How Maturity Changes Your "Average of 5"

What's the secret, bigshot?

On a pretty regular basis, someone comes to me after a talk or a coaching session and asks, in so many words, "Ok, bigshot — you're so successful, tell me the secret."

The secret to success. The secret to happiness. The secret to having the agency to create the life you want. Whatever the case, they'd like to leave with something clear and usable. Or maybe they want to see how I answer so they can decide if what they just heard was as good as they thought it was. Sometimes I get that sense.

There's always a certain challenge in the question — sometimes playful, sometimes less so. But I like getting it.

What's behind the question

It's always exciting. I'll bet my pupils dilate. I feel like it's a direct chance to make a difference for someone — a chance to knock them off the fence so many people sit on: is it possible for me, or isn't it? I take it as an interaction with real stakes. I could tip someone toward believing they can direct their life by directing their development — or I could tip them the other way.

Because to me, someone who makes the effort to move through the crowd and wait to talk to me is actually confronting themselves. While they were sitting there, they were inspired by what they heard — or, more powerfully, by the thoughts they had while listening. But they also have a habitual voice that says don't believe it. Don't believe you can change. That's who they're really confronting with this question. Some part of them is ready to stop listening to that voice. They're confronting me as a proxy for confronting it.

When I've asked if this is true — if they were at a crossroads, wanting to be knocked off their perch — the answer is always yes. I don't ask every time. And I'm willing to admit that the "high stakes" I feel may be a projection of my passion for making a difference. But I don't think it is.

How I answer

I always get a sense of the person and their situation before choosing what to say, but over the years there's been a clear pattern. One of my most common answers to "what's the secret?" is something I've shared a lot: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

I learned it from Jim Rohn. I’m not sure where he learned it, but there’s been wisdom about being mindful of the company you keep forever. I’ve shared it many times, including here. And now, as with so many things I value and believe, I've come to a new understanding of it, one that has to do with how social pressure changes as you develop and mature, and something about what your energy around people might be telling you.

How I used to think about it

If you're like me, "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with" landed the first time you heard it. Even if you quibble over the notion of actually being the average of other people, there's something true about it.

The common interpretation—and a common reason I'd share it—is that it encourages someone to look at their social network as a vital element in ongoing development. It's like telling someone who's trying not to drink to spend more time with people who don't: our motivations and commitments are socially reinforced. And because social reinforcement is one of the most powerful forces in human life, you'll be more successful in living intentionally—however you've decided to live—if you make social pressure a tailwind, not a distraction or a diffuser. 

When you're trying to be intentional and purposeful, why make it harder? Spend more time with people who are either intentional and purposeful themselves — or who bring it out in you. People who challenge you to be your best, inspire you to reach, give you ideas, support, or advice, and help you stay energized by sharing interests, values, and goals.

Relationships are the best things in life. This isn't about excommunicating anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or who doesn't want to hear about your goals. It's not about excluding people at all. It's about being aware and intentional about the social pressures around you — and making sure you're building a personal community that reflects where you're going as much as it already reflects where you are and where you come from.

There's also real value in spending time with people who take you in a different direction. New perspectives. A wider imagination. And if you think back, you can probably remember relationships that were part of a transition — people you grew apart from when one of you changed, moved, or simply had nothing more to show each other.

Maturity changes the equation

As people reach midlife, time becomes a factor in a whole new way. There are fewer tomorrows than yesterdays — and if there's anything you'd like to do, you'll need a sense of urgency.

Sometimes this is energizing. It shakes you out of the feeling of being on a long march, living the same day over and over. And whether it arrives quietly or suddenly, it often brings a powerful call: to do more, do different things, finish unfinished business, see places you've always been curious about, know yourself differently, know others differently.

All of this changes the relationships we're interested in having. 

And as we move through this reorientation, something else shifts too: social pressure, that powerful force that once shaped so much of how we lived, begins to loosen its grip. The need for external reinforcement fades. 

What rises in its place is something more internal, more earned: a clearer sense of who you are and what you actually want. Carl Jung called this individuation — the process of becoming more fully yourself.

When that happens, the old way of thinking about the "average of five" changes. You're no longer trying to find people to hold you accountable to goals you're still figuring out. You’re no longer looking for healthy pressure to accomplish or become something. You’re at a new place of your development. You’ve become yourself. Now you’d like to find people with whom you can show up fully as yourself and be the person you’ve spent your whole life working toward becoming.  

Presence requires the right company

One of my core philosophies is simple: wherever you are, be there. Be present. It sounds easy. In practice, for most people, it isn't.

When I'm with the right people, I want to be there. So, presence comes naturally. The conversation pulls me in, time disappears, I'm fully there. 

When I'm not with the right people, it’s easy to mentally go somewhere else. That matters more than most people realize. If you can't be present, you can't have impact. You can't connect. You're going through the motions, “getting through it,” and both of you know it. You're not being a true reflection of who you are, and frankly, you're not doing the other person any favors either.

