Lesson #31: Are excuses holding you back?

You will never have enough resources. You will never have enough time. Opportunities will never arrive with convenient, advanced notice. You will never have enough information. You will never have enough training or experience.

It's not a charity thing. It's a "trying to accomplish things no one has ever accomplished before" thing.

If I could go back in time, I'd tell myself this:

"It's easy to approach your work with excuses in the charity world. Some of the work we do is so draining, so emotional, that it can even be a kind of armour. Resist."

It's easy to say “I could have done better if I had more time, more resources, more information, more training.”

Resist. 

Because real failure comes when you approach work armed with excuses. It makes you feel better about yourself for a short time. But it holds you back.

Excuses keep you living in a nice, comfortable box where you slowly but surely make it okay to achieve less. Except, the problems you're trying to solve will impact the lives of millions of people. It's not okay to aim low.

When you protect yourself with excuses, you also strip yourself of agency. Success comes from you and your talents, but all shortcomings are the fault of constraints imposed upon you by the world. Give that thinking enough time, and you'll stop believing that you actually have the ability to change the world.

There are a million legitimately good excuses to give up, to achieve less, or to distance yourself from the impact of your work.

None of them matters

Lesson #30: The most important work has no deadline. It's already due.

“It is so much easier now that we’re out of school.”

“I know, right! A job is so much easier.”

“When you’re in school, you have to do all that work by deadline.”

“I’m so glad that’s behind us.”

That conversation (or a version of it) played out in my local coffee shop today. Zoinks.

I don’t know the former students and I don’t want to judge the former students, but I feel like they, too, might one day be writing a blog where they go back in time and give themselves advice. And the first piece of advice they would give would be something like, “Oh my God you're wasting so much time!! Hurry up!”

It’s true that you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder ticking off percentage points for every day you’re late with that press release, grant proposal, social media post. Because it’s not about you, or me, or any one diligent student.

It’s far, far scarier than that:

Miss a grant deadline? Cancel that project.

Miss a project deadline? Your mission fails.

No one is chirping at you about deadlines because you’re expected to care more about it than anyone else. In fact, you need to care more than anyone else. Because the whole bargain behind the good world-changing work that we do is that we’ve made a promise to think hard about things no one else wants to think about … in exchange for a life of meaning that few people get to experience. 

I was pretty good on the deadline front. I guess school pounded it into my head.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of important work that needs to get done that doesn’t have a deadline. No one will notice if you don’t do it, because no one has even realized yet that it needs to be done. 

Here’s what I’d tell myself if I could go back in time:

Meet your deadlines, but don’t worry about them. They aren’t your real goal. 

Instead, spend your nights worrying about all the things you should be doing that no one is asking about. 

Grasp at the opportunities in front of you that could slip away at any moment. 

And don’t lose sight of the big problems you’re trying to solve. Problems don’t sit still. They aren’t like deadlines, patiently waiting for you at a pre-arranged date and time. 

True, you can see them. You can work towards them. But they can - and will - shift on you. They’ll get bigger. Thornier. Or you’ll hunt one down only to discover it’s hiding another problem right behind it.  

The notion of school-master imposed “deadlines” will trick you into thinking that important milestones are set by other people and fixed in time. It will lull you into believing that the space between now and then is yours in which to roam. 

Focus too much on deadlines, and you can lose sight of what is really at stake. 

Lesson #29: Asking for money is the best

One of the hardest things for many charity professionals to do is to ask for money. 

When you’re a small organization, you feel like you’re basically asking someone to contribute to your salary: “Hey there! Could I ask you to make a donation? We’ll use the money to pay me so I can pay my rent. I promise to work hard and do really really good work (or the best I can with no resources whatsoever)”.

You also don’t want to hear “no” in the middle of a funding crisis, because you have no Plan B. You don’t want to hear “no” because no one likes rejection. 

Sometimes, you don’t want to hear “yes”. I’ve met people over the years who find “yes” scarier than “no” because “yes” means you now have to show up. You have to deliver. That’s hard. And hard is scary.

The first truly valuable piece of advice on fundraising I heard from Gandhi. (Yes, I know that’s pretentious, but it’s true.) Buried somewhere in his autobiography is a brief section that describes the time he left law to become a social activist. Someone asked him why go door to door and beg for money. Why not work as a lawyer and donate his profits to the cause instead?

I remember his response went something like this: We ask for money from the community because that is how we ensure our work reflects their needs. That is how we know we have their support and we work for them. If we fund it all ourselves, we have no way of knowing that the people support our cause.

It doesn’t make fundraising any less daunting, but it reframes it as checking in with the public and being accountable for what we’re saying and doing. It makes it an honour to receive their money to reminds us to keep their needs in mind every minute of every day.

The second piece of advice came from a stranger. I can’t remember the name. I can’t remember the exact words, just what I took from the interview/ article/ speech/ podcast/ whatever it was:

Donors give through you, not to you.

We aren’t asking for money for ourselves, our desks, our time. We’re asking for money for the cause. And we spend it on the cause. We spend it on programs, services, supplies, and people who accomplish real social good. 

