I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great by Jim Collins and have just finished a great chapter on confronting the harsh realities that people love to sweep under the proverbial rug. This paragraph really struck me:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Acting with reality versus talking about dreams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The sprout of an idea occurred to be a couple of years ago while watching Bill Gates give his keynote at CES. He was doing his kitchen-of-the-future thing. Your kitchen worktop, he predicted, was going to be a touch screen monitor that showed you recipes. He followed this with his bedroom-of-the-future, where the walls were covered with monitors and you decorated your walls with the wallpaper of the operating system. Putting aside the nightmare of sleeping in a room surrounded by the Windows desktop, something else was bothering me: I knew this was never going to happen how he imagined it. And even if it did, it would be too many years away and pointless enough that it was not worth caring about.

The same month Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and introduced the iPhone. He said:

When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.

It struck me then why I had started to enjoy these Apple keynotes; every announcement came with a shipping date. They didn’t say anything until they’d built it. They weren’t talking about their plans; they were talking about what they had already done. They waited until they were forced to announce it to start talking.

Since then I’ve noticed this quality in others (though very much in the minority). I have grown to admire it. It’s far more interesting to hear what people have accomplished already, rather than what their goals are. Most people plan, dream and set goals, but how many of these actually get accomplished? I’d prefer someone to tell me they got up early this morning and ran a mile, than to hear them dream of running an ultra-marathon. Reality always trumps the dream.

But I had always thought that telling people your goals was a good thing. Tell a friend or publicly announce your goals and you will be held to account if you fail, right? Well I’ve tried this strategy and it has a fatal flaw: people don’t hold you to account. It is not embarrassing to give up; it just means you are like everyone else.

I started to try the opposite strategy: don’t announce what you are doing until you’ve achieved it. Planning to run that marathon? A week after training you can tell people you’ve been running every morning, but don’t mention the marathon you signed up for until you absolutely need to. This strategy, to my surprise, doesn’t just make you look like someone who gets stuff done rather than breaking promises, it is also motivating in itself. There is something far more motivating about telling people your accomplishments than your plans. It becomes something to look forward to. It’s frustrating to stay in stealth mode because you are excited about your plans, so you make sure you get stuff done so you can talk about it.

This strategy also stops you wasting time. I remember an evening many years ago when my dad couldn’t stop chatting away about a leaking tap in the bathroom. It sticks in my mind because he really didn’t have anything to say, but he kept on and on and I grew very bored. Actually fixing the tap took about five minutes. When you’re bored, you really notice how time consuming talking can be. Well that time stacks up whether you are being boring or not.

A year’s worth of gradual understanding recently got summed up by Mike Cane on Twitter:

A lesson I have learned the Hard Way: Those who talk about doing, NEVER DO. Those who STFU and show what they’ve DONE, win.

Shut the Fuck Up and DO IT.

STFU.

Yesterday this was running through my head while I was writing an email meant to motivate someone into getting some work done.

STFU, I thought.

And I did.

If my own motivation gets derailed by talking too much, maybe trying to motivate others by communicating a bold vision is actually destructive too. Maybe the way to motivate someone is not to express a compelling vision of what we can create. Maybe it’s just to start setting tasks and getting something done. To celebrate the achievement; not the vision. To let the motivation build itself.

Having goals, dreams and being visionary are all important. But I’m no longer convinced talking about them is a good idea. Not if you want your ideas to feed reality.

Of course no politician ever got elected by shutting up; so there’s already one case where STFU is bad advice. But then again, how much of what any given politician says actually gets done?

Well, I should probably STFU now.