach’s disposition, style and knowledge.

For this reason, I try to schedule in-person sessions at the start of a coaching series and whenever I am in the same city as my clients.

Once coaching is underway, many of my clients transition to the more flexible benefits offered by over-the-phone sessions, though some still prefer the convenience or challenge (as they experience it) of coaching face-to-face.

As always, I let coachees choose what’s best for them.

Either way my answer is no.

Some context: I am an early adopter and daily user of both platforms. I’ve studied their businesses and believe they work very differently. I predict both companies will continue to thrive for a long time.

But there is one distinction I would make.

I think Facebook today, for all its current success and momentum, is in a trickier position than Google.

In the past year, Google has signaled its intentions on multiple fronts, and launched several major initiatives, Google+ included, that are just starting to bear fruit.

One could extrapolate from today’s evidence, even against a backdrop of incredible technology change, what Google’s business model and suite of resilient offerings will likely be in a year or two or three.

But Facebook’s future state is far less clear. After its IPO, what will its next move be?

My admittedly simple assessment is this:

Google today is facing execution risk. Facebook is facing strategy risk.

Everything that rises must leap, and leap again

Here’s what I mean.

The mathematician Geoffrey West has modeled impressively the trap that all successful global enterprises are in: they must continually reinvent their core strategies to avoid endgame.

See in particular his comments at the 14:52 minute mark in the talk below, and the graph entitled “Unbounded Growth Requires Accelerating Cycles of Innovation to Avoid Collapse.”

Hockey stick growth in other words is not just a blessing and an accomplishment: it’s a wake-up call that a reinvention is imminently needed.

My interpretation is that Google in the past year has jumped to a new curve, while Facebook has yet to do so. Facebook’s business will continue to evolve, but I would keep an eye out for a major leap, not ongoing linear advances.

Leading while leaping

Facebook and Google are just examples, of course. Anything written about them instantly becomes dated.

West has identified the real trend, which is that for global enterprises “always-leaping” has become the new norm.

Last year, Ram Charan and Michael Sisk wrote an excellent piece describing how Dow Chemical and other global enterprises had navigated these kinds of daring, bet-the-farm jumps.

What I loved best about the article is how the authors explore in detail the cross-sector conditions that make these leaps necessary, and also how our notions of leadership and culture must adapt to these new circumstances:

“The need to make strategic bets, and be prepared for them, will ultimately change the way many business leaders regard strategy. In addition to their existing concerns — their company’s functional strengths, arrangement of business units, and portfolio — there will now be the presumption of a more dynamic, ambiguous, and difficult business environment. The only way to manage this environment, in a collected and capable manner, is to think in terms of external strategy, to continually cultivate an outside-in view of the company in which strategic bets are not automatically resisted, but are instead dispassionately evaluated.”

For large enterprises, this is the new reality. For some, this new time will be very exciting, for some it will be too much. But there is no real alternative.

Rise of the indies

At least for enterprise.

Startups and SMBs, and new networked collaborations—what Bryce Roberts together calls “indie businesses” —are growing very differently.

Startups can have real exits, and SMBs can have gentler growth curves than what West describes.

Enterprise is still extremely important, given that it drives our economy and creates context for future innovation. But that is changing.

For a great thought piece on this, see Chris Devore’s recent post on the future of work, where in addition to quoting Roberts, he talks about the unique opportunity spaces that are opening for individuals.

So: it’s worth asking yourself regarding your current company direction or personal career path: are you facing execution risk or strategy risk?

And… is it time to take a leap?

When done well, at the right time, it’s useful and clarifying.

When done poorly, or at the wrong time, it’s soul-sucking. Instead of accelerating your business, it can grind it to a halt.

A quick web search will turn up many strategic planning resources, all describing the same elephant. Thankfully there is a general consensus about what a strategic plan is and does.

Some of those readily-available frameworks are quite detailed, and in certain contexts, those details can be valuable. My tools however tend to be simple.

Here is a format and conceptual process for strategic planning that I’ve found works well for businesses of all kinds.

