On July 1, in the United States’ knockout stage opener against Bosnia and Herzegovina, American striker Folarin Balogun was ejected from the game by a red card penalty. The card came after a collision that virtually every analyst called accidental, and the punishment was mandated by an automated video review, not a call on the field.

Balogun had every reason to feel wronged. And his team would have to finish the biggest match of their lives a man down.

If you’ve watched the World Cup before, you’ve seen how many players respond to this type of unjust call. Players dramatically surrounded the referee, arguing every call as if their honor depended on it even though it never impacts the outcome. But Balogun did none of that. He didn’t throw his hands up for the cameras or berate the official. Instead, he simply walked off the field. After the match, he sought out the referee and shook his hand.

Asked about it afterward, Balogun didn’t pretend he agreed with the decision. He did, however, offer this about his dignified reaction on the field:

“I never want to react out of anger and out of emotion. There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”

Then, regarding the handshake, he added: “You can feel like an injustice can happen to you. It’s not an excuse to be disrespectful.”

It’s easy to display character when things are going your way, however, character truly comes through in our most challenging moments, when it seems natural to lose our cool.

But when he faced that moment in the biggest game of his life, Balogun took the high road.

This isn’t what we’ve come to expect from elite athletes. Watch a night of NBA basketball and you’ll see grown men chase officials down the court, throw up their hands after every whistle, and treat each call as a personal affront. Many professional athletes’ behavior toward referees even earns them technical fouls that harm their team. The theatrics are so normalized that we barely register them anymore, and each successive generation emulates this behavior.

But Balogun, just 24 years old, understood the size of the moment and what it meant for his country.

“I’m aware that the World Cup might be the first time a lot of American viewers are tuning in. So it’s important just to show people, whether things happen to you, good or bad, just to continue to be yourself.”

Balogun recognized he had an opportunity to set an example and make his country proud, rather than focusing on his own grievance or anger. That is what a leader does: consider the impact beyond themselves and remember that people are watching and learning from them.

The developmental psychologist Dr. Aliza Pressman has a line I keep coming back to that was the anchor of a recent Friday Forward: “All feelings are welcome, but not all behaviors are.” The discipline lives in the space between the two, separating what you feel from how you act. Balogun felt wronged and didn’t pretend otherwise. He simply refused to express that feeling through his behavior and make everyone around him angrier about something they could not change.

The United States’ run ended a round later. But I have to believe Balogun walked away from this World Cup with a new set of admirers, for both his play on the field and his words and actions off it. He’s a class act, and the kind of example that seems to be getting harder to find.

Quote of the Week

“Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” – John Wooden

Have a Great Weekend!

-Bob

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• The Unspoken Rules of Work

• How To Eliminate Your Pointless Meetings

Recently, Keir Starmer announced he would resign as Britain’s prime minister. I follow British politics only from a distance, so many people can speak to the particulars far better than I can. But one pattern stood out so much it was visible to me from across the pond.

As the UK was roiled by a series of crises and problems, Starmer kept insisting the situation was less grim than the reality people could observe with their own eyes. Starmer’s characterization of events diverged so greatly from the national mood in the UK that eventually his party decided he had to go. Starmer seemed to recognize this later than anyone, only resigning once the Labour party elected his clear successor and forced his hand.

That gap between the story a leader tells and the reality people live is constantly visible in life. And before I point at anyone else, I should admit I have created this gap myself.

Earlier in our company’s lifecycle, I led an aggressive expansion of our service line. While this felt like an exciting signal of growth, I was unwilling to recognize this expansion was pulling time, talent and focus away from the core business that paid our bills. The numbers were telling me something was wrong long before I was willing to admit it.

Thankfully, we were able to turn things around and get back to growth. But we only did so after I abandoned the expansion plan and got us laser focused on our primary offering again.

When you deny reality, you cannot solve the problems that threaten to ruin you. In my experience, facing reality can only happen in three stages; most people never get past the first.

Stage One: Admit to yourself that you have a problem. This is the hardest step and the most important, because nothing else can begin until it is done.

Stage Two: Acknowledge the problem to the people it affects so they can help you. You need other people to make a situation better, and honesty is what earns their trust. People are often willing to offer help to those who have the courage to ask for it.

Stage Three: Accept that there is rarely a quick fix. Many things take years to build, minutes to destroy, and years to rebuild. This asymmetry is very hard for most people to come to grips with.

You can bury your head in the sand and hope a problem resolves itself. But we all know this rarely happens. Instead, reaching a solution takes a long climb; you want to start that journey as soon as possible, and avoid doing it alone.

I often come back to a phrase I use with my kids, with leaders I work with, and with myself:

“We are where we are, now what.”

The one thing that reliably moves a situation forward is accepting where things actually stand and turning toward the present and the future, rather than litigating the past. You have to play the cards in your hand and go from there. Looking back at what you used to have, or where you used to be, does not help you address where you are today.

Reality does not wait for us to be ready to accept it. And the longer we put off that moment of recognition, the poorer our options tend to be.

What is one reality in your work or life that you already sense but have not let yourself fully admit? And what would change if you stopped waiting, faced it today, and asked for help?

Quote Of The Week

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” — Ayn Rand

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

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• The Unspoken Rules of Work

• How To Eliminate Your Pointless Meetings

• A Different Way To Think About Your Best Employees

• If you’ve ordered the most expensive meal at the table, don’t be the one to suggest that you split the check evenly.

• If you borrow a car, return it clean and fill the gas.

• You should repay a debt/loan before someone has to ask.

A few readers replied that there are just as many, if not more, unspoken rules at work. Violating these rules often has consequences that can be career limiting, even if you are never explicitly reprimanded. And anecdotally, I have heard from several leaders whose younger employees and newer leaders may not be familiar with these important best practices that aren’t found in an employee handbook.

I shared many of these rules with my daughter before her first internship, and I’ve shared several of them with new leaders I’ve mentored over the years as well. These are good to reinforce at all stages of your professional journey.

Don’t reply all unless every single person needs the message

So many people use reply all when the context of the email makes it clear that it’s not the appropriate or requested thing to do. This always makes people question your emotional intelligence and can be something people joke about for years.

