Levelling Up

What got you here won't get you there

I was delighted to see that my book Life in the Negative World received a very nice review from Kevin DeYoung in the new issue of First Things magazine.

What would DeYoung think if I posted a crackpot conspiracy theory right after his review appeared? He certainly would not appreciate that. It would make him look bad for having publicly said something nice about me. And he’d probably never make that mistake again.

Too many people don’t understand that. They don’t realize that as they rise through the ranks or even simply get older, they need to level up. You need to raise your standards and change your behavior.

What got you here won’t get you there. If you want to reach the level you aspire to in life, you have to change your approach along the way.

I mentioned once before the painful executive coaching feedback I received when I was rising senior manager in the consulting world. One of the points was, “Here’s the bad news. Aaron needs to wear a jacket, every day. That’s just what it is.”

At a certain point in the corporate hierarchy, you have to level up the way that you dress. People who don’t discern that and act accordingly hurt their ability to advance.

There are many areas where things like this the case. Today I want to highlight a few of them.

Humor vs. Seriousness

The older you get, or the more prominent position you attain, the less you should use humor in most cases.

This is painful for me because as Generation X, the detached, sarcastic joke comes very easily. I’ve hade to make an effort to dial this back a lot in the way I publicly engage.

If you’ll notice, Kevin DeYoung has done the same over the years. He obviously has a great sense of humor, but he makes a lot fewer jokes than he used to. As befitting a prominent mid-40s pastor who is emerging as a national tier leader, his work today is very serious and has the gravitas appropriate to that level.

This is one thing Jordan Peterson get right. As I just noted, he treats life as an endeavor of the utmost moral seriousness. And the way he talks typically conveys the earnestness of that. He comes out on stage in a three piece suit. At 61 years old, he wants to embody in his appearance and language what it means to be the Sage.

That’s not to say you can never tell a joke once you hit 40 or get a high profile job. But you can’t over use humor. And your jokes probably shouldn’t be too edgy.

Similarly, you need to keep control of your emotions, and avoid too many petty public squabbles.

If you want to be taken seriously at a high level, you have to act like a serious person.

Rigor

About 15 years ago I saw an article in the news claiming that a particular town in Ohio had been transformed from a decayed Rust Belt community into a sparkling new revitalized town.

I fired off a blog post that basically said, “That’s crazy! There’s no way that’s true.” I got an email from a prominent organization in Ohio pushing aback against my take.

I realized that I had spoken without actually personally visiting the town to confirm what I’d said. It has been years since I had visited. Now, I was probably right. But it dawned on me that a lot of people were now reading me, which meant unlike when I started out as a blogger about cities, I couldn’t just fire off posts with hot takes. I needed to make sure there was an increased level of rigor in what I was saying, and to think about the targets I was selecting and the tone I was using. Bashing a struggling small town in Ohio was probably not the best look for someone with a lot of readers, even if I were 100% right.

I get a lot of emails from people telling me how they’ve put something I’ve said into practice. Or used it in their church or a sermons.

When people are making life decisions based on what I say, that comes with an enormous weight of responsibility. And I have to be diligent in trying to be thoughtful and rigorous to that level.

A lot of people don’t realize how large their audience has grown, and how that comes with a different set of expectations. For example, when people with large social media followings criticize someone, their followers often follow suit. This lets the target claim that he is a victim of an attack mob or abuse. People have gotten banned over this, because they didn’t realize that when you have 500,000 followers you can’t get away with the things you could at 5,000 followers.

Why do famous, big name people often sound like politicians, choosing each word very carefully? Because they have to. There’s a lesson there.

Associations

So much of today’s media and social media fray consists of guilt by association attacks. In most cases, I think these are ridiculous. They are almost always just an example of the politics of personal destruction. The people doing this don’t even really care about the associations they are denouncing. They are just using them as a convenient tool to attack a pre-existing target.

Association attacks are also unavoidable. Everybody knows there are “six degrees of separation” between anybody. And even if you are perfect about carefully curating every person you ever attend a conference with and the like, many people veer off in bad directions long after you talked to them once in the past.

But we do need to rethink associations as we grow. If you are a podcaster starting out and trying to get listeners, you need to grab every opportunity you can to grow. Once you start getting big, you need to think harder about what guests to have on and what other shows you want to appear on.