The why

A strategic plan helps an organization optimize its efficiency and impact.

The when

It’s usually created when:

1. You realize your business does not have a strategic plan.
2. You are reaching the end of the previous strategic plan.
3. You must react to major external or internal shifts.
4. You are choosing proactively to grow or change the business.

The what

Here is what a final strategic plan includes, and how the pieces knit together:

It can be shared on a wall, in a Google Doc, or via a sophisticated online dashboard or task management system. It might have deeper details, but the basic template is the same for all organizations, in any situation.

Step 1—Start with Vision

Vision is where most organizations lose the way.

Vision tells everybody internally where you’re headed.

Vision is not a lofty and vague aspiration or a pleasant fantasy about the future.

It is either:

• An ambitious, measurable, time-delimited goal
• A short description of the disruptive innovation you intend to create
• An honest answer to the question: “What do you want?”

If a vision is not articulated, then a secret one is at work. Examples: “Preserve the internal culture at all costs” or “Just get through the year.”

If your vision is primarily about your internal systems, not your external impact, then you have a hobby, not a business.

Step 2—Define Objectives

Choose 4-7 objectives—really, no more—that support your vision, capturing all the major functions of your organization: current services, operations, marketing, culture, experiments, etc.

Make sure each objective is measurable, meaningful, and doable. The time horizon will vary depending on your unique situation.

Then, assign a clear owner for each objective. This usually provokes some epiphanies regarding your organizational structure.

Step 3—Choose Strategies

Identify 1-5 strategies that you will use to accomplish each objective.

Strategies ideally are not simple tasks that can be accomplished in an afternoon. They should be complex initiatives that will last for at least a few months.

Examples: “Hire the agency Walk into Mordor to design and implement our PR campaign,” or “Launch a new app-based version of our proprietary content, targeted at golfers aged 45-65,” or “Overhaul our board and advisory board composition to match our new long-term vision.”

Assign an owner to each strategy. And then:

For each strategy you must define not only how you will know if the strategy was executed but also how you will know if it was successful.

If you skip this very important step, your strategic plan turns into an endless list of to-dos. Some strategies will fail, and those failures will be educational. If all of your strategies are sure to succeed, you are likely being too naive or too conservative about your business growth.

Step 4—Develop the Plan

Identify the key activities and milestones needed to accomplish and assess the strategies. The plan can be to whatever level of detail and in whatever format makes sense for your business. Typically, it’s a Gannt chart.

The how

The shell above is the one I would use and populate for all organizations. Larger organizations will require deeper and more sophisticated content—for example, calling out critical success factors for each objective—but the template is the same regardless.

Most of the important variations you see between different strategic planning approaches are not about the outline, but the process used to populate it. One reason for this is that many organizations use strategic planning as a mechanism to align people and generate insights.

Here it’s important not to a follow someone else’s methodology blindly. Enrolling and aligning people and coming up with great new ideas can take place as part of strategic planning, or separately. I’ve seen highly successful strategic plans that were imposed by a CEO with little input or collaboration, and ones built iteratively through complex, multi-stakeholder engagement models that completely failed.

Generally speaking, there is no process that will compensate for a weak leader, a shortage of good ideas, a lack of useful and actionable information, or a failure to implement usable management tools.

The “how” can vary not only based on organization’s size and maturity but also its type. The Wikimedia Foundation has modeled how to do strategic planning with large networks, with a resulting direction that’s both “bottom-up and outside-in.” The Transition Town movement has articulated a great process for strategic planning with communities. I’ve written about these different organization types before: they allocate and optimize power in ways that are very different from traditional, closed organizations. And a growing number of organizations these days are hybrids—e.g., a private company that is porous to a network that it incubates, or a public institution that is inter-dependent with a larger community.

Optimizing your strategic planning process for efficiency, inclusiveness, consensus, or emergence might make sense or it might not depending on your circumstances.

When in doubt, look for an experienced facilitator who is aware of multiple different methods who can make a custom and context-appropriate recommendation.

