Rarely do I wish I was a man.
Last week Mark Zuckerberg gave his first ever live Q&A and while he was asked really interesting questions about FB and diversity and especially about their computer science program “Girls who Code” one of the best and most telling, from my point of view, was the question about his T shirt and his great reply:
Why do you wear the same grey t-shirt every day?
To which he replied:
“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Facebook user base.
“I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life, so that way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services.”
This is what I want, to be able to wear the same thing every day. OK, so right now I don’t “help serve more than a billion people”. I’m working on it.
Being able to wear the same clothes every day has been my dream for some time ever since realizing that Steve Jobs only wore that same black polo neck and jeans. I was deterred because some how wearing the same clothes every day is easier for men. I then learned that Barack Obama wears the same clothes and eats the same meals every day, I thought “That’s me”. I eat the same breakfast and pretty much the same lunch every day.
When I don’t have to think about the minutiae, my mind has more room for thinking about really important things
Many intelligent and creative people eliminate the small, tedious decisions in their lives because they simply do not have time for them.
I often have a discussion with clients when we are working together to improve their business outcomes. I talk about eliminating the minutiae and suggest they develop systems and processes for many of the things they do routinely.
This is often met with eyes glazing over and they say some thing like “Oh no, systems wouldn’t work for me, that would just stifle my creativity!”
Far from stifling creativity having systems and processes positively unleashes creativity because the mind is free of all the nitty gritty decisions
Have you ever thought about which daily, trivial decisions you could eliminate?
Me, I’m off to buy some Tshirts! Won't be grey, or black. Maybe white? or perhaps green?
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