Praise in public, correct in private

This is a vital rule for feedback, whether you are correcting a peer, a direct-report or certainly a manager. Don’t call someone out in front of others; pull them aside privately and politely share your feedback. But if you’re praising someone for a job well done, be sure to highlight it in front of their team, department or, if appropriate, the entire company.

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Boston was hardly prepared for the celebration the Scots brought. By the end of the week the Scottish fans, dubbed the Tartan Army, had taken over the bars, drained the city’s kegs, and brought Fenway more joy than it’s seen all year. The Boston locals even shed their typical reserve and fully embraced their enjoyably rambunctious visitors.

What I found most interesting was many of these Scottish visitors acknowledged they were nervous about their trip to the US. Some admitted they nearly didn’t come at all.

They have been absorbing the warnings on social media about our political climate and ICE presence and half-expected hostility at the airport. Instead, they were met with hospitality and kindness. As one Scottish fan put it in a viral video: “The America that we are experiencing right now is the America we were promised growing up.”

This experience wasn’t unique to Boston, or to the Scots. In Lawrence, Kansas, more than five hundred people came to the airport to welcome the Algerian national team. The local high school band learned Algeria’s anthem and played it on the tarmac.

Across the country, visitors have been posting wide-eyed videos of the most ordinary American things: free refills, ice in their sodas, driving a pickup truck, the size of a Walmart, the existence of Buc-ee’s. They are experiencing a warm-hearted cultural exchange.

All of these people are discovering the oldest lesson of travel: a country is not its government, and people are more than their politics.

The news doesn’t make money showing you that. Fear and outrage sell; a stranger giving good directions, or offering a place to sleep, does not. Too often our view of places outside our comfort zone is distorted by sensationalized, negative headlines, broadcast on a loop. We end up afraid of entire countries we have never set foot in, nervous around people we have never met, and less willing to make the connections that make life worth it.

It’s worth remembering that most countries’ leaders today were either elected by a little more than half the population or installed by a regime the people never voted for at all. Yet we routinely act as if a country’s people uniformly support its policies and leaders. We do this selectively, judging some people more harshly than others without even realizing it.

None of this is to say governments don’t matter or policies don’t carry real costs. They do. But the experience of visiting a country is much more about people than it is about policy. This is why I keep coming back to travel as one of the best investments a person can make. You see things in a new light, meet new people, encounter perspectives you wouldn’t have found at home, and even bring some joy to the locals.

The Scots have left Boston, but the lesson from their visit endures. They arrived expecting the country they had seen on a screen and found the one they had long hoped to see. For one summer, the world showed up at our door with a bit of fear and left with a warm feeling toward our people and culture.

It’s a lesson worth remembering the next time we’re sure we already know a place we’ve never really seen.

Quote of the Week

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

Have a Great Weekend!

-Bob

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• How To Eliminate Your Pointless Meetings

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The very next day, I saw a CNN panel where a politician held up Musk’s net worth in contrast to the need for more resources and better public infrastructure for constituents in his district. Another panelist rebutted him by correctly pointing out that Musk’s wealth did not come at the expense of the politician’s district, and if SpaceX didn’t exist the district wouldn’t suddenly be richer.

There are legitimate criticisms of Musk, some of which I have made before. But in this specific area, many people are distorting the picture, reaching for arguments that stir outrage while ignoring basic economics.

It’s true that the SpaceX IPO created a massive amount of wealth for Musk. It also created life-changing wealth for many other people.

The SpaceX IPO turned roughly 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires and pushed around 400 of them past $100 million. Most were not executives; many were machinists, engineers, process planners, and rank and file workers. This includes a welder who joined SpaceX in 2015 because he needed the paycheck and whose shares are now worth just over a million dollars.

These are transformative outcomes for real people, but you won’t find much discussion of their stories in the headlines.

It’s also worth noting the trillionaire headline everyone argues about is also misleading. Musk does not have a trillion dollars in the bank; in fact, his net worth actually dipped below $1T shortly before this article published. Instead, his net worth is the value of his equity in the various companies he built. And wealth creation isn’t zero sum: every dollar of value of SpaceX isn’t taken out of someone’s pocket.

The companies Musk built are worth about $3.5 trillion today, roughly $1.5 trillion for Tesla and more than $2 trillion for SpaceX. None of this value was created by accident, or without significant personal risk. Musk poured nearly the entire $180 million from the PayPal sale into SpaceX and Tesla. At one point in 2008, both were nearly bankrupt and he had to borrow money to cover rent. Musk risked everything he had to bring these companies to the top of the market, and he’s being rewarded for that risk.

While his own share of those companies is worth about $1.1 trillion, the other $2.4 trillion belongs to others, including the index and pension funds inside millions of ordinary retirement accounts. More than 140,000 people draw a paycheck from his companies and spend that money into the economy. Reusable rockets seeded a commercial space industry, Starlink put internet access where fiber never reached, and Tesla pushed the global auto industry into electric.

Elon Musk does not need me to defend him. But I have an allergy to arguments that are made loudly, intended to stoke populist outrage, and don’t hold up to scrutiny.

There are good arguments for criticizing Elon Musk. His controversial work with DOGE is a reasonable target. It’s worth debating whether one person should hold this much sway over rockets, satellites, AI, and a media platform, or whether he should enjoy a direct line into the government. There is also the fact that extreme wealth gaps have always frayed our social fabric and have often become a source of considerable social instability.

But criticizing Musk for being a trillionaire and suggesting he is hoarding money that could be better used elsewhere is economically inaccurate. Even Musk’s critics can say so.

Those who act as if Musk could simply use his newfound paper wealth to fix all manner of societal problems are not based in reality. He cannot simply liquidate his Tesla and SpaceX stock and give hundreds of billions to charity. Selling that many shares at once would crater the stock price.

Meanwhile, wealth created from the IPO will begin to flow into the economy. When employees and investors sell their shares, they’ll pay capital gains taxes. This includes Musk, whose $11 billion tax bill in 2021 was the largest individual payment in the history of the United States treasury. And newly wealthy employees will buy homes, hire tradespeople and pay the property taxes that fund their town’s schools. Those are real benefits that affect the real economy. And like him or not, that money was created through his businesses.