Several people have asked me recently about the particular tapes and programs I use. Below are some of my favorites, which I’ve also added to the Next Us resources page.

Meditating alone or with a group, guided or unguided, are all different experiences. Each one is worth trying.

Personally, I find for my daily morning meditation that recorded instruction usually helps deepen my practice, leading to more calm and better insights.

1. Meditations to Change your Brain

This is the companion audio CD to the excellent book Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, which I’ve written about before. Half of the tracks explain the neuroscience behind the various meditation techniques, and the rest are guided meditations of 5-20 minutes each. There are some references to Buddhism here and there, but in general the CD uses colloquial language and is meant to be practical for a broad audience.

2. Meditation for Beginners

Jack Kornfield is a teacher famous for bringing ancient insight and mindfulness meditation practices to the West. The frame for this CD is more explicitly Buddhist, with references to concepts like the Four Noble Truths. As with the recording above, half of the the tracks are background teachings; the rest are “listen-along” guided meditations.

3. Appropriate Response

Pamela Weiss is the founder of Appropriate Response, a mindfulness-based leadership development and coaching organization. On the AR website, she offers a number of free .mp3 guided meditations of varying lengths, all very good.

4. Stress-Proof Your Brain: Meditations To Rewire Neural Pathways for Stress Relief and Unconditional Happiness

This is another invaluable CD from Rick Hanson, with an apt title. These meditations are slightly longer, averaging around 15 minutes each.

5. Recover Your Center with Conscious Embodiment: Audio Practices That Develop Presence, Confidence, and Compassion

Tiphani Palmer of Conscious Embodiment spoke at a recent Next Us event and eloquently shared some of the history and benefits of these Aikido-based centering techniques.

6. Guided Mindfulness Meditation

These Jon Kabat-Zinn meditations follow the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program he pioneered. This program requires a more serious time investment, but has scientifically proven effectiveness helping people with chronic pain and several other medical conditions.

• What do you want?
• Who is your customer?

I’ve written about vision recently. Vision is essential because it focuses your attention. Where you focus your attention creates your world.

Knowing your customer is also essential. But surprisingly, in all their day-to-day busyness, companies can easily forget exactly who they are trying to serve.

The art and science of customer segmentation can get a bit complicated, but there’s a simple framework I’ve been using with enterprise, SMB, and startup clients for the past few years that seems to work well to sharpen thinking and provoke new insights.

If you’re an entrepreneur planning a new phase of growth, I suggest using each of the four filters below to identify your current or ideal customers. List the possibilities for each one, taking breaks in between to recharge your mental batteries. Then look at your answers, cluster any groups that naturally go together, and prioritize where to focus your energy.

The Four Filters

1. Demographics
2. Psychographics
3. Occasions
4. Categories

Demographics

Demographics cover basic objective data about your customers, including their gender, location, and economic status.

Almost all enterprises know this information cold. By contrast, many small business owners don’t articulate this precisely for themselves. But it’s useful to get really specific here; it narrows your focus and highlights things you might not otherwise see.

Tip: Everyone at first thinks their customer is “everybody.” Move quickly out of that trap.

Psychographics

Psychographics refer to your customers’ values, wants, and needs.

To be honest, many companies are terrible at this kind of segmentation. Asked to describe their target customers, they respond with some version of: “People with a vague spiritual ache that can only be met by our current offering exactly as it is today.” Their error in other words is projection, seeing others through an overly subjective filter.

Good psychographic profiling requires data—quantitative data—about how your customers experience the world from their point of view. Luckily, many people know how to do this kind of research, and if you’re in a mature category, there are often freely available reports that can help get you started.

If psychographic research is new to you, never fear, simply start with your best assumptions about what your customers value and find smart ways to test those assumptions.

Tip: Avoid projection. Get data.

Occasions

Some situations create their own customer segments, where the usual demographic and psychographic differences between people cease to matter as much. People standing in line at the post office tend to behave like people standing in line at the post office. Planning a wedding, searching for a divorce lawyer, or finding a last-minute table for four with no reservations are all occasions that generate their own set of predictable human behaviors.

