Women Who Put Out Fires

Recently there’s been chatter on how women often become leaders during crises. A number of examples come to mind: Carly Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard); Mary Barra (GM); Marissa Mayer (Google, Yahoo); Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister) and Theresa May (UK Prime Minister). All these women attained high leadership positions during major upheavals in companies or countries.

Why do crises and women leaders go together? Two reasons stick out: (1) the men screwed things up and don’t want to touch the problem with a ten-foot pole; (2) groups cast about for a fresh perspective, saying, “Let’s see what a woman can do with this situation.”

Of course, sometimes men on the outside are simply waiting for the problem to overwhelm the woman so they can claim, “See? She can’t do it! But we can!” and winch themselves back into power.

Thus women candidates for leadership may want to think twice before gambling on a position that could turn out to be a sucker bet.

It brings to mind an old joke: “Why do ducks have webbed feet?” … “To stamp out forest fires.” … “And why do elephants have flat feet?” … “To stamp out flaming ducks.” You don’t want to become a pile of ignited feathers squished by an elephant of a crisis.

Two approaches to this dilemma are likely to be popular:

1. Complain that “men are no damn good” and they only use women in blazing emergencies and then toss them under the fire truck when the going gets smoky.

2. Learn how to put out fires.

Number 1, above, may be partly true and therefore useful to know. But complaining does not a leader make.

Number 2 is where the money is. A crisis is a woman’s chance to demonstrate calm capability. To that end, prepare for the opportunity:

• Learn how to handle budget emergencies

• Learn how to cut red tape

• Learn how to lay off employees, especially men who will try to intimidate you when you hand them a pink slip

• Learn how to cut spending, especially pet projects that are squirting money like severed arteries

• Learn how to meditate (or anything else that keeps you calm and unflappable)

With hard work, smarts, and a bit of luck, a woman can save the day, convert a trap into a triumph, and rise from patsy to hero. At that point, she should make sure her future compensation reflects her excellent performance — and/or be ready to field offers from other companies desperate for a turn-around artist.

So, ladies: prepare for the job as if it’ll be a series of emergencies … assemble your fire equipment … and go put out some fires.

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How to Multitask

The multitaskers perceived that they performed better, because their brains were more stimulated, but in every single study they performed worse. — Chris Bailey

When you are in a hurry, you are in danger. — airplane pilot’s adage

There’s an old Buddhist story where a businessman visits a Zen temple and says to the Master, “I need to become enlightened. How long will it take?” The old Roshi answers, “A minimum of one year.” The businessman says, “That’s way too long! I have a company to run.” The Roshi replies, “In that case, it’ll take five years.”

Many of us are busy and harried, and we cast about for productivity tools to help us get more done in less time. One of the most tempting techniques is multitasking, or doing several things at once. Pretty soon we’re driving while shaving and talking on the phone and texting and grabbing quick sips of coffee. It’s exciting! We’re getting things done.

Except we aren’t. Our brains are poorly suited to thinking about more than one topic at a time. It may feel as if we’re accomplishing more, but in fact we’re performing worse.

Yet we’ve seen people do multiple things simultaneously with apparent success. And, after all, we can walk and talk at the same time. Brush our teeth and listen to the news. Play the piano with both hands.

The piano: you read the music while managing keys simultaneously with both left and right hands. Heck, it’s like those super-geniuses who can write two separate sentences at the same time, one from each hand, on a whiteboard!

But it takes time to learn a new piece: you begin to memorize phrases and sections so they become automated as you study the next segments. Basically, you’re transforming each section into “brushing teeth”, where you don’t have to think about it anymore.

If you’re going to multitask, you must do it deliberately. Take the time now to automate small physical tasks — turning them into consistent routines until they’re memorized — so your brain is free to concentrate. The effort will pay off later. Remember: multitask rote physical stuff, not mental stuff.

Here are the main ideas:

• Do one mental task at a time: Resist the temptation to do multiple mental jobs at once. (Examples: reading and talking, talking and texting, conferencing and texting, anything and texting.) Instead, calmly go through your list, one item at a time. No panic! You’ll get there.
• Automate physical activities like making copies, brewing coffee, changing your tie, driving. (But be careful! Nearly any activity can require full attention on occasion — especially driving — so stop with all the texting!) Go watch a good bartender mix drinks automatically while chatting with patrons, and you’ll get a sense of it.
• Slow down to speed up: If you hurry, you tend to perform poorly. (Remember that time in the parking lot when some bigwig was waiting for you to pull out of your space so they could use it, and they honked their horn, and you rushed and dropped your keys under the car, and hit your head as you got in, and dropped the keys again, this time between the seats? You get the idea.) Anything you rush gets worse, including multitasking.