No one has to like Elon Musk to be honest about how his wealth actually works and what it has built. Building things has always improved more lives than populist rhetoric ever has.

Quote of the Week

“There is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth." – Paul Graham

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

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• How To Eliminate Your Pointless Meetings

• 12 Lessons For A Great Life

• 3 Things People Who Hit Their Goals All Do

Jason Fried, CEO of the tech company 37signals and a New York Times bestselling author on work and productivity, urges his team to schedule as few meetings as possible. In a conversation we had on The Elevate Podcast, Jason explained why:

“A good night’s sleep is when you wake up and say ‘wow, I slept through the night, that’s awesome.’ That’s what a good workday should look like...I wasn’t distracted all day. I had an eight-hour day to myself to focus on work.”

Ideally, we would dedicate as much uninterrupted time as possible to our top priorities, as very few people’s job performance is judged by the number of meetings they attend. And yet, so many leaders, especially new ones, find their calendars are so clogged up with meetings that they have barely an hour a day to spend on strategic thinking or creating materials related to the work or new initiatives.

Practically you’ll never be able to get rid of all your meetings, or even all the unnecessary ones. But even if you eliminate one or two meetings per week and shorten or change the frequency of others, you can easily claw back 30 percent of your time, which is meaningful.

Here are several tactics that when implemented help you to do this.

No Agenda, No Attenda

Once I was invited to a pitch where the sales rep clearly lacked a concrete plan. After a few minutes of awkward intros, the rep rambled for nearly 20 minutes, without actually telling me what the tool did, providing a demo, or even explaining pricing.

As our 30 minutes ended, the rep said we could simply have a second call to go over those details. I felt my time had been wasted and declined to book a follow-up.

Every meeting should have a clear purpose and a basic outline of topics. At minimum, the organizer should be able to add a bullet point agenda to the meeting invite.

If no one is willing to step up and provide a simple agenda for the meeting, the meeting should not happen. This should be a blanket policy for your team or organization so that no one feels like a jerk for saying “I see there’s no agenda for this meeting. Can we cancel?”

The Two Pizza Rule

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The group goes to an upscale restaurant to celebrate Monica’s promotion. Ross, Monica, and Chandler order expensive entrees and appetizers. Joey orders a small pizza, Phoebe gets cucumber soup and Rachel, short on money, just orders a side salad.

When the bill arrives, Ross pulls out a calculator and divides the total evenly. However, Phoebe refuses to pay, pointing out she should not have to pay $30 for a bowl of soup.

Aside from the inflation changes ($30 in the 90’s would be about $72 today), the scene still works decades later because the dynamic hasn’t changed. Last week, a friend described a dinner that followed this same script. One person had a salad. Another ordered an expensive steak, several drinks, and multiple desserts. When the bill came, someone looked around and said the familiar words: “Let’s just split it.”

No one objected. But something was still violated.

In all areas of life there are certain rules that aren’t written anywhere but are understood by most emotionally intelligent people. Every culture has its own version of this invisible social contract we inherit, follow, and pass down.

The dinner scenario has its own clear rule: the burden falls on the person who racks up the highest share of the dinner bill to say, “this isn’t an even split. Let me put in more.” It is unfair to expect the “salad eater” to advocate to pay less, as doing so makes them look petty; so instead, they keep silent and feel resentment afterwards.

I have tried to pay attention to this over the years; especially since we have a lot of family dinners with friends. My wife and I have three kids, and many couples have fewer than that. If we’ve brought one additional kid at the table, we might say nothing and split it; the difference is trivial, and itemizing may be more awkward. But if we have two or three more kids, or if we simply ordered much more, I will almost always offer to pay more or cover the entire tip. Making this offer is the right thing to do, even if the other party doesn’t accept it.

No one has ever asked us to do this. That’s the point. These rules only work when the person they apply to enforces them on themselves. This is the very nature of accountability.

The same dynamic applies well beyond restaurant bills. There are unspoken rules about reciprocating invitations, returning a borrowed car clean and with a full tank of gas (even if it means buying more fuel than you burned), repaying money someone lent you before they ask, and not making your emergency someone else’s problem twice. None of these are written or enforceable. You’ll rarely be called out for violating them. But the infraction will be noticed, and your reputation may be impaired with or without your knowledge.

This is the defining feature of unspoken rules: the enforcement mechanism is personal standards, and the consequences arrive silently. The same friend I referenced earlier also shared that he used to dine regularly with a group that always split bills evenly, even though some members of the group didn’t drink and ordered far less. Eventually, the group stopped going out together; the overpayers stopped showing interest, and the underpayers probably never realized why.

I’m not suggesting anyone keep a running ledger with friends, itemizing every dinner bill and reconciling at the end of the quarter. In fact, tit-for-tat accounting is sometimes its own violation of the social contract. But it’s good to be self-aware and to err on the side of generosity. Trust is often built in these small, voluntary moments, not the big, declared ones.

In the Friends episode, the bigger spenders at the table eventually got the message, but only after a fierce argument. The next time one of these social contracts is in play, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and ask a simple question: am I the salad, or am I the steak? If you’re the steak, you don’t need a written rulebook to know what to do.

Quote of the Week

“Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking.” – J.C. Watts

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

robertglazer.com

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• 12 Lessons For A Great Life

• 3 Things People Who Hit Their Goals All Do

This saying dates to ancient Greece, where envoys carrying unwelcome news often paid with their lives. Last month, a modern transformation of this played out at Yankee Stadium.

Jonathan Haidt, a longtime New York University professor, was selected to deliver NYU’s commencement address. It’s easy to see why. His latest book, The Anxious Generation, has spent two years on the bestseller list. It documents how smartphones and social media have rewired childhood and damaged a generation’s mental health, and it has sparked a movement that has led nearly two-thirds of U.S. states to restrict phone use in schools. It even inspired NYU’s own device-free campus initiative.