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you probably have a good sense of how and when people come to use your services. Write down these different occasions, and try brainstorming some new ones.

Tip: Occasion-based profiling can often unlock some powerful new ideas about how to market your business or extend your product and service offerings.

Categories

And last, most mature categories come with their own built-in expectations. If your business doesn’t meet those expectations, you have to call out those differences and spin them as positives, or else commit to adding the services and features that your customers expect. Example: an urban coffee shop that does not offer wi-fi could market itself as a place for in-person socializing and personal connection, free from digital distraction. Or it could invest in wi-fi.

Tip: Compare your psychographic targets to the expectations for your category. Anything that makes you different must be a plus to the customers you are trying to reach.

1. You don’t know how to filter the multiple good opportunities before you.
2. You don’t know what big risk to take next.
3. Your top priority is preserving the existing system.

Vision is a goal. It is not a story, an idea, or plan. It is not a means to an end—it is the end itself.

All systems are dynamic, so visions once achieved can’t be maintained forever without new risks, new goals—in other words, new vision.

Is vision really that important?

There are many excellent articles about the tension between vision and execution and which of the two matters most. The question is a good one, but like all really great questions there is no universal black-and-white answer. Vision and execution are both always necessary, but visions tend to look a little different depending on the size and maturity of an organization:

• Large-scale enterprises tend to have visions that are formal, with clear metrics and time horizons (often 3-5 years) that can align efforts across many diverse constituencies.
• Startups can usually get by with a short statement of the disruptive innovation they’re trying to create, and then a rigorous focus on the 90-day plan.
• A small business‘s vision is often implicitly linked to the life vision of the founder, so the two must be looked at together and either merged or de-coupled.

For more thoughts on vision, see my earlier post “What do you want?”

If you still don’t believe that vision’s important, just ask a giant robot dinosaur.

For most big choices, there is no objective right answer, a single definition of success. To move forward in business and life, you must know what you want.

Having a vision

In business, knowing what you want is usually called “having a vision.”

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last describe in detail how some successful global companies in the 20th century used vision to create long-term advantage. It’s an excellent starting point for thinking about vision. That said, it’s hard to apply the Built to Last formula in every circumstance—e.g., in the social or public sectors, in a startup environment, or in 21st century organizations that don’t resemble traditional institutions.

If you’re a smaller company or startup, or simply need more practical advice about how to set vision and use it to drive decision-making, David Binetti, CEO of Votizen, is your guy. I’ve shared his talk from the Startup Lessons Learned conference with many of my clients. (Binetti digs into vision at the 10:30 mark, but the whole talk is worth watching.) For more advice in this vein, I also recommend Alan Weiss’s recent piece “When You Can’t Win Enough.”

IDKWIW

Outside of work, we don’t tend to ask people about their vision; we simply say: what do you want?

But asking someone what they want can often seem impolite, even aggressive. There are also many situations where people rightly assess that it’s neither safe nor wise to reveal their agenda. Yet even when we’re in a trusted relationship, or alone, we often still don’t want to admit what we want, to examine our own thinking. When this happens, we miss out on life.

The last step before a big leap is often “I don’t know what I want.”

For example, in dating and romantic relationships, IDKWIWs are frequent, and in a sense, they’re truthful and considerate. But with a bit of exploration, they evolve:

• “I don’t know what I want… so I’d like to play the field for a bit and not make any long-term commitments until I have a better sense of what I like and don’t like.”
• “I don’t know what I want… but I know I enjoy romantic relationships and would like very much to be in one, so my m.o. will be to throw myself passionately into each new person who sparks my interest to see if that makes me happy.”
• “I want to be in a relationship, but my current partner has habits that make me uncomfortable. So I’m biding my time hoping that they change. I don’t want to bring up these issues directly and risk losing the relationship I do have. Instead I’ll withdraw a bit and claim that I’m no longer sure what I want—hopefully they’ll take the hint.”

Notice that each of these people knows exactly what he or she wants.

