If you’re wondering how last week’s big proposal went - we didn’t get the work...
...yet.
The client asked us to increase the scope and go further downstream in the work. We'll meet one more time, later this week, and expect to hear yay or nay.
This sales cycle got me thinking about the cost of proposals. We’ve spent close to 15 person-hours on this one so far, six of them just on calls with the client. If we get the work, that’s a fine investment, but I’ll need to develop some guardrails on this in the future.
Thinking about it another way, I'm impressed at how fast we went from first introduction to being in the running for a very large project. It's nice to have earned trust relatively quickly.
To make sure we're getting better from every experience, I created a Confluence template of our sales proposal. Ours looked snazzy! We also created a section called “Why Choose Group 18?" that I want to build on. No sense starting from scratch next time. It took me three minutes to create the template, but will save me hours over time as we build out a library of sales proposals.
In other news, if you’re in Austin, I’m putting on a one-day conference called the Founder Summit on November 6th with others in the Operator's Guild. Attendance is free. You get in automatically if you’re in the Operator’s Guild, but other registrants will be reviewed before granting admission. During the event I’ll be doing 1-1 operational audits. You bring me your gnarly problems, and I’ll give you advice on how to improve them!
I’ve had to learn a lot about putting on an event over the past few months. We’ve had to design the agenda, find speakers, find sponsors, set up registration, locate a venue, solve food, etc.
It all made me realize that setting up events is not my passion. I'll leave that to others from here out. 🤣
Lastly, the OKR Party is this week! I’ve attended some other “webinar” type events recently for competitive benchmarking, and they couldn't hold my attention. That's not going to happen at the OKR Party!
Attendance is small, so everyone who joins will be able to explore their personal interests and challenges with us.
PS - I plan on giving you an update on Meshwell next week, too. Things are heating up!
A Quote
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Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.
Host Russ Roberts had Julia Belluz on the podcast to talk about food and her new book, Food Intelligence. I didn’t know of Julia before this podcast, but I enjoyed the episode exploring the complexity of calories. A calorie might be a calorie, but the body has all sorts of compensatory moves when you change what you eat. I like how Russ is good at politely pushing back on guests, like when Julia advocated for government regulation of what we can eat.
I really like using Granola for keeping track of meeting notes. Instead of getting a full call recording, you get concise notes of what happened and your action items. What I’ve really been interested in lately is their new “recipes” functionality. For example, they released one done in conjunction with CEO coach and author, Matt Mochary. It reviews your meetings for the past week and gives you coaching feedback. Mine was brutal, just like a good coach would be! 🤣
Working at Atlassian I worked with people around the globe. While each of us are unique, we’re also products of our environment, so learning about the predominant ways of working for different groups can be really helpful. “If your business success relies on your ability to work successfully with people from around the world, you need to have an appreciation for cultural differences as well as respect for individual differences. Both are essential.”
(please enjoy this 6️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Always Happy, Never Satisfied
Life is full of tension. As humans we have competing desires - to be loved and appreciated for who we are right now, and to strive to learn and improve for tomorrow.
Adam Smith captured this sentiment when he said: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
If you focus on being loved without being worthy of it, you have empty appreciation and participation trophies. If you don't improve, you may inadvertently fall out of being loved through lack of effort.
If you focus on being worthy of love by constantly striving to improve, you’ll burn out AND likely not be loved anyway because of that relentlessness.
So how do we strike a balance between those two extremes?
In today’s newsletter we’ll explore how to stay in the productive middle part of the curve. Or, as I like to say: “always happy, never satisfied.”
Where this phrase first appeared for me
I started using the phrase "always happy, never satisfied" during my time at Atlassian. The company grew roughly 30% per year, every year, for a decade. In that type of high growth environment there are always problems to be solved. There are always areas that need to improve.
I don’t remember the specific meeting, but I was pushing for improvement in certain areas. Members of the team pointed out how much those areas had improved over the years. Wasn’t I happy about that? Why did I need to push it further?
Lots of wins along the way, but plenty more to go.
It’s true, those areas had improved quite a bit, and I was happy about it. But I also saw how much more those areas needed to improve in the future to keep pace with the rest of the business, customer expectations, and competitive pressures.
I started using the phrase, “always happy, never satisfied” (AHNS) to represent the duality I felt.
Diving into the duality
AHNS doesn’t mean “never good enough.” It means things are good now, but we need to make them better next.
ANHS doesn’t mean “work more.” It means we need to consistently rethink our approach and the systems that drive these outcomes.