However, a group of students made it clear they didn’t want to hear from Haidt. Weeks before the ceremony, student government leaders demanded the university rescind the invitation, calling his selection “a regression.” In their letter demanding rescindment, student leaders made a number of accusations that cast Haidt’s viewpoints as far more inflammatory than they are and did not consider what Haidt was actually going to speak about at commencement.

When Haidt took the stage, some graduates booed and dozens walked out. But his actual speech was anything but polarizing.

Instead, Haidt gave the students a key piece of advice: treasure your attention. He argued that the largest companies in history are built to take our attention, not earn it, and that the most consequential decision we make each day is what we choose to think about. He shared the exercise he runs with his own students: kill the notifications, remove social media from your phone for a week, and notice how your life changes. He talked about what they could do and with whom they could spend that reclaimed attention, especially in the physical world with real people.

Why would this well-reasoned, influential message draw such anger from students?

Haidt has been critical of the monoculture of the modern university system and has repeatedly argued that shielding young people from discomfort leaves them more anxious and less capable, not more protected. In making that case, he has occasionally made statements that NYU students can reasonably disagree with, including on some controversial topics.

However, Haidt has also spoken about the damage technology addiction is doing to young people with as much clarity, logic, and empathy as anyone. He is not a provocateur seeking to belittle people for attention, and his message is completely appropriate and highly relevant for graduating students to hear.

But many people simply refused to hear it because they’d made up their minds on Haidt before he reached the podium.

The phrase “kill the messenger” was about punishing the messenger after the bad news arrived. Today, we take an even worse approach: we evaluate a message without even hearing it, based purely on our view of the messenger.

This is not to say a messenger’s credibility is irrelevant. Track records matter, and someone who has repeatedly misled you deserves extra scrutiny. But being skeptical of a messenger is rarely a good reason to refuse to listen entirely.

We should be able to examine a person’s statement on the merits without dismissing it based on our perception of the speaker. But because evaluating each message objectively is harder than sorting messengers into tribes and deciding if they’re worth listening to, so many people simply do the latter today.

Universities are built explicitly to serve ideas that challenge students; that is the product. And yet, here were graduates of one of the world’s leading universities, at their coronation, demanding not to hear a perspective they had preemptively decided to reject.

When we don’t listen, we don’t learn. Here’s a simple test for the next time you feel an instant guilty verdict forming before the case has been made: if someone you trusted said the exact same words, would you judge them differently? If the answer is yes, you’re grading the messenger, not the message.

The ancient advice still holds: don’t kill the messenger. But at least the ancient Greeks waited to hear the message before passing judgment.

Quote of the Week

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

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PS: The Compass Within is on sale this week on Amazon for just $3.77, so don’t miss you chance to pick up your copy (or buy it as a gift).

The reality is performance and behavior are much more situational than permanent. To that point, I once saw a child psychologist claim that a parent should never tell their kid they are smart or not smart. Instead, they should tell them when they do something smart, and when they do something that is not smart. If a child believes they are inherently smart, they may think they can do no wrong or crumble the first time they get a bad grade.

The same is true for professional performance: an A Player is not a permanent title, but a situational one. Jim Collins talked about A Players being the right person on the team in the right seat. I think that was missing one dimension: the right time.

This is my definition:

An A Player = The Right Person + The Right Seat + The Right Time

It is this last dimension that often matters most: the person’s fit for what the role demands at a specific point in a company’s life cycle. A person can grow into being an A Player in the right role, and they can fall out of it in the wrong role. A person can also be exactly what the company needs today, but not quite right tomorrow as the business’ needs evolve. If you understand this as a leader, and help your team understand it as well, it makes performance decisions easier and less personal.

Let’s dig into each part of the formula.

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Six weeks earlier, I had severely pulled an adductor and groin muscle while playing tennis. The injury was bad enough that for a few days I couldn’t get out of bed or walk normally without pain. And the recovery was hardly linear.

First, I tried to rest which is not my strong suit but seemed appropriate. But when that didn’t seem to work, I did some research and learned that rest can actually slow recovery from this type of injury, and cause tightness, weakness and overcompensation from the surrounding muscles.

Next, I went to a massage therapist who’d helped me through previous injuries. For an hour, she stretched my leg and firmly worked my hip, hamstring, and glute. It was torturous to the point that I was close to tapping out on several occasions. I left feeling certain she’d made things worse.

To my surprise, however, the next morning I felt better enough to get on the elliptical and resume real cardio. That led to gradual improvement. But even after a few weeks, I still couldn’t do even a basic jog. When I tried, every stride was excruciating.

Which brings us to the parking lot, where after weeks of frustration I decided to try some exposure therapy. I forced myself to jog across that lot, which was probably not even a tenth of a mile. It hurt the whole way, and I thought I might be setting myself back.

But the very next day I was able to lightly jog with far less pain, to the point that I was able to push myself to a full mile with just a little discomfort. Two days later, I ran two miles. Within a week, I managed just over three and felt pretty much back to normal.

When I think back on this recovery, a clear pattern emerges. At every step, the thing I least wanted to do in the moment was what moved me forward, despite some pain. The massage was excruciating, but it loosened me up. The parking lot jog was agonizing, but it seems to have worked some muscles that needed to be activated.

Nature provides a valuable metaphor here. When we’re in pain or stuck, the instinct is to retreat. To rest. To wait it out. But often, we need to do the opposite: push through our discomfort and see the pain as a necessary hurdle to clear.

A hurdle isn’t just physical. It’s the hard conversation. The fear we’ve been avoiding. The step we need to take, even when we feel paralyzed.

I wrote a few months ago questioning the modern approach of overprescribing rest and withdrawal as the default healing strategy for mental exhaustion or emotional struggles. I acknowledge there are genuine cases where immobilization is the right call and complete rest is medically required. But I believe those cases are far rarer than much of the prevailing wisdom suggests.

In many cases, rest and retreat are the worst things we can do. Rather than running from a relationship, a job, a workout or a difficult person, we often just need to push past the pain to get what we want on the other side.

