005 - Manage like Mattis
Happy Monday! You ready to have a fantastic week?
I spent the weekend camping in Prince William Forest. I went despite the rain and it was amazing.
Firstly, because Prince William Forest is like a well kept secret in the DC-area. Everyone typically goes to Shenandoah, which is very nice, but it gets really crowded. Prince William Forest is 1 hour South of DC on 95 and it's always empty. I did an 11.5 mile hike there once and saw 1 couple on the whole trip. This weekend was no different: there were 4 other groups at our campground of ~30 sites. Secondly, it’s beautiful, woodsy and remote. The forest is dense and green. While it’s only an hour outside of DC, I had no cell service. Being in the woods surrounded by trees and the sound of light rain was so relaxing.
Off The Press
I published another article in the series I'm doing on the biography of Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos. This one is directly about management and the management style Mattis called Command and Feedback.
I think there's a pretty widely accepted idea of what management in the military is like. It involves a lot of orders, some yelling, all that stuff. Mattis seemed to be personally offended by that stereotype and spent a lot of his biography drawing a comparison between that style of management, which he called Command and Control, and the way management and leadership is actually thought about in the Marines, which he called Command and Feedback.
He once said this to a fellow NATO commander who had just criticized a subordinate’s work:
“Your staff resents you,” I said. “You’re disappointed in their input. Okay. But your criticism makes that input worse, not better. You’re going about it the wrong way. You cannot allow your passion for excellence destroy your compassion for them as human beings.” This was a point I had always driven home to my subordinates. “Change your leadership style.” I continued. “Coach and encourage, don’t berate, least of all in public.”
Mattis' discussion of Command and Feedback deepened my thinking of my personal philosophy of management, which I call Wise Management. Basically, how do you lead a team that is driven to do excellent work, while also being a fun and connected team? Most of the teams I've worked on have achieved one or the other. The team has been well connected and supportive of each other but the work product was only okay, or they've been really driven and successful but everyone was miserable. Both Command and Feedback and Wise Management are about achieving both.
You can read the article here.
Interesting Reads
I'm really focused on becoming a better writer, so I've spent a lot of time reading things about or by writers I look up to. I read two articles last week that I ended up taking a lot of notes on:
How Anne-Laure Le Cunff Wrote 200 Articles In One Year (Super Organizers)- The title of the article is a bit of a giveaway: this article about how someone writes 200 articles in a year while being a student full-time and running a business.
How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life (Nat Eliason) - The title here too is a bit of a giveaway. Nat Eliason writes a review on his website, which he's published on consistently for six years.
Success is a Byproduct
I've been reading and thinking a lot about how to create success.
Not the image that I assume most people have when someone says "create success," I'm not trying to buy a convertible or a fancy house or anything like that. The most important thing for me in my next home is a nice garden.
When I say "create success," I mean something more like successfully achieving a meaningful goal. It’s different from goal-setting, which is about achieving a single goal. Success is achieving many related goals, some of which are known but many of which are not.
My working theory is this: it's better to think of success as a byproduct of a consistent process than it is to work towards success itself. Right now, my goal is to become a better writer. I've been specifically focusing on that, hence the two article recommendations above.
Both articles talk about the process of writing where the "success" part is almost like this assumed side effect. Whether it's writing a lot and building up a business or starting a company and earning a lot of money from writing, the process itself is actually really boring: make an outline, write a draft in a Google doc, hit publish. A Google doc for God's sake! Surely there's some other, secret ingredient.
I think the secret ingredient might just be consistency. Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published 3 articles a week for over a year and Nat Eliason has published almost every week for 6 years. Boring process, applied consistently can't lose.
I'm going to get to the part where I talk about how I'm learning this, but first I have to talk about how I've actually done it.
An example from my own life is the success I've had as a software engineer. I've won international awards for my work. I built the website that helped convince Amazon to move their second headquarters to DC. I've reviewed technical books for Manning Press, one of the biggest industry publishers. I've turned down multiple salary offers north of $200,000. The thing that made me feel most successful as a software engineer is that I got a job teaching other people how to be software engineers.
I did all of that after only about 3 years of being a software developer.
There were a lot of things that went into achieving each of those things, some of which were in my control and some of which weren't. But the thing I did to achieve all of that is really boring: I spent a dedicated hour reading technical books. See? I told you it would be boring. The "secret" is that I did that almost every day for 3 years.
So for Anne-Laure, Nat, and me, achieving success was about consistently following a process.
Even though I did it as a software engineer, I have to say this as a reminder to myself when it comes to writing. I've been writing for an hour almost every day since February and I'm just now starting to get to the point where I can write something and say it's not bad. We'll see where we are in two years. Seven people read my last article. Maybe by then it'll be 14!
End Note
I'm on the other end of this email, so if you found anything in here interesting hit reply and we can chat about it! You can also share it with someone by forwarding this email or sending them to https://hawthorne.substack.com.
Have a great week!
Zakk