So the question worth asking isn't just “who are your five?” It’s, “are you really showing up for the people who value you?”

Batteries included

As I've gotten older, my filter has sharpened. Maybe I've lost some of the social patience I used to have. But I think what's really happened is I've gotten more honest with myself. More than ever, I want to be around people who have batteries included: people who bring their energy and curiosity into a room, rather than needing mine. Adding to the net energy in the room, not draining it. 

In particular, I have no interest in spending time around Happy Talkers, one-uppers, people who have every answer before they've heard the question, or those who perform enthusiasm without actually feeling it.

I've written about these qualities for years but I’m more focused on it now. And I use this thinking looking at it the other way around, too. It’s part of how I look at my relationships now: am I engaged and bringing energy to this, or am I just not engaged enough to be anything but a warm body or even a drain? I don't want to be that person either. 

One of my highest values is congruence, to be who I say I am, I’m not trying to convince people with words, but to prove who I am through my actions and attitudes. If I want to be in your top five, I have to earn that. I take that seriously.

The phone filter

When your phone rings and you see a name on the screen, what happens? Are you glad? Do you pick up immediately? Or do you start calculating how to avoid it?

I only give my number to people I’ll be genuinely excited to hear from, people whose calls I want to take. And I work hard to make sure that when my name shows up on their screen, they feel the same way about me.

That gut-level, immediate reaction is a real measuring stick. It works in person, too. When you're in a meeting, at a dinner, in a team conversation, pay attention to whether you're present or whether you're mentally somewhere else entirely, wishing you were playing a different game. If it's the latter, it's worth getting honest about why.

A few things worth saying clearly

• Your five is bigger than five.When I talk about the qualities I want in my closest relationships, I'm not talking about having a tight, exclusive list. I have many more than 5 relationships that carry the qualities we’re looking for. But also, when the moment calls for circling the wagons, you do want to know exactly who you want in that circle.

• Your people don't have to be their people. If you have a partner or spouse, don't assume the people you want in your top five will automatically be theirs. That conversation is worth having with honesty and without pressure. Forcing a fit here creates distance rather than closeness.

• Shared values matter more than shared opinions. I've written before about not imposing our beliefs on others, and I mean it. Perfect alignment in any relationship isn't the goal. Difference expands your experience. What you're looking for isn't a mirror. You're looking for people whose character, energy, and integrity you genuinely respect.

Honest inventory

If your personal or professional relationships feel like the wrong kind of work, that's worth sitting with. If you keep attracting the same kinds of people and getting the same results, holding on to relationships that no longer fit, or in some that are quietly unhealthy, take inventory. Tell yourself the truth. It will be uncomfortable, but not unbearable, as most things that make you stretch and grow tend to be. 

You don’t have forever 

We get one shot at being who we want to be. That choice comes with real requirements: the habits, the discipline, the willingness to go the extra mile, to listen deeply, to be consistent and genuine and interested in others. Do that work, and the right people tend to find you. They recognize it.

I understand the urgency of this differently than I did when I was younger. Losing my daughter Jennifer last year made it visceral. It stripped away the last of my patience for waiting until tomorrow, for living in yesterday's excuses or tomorrow's stories. What we have is today. Being present and purposeful today is how you get to fully live the life you have left to live. 

And I hope every time your phone rings, you feel like you can't pick it up fast enough.

Questions, thoughts, reactions? I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks a billion, 

Dave

Your Genius: Your Contribution to the Story of the World

Genius is one of my favorite ideas to work with. 

It's a very powerful frame to simultaneously connect to an internal source of power and confidence and direction. And it’s crucial for working with the future. It's a great concept for individuals, and it's just as useful for thinking about teams, products, and companies. 

One of my highest values for myself and for the Comma Club is "always learning and growing." For me as a coach and a leader, part of that means always learning and growing in my understanding of concepts and models and frameworks for development. And that means that my sense of what "genius" means, how it works, and what it's "made of" is always in an ongoing evolution. 

Because of this, I've had some interesting insights around "genius" over the last few years. Since they are starting to come into a shareable shape, I wanted to share some updated thinking on the concept of "genius" itself, and some new ideas on how to work with the concept. 

Genius, Meaning, and Destiny 

Comma Club is all about living intentionally and choosing your path. Getting clear on desires, setting goals, and achieving them. We tie these all to our values and make the whole vision all coherent with the purpose we've identified for ourselves. 

But there's another sense of purpose to connect to. And the need for it comes up a lot these days, when it's so easy to feel disconnected from the big picture and the story of the world. 

In times like these, we feel drawn to something like how the Greek myths talked about destiny, something more like "what did I come here to do?" Not what you were "destined" to do, as though it's preordained, but "destined to do" because it's what your values and unique combination of gifts and capabilities seem to point to. 

You can reflect and think about: 

"I am who I am, knowledgeable and skilled in the ways I am. And I value what I value. 