The old line about no pain, no gain has become a parody of itself, often used to sell gym memberships. But there’s real wisdom underneath it that we seem to have lost. Healing, whether physical, emotional, or professional, often requires going toward what hurts a bit, not avoiding it.

It took a badly pulled muscle and a parking lot to remind me of something I should have already known. The next hurdle likely won’t be physical. But the move is the same: through it, not around it.

Quote of the Week

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” – Seneca

PS: In case you missed it, I’m teaming up with Why Institute founder Gary Sanchez for a free webinar on how core values and purpose can ground you in tumultuous times. Learn more about the webinar and save your spot at the official event page.

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

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• 12 Lessons For A Great Life

• 3 Things People Who Hit Their Goals All Do

• Are People Afraid To Tell You Bad News?

She was right. In fact, I know the author well.

His name is Dave Kerpen. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has founded seven companies, and he’s also an author and speaker. By any definition, he is busy. And yet, every weekday at 3 p.m., you can find him sitting in the pickup line outside his son Seth’s elementary school in Port Washington, New York.

Seth is in fifth grade, the final year before he starts riding the bus to and from school. Dave knows his pickup time with Seth is running out, so he schedules accordingly. He blocks off 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. every school day to pick up his son, with no exceptions.

No call, meeting or business fire drill takes precedence. Every school day, those two hours are untouchable in his calendar.

As Dave revealed in the piece, this rule makes him a better CEO, not just a better dad. The 2 p.m. cutoff, he wrote, has led him to eliminate 80 percent of the meetings he used to take and only schedule the remaining 20 percent that he deems important. As he put it, “The pickup line gave me the discipline to say no that all the productivity books in the world couldn’t.”

That line stayed with me, because I have used a few similar rules that helped my own schedule.

The first rule started when my kids were younger and I was traveling constantly. I made a non-negotiable promise to always be home for each of my kids’ birthdays. Occasionally, this meant turning down lucrative speaking engagements on those days. But the rule was the rule, and over time, it stopped feeling like a sacrifice and started feeling like a cornerstone.

A second practice came from my observation that no one ever bothered me when I was on an airplane, nor was there ever an emergency that couldn’t wait until I landed. So, I started blocking off portions of my calendar for thinking, writing, or rest, and I labeled them “Airplane Time.” It sounded silly, but it worked. People learned not to try to book things during “Airplane Time” even if I was at my desk, not in the air.

If all of your hours are for sale, there will always be buyers. Meetings especially seem to find their way into any available open spaces. This is why I avoid tools that allow others to book time on my calendar. If you do use these tools, I recommend putting strict limitations on which hours can be booked and take advantage of time blocking.

No matter how busy your schedule is, think about what time you want to protect and create a short list of non-negotiables you set in advance and stick to. School pickup at 3 p.m. Every birthday at home. The Friday night dinner. The Saturday morning run. Decide what you care about most and make that time unbookable before people take it for themselves.

Dave’s example shows this kind of constraint often makes people more productive, not less. Because he cannot take a meeting between 2 and 4 p.m., he doesn’t book meetings that just don’t need to happen.

The hardest part about protecting your time is that no one else will do it for you. Most of the people sending you invitations want to use your time for their priorities. The responsibility for guarding your time for your priorities therefore rests with you.

Dave closed his piece with a line worth sitting with: the day you miss for a meeting is a day you do not get back. He went on, “If you’re a founder and you’re routinely missing pickup, dinner, the school concert, the soccer game, please stop. The business will survive. Childhood won’t wait. Pick the meeting, pick the conference, pick the trip strategically. But protect the recurring time.”

Some of the most effective leaders I know are not the ones with the fullest calendars. They are the ones who never give up their protected time.

Quote of the Week

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Buxton

PS: In case you missed it, I’m teaming up with Why Institute founder Gary Sanchez for a free webinar on how core values and purpose can ground you in tumultuous times. Learn more about the webinar and save your spot at the official event page.

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

robertglazer.com

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We had two account generalists who worked as contractors, filling a variety of roles on our account teams. This was perfect when we were a scrappy operation with a couple dozen employees.

But as our company grew, we created more structured roles on our account teams and we needed people to evolve into one of those new roles with more specific accountability. However, the contractors really wanted to keep doing what they were doing. Our business needed something they weren’t interested in providing.

Part of me still wishes we had made it work. A great analogy for the reason it didn’t work comes from the world of baseball: Utility Players versus All-Stars.

In baseball, a Utility Player is a generalist athlete who can play several different defensive positions on the field at a solid level. They’re not a star, but their ability to slot into several different positions as needed makes them an asset to any team.

They are quite different from all All-Stars: the players who typically play one position extremely well with an elite skill, such as hitting, pitching, or fielding. Despite their narrow skillset, their excellence in that area makes them invaluable, and they get the awards and big contracts.

Businesses also have Utility Players and All-Stars, whether in finance, sales, marketing, or delivery. And the values of these players to the business can change over time.

Small Organizations Need Utility Players

Early on at Acceleration Partners, we had a lot of generalists. Our small, nimble team required versatility, so we rewarded people who supported multiple functions in one role.

For example, we didn’t have a sales or marketing leader, or even separate sales and marketing teams; the lines were blurred. The same was true for operations, where we had a few versatile people covering finance, operations and technology.

These generalists were lifesavers in those early years. Their versatility enabled us to grow the business without needing to invest in building out specialized departments early on. This allowed us to fund our own growth through cashflow for over a decade.

We rewarded these Utility Players with praise and promotions, and they delivered what we needed. The system worked great. At least for a while.

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The study, from the Institute for Family Studies, surveyed nearly 24,000 American parents about how they raise their children. One shocking chart plotted the percentage of kids at each age, from four to 17, who are not permitted to leave their house, their yard, their street, or their neighborhood without an adult.

At age seven, nearly half of kids are not allowed to play in their own backyard unsupervised, and 77 percent can’t play in a neighbor’s yard. At 10, 88 percent can’t leave their street without an adult. At 17, on the doorstep of legal adulthood, 61 percent are forbidden to leave their neighborhood without one.

But it gets worse. The study showed that while parents are restrictive in the physical world, they are quite lax about the digital one.