It’s a whole different (better) way of looking at fundraising. It also promotes a sense of mission, impact, and accountability. Because if that person’s $25 didn’t go to the cause, if it wasn’t a drop in an ever-growing impact puddle, then you didn’t give them what they paid for. You let them down.

Another incredible gift you can give ...

But boy-oh-boy, if you did create an impact, that’s such an incredible gift. You turned that $25 into something that will change people’s lives for the better. You did what few people could do. And your donor was super lucky to have met you.

Lesson #28: Watch out for drive-by mentors

The best (and possibly only) mentors you’ll meet don’t come into your life through a formal mentoring program. They are not wearing stickers that say, “Hi my name is … And I will be your mentor today.” They are not assigned to you by attentive HR departments. They are not funded or facilitated or encouraged by a corporate program. 

Mindy Kaling summarized it best in her book: "If you have the opportunity to observe someone at work, you are getting mentoring out of them even if they are unaware or resistant.” Sergey Brin famously asks people to tell him something he doesn’t know in a job interview, figuring he can get something out of the meeting even when he’s not going to hire the person. There are loads of these anecdotes sprinkled liberally through memoirs and autobiographies of people who did interesting things with their lives. 

The best mentors don’t have to know they’re mentoring you. They don’t have to remember your name. They definitely don’t have to like you or want to help you.

You will learn the absolute most you can possibly learn, if you do two things: first, commit to stealing mentorship whenever, wherever, and from whomever you can and second, stay open to learning from unexpected people in unexpected places. 

A mentoring opportunity can flit by in the blink of an eye. It won’t announce itself. You can’t anticipate its arrival. You just have to breathe deep and absorb as much as you can before it’s gone. 

Lesson #27: Expect change, not progress

Two balls, in the air, at all times. Keep your eye on them both. 

One ball is the impact progress social change ball, the reason you’re there and likely the reason your staff, volunteers, and donors are all there, too. You’re trying to solve a serious social issue. You’re creating programs and services that tackle that issue. Are they working? Are they having the greatest impact for every dollar and person hour spent? That’s the impact ball. 

Everyone expects you’ll drop the impact ball. You won’t be able to solve the problem. You won’t be able to afford to solve the problem. You won’t be able to deliver programs that work. You’ll get tired of juggling that ball and just want … to …. rest.

You won’t. You won’t drop that ball. It’s the reason you get up in the morning. It’s your muse. It’s hard, impossible work  - but you’re up for it. 

The other ball is the one that no one talks about. It’s the organization, the operations, the day to day practice of managing a group of people trying to harness resources for impact. Most people who dive into charity work aren’t prepared for this. “I don’t remember the last time I had a conversation about our actual issues,” is a refrain I have heard from many executive directors, usually just before someone utters the words “burnout” and then “resignation”. 

In the years leading up to burnout, you’ll hear the phrases “I just need to get through this [insert organizational challenge here]” or “As soon as [challenge] is over, we’ll finally be able to [project idea].” That transition from fixation on organization challenge to impact challenge is seen as the ultimate sign of progress. 

If there’s one piece of advice I wish someone had given me years ago, it’s this: “Expect your organization to change, but don’t expect progress.” 

It sounds gloomy, but it’s not. It’s really not. Heading to work every day hoping that all organizational challenges will magically go away and you’ll just “work on the issues” 24/7 is what causes burnout. It’s a fantasy, and when it doesn’t come true, you won’t know how to cope. I’ve seen it. The organizational stuff doesn’t go away. It feels like no progress is being made. And leaders give up. 

Instead, we should just accept reality. The organization ball never goes away. It’s always there. You can never set it down. One set of issues will constantly replace another.

Think about it: Overworked because you’re the only staff member? No problem, raise some funds and hire more staff. But then you have training and HR and communications challenges that never existed before. Having a hard time having an impact because no one knows who you are? No problem, get a public profile. Then cope with people’s expectations for your time and your brand and access. Feeling too small to have an impact? No problem, get big. Then figure out how to remain true to the original mission and passion that made you effective in your early days. It. Never. Ends.

The organization ball is omnipresent. Your goal isn’t to make it go away. And it’s a problem in the charity world that there’s very little discussion, very little training, and - frankly - a lot of disdain for this aspect of the work. 

Organizational challenges don’t mean you’re doing something wrong or you’ve failed in some way. They don't mean your time isn't well-spent. They aren’t a distraction from the “real” work.

They’re an inherent part of working with other people to try to do something. And the bigger and more important that “something” is, the more people (staff, volunteers, donors) you’re gonna need on your team. Those challenges mean you’re not alone on your mission. So rather than hoping they “go away” so things will get “better”, I thank my lucky stars I have organizational challenges and people to tackle them with me. 

And that’s the ultimate irony. The thing that feels the least like progress - hopping from one set of issues to the next without rest - is actually the best sign of progress. You’re still there. You’re still growing. People are still joining in. If all that went away, then what kind of impact could you really have?