one-legged table

Sometimes everything is just hard and

there's no way over or around it, you just have to go through

it. Like that kid's song that some of us grew up with, you

know, there's no way over it, there's no way around it. Well,

here we are. And sometimes everything at once is just hard.

And it's in those moments that we are most particularly

vulnerable to making bad ethical calls. Because everything is

hard and our systems are scrambling for survival. Our

systems are scrambling for a break, for a space, for any

opening, for a way up out of this valley that just seems to

go on forever. And sometimes, it seems like the only way we're

ever going to get out is if we step on someone's head. Or if we

crush that completely irreplaceable plant. Or if we

drive stakes into a wall of rock that's been there for millennia.

We've got to get out, we've got to get out, we've got to get

out. And so we do whatever we have to do to get out and there

is a certain amount of survival. And there's a certain kind of

survival that we need. And so we go after it in any way we can,

there are thresholds of survival where almost anything is

justified. But we tend to think that we're in those corners long

before we are especially if we're intensives, especially if

we feel everything at all-or-nothing levels.

Especially, especially if other people are also relying on us,

if other things are also riding on us. If we're in the public

eye. If we're in leadership roles, it's really, really easy

to think that things are at survival pitch before they are.

That things are at "anything justifies this" before they are.

It's really easy to let Machiavelli run the show. But

this is not Machiavelli's theatre, this is life. And

sometimes we need to tell him to take a seat. So what do we do?

If the ends do not justify the means? What we do if what we

think is a survival question is actually more of a "this would

be much easier if I didn't have to do this" question. How? How

do we take our power and turn it to the good when we are the ones

under stress? Well, the good news is, the good news is that

we get to use our own judgment. And the bad news is also we get

to use our own judgment. That judgment that is impaired by the

fact that we're under stress, that we might think that it's

more of a crisis than it actually is, that we don't

exactly have the perspective we need, which is why, which is why

we have other people in our lives, which is why we have

other leaders in our organizations, which is why we

ask around, but probably not on Facebook or LinkedIn. We ask

around, but we have to ask people who get it, people we

trust. And that doesn't always mean people who are doing the

exact same thing we are from inside the company. Sometimes it

means someone who has known us longer, it seems, than time

itself and can look straight through our bullshit. And

sometimes it means someone who can embrace us and tell us it's

going to be okay. And sometimes it means someone who can look

through the emotion to the logic because sometimes the logic is

what we need. And sometimes it's someone who has better intuition

than we do and can look straight through the numbers to the

truth. But almost always, it's someone outside of ourselves.

They say it's lonely at the top. And it's true. It's hard to find

the right person or the right cadre of people. It's hard to

gather that group and keep it tight. Everybody has stresses,

everybody has things that take them away, just at the moment

that you need them most. Everybody is trying to do a

little more than they can or they should, because nobody else

can do it. Because that's the state of the world right now.

And everybody is simultaneously fighting that impulse in order

to keep ourselves afloat, so that we can in fact help to

float others. It's complicated, it is not easy. And it's not

really something you can always explain to people who are not in

that position themselves.

I don't blame people who don't want to be in that position. But

I can't imagine choosing to be anywhere else except that

position even when it's desperately uncomfortable, even

when I hate it, even when I'm just sitting there at my desk at

my computer, wishing that being a barista paid better. Wishing

that my biggest problem was whether or not I was going to

make all of the coffees correctly that day. I almost

certainly would not, I would be a terrible barista, you do not

want me making your coffee. I don't even drink coffee. But

sometimes I long for the apparent simplicity of a

straightforward job with a thing that you produce that everybody

knows they want. I know it's not that simple. I know it's not

that easy. I know at least one of the people in my circle runs

a coffee shop. And she would almost certainly tell me that it

is not that easy. But here we are. Here we are backed into a

corner trying to figure out if it's a real corner. Or if it's

an illusion, if we really have no choices, or if we just can't

figure out what those choices are. And that's why we need

somebody else. That's why we need each other. Sometimes

everything is just hard. And sometimes the reason it all

seems harder than it needs to be is because we have been raised

in this culture of hyper individualism. If you're in the

West, it doesn't really matter what your sub cultural context

was. Because outside of that sub cultural context, there is the

bigger soup. And the bigger soup, this world of

entrepreneurship, the dominant cultural space, emphasizes so

much individualism, that we fall down. We fall down regularly

because being an individual is like being a table with just one

leg. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's, it's not a

pedestal, we don't have a broad base to help. If we had a broad

base, we would have a community, if we had more than one leg, we

would have close friends and family. And we do, sort of. But

somehow there's this valorization of getting it all

right all by yourself all on your own, no help, no help, no

help, you shouldn't need help you shouldn't- And it's

bullshit. We all need help. We are made to be interconnected.

We are made to be interdependent. That is how our

brains work. That is how our biochemistry works. That is how

our bodies work. We are made to be connected. We are made to

rely on each other, which means we need other people around us.

Who can tell us when we're trying to operate like a table