Dive 97: Want to grow your career? DRIVE initiatives.

Go above and beyond.

Hey, it’s Alvin!

Apparently, all you need for a successful career is to start more initiatives.

At least, that’s the suggestion from a social media post I found on growth and productivity. But that only works if you’re ready to start initiatives. Otherwise, you’re learning to run before you can walk. Or crawl.

I’ve driven initiatives as a software developer for over 10 years that landed my companies multi-million-dollar deals. But I couldn’t have succeeded without creating a sturdy foundation for myself first. Today, I want to share with you what it means to drive initiatives to success.

Because every rocket needs a sturdy launchpad or it will never reach the stars.

But first, we need some context from the social media post I found…

I came across a post on X/Twitter, quoting from a book by Seth Godin called Watcha Gonna Do With That Duck? The passage starts by saying:

Most knowledge workers spend their day doing one of three things:

• Reacting (badly) to external situations

• Responding (well) to external inputs

• Initiating new events or ideas

I won’t quote the entire passage. It’s long. The gist is:

• Reacting is a reflexive response to a situation out of your control (e.g. an angry comment on social media)

• Responding is a reply to a request for which you have direct responsibility (e.g. a business email sent to you)

• Responding makes us feel good because we’re getting tasks done

• But responding keeps you in a status quo

• Most people spend so much time reacting and responding, they have no time to initiate new events

• Godin implies that initiating new events and ideas creates positive change

• In fact, the one posting the tweet says that an initiative “is where growth happens”

This makes sense on the surface. But if we flip some of his assumptions, we’ll see that Seth Godin’s talking about problems that were already solved at least 35 years ago by educator and author, Stephen Covey.

And if we want our initiatives to succeed, we need to better understand the relationships between reactions, responses, and initiatives.

Is a reaction truly bad?

If we look at the first two points Godin makes, we see he isn’t just talking about reactions and responses:

• Reacting (badly) to external situations

• Responding (well) to external inputs

By parenthesizing “badly,” and “well,” Godin is either implying that reactions are bad and responses are good, or he wants to focus on bad reactions and good responses. But why?

What’s confusing is that Seth Godin separates “reactions” from “responses.” But a reaction is a response.

What Godin calls a “reaction” is just an emotional response.

What Godin calls a “response” is just a physical response.

Whether a response holds you back or propels you forward has nothing to do with whether it’s emotional or physical. Even if that distinction exists, it doesn’t matter. Because reacting badly is as bad as responding badly. And reacting well is as good as responding well.

Stephen Covey reminded us long ago that we have the power to choose all our responses. Covey called it “being proactive.” Because reacting and responding well is the key to success. While reacting and responding poorly is a recipe for failure.

Let’s take one of Godin’s examples.

Suppose you’re an airline CEO and you just saw a comment from an angry passenger online. Sure, you could respond reactively in anger. But you could also respond in a calm, professional, proactive way, and treat it as feedback valuable for improvement. That’s a choice you make. I called it “choosing your emotional flight.” What about what Godin calls “responding”?

Maybe you noticed that Seth Godin implies that responding well only gets you so far. What he means is that if all you do is what you’re told and nothing more, then you’ll remain where you are in your career, life, etc. Godin suggests you need to take initiative to go above and beyond if you want to level up. And I agree with Godin just based on my experiences in software development.

In my software development team, we’re encouraged to fix small annoyances when we have a few minutes to spare. Even if they’re unrelated to our assigned task. For example, maybe we see an opportunity to rewrite a function to perform better.

The initial reaction we get from seeing unwieldy code might be disgust. And we can respond by ignoring it. But we can also respond by improving it. Of course, we won’t always have time to address all the little annoyances we find. That’s when we’re encouraged to raise it with the team and say, “hey, I think we should set aside some time next week to fix this group of annoyances.” That’s an initiative. Put another way,

Initiatives emerge from responding well to situations.

Driving initiatives this way is an effective way to take your career to another level because it lets you practice leadership. But there’s a caveat. It’s not that you need to start initiatives to level up…

Is starting initiatives truly good?

Is it true that people suck at starting initiatives? That’s what Godin seems to suggest.

But people start initiatives all the time.

Every new year, people set resolutions. It’s why new gym memberships skyrocket in January each year. But according to one source, about 80% of those gym-goers quit within 5 months.

Since I was a kid, I always heard of people who would start writing books they would never finish.

As a software developer, I keep hearing about people who start coding software they never ship.

So, people don’t have problems starting initiatives. If a person feels strongly enough about an initiative, they’ll find time to start it. But what good is starting a bunch of initiatives that never finish? Lack of finish is a bigger problem. Here’s why.

From personal experience and observation, it seems like people don’t finish what they start often because they quit just as they come across a challenge.

Their reaction is frustration and exhaustion.

Their response is to quit.

So, their initiative dies.

But growth happens in conquering those challenges. So, quitting too soon means no growth. You can’t grow by starting lots of initiatives if they all die fast. In fact, starting lots of initiatives at once is a recipe for failure because other initiatives will tempt you to quit the current initiative as soon as it feels challenging.

So, starting initiatives isn’t enough for success. You have to finish what you start.

Putting it all together.

Seth Godin suggested people spend too much time reacting badly to external situations. And that responding to external inputs isn’t good enough. So, he suggested people need to initiate more events and ideas.

But there’s a simpler message buried below the surface of his suggestions. Because there’s no meaningful difference between what he considers a “reaction” or “response.” And initiating events and ideas isn’t enough. It all boils down to two key points:

1. Respond well enough to events to maintain your current level.

2. Start initiatives to go above and beyond to level up.

That’s it.

But by thinking through Godin’s ideas, I’d say there are two other keys to success that are much more valuable:

1. Respond well to discover new initiatives.

2. Drive the initiatives by starting and finishing them to level up.

By responding well, you can use that reaction/response as a spark to launch an initiative.

Responding well to those challenges improves our chances of conquering them.

Conquering a challenge leads to growth.

We complete an initiative by conquering all the challenges it gives us, leaving us feeling productive.

That’s the key to productivity and growth.

Reply to belowthesurfacetop@gmail.com or click “Message Alvin” below if you have questions or comments. I’d love the hear from you.

Thank you for reading. Take initiative to level up. And I’ll see you in the next one.