When I consider together what matters to me, in my life and in the world, and the things I know and am good at, it suggests that maybe what I'm here to do is…." 

What it comes down to is that thinking about your purpose, values, and genius together like this can guide you to understanding the contribution to the big picture you're best suited to make. So many people, even people of faith, are so hungry for this kind of personal meaning and sense of how they can contribute to the world. This is a powerful path directly to it. It's especially useful at moments in life when you're trying to reorient or set a new course: career change, midlife, reaching financial independence, retiring from daily work, and more. 

Opening up the language around "genius" 

Because we're looking at genius in relation to these other powerful mental energies, making some distinctions can unlock more interpretations. And more insightful ones. 

The classic way we talk about genius is that it’s what you're effortlessly brilliant at. But when we look at genius in a more profound way, as a way to think about how we might contribute most to the world we want to see, it helps to take apart and open up how we usually talk about it. 

It may be that it seems effortless to work in your genius. But maybe it doesn't. Maybe you love the effort, the challenge, overcoming the difficulty or the odds. Effortlessness may not come into it at all. Maybe it always feels very hard but very rewarding. 

Whatever the case, your genius is the thing that you can bring to the world—to a relationship, project, team, company, and so forth—in a special way. Maybe you're just plain better at it than anyone else. Maybe no one does it quite like you. 

Genius unlocks future focus 

So we’re considering genius with an eye toward destiny or contribution to the story of the world. One of the best things about this approach is that it helps clear up something I have often seen when people are first trying to define their genius: the sense that there's a "right answer," a genius you "ought to" have. 

Maybe it’s what other people seem to be good at, or famous or widely admired people are famous for. Hoping, fantasizing, trying to keep up, wanting to take someone else's style. Sometimes people want to reverse engineer their work role into their genius. They define their genius as though they're responding to a job description. Maybe from a wish to prove to themselves or others that they're in the right place, they belong, and are especially suited to what they do. 

It is definitely valuable to do work to establish personal confidence that you are where you should be. But genius isn't about something you aspire to. It's not about anything that you aren't. It's about something you are, on a deep enough level that you can count on it for the foreseeable future. 

Because one of the practical reasons I have people define their genius is to put them in touch with something that feels unique and “theirs.” Something to tap into and pull from and use as a northstar. Thinking about yourself as a unique person with a unique offering for the world, which in turn, tells you how you can expect to connect to others and the world. Having real, accurate, high-confidence answers to questions like: 

Who am I? 

What do I have to offer? 

What is my place in the world?

What do I want to do here? 

Is something most people don't have. And it stops them from thinking about the future in a practical way. Which cuts off working with goals effectively. Why? Because they imagine too many possibilities, and too many generic possibilities. 

When you answer these questions, you focus your mind and you focus your energy. And you can focus clearly enough to set goals and paths to goals in a way that will actually work. 

Self-knowledge and genius 

We're not interested in talking about genius like it's something to aspire to. We're most interested in genius as a fact. That means that we're interested in accurate self-knowledge. 

Sometimes we don’t want to know about ourselves. This interferes with understanding and working with our genius. 

Sometimes it’s just a simple matter of words and definitions. Sometimes it's a tricky mental/emotional block. And sometimes a nuanced confusion pops up between working with information and feedback from others and making them responsible for how you define yourself. 

Walter Payton said something like, "When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you." When it comes to knowing what you're particularly great at, the unsolicited feedback of those who know you, and know your abilities, is very powerful. 

The flip side of this is when someone is always promoting a story or image of themselves with others. This is a strong indicator that they're not in touch with self-knowledge about their capabilities and worth. They need someone to tell them. Often. 

Sometimes a person like this just needs to do a little reflection. Other times, it's part of a deeper set of issues. 

Lacking self-knowledge is normal. Even after we've learned about ourselves, we will change and need to dig back in to understand who we are now. That's the kind of work we do in Comma Club. 

But leaving self-knowledge up to others doesn’t work. And it is often a sign that someone doesn’t trust the endeavor to know themselves. They may have shame and think that self-knowledge will just make them feel bad. They may have some other mental/emotional wires crossed. 

Whatever the case, avoiding self-knowledge is something people can spend years and lots of energy on. You see it often in coaching at advanced levels. People want to do development work, they want better results, but they get stuck at a plateau. Ultimately, it turns out that the logjam is caused by avoiding self-knowledge. Not wanting to know. Avoiding honest reflection. 

This is one way to say it, and how people tend to talk about it. But the psyche is strange. Often, they already know, at least on some level, what they don't want to know, or don't want to admit, or don't want someone else to know. They might even be able to say something about it in a safe environment like with a coach. But something stops them from really accepting the knowledge in a way that lets them work with it. 

Breakthroughs in situations like this are always amazing. You have the privilege of watching someone have insight they have spent energy avoiding for maybe 20, 30, 40 years. You watch a very heavy burden leave them, and you can see their eyes seem to take in more possibilities from a wider vista. 