AHNS is a reminder for the leader to live in this duality, because living at either end of the spectrum isn’t good.
I know this, because I tend to see the “never satisfied” side of things very clearly, which in practice can mean I come off “rarely happy.” It was so clear to me how far we were from “better” that I emphasized the gap and tried to close it.
The challenge with emphasizing the gap is that there are always problems to solve - it's a never-ending treadmill. If you’re constantly pointing out what needs to improve, then you’re literally never satisfied. That’s not fun to be, and that’s not fun to work for.
The never-ending treadmill of "never satisfied."
Conversely, if you’re always happy with how things are, no matter the gap to what they need to be, you’re probably not getting much done.
If you’re celebrating all the things you’ve done in the past, you’re not getting your team and company in the position it needs to be in the future.
“Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges.”
The challenge comes in being good at both sides of AHNS without overemphasizing either. You can’t be so happy with everything that nothing gets done, and you can’t push so hard to improve that you create burnout in yourself and others.
What are the ways we can balance this?
Celebrate, then Optimize
As Jocko said in the quote above, leaders need to build the mindset of improvement into themselves and the team. One way to help remember this is the idea to celebrate, then optimize.
There are many ways to implement this across many different scales. For example, imagine if someone on your team takes the initiative to create a helpful artifact, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark on the first try.
Celebrate: Thank them for taking the initiative. Tell them what you love about what they’ve created. Optimize: Ask questions to get them to see the gaps you see. Offer advice and suggestions for how to improve it.
I love the creative color choices. For the final version, please make a digital version, not crayon.
In another scenario, imagine that an employee had a difficult goal to hit, and they’ve managed to get 80% of the way there with one week to go.
What would you do? Celebrate them for achieving the 80% and leave it alone? After all, it was difficult!
Would you immediately pressure them to hit 100% in the final week?
Thinking of “celebrate then optimize” here are some things you could do next.
Immediate: Share appreciations on concrete behavior they’ve embodied and for achieving most of a difficult goal. Then ask, “What’s can you do to hit the final 20% this week?”
Within A Day or Two: Publish a public Slack post or email with the team - shared wins and progress! In a 1-1, ask: “What worked? What’s your constraint? What needs to be true to hit 100%?”
Next Week: Run a retro. What worked well? What could be better?
What you’re trying to do is strike the balance between appreciation and improvement. You’re trying to push without being demotivating. You want to show the team that they have the capacity to improve.
“It’s not easy to live with the constant angst that we might not be doing enough. It would be more fun to do victory laps and pat everybody on the back all the time. But in the end, we will be all be better off because of our intensely vigilant posture toward our mission. We won’t rest on our laurels. The competition is getting more aggressive by the day, so this is no time to relax our focus.”
If you’re like me and tend to push heavily for improvement, you’ll need to temper that instinct lest you run into burnout. This is especially important when running a team; not everyone may be built like you. Here it may be helpful to remember that you’re running a marathon, not a sprint.
Sure, you can push yourself and your team to relentlessly pursue goals and self improvement, and there may be times when you must do that for the importance of the mission or a critical milestone, but you can’t do that forever.
Just like our bodies have the dual “fight or flight” and “rest and recharge” nervous systems, you’ll need to balance any periods of pushing with periods of lighter intensity.
Bringing it all together
“Always happy, never satisfied” is a way of being as a leader. It starts by honoring the good work that you’ve done to date, then challenge yourself to think what could be better next. Where’s the final 10–20% hiding? What constraints can we remove to unlock it?
The loop is to celebrate, then optimize. It shows people they’re seen and it gives them a path forward. We can be proud of today without getting stuck there.
Over-index on “happy” and you drift into victory laps. Over-index on “never satisfied” and it turns into a grind. The middle path asks you to balance the tension between those two for better overall results.
Think marathon, not sprint. There will be weeks where the right answer is to push hard, but there must also be time to consolidate the gain, catch your breath, and make the next improvement easier to achieve.
Be proud of today, and earn tomorrow.
Call to Action
This week look for what’s gone under-acknowledged. Is there a win or improvement that you can honor? Give yourself the opportunity to celebrate how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved.
But don’t stop there! Look for the 1% improvement you can make in an area of your personal life or business. Where have you gotten too comfortable and you need to challenge yourself to improve?
Choose to make one improvement by the time next week’s newsletter rolls around.
Kevin
PS - Share the win with me. I’d love to celebrate you as well! heykev@kevinnoble.xyz
