01:01 – The first episode with my dear friend Ian Scherling.
Lesson: Set the bar.
I looked up the history of “set the bar” and found a compelling (and obvious) link to pole vaulting. If you set the bar too low, the task is easy – everyone can do it. If you set the bar too high, no one succeeds – moral and participation suffers. But, if you set the bar right – you give people something to aim toward, something to reach and aspire into.
That is interesting.
What is embedded in this wisdom is a spirit of ambition and drive. There is a sense of duty to respond with diligence and grit and endurance. That you have a responsibility to the work and to others to set the bar for every task no matter how menial. That is both exhilarating and potentially exhausting.
The part that is intoxicating is that you are consistently creating the framework for others to succeed and step into. You are the first pencil on the paper and the last to leave. You are engaging, listening, encouraging, and projecting. You have a vision to make a reality – you are relying on worldly experiences, a collection of past moments to make present momentum. When you sit at a table people know what you expect and how they will be better after having been beside you. You are the motor, the engine, the belief, and the will to achieve some great task in work, in relationships, in life.
That is the exciting part.
The other side is the risk of becoming a tired voice. That you would pour yourself so fully into something that it would seldom yield the rewards, the success, the quality you envisioned. I can imagine discontentment and disappointment more often than not. The truth is not everyone cares to get better, not everyone cares constantly improve. Its tiring, its exhausting, its just not fun being uncomfortable all the time.
That is the burden.
If you are to truly set the bar with intention it seems you need to do a few things:
- Listen (to those around you) – listen to their passions, ambitions, and goals. What do they care about, what do they want out of the process.
- Synthesize (the voices) – take each person’s perspective to heart and explicitly offer a path for them to succeed and get better.
- Set the bar – once you have listened and then received buy in from everyone involved. Then set the bar – but set it higher than people expected. Give them something that will stretch them, that will bring discomfort, but growth. Encourage them this is not out of their reach, we will go through this together and find success on the other side. If it is not recognition and acclaim, at least it will be growth and improvement, a language developed.
Maybe Wendell Berry said it best…
““You can’t deal with things merely according to category; you are continually required to consider the distinct individuality of an animal or a tree, or the uniqueness of a place or situation, and you do draw upon a long accumulation of experience, your own and other peoples…you are always under pressure to explain to somebody (often yourself) exactly what needs to be done. This is the right kind of language for a writer, a language developing, so to speak, from the ground up.” – Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place, pg 58