By age 11, more than 60 percent of American kids have a smartphone, generally with few parental restrictions. Nearly half of three-year-olds routinely use a tablet.

The average twelve-year-old can’t bike to a friend’s house but can stream eight hours of TikTok in their bedroom. A sixteen-year-old isn’t trusted to walk to the store but has free access to an algorithmic feed engineered to keep them scrolling for hours, regardless of what it does to their brain.

Jonathan Haidt calls these shifts the great rewiring of childhood. Walks to the corner store or a friend’s house built a generation of capable, independent adults, but are forbidden today. There’s no real evidence these activities are particularly unsafe or have become more dangerous. The odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are roughly one in 720,000. According to Warwick Cairns, author of How to Live Dangerously, you’d have to leave a child unattended on the street for roughly 750,000 years for an abduction to be statistically likely.

Parents are making safety decisions based on anxiety, not reality.

Yet, these same parents hand their kids the very screens proven to harm them, and rarely set limits on how they’re used. Teen depression and anxiety have roughly doubled in a decade, and even the court system is now recognizing social media’s responsibility for a fair share of that harm.

These two trends create a vicious cycle. A child who can’t walk to a friend’s house will text that friend instead. A teenager who cannot leave their neighborhood will spend all weekend playing video games in their basement. Take away the analog options and the digital ones fill the vacuum. Physical isolation and digital addiction fuel each other.

Good intentions aside, it would be a fundamental failure of leadership at home to ignore these outcomes. Effective leaders act based on results, not popularity or convenience, and change course when evidence says the current approach is failing. In the most important leadership role most of us will ever have, too many parents have let their love for their kids blind them to what is healthy and what is detrimental to their development.

Don’t ignore the data just because so many other parents are making wrong choices as a crowd. The kids in the IFS survey are not “safer” than the generations before them. They are more anxious, more depressed, less capable of independent decisions, and reaching adulthood unequipped to manage their own lives. We have given them the wrong freedoms and the wrong constraints, and the results are clearly negative.

Elevate Your Kids is still a year away, and I hope it will present a helpful framework to understand how we got into this mess and how parents can use timeless leadership principles to begin to turn the tide. But I wouldn’t wait that long to start making changes. Let your kids walk to school. Let them order their own food at the restaurant. Let them figure out the bus. Let them play outside. Let them be bored, which is when most of the good stuff in childhood actually happens.

The data tells us clearly what’s gone wrong. Only effective leadership at home can make it right.

Quote of the Week

“We have overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online.” – Jonathan Haidt

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

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After graduation, Chloe and I drove her car home together from Atlanta to Boston, packed to the brim with all her belongings. Seventeen hours of driving in two days, with almost 12 of those hours coming on the first day.

Generally, a 17-hour road trip would be near the top of my list of things to avoid. I am impatient, I don’t sit still well for sustained periods of time, and I despise traffic. Shipping the car would have been faster, easier, and probably cheaper after accounting for wear and tear on the car.

But so many friends have told me over the years that they treasured the long drive to or from school with their kids. My wife made the trip twice with Chloe when my schedule did not allow it, and I was a little bit jealous. I did not want to miss the last trip with my daughter, so I blocked the days in my calendar months ago.

I was driven partly by a small voice in my head that I’ve written about in my most popular post to date, 18 Summers. That post included a reference to Tim Urban’s now-famous chart visualizing how much in-person time parents have left with their kids. The chart reveals a sobering truth: by the time a kid graduates high school, they have already spent roughly 93 percent of the in-person time they will ever have with their parents. Even more of that time is gone by the end of college.

Through that lens, the math gets easier. The efficient choice was to ship the car, fly home, and save a day (or two). The right choice was to drive.

So, we drove. We listened to music, worked through a few podcasts, and took turns napping. We spent the night at a cousin’s house we had not visited for years and had some quality time with them. We also sat silently for long stretches just taking in the scenery, which is its own kind of quality time.

Nothing about the drive was remarkable on the surface. We did not have a breakthrough conversation, imparted life wisdom or a Hallmark moment. And yet it is a memory I will cherish, and I hope Chloe will too.

The experiences in my life that I look back on with the most appreciation are rarely the ones I optimized for convenience. They are almost always the ones that required a little more time or effort, or that had some sort of complication in the moment. Days that, at the time, I would have happily traded for an easier alternative if someone had offered.

Comfort and meaning, it turns out, are often inversely correlated.

The drive also reminded me of something useful about expectations. A half hour drive stretched to two hours by traffic can feel endless. But once you have mentally committed to 17 hours, two hours flies by like nothing. The same is true of the harder things in life. When you stretch to do something you did not think you could do, your baseline shifts. Things that used to feel hard start to feel manageable. Resilience, in that sense, comes from recalibrating what we think is normal.

The next time you find yourself reaching for the efficient choice, the one that lets you skip the work, it is worth asking if there is an experience you may be missing. Sometimes the inefficient option is the one with the memory or story in it. And the older I get, the more I find myself wanting that option.

The inconvenient thing, depending on the context, can create the most meaning. Remember that the quantity of hours you invest is less important than the quality of that time.

Quote of the Week

“The longest way round is the shortest way home.” – James Joyce

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

robertglazer.com

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PS - Many of you replied to Chloe’s guest post last week curious about the 12 Life Lessons letter she referenced me giving to her when she arrived at college. I’m not ready to share that with the full internet, but to start I put it on Substack for Premium Subscribers to keep the reach a bit closer. You can find it below:

Several of you reached out about the letter I’d left in her dorm drawer the day we dropped her off at school. The letter itself was personal, written just for her, and I’m going to keep that part private. But the 12 Lessons at the end stand on their own, and I’m willing to share those.

I decided to put them here, available for a much smaller collection of premium readers, as a thank you to everyone who regularly engages thoughtfully with my writing and supports Friday Forward.

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The CEO had begun to observe how many fairly routine customer service requests had turned into long strings of back-and-forth e-mails. Her direction in response was simple but rare in business today: next time, pick up the phone and simply call the customer. Often times, a 10-minute phone call would get to the root much faster and resolve the issue; no follow-ups required.