So now you’re at work, and your boss yells, “Where’s that report, Jenkins?! And get down to Receiving and find those overnights! Also, Simmons got sick, so grab someone to fill in!” You take a deep, calming breath and say:

“It’s on my list.”

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A Survey of Startups

Nearly all startups fail to scale up.

There — we got the bad news out of the way. The good news: it’s possible to greatly shorten the odds by following a few simple rules.

A report on recent MIT research lays out some pointers:

“Compared to average startups, which have a one in 3,500 chance of experiencing growth, the top one percent of firms with these characteristics have a much better chance (one in 100) of taking off. New startups are four times more likely than the average startup to grow if they are a corporation, two and a half times more likely if they have a short name, and five times more likely if they have trademarks. Furthermore, firms that apply for patents are 35 times more likely to grow. And, curiously, eponymously named firms are a whopping 70 percent less likely to grow.”

There’s more, but in a nutshell:

• Incorporate
• Use a short name (not the founder’s name!)
• Nail down your trademarks
• Apply for patents
• Locate in a high-tech region:
  • Silicon Valley
  • Southern California
  • Washington state
  • New York / Boston
  • Texas

Oh, and let’s add the standard principles for business success:

• Provide a product or service people need and love
• Make what you sell vastly better in some important way
• Hire excellent people you can get along with
• Stay focused on results (instead of signs of your own importance)
• Work your butt off for 4 years or more

What could be simpler? Now get to it.

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Expertise: Complex or Simple?

Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time. — Arnold Glasow

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. — Pablo Picasso

Beginners hardly know anything, while experts know a lot. Thus skills start out simple and get complicated as you learn them. Right?

Oddly, it’s the other way around. Beginning efforts are inefficient, arbitrary, and random. And randomness can generate enormous complexity. Expertise, on the other hand, is simple and straightforward. The expert knows what to do directly and effectively.

A professional will know many more things about a given skill than an apprentice, but those things are discreet and focused. The beginner’s mind casts about in all directions for a way through a situation the expert has already solved.

The first time I tried a crossword puzzle, it took two hours and a dictionary. Within a year, I was tossing them off — in pen no less — in five minutes. (Competition puzzlers often can complete them in less than two.) My crossword skills went from inefficient and ignorant to knowledgeable and focused. Beyond the puzzle-solving techniques I’d learned, I’d also internalized a vocabulary of special words for filling in the odd corner. But those skills and words were specific: instead of struggling with a dozen approaches, I had particular ways forward; instead searching through reference books, I could call on a short list of words from memory.

Blood-flow studies demonstrate that beginners’ brains are much busier than those of professionals: learners are all over the map, while masters are homed in. “ . . . [E]xtensive practice over a long period of time leads experts to develop a focused and efficient organization of task-related neural networks, whereas novices have difficulty filtering out irrelevant information.”

Basically, the pro sees the problem as a pattern with a solution, while the newbie sees a jumble of noise. One sees a map; the other sees a maze. The expert finds pathways; the beginner wanders around.

Expertise, then, tends to be elegantly efficient and simple, with few wasted moves — it’s economical — whereas students must slog slowly through their own ignorance.

Think of the inexperienced marketer or administrator, who takes too long to explain a situation, and the seasoned pro who encapsulates the problem in a phrase. Or the office assistant who makes a series of mistakes that his boss clears up with a couple of quick decisions. Or your golf partner’s swing, with its inefficiencies, compared to the fluid power of Rory McIlroy or Jason Day.

Of course, no two problems are the same, and even the experts must slow, sometimes to a crawl, as they approach new questions. In that respect, everyone is a beginner. But the pros have tools of experience they can wield at all times to cut quickly through the randomness of novelty.