If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s the “too cool for school” attitude. There are some people who only ever want to associate with people at their celebrity level or higher. They never build up or boost anyone else who is smaller than them. I’ve made a point to reject that. One of my guiding principles is to pay it forward by trying to showcase new and emerging talent.

I’m also a believer in the power of saying Yes to people who want to meet with me, have me on their podcast, etc.

And, we are explicitly instructed to associate with the lowly. Refusing to be seen with low status people is anti-Biblical.

For those reasons, I want to continue spreading a wide net in who I associate with. But I don’t want that to be unlimited either.

I used to take essentially any podcast opportunity that came up. I was trying hard to build an audience. Beggars can’t be choosers.

But today, if someone invites me on his podcast, I’ve started asking, “Who is this guy?” One of the changes I’ve made over the course of the past year is to do more due diligence on what shows I go on, who I have as a guest on my podcast, and things of that nature. Is this person legit? Are their views too extreme? Is there enough common ground to enable a constructive, value generating engagement?

One rule I’ve long had that has served me well is not to appear on a foreign media outlet I can’t confirm is fully legitimate. A bit less than a decade ago I was asked to appear on Russia Today TV (now known as RT). At the time, RT was viewed sort of like Al Jazeera. It wasn’t mainstream, but mainstream people would appear on it. But I decided to take a pass, and I’m glad I did.

Again, although I want to continue taking a very broad stance towards who I am willing to have a conversation with, I do have boundaries. And those boundaries probably need to grow narrower over time.

Becoming more judicious about who you platform or associate with isn’t selling out or going squishy. It’s called being an adult.

Become Worthy of Associating With

When I was a consultant, I knew in my head that the only reason we got an engagement was because someone at the client went to bat for us. Somebody put their reputation or maybe even their career on the line to say that we should be hired.

But I didn’t really get that in my gut.

Later, when I got my first major public speaking engagement to keynote the annual meeting of a major civic organization, I realized that people had placed enormous trust in me to perform well. They at placed a big bet on me — me personally. Unlike in the past, this time I got that in my gut not just my head.

I made sure I did a great job at that event. And today I really have a strong sense of how if someone invites me to speak at a conference or something, they are investing reputational capital on me that I need to make sure earns a positive return.

That’s what that Kevin DeYoung review is. As I said, he is now a major figure in the evangelical world. He has the potential to be the leading figure of his generation. He has to be very judicious about what he does. When he writes a positive public review of my book like that, he’s putting reputational capital at risk to do so.

Similarly, I recently had Sen. Marco Rubio on my podcast. That required getting his staff to put their reputation and potentially their jobs on the line in telling him to do that interview. There’s no risk to them in saying Yes to a Fox News request. But there’s a lot of risk in saying Yes to me.

I have to be a person that demonstrates through my actions that I am a good place for people like US Senators and top tier pastors to invest their reputational capital.

Too many people do not get this. They are not aware of how their own actions make it very difficult for other people to associate with or engage with them.

Now, simply by saying things that are other than the mainstream consensus view, I am limiting the people who will engage with me. I am not doing what I’m doing while silently saying “Pick me! Pick me!” to big name people and groups that are never going to do that.

The pursuit of that sort of pure mainstream bankability cannot be our only goal.

For me, I have made the choice that for the sake of mission, I’m willing to sacrifice a certain level of accessibility to some people, institutions, and venues.

I’m also not going to avoid speaking about people in the low probability hope they’ll eventually do something for me. It would be great to be invited on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. But I’m not going to let that stop me from giving what I hope is a fair assessment of his work from time to time.

But if people are going to reject associating with me, I want it to be for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

This is part of why levelling up matters. You want people who you aspire to interact with to be confident that you know how to operate at their level.

For some people, they choose to take a more purely prophetic approach in which they don’t aspire to ever be invited into any clubs. That’s certainly a valid approach. And we probably even need some people like that.

But a lot of folks end up forced into that track without even knowing it. They’ve made it too hard or too risky for people to choose them.

Whenever someone picks you, they are making an investment. The higher up you go, the bigger and more riskier those investments are. You need to make sure people have confidence you are the right person to make those investments in.

As you grow, as you get older, the game changes. If you want to have success at those higher levels, you need to make sure you are levelling up your own game.

I used myself as an example here. Does that mean I think I’ve gotten it perfect? By no means. But making sure I’m operating at the level I aspire to be is something I think about and work towards a lot. You should too.