This is as good a time as any to say that whenever someone only values other-approval and doesn't value their own self-knowledge, it will prevent any meaningful development. Because all growth starts with the truth. 

Other people are a powerful source of feedback, perspective, and advice, and they help ground us in the universal experience, even as they show us the range of individual experience. 

But you know something's up if someone has given up the responsibility of knowing themselves best and leaving it up to others to define them. 

In sync with your destiny 

When your genius and your story are pointed in the same direction, something shifts. Effort seems more meaningful. Your motivation runs deeper. Your results speak for themselves. Genius isn't a destination. It's something you keep discovering, keep refining, keep learning to work with more skillfully. That's true for individuals, and it's true for teams and companies too. Which is why it's one of my favorite ideas to keep coming back to. I hope you’ll make some interesting discoveries about your genius, and I hope to hear about them. 

Cheers, 

Dave

Reflection: Getting a new sense of your genius

1. So with all of this in mind, think about your genius. Think of the words you use, and think of what you mean. Try to bring up the feeling of being in your genius. Visualize times you know you've been working in it. Make some notes about all of this, just to get your eyes and body into it a bit more.

2. Think about activities you love, the accomplishments, achievements, contributions you made that mean the most to you. Look at the moments when you felt most alive in your work. What do people come to you for, want your unique input into? Those moments are full of information.

3. What do I want my story to be? What are my real dreams? Not just dreams that sound good or make sense, but dreams that actually belong to me. How do I want to contribute to the story of the world?

Unlearning with Honor: The Art of Decommissioning Your Beliefs

As we look toward our next Comma Club workshop, I'm thinking a great deal about what it really takes to "always be learning and growing," which is one of my highest and most consistent goals, and one that is shared with all of you.

When I first dug into the research around learning agility, the word itself, "unlearning," grabbed me even before I'd fully decided what it meant and what its value was to me and what it might be to you. Really, it was the first two letters: "un–."

I had gone through my whole life without considering learning and growth as anything but additive processes. I was very much stimulated by the idea that things I knew, and certainly things I thought, stopped being useful, and stopped being useful to the point that they needed to be retired.

And that right there was one of my insights: Just as we go through a conscious process of transition, maybe with a party or a trip or another occasion to mark the change, unlearning often requires steps to shut an old way of thinking down. To do it right, it's much more like decommissioning a ship than it is donating a sweatshirt.

How to Decommission a Warship

There's a great and interesting article from the US Naval Institute about what it takes to decommission a warship. I'll share the link here. Suffice it to say that when you decommission a ship, you're shutting down something that works, you're shutting down a workplace and a living space for many people, and you're acknowledging at every step that something that used to be a valuable and necessary part of a fleet is ready to be removed from service. The fleet will still run without it. In fact, it will run better. 

You don’t just burn it down. There’s a process. When it comes to decommissioning a belief, that process starts with reflection.

Merchant of Reflection

All change starts with the truth. And the kind of truth that's needed for personal development only comes through powerful, deep reflection. The lessons and concepts I share at each workshop and the tools I bake into the worksheets and the planner are there to make your reflection as focused, successful, and efficient as possible. It's a constant refinement process on my part.

What I want to bring to the front of your mind now are some thoughts to take your reflection deeper than you need to go on a daily basis. Deep enough to get your fingers underneath some of your most automatic responses and unexamined attitudes.

Two (Loving) Provocations

There are 2 big things I will drop on you now that will, once you come to your own personal understanding of them, transform your daily experience of being alive, and will open up new vistas for your results and impact with other people and the world:

You might believe a fact, but your beliefs aren't facts. They are mental constructions that help you connect to and work with the world outside your mind. They may be helpful, but they aren't the only beliefs that will work for you.Your beliefs were all formed in the past. Many were formed for a world that doesn't necessarily exist anymore. Relationships that don't exist, situations that don't exist, and a "you" that doesn't exist.

As we make progress working on our limiting behaviors and beliefs, we all get to a point where we realize that something big has to change. If you've hit a plateau, it's time to look at these two ideas with focus and patience until you see something in them.

Our first beliefs about all sorts of things: money, relationships, human nature, who we are, how we should feel about ourselves, start when we are kids. There’s nothing to stop you from simply reinforcing those beliefs for 50 or 60 years, even if you’d really benefit from a more adult perspective.

Growth in the Era of Quickening

For years, I have coached on removing next-level stoppers, but the world has been changing increasingly fast, and more and more the development people are seeking is as much about finding ways to adapt to the world, find their fit, and learn to read the environment for opportunities.

Whether you're looking more to grow linearly, i.e., how can you maximize the opportunities you're already in-flight with, or trying to adapt to changes, if you've already set goals, worked the process, and aren't seeing the results you need, it's time to chew on these two thoughts and get down to their implications for you. I'd like to help you get a jumpstart on these now in advance of our next workshop.

Exploring the 2 (Loving) Provocations

Just What, Exactly Do You Mean?