What about all that knowledge and lore, the sheer number of facts to be learned? Doesn’t that make expertise more complicated? True, your acquired skills involve a library of facts a beginner won’t have. But those facts greatly simplify the process, enabling you often to see at a glance into the essence of a problem, turning it from a puzzling predicament into a process quickly fulfilled. Your store of knowledge makes things easier, not harder, and you complete tasks more quickly, with less total energy expended.

To attain the simplicity of mastery in any field or profession:

• Relax … and practice: Your brain will find its way through the maze of ignorance to the exit of competence, and it will do so automatically — all you have to do is practice. There’s no need to force things; your mind will grow the particular skills it needs in good time. (Still, it’s possible to “master mastery”, as with the suggestions that follow.)

• Find mentors: Don’t re-invent the wheel if you can befriend an expert who will teach you how it’s done. Of course, you can also study books and other media that describe the skills you’re learning. All these resources will speed things up tremendously.

• Find the general principles: Every skill has a set of fundamentals which serve as shortcuts to learning. If you can master these, you’ll become expert faster. (You’ll know you’re becoming competent when you discover how to break the rules now and then for even better results.)

• Find simpler ways: Once you have the basics down, think of how you can do them more efficiently — how to perform the action with fewer steps, how to say it in fewer words, how to focus in on the important data. This will move you quickly toward the end goal of polished mastery.

• Find the 80/20 Rule in your field: As you practice, you’ll discover areas where your efforts generate much higher returns. If 20 percent of your work gets you 80 percent of your return, then increase the 20-percent activity.

• Search for expertise in others: When partnering or hiring, look for people who have an easy grasp of the topic, who respond to challenges in a relaxed and confident manner, and who ask questions and incorporate the answers quickly into their process. Effective mastery depends, not only on your own skill set, but on the competency of your co-workers. Leverage each others’ contributions to multiply the results.

The goal is to be effective — to arrive at the solution without wasting time, energy, or money. While the student puts in hours, the master gets results. A few well-placed words, a stroke of a pen, a simple phone call, a single idea that solves a dilemma, an elegant motion by a craftsperson — these are the home runs, the three-point baskets, the hat tricks in the game of expertise. Practice the simplicity of mastery, and your scores will soar.

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UPDATE: The seven fatal thinking flaws, and how to transcend them

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Your Livelihood and the American President

                                      

Running a brilliant campaign does not translate into running a brilliant White House. — Gail Collins

Does it matter to your bottom line what the government does? Absolutely. Legislatures and bureaucrats and presidents and prime ministers can screw up an economy with the stroke of a pen. Witness, for example, the run-up to the Great Recession of 2008: the U.S. set low interest rates, encouraged home buying (and strong-armed banks to provide loans to incompetent borrowers), spent nearly $2 trillion on a useless military venture in Iraq, then blamed Wall Street when the bottom fell out … and then bailed out the Street’s investment bankers while workers and small firms on Main Street had to suck it up.

Okay, but does it matter to your bottom line who is the U.S. president? Yes and no. Great power does flow through the White House, but it’s like water through a firehose that’s hard to point at problems without backsplash or getting knocked over. Over the past century, a few Chief Executives have managed to wield enormous influence (for better or worse): Wilson, FDR, Johnson, Reagan, Bush. But most have come and gone without leaving much of a mark.

A finer-grained question is: does it matter to your income stream which party a president belongs to? Campaign contributors tend either to be labor groups or corporations, neither of which are keen on draconian measures that might cause job losses or declines in revenue. So there’s a political limit, despite all the rhetoric, to what either party can do to the economy once it controls the White House.

In fact, it may not much matter which party holds the office. Sometimes a Democrat can be good for business (as with Clinton’s budget surplus), and sometimes a Republican can be bad for it (witness Bush with Iraq and the Recession). What’s more, it’s hard to tell what kind of administrator a candidate will turn out to be, and it’s often just as hard to foresee what policies they’ll instigate once in office. Meanwhile, situations can change suddenly — Pearl Harbor in December 1941 … 9/11 … the recent upheavals in technology — with unpredictable results for White House policy.

On top of that, the Constitution was written deliberately to throw sand in the gears of political change, impeding the government from rushing headlong into wild-eyed projects that might do more harm than good. This applies to the Executive as much as to the Legislature. Sometimes the American government breaks through and hurtles toward disaster, but usually progress is glacial. Thus one change of government probably won’t result in enormous shifts in society or the economy.

