“the secret to a happy relationship is less finding someone with no baggage, and more finding someone with whom your own makes a nicely matched set.” -Joshua Newman

http://www.self-aggrandizement.com/archives/021407_cupid.html

You may have noticed I changed the name of this blog, my resume and bio.  Here’s why.

I was thinking about what I’d like to do more of.  What is perfect for me?  I wrote down the verbs in the past tense.  Then I made a second list and thought about what I’d like to happen to, for, or with me.  “Loved me,” “Included me” were some verbs I didn’t have on my first list.

Then I went back to my first list of verbs I’d like to do to, for, or with other people.  I crossed out anything that I wouldn’t want done to me.  So “coached me” and “chose me” stayed, but “structured me” didn’t sound right.  Even “collaborated me” didn’t sound right — it reminded me of collating papers in a photocopy machine.

The result?  I have a growing list of 42 “verbs me.”  Reciprocal verbs I’d like to do and be done to.  And I revoiced my resume around these verbs.  I’d done about 30 of them in my work and gotten paid for it.

Can I tell you a story?  Justine is a girl in a novel (I was asked to read it awhile ago and only skimmed it).  And early in her life, she is abused and raped and beaten.  Not a pleasant story.  But it gets worse.  Because Justine meets new people in her life, and they say, “Who are you?  What’s happened to you?  What’s your story?  What’s your resume?”  And she says, “I’ve been abused and raped and beaten!  Help me, won’t you help?”  Now, some people pity her, but almost all of them involve her into a situation where she gets abused and raped and beaten again.  And again.  And again. 

Each time, in a new way.  Each time, different.  Sometimes well-intentioned.  But each time, Justine’s future reflects the story of her past.

On the opposite side, I know someone who told me, “Whenever I interview, I’m offered the job.”  I was interviewing him.  And when I heard this story of his past, it got me thinking.  “Whenever he’s interviewed, he’s offered the job.”  He was very qualified, and very eager and, most importantly to me, had welcomed challenges in the past and found innovative ways to handle them.  Now I wasn’t thinking too deeply, but I bet a question crossed my mind, “Why would it be different this time?  Why wouldn’t I hire him?”  And I bet he was thinking, “Why would it be different this time?  Why wouldn’t Alex hire me?”  And it’s a lot harder to come up with a reason against something…it’s harder to think out of the box when you’re not even thinking about the assumption.  He might have instead said, “There’ve been a lot of jobs I’ve thought about but never applied for,” and that would have gotten me thinking much less positively about hiring him.

Imagine if Justine said, “I’ve worked hard in the past, and I like it when I have a warm place to live and good food to eat.”  So Justine is really focusing on her ideal future.  The story of her past reflects her future.

Of course words alone don’t make it happen.  Attitudes, beliefs, experience, confidence are huge.  And in a resume, don’t exaggerate.  Be true to yourself.

But focus to your ideal future, and the parts of your past reflect and frame that ideal future.

With work, I think most people assume (without thinking about it) that the words you use to describe “what you do” are describing “what you do with me.”  For example, when I told a friend-of-a-friend I do anthropology, he said, uneasily, “Well what are you observing about me?”  I wasn’t in my work mode!  But he assumed I was doing “what I do.”

There’s a great book by the company ?WhatIf! that describes this in a similar way.  They call it “river jumping.”  If you’re trying to innovate and make a better bicycle, you’re usually thinking, “Better bicycle…better bicycle…how do I make a better bicycle?”  You have assumptions about what a bicycle is, and limiting beliefs about what a bicycle can be.  Instead, ?WhatIf! suggests you ask, What is a bicycle like?  You might say, “A bicycle is like a bird because they both move quickly above the ground.”  Or a bicycle is like a car because they have wheels.  So…a bird has wings to balance it when it flies.  What if a bicycle had wings to stabilize it?  Or long ago, someone probably said a bicycle is like a car.  A motor powers the wheels of a car.  And so we got the motorbike and motorcycle.  (No that is not historically accurate.)

When I was marketing director at a $60 million company, there were two ways I reduced cost of advertising by 1/3rd.  One was “online marketing.”  I was good at looking at how people navigated through the website, where advertising was wasted, and finding ways to improve that.  But the other way was “understanding people.”  One was overt and what you’d see me openly doing.  The other was covert.  It’s hard to involve people in being more trusting.  It’s easier to involve people in teams and as they work together, they start to trust each other.  Likewise, you’ll see me writing a report or drawing a picture.  But the covert theme is I’m voicing what I’ve seen and heard and experienced.  I can voice in lots of ways.  I can frame and lead exercises.

