I see a lot of posts and blogs on the internet about hustle culture. Get up at 5am. Get to work. 14 hour days. Go Go Go. Get it done, bay-be! It is an effective approach for the young and the yang alike. But what if time and experience (and the feminine) offers another way? What if instead of hustle and go, we lead instead through breathe and flow?
In the past, I have had many leadership roles in very yang oriented industries including the defense industry, high tech, and venture capital. In those roles, yang style leadership was effective. Now, as co-founder of a blockchain project, I can tell you that, in this industry, yang approaches do not work. In general, schedule driven, hustle and go leads to team burnout and community alienation (and worse). Pushing through resistance this week to make that decision or finish that task and you miss the critical bit of information that was going to show up next week that would have made it all 10x easier or better. This is fine in a hierarchical organization. But it doesn’t work in a flat community-oriented volunteer organization.
I have an opportunity to lead with a different style and so far, it is much more effective. I am leading like a Guru. No hustle and go, it’s all breathe and flow. I wake up when my body is ready to wake up (or when the dogs wake me up… mostly when the dogs say so.) I spend nearly 2/3 of my waking day total in activities that sharpen the saw, as they say. The other 1/3 of the waking day is spent in deep work. But how do you get anything done? If you have been tracking the project, you would be blown away with the productivity. By keeping my mind, body, soul, energy and consciousness optimized, I am able to do more in that 1/3 of a single waking day than most do in a week. I consciously create a situation where work flows effortlessly and information arrives at the perfect time. But that is just me leading myself. What about others?
Our community is all volunteer as we work towards launch. There is no hierarchy. We all take up roles that we personally are excited about. We believe that if each person does what they naturally are drawn to do, within the context of the project, we will have a higher quality project in the end. That’s actually Nash Economics which shows us that the best result will come when each individual does what is best for themselves AND the group. (go watch the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind).
While we are excited to see it launch, we are not schedule-driven, we are motivation driven. Breakthroughs happen more often because we are moving forward in joy, not in stress to meet some deadline. Funny enough, we are moving along faster than I could have hoped in any schedule. Instead of a schedule, we work one step at a time, accomplishing the appropriate steps in order, researching, learning and then creating. And we just don’t quit.
Of course none of this would work in an environment where you needed to deliver results to a customer by a deadline, or manufacture products, etc. But for the world of volunteer community tech development, it works beautifully. We always seem to have the information and the connections we need at just the right time. You cannot buy that reality – you have to create it. It is YIN leadership for a YIN situation.
In all of this, intuition is primary. If something does not sit right on a gut level, we don’t do it. We do plenty of research and work to get smart on each step along the way, but intuition will trump all of that in an instant. I have learned that lesson the hard way throughout the decades. So as we research and look at our options, the final decision rests in the gut and in the heart. No questions asked. We move toward what feels like joy and purpose and mission for humanity, and we move away from what feels like fear and ego, and it is working.