First off, I'll be clear: I'm not talking about your faith, marriage, or core values you base your entire reality on. While we can reach crisis points where those things need to be investigated, I'm not talking about those today. For now, your truest northstars aren't what we're discussing.

The beliefs that we all benefit from auditing from time to time are the ones that drive our attitudes. I'm the kind of person who… I'm not the kind of person who… I hate people who… It's so lame when… This or that is so uncool… It's important to realize how many people have, once reaching success and midlife, found untapped energy, motivation, and "yes to life" by doing a 180 on something like that.

Often, other people help us see these possibilities. We accept something because we accept someone. We have a child, grandchild, or colleague from another generation who shows us that something we dismissed or forbade ourselves from isn't what we thought it was, and suddenly we see a whole new corner of life. Whether it's as simple as opening up your sensibility or as complex as seeing a perspective you disagree with as valid, suddenly, you are "the kind of person who…" and it ignites passion and energy you never thought possible.

Or in business, we make connections, learn about something, develop a skill, and now a world we thought was out of our purview is something we want to take part in.

Belief and Fact

Here's the first piece: You might believe a fact, but your beliefs aren't facts. They're mental constructions—tools that help you work with the world, not the world itself.

It’s simple and easy to confuse these. We think our beliefs are Reality , so changing them feels impossible or just dishonest. “This is just how things are." Luckily, no. It's how you've organized things to make sense of them.

Think about a fact: Revenue was down 15% last quarter. That's a measurable, verifiable fact. Now beliefs come in. One person sees that fact and believes: "We're failing. This business is dying. I'm not cut out for this." Another believes: "This is a signal. Time to pivot. We're learning what doesn't work." The same fact is met with completely different beliefs about what it means, where it leads, and what should happen next.

A fact doesn't tell you what to believe. You construct the belief from the fact plus your interpretation, which comes from your history, your fears, your goals, and so on. Sometimes

You can be completely committed to facing reality, to accepting hard truths, to being honest about what's actually happening, and still have tremendous flexibility in what you believe about those facts.

Ants Don’t Need Beliefs

Ants directly perceive the presence of chemicals in their environment. It’s how they communicate. They have totally different organs than us. They don’t need to believe anything.

But we don't have a sense organ that directly perceives fact. We have brains that take impulses in, create memories, connect them to other memories, compare them to patterns, and construct stories. This happens so automatically that we think we're perceiving reality directly.

We're not. We're always interpreting, always building a model, always choosing—usually unconsciously—which details matter and what they mean.

Retooling

This is actually good news. It means you have more freedom than you think, as long as you’re willing to dig in and get underneath all that work done unconsciously and automatically and do it manually.

The beliefs that drive your attitudes—"I'm the kind of person who..." "People like that always..." "Success means..." "It's pathetic to..."—these aren't facts you discovered. They're tools you built. And tools can be rebuilt.

A spoon makes a terrible knife. A knife doesn't work as a fork. The question isn't whether your belief is "true" in some absolute sense. The question is: Is this belief the right tool for what you're trying to do now?

Sometimes you discover a belief has been working against you for years, and you thought you were stuck with it because you thought it was just "reality,” or who you are. It's not. It's a tool you can put down and pick up a different one.

A Secret Source of Energy

How often have you heard of people finding new energy, new insight, new motivation, or a new “yes to life” from allowing a perspective they dismissed, or a possibility they forbade themselves?

“I’m not the kind of person who likes concerts” changes to “I love live music when I get to sit down,” and suddenly a whole new corner of life has opened up.

“Only people who should be divorced have separate vacations” becomes “our couples trips are actually romantic now that we also get to do solo trips the other isn’t interested in.”

“I need to be there every day, or I don’t deserve my percentage” becomes “I’ve been trusting my team more, and they’re taking things in directions I’d never imagined.” And life heads in new and better directions

Beliefs Past Expiration 

As to the second provocation: Beliefs are formed in the past, often the distant past, for specific conditions that no longer exist. They expire. And they can really go bad.  

Relationships that don't exist.

Someone might learn to be careful around anger because a parent was volatile, and they’re still tiptoeing when they’re 40. Sometimes people learned to be self-sufficient at an early age because they couldn't count on help. Now, as adults, they don’t know how to ask for help, and they are limiting their ability to delegate—and alienating people who genuinely want to give support.

We learn how to act to please or cope with parents, teachers, and school relationships. It can be a massive millstone to drop when you look up and realize the beliefs and attitudes you formed for those people don’t matter anymore. You’re free to completely reassess.

Situations that don't exist.  

There are plenty of examples, but one is very common in our circle: so many of us developed attitudes about money based on the sense of scarcity we grew up with. Whether we grew up around dire poverty and material lack, or we heard our parents argue or worry about earning, saving, or spending, we developed certain beliefs. Even if we later understand on some level that our parents weren’t experts on money, we often resist shaking it off. Sometimes because we believe it helps us stay driven. Sometimes we hold on because we just don’t inspect our core beliefs.