Admitting what you want takes some courage and vulnerability. You might identify humbling errors in your thinking. You might face rejection. But when you can get to a place where you can tell people succinctly what it is you truly want, you’ll be much more able to enroll others in helping you get there. Savvy daters share what they want and screen for compatibility. Savvy networkers are clear in their positioning so people know which referrals to send their way.

And of course, it’s okay to change what you want. Life is dynamic, and we learn by doing. Corporate visions are meant to be achieved and then re-set. Serendipity can be a great teacher. And most of us need a hobby, a practice we engage in for its own sake. This might be salsa dancing or kite surfing, or it could be a separate business… many successful entrepreneurs have one. (Think Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his spaceship project.) When an an entrepreneur creates a second business, they’re usually following their intuition, creating a place where they can learn things they don’t already know.

Still, it’s a kind of not-knowing that has clarity to it: “I want to follow my intuition here. I want to explore this further and see what there is to learn.”

• Billy Polson, Mike Clausen, and Gina Gutierrez (DIAKADI Body)
• Adam Dole (Mayo Clinic)
• Tiphani Palmer (Conscious Embodiment)

I’ve made it a point in the past year to pay more attention to my body as a source of wisdom… and I had a gut sense that these speakers, individually and together, would have a lot to share. I wasn’t disappointed. Thank you to all who participated in a rich discussion and a memorable evening.

DIAKADI Body:

Adam Dole:

Tiphani Palmer:

I did not appreciate the perspective.

Normally, I like to think my life is pretty exciting. I live in the city of my dreams. I have a job that brings me great satisfaction, loved ones close to me, and hobbies that fuel me creatively. I’ve traveled the world and leaned into my growth areas. I’ve taken to heart the Helen Keller quote: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

My life is not dull.

But his words stuck with me for several days afterwards… a sure sign, I knew, that they were right in some important way that I couldn’t see. So after a few days of avoidance, I gave the thought its full due:

“Life can be pretty dull sometimes… is that true?” (I channeled my inner Byron Katie.)

The answers hit me immediately. Well, yes, in business, of course it’s true. The Lean Startup community has pointed out convincingly that the difference between a successful venture and a failed one is the willingness to do painstaking, intellectually honest, data-driven work. Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisted describes how many small business owners throw their heart and soul into service delivery, while ignoring the more challenging aspects of their business. Getting to Carnegie Hall—or the equivalent in any field—requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. Many people find long-term financial planning enormously dull until it’s quite late.

First Lesson: If you’re not actively doing things you find dull, you might be avoiding your real work.

There’s a second lesson. If you strip away your story, your accomplishments, your setting, your goals, your cultivated community, your online persona: who are you? Who are you when you are alone with yourself… with the messy, unfinished you that Yeats called the “rag and bone shop of the heart”?

Many people find this more terrifying than they’d like to admit. So they fill their lives with things and experiences. Never able to be fully present with themselves, they end up always lonely.

It’s a shame, because the emptiness most people feel behind their provisional, social self can be a source of enormous creativity. The actress Thandie Newton describes this eloquently in a recent TED video: “Let’s not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness.”

Madeline Levine also touches on this topic in The Price of Privilege, exploring how children of affluent, overly involved parents are increasingly the most at risk of psychological and emotional maladjustment. She writes of one teenager:

“Allison’s whole life had been defined by well-meaning parents, relatives, and teachers, robbing Allison of the opportunity to think about what she wanted for herself… She stormed out of therapy one day, declaring the whole endeavor ‘boring.’ What was really boring to Allison was Allison herself. She had evaded growing into a complex, robust, conflicted, normal adolescent.”

The Second Lesson is to know yourself, deeply—it’s never too late. For most people, that looks like some kind of regular meditation practice or other deep check-in… a place where you can witness and be present for what arises for its own sake. In our go-go-go, entertainment-on-demand culture, that may seem dull, challenging, or scary, but it pays enormous dividends.

In the play Our Town, the Stage Manager says at the end that perhaps only “poets and saints” realize their lives as they live them. But that richness of experience is actually available to all of us.

We just need to first embrace the dull.