Electronic communication can be easier at times, and there is no shortage of ways to communicate these days. But overdependence on those text-based channels is a problem for leaders and employees under 40, and it erodes our ability to build relationships and get things done. Sometimes, picking up the phone is simply the better choice, especially when it comes to solving a problem.

It’s simpler

Everyone’s tried to solve a problem in an exchange that goes nowhere. The sequence usually goes something like this:

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For the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving and reading weekly Friday Forwards. Since long before Friday Forward even existed, I have also had the privilege of being Robert Glazer’s daughter.

A week ago, I made the bold decision to request a guest-authorship for a Friday Forward (assuming I’d likely be rejected). Instead, Dad said yes. Maybe it was a graduation gift, or maybe he just wanted to take the week off.

Those of you who read the Friday Forwards and engage with my dad’s writing hopefully understand this much by #535: he is kind, values-driven, thoughtful, and intentional. Now, as a senior with just a few days left before I enter the real world, I find myself in deep nostalgia, reflecting on what I learned from him.

My college experience started teary-eyed as I hugged my parents goodbye in Eagle Hall in August 2022. I opened my desk drawer in my new dorm far from home to find an offering from my dad, which turned my tears into sobs. One letter, a direct note to me, and another titled “12 Lessons for A Great Life,” which my brother also received when he arrived at college. While I won’t bore you with all his wise life lessons, I will affirm that his guiding principles, like being accountable, happy, and kind, shaped my four years at Emory.

In my happiness class this semester, we were prompted to write a letter to our future selves a few days ago, which will be mailed to us a year from now. This is a portion of what I wrote:

While far from perfect, you have grown a lot in the past four years, or as I term it, your frontal lobe has developed. College brought a lot of fun and also a lot of change to your way of life. You really began to prioritize yourself and your well-being. You found friends willing to engage in deep and meaningful dialogue. You learned to cook and prioritize healthier eating. You learned the importance of doing tasks now and not later. You came to realize the importance (and excitement) of a healthier lifestyle through yoga, walks, and training for a 15k. You found solace in journaling and reflective exercises. You found joy in actively separating yourself from your phone at night and at social gatherings. And most importantly, you became a happier person.

I think my reflections emphasize my commitment to honoring our Glazer family life lessons. For so long, I listened and watched, and watched and listened to my parents, but my actions did not reflect these learnings. I wonder if my parents considered turning their efforts more to my brothers.

But the truth is, teaching the importance of principles like values, goal-setting, and purpose is always worth it, even if your kids cannot fully internalize them in the moment. Instead, it gives them a toolkit to help them succeed when they are ready to take the leap.

As an example, I am a self-aware procrastinator with a disorganized to-do list, so I struggle to hold myself accountable for completing tasks. On a run this summer, my dad and I discussed the prospect of running a turkey trot together Thanksgiving weekend, but the registration hadn’t opened yet. My intuition was to do nothing in the moment when he asked me to register us and hopefully remember sometime in October, assuming there were still spots available.

In contrast, my dad immediately asked Siri to set a reminder for the date registration opened. Seeing him act on one of his life lessons (be accountable and do it now, not later) underscored his genuine commitment to them. And for the first time, I started actively working to do the same.

While I try to think of novel pieces of gratitude every day for my 5-minute journal, a gift from my dad, my parents undoubtedly deserve a spot on that list every day. I am grateful to be the product of two intentional individuals who encouraged a thoughtful, meaningful perspective on life.

All this to say: share your perspective and values with your children. Give them the scaffolding to enter independence with confidence. I am proud of the person who will walk across the stage this weekend at college graduation, because of my family’s values.

Next week, back to your regularly scheduled Robert Glazer programming.

Quote of the Week

“Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” – Robert Fulghum

Have a great weekend!

-Chloe Glazer

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I have spoken at several different installments of Pine Bluff Sand & Gravel’s Spring Culture Meetings. Pine Bluff is a family business that has mined, dredged, and delivered building materials across the southern United States since 1913. They hired me to speak to employees about building their capacity both at work and beyond it.

The McGeorge family, which has led the company for four generations, clearly understands something that many leaders miss: behavior follows incentives. What you measure, recognize, and incentivize is what gets lived out in the organization.

This principle was visible in every facet of the Spring Culture Meetings I attended.

Each event began with free health screenings, where employees were incentivized to get blood work done on-site. A vendor fitted workers for new work boots, paid for by the company. Representatives from the company’s 401(k) provider joined to encourage enrollment and explain the company’s generous matching program. And several counselors and therapists were on-site to provide information about the free, confidential mental health services available through Pine Bluff’s Employee Assistance Program.

Just to go the extra mile, Pine Bluff even treated me to my own pair of boots and a free health scan. In fact, they insisted upon it.

Of course, Pine Bluff’s culture extends beyond employee benefits and support. Core to its physically demanding business is a commitment to safety and improvement. Pine Bluff runs a program called Good Catch, which provides bonuses to employees who identify safety risks and suggest process improvements to mitigate them. Separate bonuses also go to employees with clean safety records.

As I absorbed all these cultural hallmarks, I also noted the tenure of the employees in attendance. Ten years of service barely qualifies someone as a veteran at Pine Bluff, and several employees who had been with the company for five years described themselves as “pretty new.” Many people had been with the company for decades. In an industry known for high turnover, that level of employee loyalty is rare, and it’s not an accident.

Given the visibly healthy culture, I wasn’t surprised to see Pine Bluff’s core values—including Safety First, Mutual Respect, Continuous Improvement, and Family Atmosphere—displayed prominently and discussed openly. Seeing the cultural elements on display and watching the team interact, it became clear these values are actually lived at the company, rather than being expensive wall art.

If you reward speed over safety, people will cut corners. If you prioritize short-term revenue over long-term relationships, people will burn bridges. If you don’t reward continuous improvement, people will stop raising the bar. By tying daily attention, compensation, and recognition to safety, health, financial wellbeing, and mental health, Pine Bluff has made its people-first culture real. Its incentives reinforce its values instead of quietly undermining them, as many well-intentioned organizations inadvertently do.