A "you" that doesn't exist.This is the big one. You formed beliefs about your capabilities, your worthiness, your limits when you were younger, less experienced, less capable. "I'm not good with people." “I’m bad with numbers.” "I always mess up under pressure." “I need more time than other people.”

These might have been accurate observations once. But you've changed. You've learned. You've developed capacities you didn't have. Even if there’s some factual basis to these, you’ve learned to thrive despite them.

So much of what makes us miserable and what alienates us from others is shame over beliefs that are long since expired, whether we are conscious of the shame and accept it, or we compensate to try to cover for it. Updating these false or inaccurate beliefs has the biggest day-to-day impact of any of them. Peace of mind that seems impossible is on the other side.

Worthy of a Decommissioning

You’re here, so you’re successful. These beliefs worked. They helped you navigate the world you were in. They were commissioned for a reason, and they've been faithfully serving the mission ever since.

The problem isn't that they were wrong then—it's that the world changed, the mission changed, and they kept on running on the same old orders.

So when you hit a plateau, when you keep running into the same wall, it's worth asking:

What relationship am I still navigating that ended years ago?What situation am I still preparing for that isn't coming?What version of me am I still protecting that doesn't need protection anymore?Which belief am I running that was written for a world I'm not living in anymore?

Take these apart. Understand the work they do, think about what you’d like in their place for the mission you’re on now.  

Then, let them go. But not unceremoniously. They deserve some ceremony. They deserve some honor. They have served. They kept you safe, they got you through, they helped you succeed. They have served you well, but they shouldn’t stay in your fleet forever.

Wish them fair winds and following seas, and find a whole new realm of possibilities by retooling your beliefs.

Dave

"They don’t get it.” Blame, responsibility, and influencing.

In the Comma Club, we talk a lot about our words, deeds, and thoughts, and how our habits and relationships shape us. Sometimes it’s enlightening to break out a scratch pad and put some numbers to these things.

Say what you will about the world in 2025, but it’s fun to have AI around to explore all the curiosities that come up. I worked with a LLM and did the math to estimate how many times I have heard the phrase “I love you” in the last 40 years—factoring in my wife, my kids, all of my family, and all my close relationships where that phrase is appropriate.

My favorite part of the calculation was the assumptions the model made about how often kids say they love you at different ages. It guessed that you’d hear it daily from a 2–8-year-old, 0.5 times a day (whatever that means!) from a 9–12-year-old, and then rapidly going from weekly to monthly to quarterly as kids become teenagers, young adults, and mature adults, respectively.

Now, I’ve been blessed to have a lot more time with my kids than that, and a lot more affection, but I was interested in the process of the estimation as much as the actual estimate.

With all of this in mind, it turns out I’ve heard that phrase at least 70,000 times in the last 40 years. And I’ve said it at least that many times. I chose 40 years because there was another phrase I wanted to clock.

A foundational lesson on influencing, responsibility, and how they connect

As I think about my legacy, one thing I’m interested in is sharing what I’ve learned with the next generation. And the insights I’m sharing here are fundamental ones. 

As you read, I doubt you’ll feel the lesson applies to you. But I know that it will help you express your similar insights to those you want to inspire to be the best they can be as entrepreneurs, leaders, and employees.

In fact, the second half is all about employees, and it resembles the comments and conversations I’ve had coaching teams to be better at influencing. The lesson here is exactly the kind that will save time and suffering if it’s learned early. I’d love to hear your version of these insights and who you share them with and how.

The song of a frustrated entrepreneur?

Over the last 40 years, I’ve probably heard the phrase “They just don’t get it,” and all its variations, 2,000 times. That’s about once a week. Someone will be telling a story about a pet opinion someone didn’t agree with, a great idea they have that they can’t get going, or something they’re always trying to get their team to understand—and they’ll end it with: “They just don’t get it.”

And that made sense to me. We all know how easy it is to spot an opportunity from our perch as entrepreneurs. To us, it’s not more complicated than fund it and put a team around it. I came to think of it as the song of the frustrated visionary.

That’s how I heard it at first. My life had been blessed to that point and I was always pursuing ideas that I could get across to people and teams who understood. How could the problem be anything besides the other person?

Or is it something else?

But after maybe the 1,001st time, I started to hear a different ring to it. I realized I wasn’t hearing it from everyone. I didn’t hear it as often from corporate leaders. I didn’t ever hear it from VCs or investors. I didn’t hear it from entrepreneurs whose businesses were growing.

And, regardless of anything else, I didn’t hear it from people who were emotionally grounded and secure in themselves. So there was something else going on.

Over time I realized that it wasn’t the words themselves but the resentment and defeat they were delivered with. “They just don’t get it”  was the phrase people were using to excuse giving up. And crucially, it excused giving up without changing your mind.