In recent years, though, the purview of the White House has widened. Under George W. “I Am the Decider” Bush, overly broad use of signing statements — which are meant merely to outline a Chief Executive’s plans for implementing legislation — enabled him to get away with backdoor line-item vetoes. Then the administration pushed through Congress laws that vastly increased federal power to spy on, arrest and/or kill U.S. citizens, often without warrants.

In 2009, Barack Obama — a constitutional scholar who as a candidate railed against Bush’s assault on civil liberties — became president and added to Bush’s power grab, especially in the overuse of Executive Actions.

Every president feels beleaguered by ongoing assaults from political opponents and will cast about for any influence that may win the day. No sitting president willingly lets go of arbitrary clout inherited from previous administrations; worse, there’ll be an enormous temptation to expand on it. Basically, if a Chief Executive exceeds the limits to his authority and nobody calls him on it, the next president will do the same … and then some.

The overall result is an ongoing expansion of Executive power, with no sign that it will slow down. In that respect, it doesn’t matter which party occupies the Oval Office; presidential prerogatives will likely continue to grow. More and more edicts will be handed down arbitrarily, rulings that could cause your company, or your career prospects, to lurch crazily.

What’s a business owner or employee to do?

• Don’t waste a lot of time worrying about who will be the next president. Their behavior and influence is hard to predict and often vastly different from what they promise. Besides, fretting about events you have virtually no influence over is a waste of resources. Instead, put your energies where they can do some good — work on your career. Hold a steady course despite the changing winds.
• Assume taxes and regulation will continue slowly to increase, no matter who’s in office. They have done so for decades, and there’s no sign they’ll halt or reverse course. Any compliance process you can computerize will simplify the burden and save some of the time and money you’d otherwise lose.
• Assume recessions will recur under Democrats and Republicans alike. The Fed tends to tweak interest rates to stretch out economic booms, and the resulting busts become that much deeper, regardless of who’s in office. Resist the temptation to invest or make expensive purchases at the end of a boom simply because you’ve been doing well and there’s no sign of trouble. You’ll find yourself over-extended just as your income drops.
• Assume 5% unemployment is the best we’re going to get. Rarely does the rate fall much lower, and soon enough it begins to swing upward, often doubling within a year or so. At 5% get ready to batten down the hatches.
• Never assume a strong economy, or a good job or business, will continue indefinitely, unmolested by national turmoil or bad governance. As they say in poker, “Take some chips south” — squirrel away cash from the win streaks, and you’ll still have resources after a loss.
• Never assume Washington will save you! They’re much more likely to cause problems than fix them; at best, their help is a mixed blessing. It’s better to have yourself on your side: you’ll retain the best ally you can get … for both bad times and good.

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How to Reduce Event Attendance

The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. — Charles Caleb Colton

Most of us go to events from time to time — festivals, concerts, conventions, street fairs — and many of these get promoted by email. If you’re on a list for, say, a monthly swap meet, you’ll receive a notice in your Inbox from the promoter, and it’s often written in a breezy, upbeat and chatty style that’s sure to charm and attract customers.

Yes, making money is probably one of the main purposes of the promoter. No problem with that, of course. The trouble lies elsewhere. Here’s an example of what you might get:

“Okay, our regular meet is all set up for the end of the month! Get ready, because it’s gonna be a great one. Usual start time, but we’ll have some extra-special guest vendors that you’ll love. Admission is $20 this month because of extra expenses, but rest assured you’ll think it was worth more. We look forward to seeing all of you. Do come to the main tent and say hi.”

What’s wrong with it? … Yes, you in the back.

“There’s no date listed.”

Exactly. I’ve lost count of how many announcements I’ve received that bubbled with excitement about an event but forgot to mention the date. Or the time. Or the address. Or the price.

The above sample omits nearly every particular. This is surprisingly common. Promoters seem to assume that their list members already know the recurring stuff, so why bore them with the same details?

Here’s a why: List members themselves often need the basic information. Your regulars are a motley bunch, some of whom have not been with the group long, or have poor memories, or have always caught a ride with someone else until now. Etc etc.

Here’s another why: Your regulars may want to forward the email to friends and new recruits, but they won’t if it’s an embarrassment of non-information.