You don’t need to run a century-old, family-owned business to make this same cultural commitment. The same principles scale in any organization, regardless of size or industry. Every leader is running a system of incentives and behaviors, and the only question is whether that system pulls people toward the stated values or away from them.

I’ve watched companies with beautifully crafted values statements reward employees who hit their numbers at any cost, ignore the ones who quietly hold the culture together, and wonder why their culture erodes. I’ve also watched companies like Pine Bluff, where the connection between what matters and what gets measured is so explicit that employees don’t need an employee handbook to know what’s expected of them.

The easiest way to audit your own organization is to look at what you actually pay for, celebrate publicly, and promote people for. Then ask whether those signals match the values printed on your website. If there’s a gap, it may be the values, but it might also be the incentives.

Pine Bluff reminded me that putting people first is not a tagline or a slogan. It’s a series of values-based decisions, made every day, and reinforced by the right incentive systems.

Where might the incentives in your organization, or your household, be quietly pulling against the values or results you care about most?

Quote of the Week

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

robertglazer.com

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There are many gifted, intelligent people who make little progress toward what matters to them. On the flip side, there are many people who may not seem as talented at face value but build the life they want by keeping their focus on what matters most to them.

People who hit their most important goals consistently do three things.

They Don’t Follow Others’ Definition of Success

If you struggle to follow through on your goals, you might be setting the wrong ones.

Anything worth doing requires time, hard work, and pushing through setbacks. It’s difficult to maintain that level of passion and persistence unless the objective draws on real intrinsic motivation. In other cases, you may manage to keep climbing until you reach your summit, only to discover you don’t like the view.

To ensure you can keep up the necessary effort and have that exertion feel worth it, pick goals that are longer term in nature and are aligned to your core values. It’s easier to maintain persistence toward a goal if it’s something that matters to you so much that you are willing to sacrifice for it, rather than simply being a traditional marker of success such as a better title, a bigger house, or a flashy car.

You shouldn’t set a single long-term, annual or even quarterly goal until you get clarity on your vision and values. There are a few ways to do this:

• Find your core values: Life will seem clearer when you know your core values. Remember that my course only takes an hour and you can use the code compass for $25 off.

• Write a personal vision statement: Write a narrative of your ideal life five years in the future. Use the present tense and be specific and vivid (for example, “It is April 29, 2031. My family and I live in a small town outside of Denver, CO, which provides easy access to hiking and skiing”). This exercise puts specific language around what you want, helping you identify goals that build toward that vision.

• Try vision boarding: This is a similar exercise that takes less writing. A vision board helps you capture the things that you want to make part of your life in the long term, and it’s fun to do as a family. Instructions are in this Friday Forward.

Getting clarity makes it much easier to set meaningful goals. Start by thinking five years out and then, once each value-aligned goal is set, consider what needs to be done each year to get to those multi-year objectives.

They Measure Themselves Consistently

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At Dartmouth College in 1980, psychologists Richard Kleck and Angelo Strenta decided to study how people with physical differences believe others view them. They sat each subject down with a makeup artist who applied a realistic scar to the subject’s face. Each subject was shown their reflection in a mirror, given a moment to process their scar, and then given a last touch-up of makeup before going to an arranged job interview.

What the participants didn’t know was that the touch-up was a ruse. The makeup artist actually completely removed the scar, meaning the participants walked into their interviews looking exactly like themselves.

When the interviews ended, the subjects immediately met with the study organizers to reflect on the experience. The results were striking. Participants reported significantly higher levels of discrimination than the control group, with some even describing specific comments they were certain the interviewer had made in reference to their scar.

However, we know this could not have been the case because the scar was not actually there. Simply because they believed they had a scar, the subjects were psychologically primed to identify references to it that didn’t exist.

This is a classic illustration of confirmation bias. When we’re primed to look for something, we tend to find it, even when it isn’t there. Buy a new car and you’ll notice that same model everywhere. Enter a room expecting to be judged and you’ll interpret neutral glances as disapproval. The mind quickly finds what it’s already expecting to see.

The psychological term for this form of confirmation bias is perceptual set: the tendency for prior experience and expectation to shape what we perceive. It’s one of the more interesting findings in social psychology, because it suggests our experience of reality is far less objective than we think. If we believe we cannot achieve something because the world is against us in a large or small way, we greatly constrain our own potential.

This connects directly to what psychologists call locus of control: the degree to which people believe they govern their own outcomes. On that front, this is a phrase I find myself using more regularly: “We are where we are, what can we do about it?” This is a deliberate choice to focus energy on what we can control in the moment, rather than assigning blame or obsessing over past grievances. We must be taught to focus on our own autonomy as early as possible to control our own destiny.

On that note, I’ve written before about Noah Lyles, an Olympic gold medalist sprinter who speaks openly about his struggles with asthma, dyslexia, anxiety, and depression, but refuses to be defined by those conditions. That defiant agency is a fundamentally different approach than the one too many young people are taught to embrace today.

The story we tell someone about who they are and how the world perceives them doesn’t just influence their mindset. It influences what they experience, and ultimately what they achieve. When young people are taught, repeatedly, that they are fragile, that the world is stacked against them, or that setbacks are due to unfairness, they are primed to see enemies everywhere, even among people who want to help them.

None of this is to say that real obstacles don’t exist. They do; acknowledging them honestly matters. But there’s a meaningful difference between helping someone understand genuine challenges and conditioning them to expect bias or rejection at every turn.

The most empowering message a parent or mentor can deliver isn’t that the world is easy or struggles aren’t real. It’s that you are capable of navigating what comes at you and that, in the end, you control more than you don’t. We must teach that circumstances don’t determine your ceiling, and that how you see yourself may shape your experience far more than how others see you.

The Dartmouth study is over forty years old, but its lesson couldn’t be more relevant. Before we put a scar on someone’s face and send them into the world, we should think carefully about how that changes what they perceive and the lens through which they see their place it the world.

Quote of the Week

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” – Maya Angelou

Have a great weekend!

-Bob

robertglazer.com

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