It didn’t suggest any learning from the process of discussing the idea with others, it didn’t express any insight into why the approach taken or the idea itself didn’t land, and it didn’t admit that the idea wasn’t as profitable in practice as it was exciting in theory.

Once I thought all this through, I never heard the phrase the same way. I no longer heard the song of an unjustly opposed visionary. I heard something that sounded a lot like wounded ego lashing out with blame.

The buy-in you earn and the buy-in you buy

As entrepreneurs, we aren’t experts at everything. That’s why we build strong teams of experts around us. We’re often the chief visionary, focused on upside, potential, possibility, new ground. Our experts usually focus on realizing—on grounding and producing and operationalizing, analyzing for risk and feasibility, protecting investment, and ensuring profit. That’s why we work with them.

So there are two scenarios when our experts don’t “get” our idea. Sometimes, they're right. In this case, “not getting it” protects us from mistakes. In the other case, they’re wrong. Maybe because they’re stuck in established thinking, maybe because you weren’t able to express the crux of the idea in a way that made sense. And this can happen. We have all heard about visionary inventors, execs, and others who heroically had to build support from investors, partners, or others to make their big idea happen. 

In extreme cases, they spend their own money to make it happen—they bought the buy-in needed. That’s not always possible, and it’s not always the best approach. What people choose to invest in and work on isn’t the same as what people do on a mercenary basis. Hundreds of people will tell you they invented the same thing as Facebook, Dropbox, Starbucks, any number of major products, but they couldn’t get it off the ground or adopted at the same scale.

Assuming those would-be products were identical, the difference is in having earned the buy-in of others versus being impatient and trying to buy the buy-in.

It’s usually (but not always) the case that what you can’t explain to investors you can’t explain to the public. Crowdfunding is a great counterpoint to this, as it’s people who want to support the creation of something they want. Like everything else, the rules around all this are changing.

But if you can’t get it across to the teams that are going to build it, there’s no hope. If you want to be successful at a large scale, some “they” will have to “get it.” And that is ultimately the job of you, the visionary.

Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: whether they privately cursed how dense everyone seemed or had the patience of a saint, a visionary who made a fortune from their vision stayed in the saddle until the people who needed to get it, got it.

The hidden cost of “they don’t get it”

Sometimes “They don’t get it”just means, “I had a good idea, people didn’t like it, but hey, I’m still smart. Right?” Fair enough. Tending a bruised ego is necessary. Venting with people you trust is fine. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling disappointed when people you respect or admire don’t see what you see.

But buy-in from others, with all their different frames of reference, is an essential part of the recipe. Seasoned entrepreneurs know that earning that buy-in—the work of influencing—is table stakes for getting anything done at scale.

And like most things, it gets easier with practice. Over time, people grow out of the “They don’t get it” phase as they move through multiple ventures or lead larger teams. And now, when I hear it from someone earlier in their journey, I take it as a cue to coach them on the relationship between ego, influencing, and blame.

Blaming comes from feeling powerless

And here we get into what I think is the deeper reason people do or don’t give up and lash out when their ideas aren’t understood.

Listening more closely, I began connecting the “don’t get it”refrain to something else: blame language. On its surface, blaming isn’t anything special. But there’s a reason we associate blame with youth, pettiness, and panic—it comes from a place of feeling profound weakness and disempowerment.

Nonviolent Communication tells us that every time someone blames, they’re asking for help. It’s life-changing to hear blaming language as someone expressing a need for help.

They’re asking for help—demanding it, actually. They’re doing something tricky and counterintuitive: asking for help without being vulnerable. No one does this consciously. It’s reactive. It’s a wounded ego asking for first aid.

We need to know what happened and why. We need to understand who did what. This is rational analysis. Blaming is another thing altogether. If you search your feelings, you’ll be very clear on the distinction.

Blaming is what we do when we don’t know how to make something happen but don’t want to admit it.

It’s a human reflex that works less and less—and stands out as inappropriate more and more—as we gain responsibility. You can blame your little brother for breaking a vase when you’re nine. But at 30, you can’t blame your parents for not encouraging you to be what you now know you should be. At 49, you can’t really blame your spouse for a relationship rut.

If you’re the boss and you blame your team, even if they’re intimidated, it’s clear you’re not in control. In all these cases, there is nowhere to pass the buck to. It’s your problem, the rewards of solving it go to you, and you are the person all the appeals go to anyway.

Responsibility in relationships and leadership

So much of maturing has to do with setting aside patterns from earlier life. Blame is a pattern that doesn’t work for adults. Whoever got you in whatever mess you may be in, you’re always the person responsible. There’s no one else to blame. There’s immense freedom in this.

There’s cause and effect, understanding, and then there’s responsibility. In any situation or relationship you want to continue, you have to take responsibility for what happens. That doesn’t mean pretending everything is your fault—it means caring about results, not dumping blame.

Even if you had a company of one, working with AI, you’d have to make sure the AI “gets it.”

The one thing you trade for being a leader—of a business and of your life—is the luxury of ever passing the buck.

