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1/ The Gods decided to punish Sisyphus by having him repeatedly roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll right back down again, for all eternity.
2/ Could Sisyphus have been happy and fulfilled in his fate? Camus thought so. So do certain kinds of entrepreneurs apparently.
3/ For anyone not equipped with the masochistic genius of a gloomy French intellectual, Sisyphus' fate is obviously hellish.
4/ I call a project Sisyphean if it feels like a mighty, pointless, ugly, arbitrary and unpleasant struggle, with little reward.
5/ Neither the means (a brute-force struggle), nor the rewards (just slightly higher than the effort... if you're lucky) can justify it.
6/ The ONLY thing that can justify such a struggle is a philosophically convoluted fetishization of pain as some sort of meaning.
7/ If you poke at the psychology behind this masochism, you invariably find a lack of imagination and a suspicion of ideas.
8/ Classic signs: "ideas don't matter, only execution does." Or "hard work trumps talent" or "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration"
9/ There is more to this than dislike of blithe-spirit types who coast through life on the strength of ideas. There is shame and guilt.
10/ Ideas are cheats. They add leverage to hard work. Being suspicious of ideas is about a perverted sense of what counts as honest labor.
11/ In businesses, you see this in sales-driven people who are suspicious of marketing; operations people who distrust elegant designs.
12/ To Sisypheans, if effort feels beautiful and flowing, or god forbid, actually fun, it must be morally "wrong". ESPECIALLY if it works.
13/ Another sign: compartmentalizing fun into required "partying." When work is not allowed to be fun, fun turns into work.
14/ Elegant marketing and engineering are not just fun to do, they turn adjacent Sisyphean efforts into fun non-Sisyphean ones.
15/ They do this through the spillover power of ideas: compressed insights into the nature of the world that create leverage.
16/ Through marketing/engineering network efforts, ideas unleash what Einstein called the most powerful force in the universe: compound interest.
17/ By analogy, cold-call sales is perhaps the weakest force in the universe, and the perfect embodiment of Sisyphean grinding.
18/ You cannot entirely avoid it, but you need not fetishize it or make it your first and preferred form of effort out of a masochistic work ethic.
19/ Sisyphean grinding is how you backstop effort shortfalls once you've exhausted the idea-potential of marketing and engineering.
20/ Drucker got this: he said marketing and innovation (he meant it in the sense we use "engineering" today) are the only two essential functions.
21/ He also said that the job of marketing was to make sales unnecessary. In practice you can rarely get 100% there, but you should be trying.
22/ Something similar could be said of design engineering versus production operations. The job of the former is to make the latter unnecessary.
23/ Far from diminishing the importance of sales and operations, this is about making both more fun, leveraged and meaningful.
24/ A good analogy is sail warfare: to the extent you can maneuver to be upwind, you win easily and minimize tough hand-to-hand melee combat on enemy decks.
25/ You can also keep a military wisecrack in mind: the point is not to die for your country, but to make the other guy die for his.
26/ Mutatis mutandis: the point is not to undertake a Sisyphean struggle for your idea, but to make the competition undertake one for theirs.
27/ Creating clever positioning, engineering lucky breaks, replacing "hard" with "smart": these are winning behaviors, not immoral ones.
28/ Marketing and engineering put the smart in "work smart, not hard." You should only work hard where you cannot work smart.
29/ The dangers of avoiding hard, painful work are widely recognized. Armchair idea people are reliable villains in advice to entrepreneurs.
30/ But the dangers of avoiding easy and enjoyable work not only go unrecognized, we actively valorize Sisyphean masochism as "heroism".
31/ But there are more masochistic Sisypehans than armchair idea people out there, preaching the virtues of bleeding and having no fun.
32/ They are actually more dangerous. Idle idea-people just create hot air. Anti-idea types burden us with awful, inelegant solutions to problems.
33/ As a professional idea-person-for-hire who works out of an armchair, you might argue that of course I'd say that.
34/ Don't take my word for it. Look around. Anywhere you see awful things built with Sisyphean efforts and weak ideas, you'll see broken, miserable "winners."
35/ On the other hand, anywhere you see things built around powerful ideas/insights, you'll see happy, fulfilled winners, enjoying their huge "unfair" victories more.
36/ Bottomline: without beautiful, imaginative and powerful ideas for leverage, no undertaking is worth it. Idleness is better than Sisyphean winning.
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Check out Breaking Smart Season 1 for the deeper context behind this newsletter. If you're interested in bringing the Season 1 workshop to your organization, get in touch. You can follow me on Twitter @vgr
And don't forget to share this newsletter to people who might find it useful.
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