If the promoter fails to list everything anyone might need to know about the event, attendance will suffer — not merely from missed opportunities for marketing to newbies, but from regulars unsure about the date or time or address or cost. Instead of the hoped-for increase in patronage, the turnout drops.

A big difference between professionals and amateurs is that pros tend to be methodical and detail-oriented, whereas amateurs are in it for the fun, confusing enthusiasm for competence. If there’s money involved, the event organizer needs to behave like a professional. But if thoroughness makes them impatient, they’ll hit “Send” too early … and prove they’re an amateur.

When it’s a one-person operation, that person will write the announcement, and then proof-read it … if she or he has time. The problem is that most amateur writers think if they understand what they’re writing, so will everyone else. They believe they’re communicating simply because they’re typing.

I’ve received unclear or incomplete email announcements, replied asking for clarification, and been scolded for not reading the email. This tells me the promoter sincerely believes all the info is included even when it isn’t. This illusion can be very persistent; amateurs fall prey to it all the time.

Also, it’s extremely poor practice for promoters to get huffy with their customers about anything, especially communication problems, which could easily be the promoter’s fault.

If organizers simply assume they’ve announced events properly, they’ll never connect the dots between incompetent emails and lost gate. Besides, with so many variables — weather, time of year, competition, economic conditions — who can prove that it was the weak email announcement that put the brakes on attendance?

The announcement is one of the variables you can control. It is, after all, a part of marketing, which is critical to the success of your event. It’s hard to imagine it not affecting attendance.

SOLUTIONS:

Always include the basic details:

—Date and time (“Saturday, March 12, 8:00 a.m.”)

—Event and location (“Monthly Swap Meet, 123 Main St, Anytown”)

—Cost and benefits (“$20 gets you admission and a free raffle ticket.”)

—Any special notes (“Be sure to bring a warm jacket” / sunscreen / bug spray / box lunch / etc)

If you must issue an update or correction, be sure to include the basic details again, revised as appropriate. Do these things and it becomes easy for people to pop the event into their calendars … and forward the message, with its complete event info, to those they want to invite.

Always write for the first-timer. Read your own writing as if you were a newbie who doesn’t know the least thing about your event. This exercise can show you what you’re omitting that you’ve assumed everyone else knows. (And you’d be surprised how much the regular attendees don’t know about what’s going on.) Assume that your list members are like students in a classroom, where most of them aren’t paying attention. Be clear, and always include complete event information, so a beginner — and any regular who’s unsure about the latest event particulars — will have no doubts or hesitations about when and where to attend, what to bring, etc.

Always have someone else check your writing. Well-constructed sentences give off a professional air, while goofs and awkward phrases reek of amateurism. It’s easy to scan your own work and see no problems: you wrote it, it looks good to you, it must be getting the point across. We’re all a bit blinded by the majesty of our own verbiage. But be warned: our writing, unchecked, can and will rise up to humiliate us, the lovely words betraying confused or embarrassing meanings we never intended. Meanwhile, punctuation and spelling mistakes can slip past the best of us. A second pair of eyes will catch a lot of potential problems.

Don’t be the one left standing in the middle of a sparsely attended event, shrugging his shoulders — “But I told them about it!” — oblivious to the amateur mistakes he made. Let somebody else make those errors. Get your email promotions in hand … and watch your gate improve.

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Future Jobs

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. — Steve Jobs

Let’s assume, for purposes of discussion, that computers and robots will capture most of the jobs we work at today. Might there still be something left over for us humans to do? Yes. Here are a few starter ideas:

Driverless vehicle leaser: Uber plans one day to upgrade its service with driverless cars, removing the person behind the wheel and thereby reducing the already low per-mile cost by another dollar. For a time, anyone who owns such a car may be able to lease it to Uber or other fleets. Some owners may become fleet managers in their own right. Talents needed: perseverance, entrepreneurial spirit, ability to repair computerized machinery.

Cyborg stylist: Already we replace old body parts with improved ones: plastic eye lenses (to eliminate cataracts), sophisticated controllable prostheses (to substitute for damaged limbs), cochlear implants (to repair hearing), face transplants, etc. Any of these improvements can alter a recipient’s appearance and body image. To deal with that, specialized stylists will help users select clothing, makeup, and hair that hide, complement, or improve their partially mechanical appearance. Talents needed: fashion background, good color-matching and materials knowledge, creativity, strong people skills.