Helping others get it—and get you—never ends. At work, at home, and even in your understanding of yourself.

In life, it’s your obligation to sell, not their obligation to buy. Don’t take it personally.

Part II

Complexity, blame and influencing in organizations  

The ultimate blame game at work: good complexity vs. bad complexity

There’s a concept I think about often: good complexity vs. bad complexity. Companies create both. In a lot of ways, companies are machines that produce bad complexity as they pursue good complexity—and they simplify complexity as they go on.

Good complexity is growth—more geographies, products, clients, employees. Bad complexity is the paperwork, processes, and bureaucracy that’s required to be orderly and track investment and return.

Great leaders cyclically cut the knot of bad complexity once the good complexity has paid off, usually as their teams let them know it’s necessary before taking on any more good complexity.

From the ground, this can look chaotic and avoidable, the result of poor management. And from the top looking down, this can look like it shouldn’t be a problem.

But the reality is, it’s basically a natural cycle. Not understanding this natural cycle is a root cause of cynicism—and the unreflective, naive heart of every Dilbertcartoon. And it’s the generator of the baseline lack of accountability in companies: It’s not the fault of my leadership, it’s these dumb people to blame. It’s not my fault I can’t handle all these processes and meetings, it’s these dumb leaders to blame.

Neither party can fix this without the other. And in a company, it takes influencing to connect the two sides and facilitate a conversation.

It may not surprise you to learn that employees can’t effectively influence if they do their version of “they just don’t get it” directed at their leaders.

Employees have their own version

For employees, their “song of frustration” is different. It sounds like the private satisfaction of feeling smarter than your boss, or thinking you know how to fix everything if only someone would listen. It’s the cold comfort of feeling like you’re right in exchange for making peace with not being effective.

Taking responsibility for change

This is too bad, because sometimes it’s true: employees really could fix things if they could get someone to listen. It’s in everyone’s interest to encourage them to—and help them understand how to do it.

The employees who actually drive change—the ones who get ideas implemented and rise through organizations—don’t stop at being right.

They take responsibility for the entire journey from insight to implementation. They learn influencing—the micro and macro, the tactical and the strategic, the political and the practical. Not because it’s in their job description, but because they understand that in the real world, being right is maybe 10% of the equation, and that getting things done is the only thing that gets you ahead.

Companies that reward this and facilitate this have an unstoppable evergreen competitive advantage.

Recalibrate what success looks like

In a company, (and even in some families), being right is 10% of what counts. The other 90% is the work nobody teaches you in school or in “persuasion" workshops.

It’s realizing your brilliant idea must survive within budgets, timelines, competing priorities, and politics. Your manager who “doesn’t get it” might be juggling seventeen other initiatives—three of which directly conflict with yours.

That might mean your idea can’t happen now, that might mean you need to focus on another solution, or address a fraction of the problem.

And here we see one of the underlying difficulties that demotivates employees to bother to influence change: success at work isn’t like success at home.

One of many adjustments human beings have to make to serve as a part of an organization is understanding fractional progress. In life, you may not feel satisfied by small improvements—probably because you can’t measure them in the first place—but as an employee, you can measure things.

Lean into it. After all, fractional improvements are literally what resume or CV bullets are made of.

Fractional because it’s shared

And it only makes sense that some progress or success will be fractional. Because change in organizations requires many perspectives and many stakeholders, and it’s only natural that a good idea will have many chunks taken out of it and additional pieces tacked on by the time it becomes real. It’s what happens in lawmaking, too. And just like in lawmaking, the ones who make change happen in companies create consensus and build coalitions. They translate insight into language the organization understands, grounding it in metrics and priorities that already matter, framing it according to what their audience cares about.

They don’t want anyone not to get it just because their natural inclination is to frame their point from their own perspective. Overall, they take responsibility for making their idea understood and actionable to everyone who needs to understand.

The alternative—sitting back and feeling smarter than everyone—feels good for a moment but changes nothing. Just like saying “they just don’t get it” covers your ego for a moment but doesn’t change anything at all.

Your obligation to yourself and your success

Just as it’s an entrepreneur’s obligation to sell, and not their investors’ or prospects’ obligation to buy, your company doesn’t owe you understanding—even though they would benefit from it. Cardiologists know that just because their advice is good for people doesn’t mean people will take it.

A secret in life is that if you see something others don’t, that’s not the end of your responsibility—it’s the beginning. You have to make it visible, make it make sense in their world, make it feel possible within their constraints.

You have to help them get it.

And even if the answer is no, you’ll walk away with stronger relationships, better insight, and a reputation for clarity.

Because influence isn’t about being right—it’s about taking responsibility for making the right things happen.

I hope you enjoyed this as an exercise in articulating a lesson many of us learned the hard way. I’d love to hear your personal stories and insights on the topic, and I’d love to know if you find a way to share these insights to empower and enable influencing in your companies.

Cheers,
Dave