Seth Godin, looking at the bright side.

I love the optimism from Seth Godin's blog today:

Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."

Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"

Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."

In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?

If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is..."

Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often.

Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.

I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.

Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."

Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"

Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."

In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?

If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is..."

Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often.

Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.

I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.