Hyper-transit tour guide: New forms of mass transport loom on the horizon — hyperloops, maglev suborbital vehicles, scheduled space liners — and consumers will need guidance on how to make proper use of the new vehicles. Tour guides will inform and reassure them, and some will oversee groups that board the newfangled transit systems for vacations, junkets, and professional travel. Talents needed: good grasp of technical underpinnings of new transit systems, strong presentation and people skills.

Wrist TV accessorizer: Those cyberwatches everyone’s buying come with a variety of straps, but what about matching jewelry and clothing? Plus you’ll want to look your best when using your watch to video-conference. Consultants will station themselves at department and specialty stores or be available by appointment. Talents needed: fashion sense, good sales skills, strong people skills.

Financial planner for the unemployed: Within thirty years, it’s likely most people in Western nations will be out of work, rendered obsolete by sophisticated computer-controlled processes. It’s also likely that some sort of national minimum income will fend off wholesale rioting and food panics. But this won’t be enough, as each person will have a unique financial situation and will need advice on how best to parlay government payments, pensions, retirement accounts, and any spare investment income into a livable budget. Talents needed: strong background in finance, strong people skills, good sales skills.

Space station vacation planner: As with hyper-transit tour guides (above), there will be big demand for people who can apply the human touch and smooth a customer’s path to a rewarding experience on a space station or orbital cruise ship. Talents needed: experience in the travel industry, good grasp of basics of zero-gee and zero-atmosphere environments, strong grasp of ship functions, strong people skills.

Robot maintenance: Most repair jobs will probably be done by other machines, but every now and then the repairer will have trouble mending itself, and that’s when people can step in to help. Talents needed: strong computer and mechanical skills.

Craftsperson: No matter how wonderful the woodworking and metallurgy of robots, people will still want things created by human hands. Talents needed: experience with materials, knack for creating unique and beautiful items, strong marketing skills.

Artist: What’s true of craftspeople is true of artists: we’ll still want human-made paintings and music to go with our collections of art by automata. Talents needed: originality, strong technical skills, strong marketing skills.

Sports player: Robots will probably play football for our amusement, but we’ll still want to see what humans can achieve on the field. Thus sports will continue to employ people. Talents needed: roughly same as today, including top-tier athletic skills, ability to take orders, working well in groups.

Explorer: More and more, machines are sent to investigate remote areas (including outer space). But we won’t really trust the resulting data until we can go there for ourselves. Talents needed: perseverance, fearlessness, unquenchable optimism, tremendous energy and stamina, strong sales skills (to generate grant money for the trip).

Consultant: It’s likely (though this may be wishful thinking on my part) that future humans, after conferring with intelligent machines on difficult questions, will want a second opinion from a real person. Talents needed: creative problem-solving skills, large knowledge base in the relevant field, strong computer skills, strong people skills, good marketing skills.

Business owner: Once automation throws most of us out of work, you’ll do better if you can own the machines and the profits they generate. Done right, this will afford you a better living than that enjoyed by others, most of whom will be dependent on some kind of government dole. Talents needed: good business administration skills, good negotiating skills, entrepreneurial spirit, ability to plan ahead (read: starting now) in anticipation of the sea change in the workplace that will sweep across the coming generation. The sooner you own all or part of a profitable business, the safer you’ll be.

Of course, these won’t be the only jobs performed by humans in the near future. There are many other possibilities worth considering.

The worst thing is to declare, “Machines will never replace me!” (That’s a classic case of famous last words.) The best thing is to plan ahead for a brave new world that may cause both trauma and wonder and will reward those who are prepared. Don’t assume one of the above jobs will be yours for the taking, but instead see now to your future financial security.

It’s wise to remember that computerized machines, though they may usher in an era of untold abundance, are not there to make you happy. They’re there to make their owners happy, and that won’t always comport with your personal needs. You can accept the largesse of some upcoming economic miracle, but it may not last forever or unfold in a totally benign manner. Don’t expect developments always to favor you, and do expect that you will have to perform at least some work or oversight to maintain your lifestyle.

To see to your well-being, now and in the future, avoid passive reliance on developments and, instead, make sure of it yourself. That way, you’ll greet whatever comes, not with trepidation, but with anticipation.