So I’m gonna take a risk, and experiment with limiting myself to what I care about, instead of limiting myself to what might be easier to show most people.  Just as I enjoy the connections with people who like my business card which doesn’t have a job title for me, I’m gonna risk this new language.  I don’t want to show my resume to most people.  I want to show a few people, who are “self-selected” by the choices I make, who get me; who dance with what I love.  And the other people?  They’ll understand what I do in their own way, when they see it happen.

It’s happened like that in the past.

This is the last in a series of three installations.  The first installation is here and the second installation is here.  This article was first posted in 2005.

THEORY

Propositional searches are most successful when they are deeply important to the searcher. This is because when something most matters to me, I use my own words, just as someone with an accent will make an exclamation in their native language, or speak in a thicker accent when they are emotional. When I use my own words, and not words that I am imitating (words that other people use), I am making choices that are more “me,” and I am more likely to connect with someone else who is more like me, in the ways that I care about. Likewise, when I hear someone say a word or mention something that is special (the word “passionate” and the Italian town of Siena are two special triggers for me), I react to the propositional meaning of these words and places. There is a logical, literal meaning of the word and the place, and then there is other meaning that I associate with the word and the place. I react to the associative meaning. Likewise, being a logical person, when I hear someone tell a story, I understand the literal meaning, but react to the connotative meanings of all the words. The person who uses the word “passionate” or says they have been in Siena, instantly takes on special meaning to me.

People search for many things. For example, I search to intuit facts and form a “first impression” of someone. I search their characteristics and I ask myself if the characteristics resemble anyone I know. My first impression is based on previous experiences. The key data in my system of knowledge proposes what I am perceiving, how to best experience it, what I am searching for and how to best proceed.

I choose to buy an item of food or a tool, or to use a word. My possessions are the result of my choices within my perceived environment. There is a saying, “You can tell a lot about someone by the food that he has in his refrigerator.” If I list all the items in my refrigerator, and I list all the items in every individual’s refrigerator in the whole world, is it not likely that the more items I have in common with someone, the more similarly we perceive the world? Each item has been bought for a reason.¹⁴

Take another example. If I have in my garage all the materials and tools needed to build a motorcycle, it is likely that I have more in common (and could get along better, and make a deeper connection) with someone who has all the materials and tools needed to build a motorcycle, than I do with someone who has all the materials and tools needed to build a computer.

Every item that I make a separate choice to use or buy, proposes a few select choices behind the purchase, and proposes a few select reasons behind each choice. As my number of separate choices increases, more can be proposed about me. If I make one choice, “I will build a motorcycle”, then that reveals less about me than if, over time, as a result of hundreds of separate choices, I unknowingly acquire all the parts needed to build a motorcycle. In the first example, only one thing can be known about me: I decided to build a motorcycle. In the second example, hundreds of things can be known about me, because I made hundreds of individual choices for separate reasons. Therefore, it’s very likely that I’ll have more in common with someone if we both have unwittingly acquired the tools and materials that can build a motorcycle, than I will have in common with someone if we’ve both made a single choice to buy the tools and materials to build a motorcycle. Buying a complete toolkit says less about me than does the separate acquisition of every tool.

—Footnote:

¹⁴ To illustrate the symbolic logic behind this theory, picture a map of airline routes. Picture a searcher traveling through each airport, and each airport is a word. New York City has three major airports with similar meaning, which represent three very common, interchangeable words; major “hub” words. Google has 8 billion “people” traveling around. Every webpage is a “person”; every word is an “airport.” There are far more than 170,000 words (”airports”) in the English language to choose from. Imagine that you travel through 20 of these airports on a single trip, and later meet someone who has also traveled through all 20 on a single trip. It is likely that you are propositionally similar. This is a simplified model of what happens when we search large blocks of text in Google. 

Joe Rospars, the New Media Director at Obama for America writes, “This site — and this campaign in general — will always be a work in progress. We’re going to experiment, we’re going to try new things. Sometimes it will inevitably be a little rough around the edges, for sure, but that’s the risk we’re going to have to take if we’re going to run this campaign in a new way.”  http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post_group/ObamaHQ/GMV

What a great approach.  Yes, I wish the focus of the website was more on getting votes than on raising money.  How do you get votes?  You tell your friends and ask them who they’ll vote for and when they say a particular candidate and are convinced, then you got votes.

Can anyone get votes?  Yes.  Can you track it?  Yes.  Is http://My.BarackObama.com tracking it?  Not yet.

Anyway, check out BarackObama.com for a good example of community organizing, community building, getting people involved.  There’s a lot of groups up already and the “My” mini-site’s only a day old.  I have a blog up at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/alex mainly to comment on the online campaign itself.

It’s a good start.

And if you want to search the blogs, go to http://MyBarackObama.com click “Blogs” and in the lower right corner click “Search All Blogs.”  To see results from all blogs, just search for nothing (just press Search without entering any text).  Why do people who set up community blogs, like Joe, so often make it easy to read their blogs but difficult to read the community’s blogs?