All News is Good

How to reprogram our responses and upgrade work+life

Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋

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The other day, I looked back at my journal from a couple of years ago, right in the middle of startup craziness. Highlights of a normal week included:

• The $300k contract a client verbally agreed to was cut.

• We had a great hire on the goal line, but they decided to stay at their current company.

• A client lead I personally pulled in kept ghosting me.

• I poured my heart out into a blog post, and ten people unsubscribed.

Yup, we got our ass kicked that week…

But since you’re reading these words now, I survived. Our company, too, made it through these and much more bad news that came our way.

Back then, I felt a lot of stress about “bad news.” But by the time we finished selling our company, I discovered that labeling events as either “good” or “bad” was distracting and wasteful. Today, I see all news is good.¹

Some of this comes from surviving enough ass-kickings that the fear no longer sneaks through. But mostly it’s from choosing to react better—for the good of the business.

This is a superpower that’s yours for the taking once you master these four mindset changes:

1. It Is What It Is

Something bad just happened. It’s not fair, it sucks, they screwed “us”—but mostly “me”, because we take our work and ourselves so seriously. But the sooner we can accept this, the more mature we are.

We parents find ourselves repeating the words we heard as children when the milk was spilled or the toy was broken. There’s no reason to cry. Things happen. Things can be fixed or replaced. And there’s a good chance tomorrow will bring new distractions.

Someone has to be the adult in the room of our minds. It might as well be us.

And it’s completely a mind game—or more like a war within our psyche. We want things to go well, and much of our internal programming is fear-based. So when one thing goes wrong, we start catastrophizing it into a cascade of further worries.

Guy Finley captures this well in his book, The Essential Laws of Fearless Living:

“When expectations get dashed, we don’t see new possibilities unfolding; all we see is the way things should have gone. We don’t see what is with all of its positive possibilities; instead we see only the negative . . . what is not. What these discoveries reveal is as startling as it is promising: the only reason we feel powerless is because we have become the captive of a mind resisting itself, an involuntary prisoner of a mind struggling to escape its own negative images. And there is nothing but powerlessness in this resistance, because by law whatever we resist . . . persists!”

And we can go a few thousand years farther back to the Buddhist parable of the Two Arrows:

"When touched by a painful feeling, the uninstructed person sorrows, grieves, and laments... They are struck by two arrows: the physical one and the mental one."

The first arrow hurts. The second arrow is the one we shoot ourselves with. Job one is to stop nocking the second arrow.

2. It’s Data

So there’s still that first arrow sticking in your business. But it’s not in your chest. You’re not going to die. Your business might suffer a bit, but it’s got you—a smart, clear-headed human—to stop the bleeding and figure out what happened. The last thing you do is say “Serenity Now!” and stick your head in the sand—or a bottle—and hope the whole thing blows over.

“Bad news” is data just sitting there, waiting for you to understand it. The arrow came from somewhere and was fired by someone. It’s a starting point for a trove of information that can lead to insights and improvements.

So you dig in. Was it random bad luck, accidental, or a sign of something deeper? Sometimes you see a simple mistake or wrong turn, declare “Next Play”, and move on. Often, you find a problem or opportunity that would have been missed while playing the whine-and-blame game.

Back to our lost verbal contract from years ago: It opened our minds to improving how we close the verbal yes more quickly and spawned three ideas on how we might rescue that deal from budget cuts.

Over time, you might even seek new and unexpected sources of news to make sure you’re not missing things. Reporters, investment bankers, exiting employees, and even competitors will share the chinks they see in your armor if you ask them nicely. This gives you a chance to dodge them before they deliver discomfort.

3. Bad Things Happen for a Reason

Over time, you start to see that every piece of bad news—each arrow taken—is a gift. The only real tragedy is when we don’t transmute it into something positive. Once we ladder up to look at the bigger picture, we find there is usually a method behind the sadness.

For example, a few weeks ago, a CEO I advise shared a story of a failed hire. Her company is growing quickly, and she has several positions to fill. After rounds of interviews with a promising candidate, the CEO presented him with an offer consistent with both industry norms and other employees’ earnings. He was making a higher salary at his current firm, but in a very different industry, and he said he was willing to take a pay cut to reset his career. But when the offer came, he wouldn’t budge. The CEO decided not to match his demand. When we spoke, she was second-guessing herself.

To me, this was great news: She avoided the pain of hiring someone who wasn’t willing to make the sacrifice he initially suggested. He didn’t think that a short-term pay cut would get him into a much better company culture with career upside. That’s not someone who would fit in with the ethic of everyone else, and might disrupt the strong culture, not to mention screw up existing salary bands.

An offer to this person would be good news, no matter how the candidate responded. A surprising number of business situations can turn out this way if you learn to see the bigger game that’s playing out.

4. Your Audience is Watching

A couple of months into my startup’s pivot to influencer marketing, we began boosting social posts with paid Facebook ads. I vividly recall the morning an entry-level employee made a mistake buying ads over the weekend, causing us to go $20,000 over budget. Ouch.

I had moved into the CEO role a few months earlier—after a round of layoffs. We had only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank and were not profitable. This was a big arrow to the chest.

And we had an open office environment, so everyone heard this news at the same time when it dropped. Microseconds later, I could sense a few dozen sets of eyes looking at me. It’s what you might call a moment of truth. My thoughts of holding the team together won out over worrying. I let it wash over me. We told the employee it was an honest mistake and put stronger safeguards and training in place.

I’m reminded of a story that Steven Pressfield told a few years ago about the game-changing horse rider, Sue Sally Hale. She described a key to her success as “Sitting Chilly” when charging toward a 6-foot fence at full gallop:

“The horse reads everything from the rider’s ‘seat.’ If the man or woman in the saddle is scared, the horse knows it just from the feel of the rider on its back. The animal may balk at the jump if it feels fear from its rider.”

A leader’s reaction is amplified throughout the business. If we respond with fear or anger, they’ll run from future challenges and stop reporting bad news. You won’t be able to act until it’s too late.

But if we accept the inevitable challenges and dig in to solve them, our teammates will learn and behave similarly. Eventually, they solve the problems on their own. No news gets to you, for a different, very good reason: The problem was taken care of.

Fix Your Business, Fix Yourself

The easiest way to put all this into action is to grab a sticky note, write “All News is Good” on it, and post it next to your laptop. Chances are, something will trigger a peek at this within the next 24 hours, and you can start the process of reprogramming yourself through right action.

You might be surprised how much better you feel, too.

Repeatedly throughout my career, I’ve seen that changing my behavior as a leader gets my company through problems or growing pains. Then I see how this work adjustment brings similar gains to my broader relationships with people and the world. It’s a whole new meaning of “self-work”.

Increasingly, I see the real job of a leader—or a human—is to learn to manage the team within us. Ancient wisdom and modern psychology are aligning to show us that our minds are not static egos, but rather a swirling ecosystem of voices, parts, systems, influences, and shadows. Each of us is the CEO of a company within…

I see this in my dreams now, as the “me” character is often a company or team leader, and I’m treating the characters that pop up with a servant-leader approach I developed in my waking career. Dreams are often visions of our psyche and its parts sorting out new approaches to life. This is a form of self-rehearsal and new response formation—i.e., reprogramming.

And it’s almost hilarious how often I wake up remembering a scene in which a problem occurred, and I find myself coaching the characters on how to get past it.

It’s been over six years since I led a big team in the waking world. But this internal model keeps running and evolving for my benefit. Today, when life's challenges arise, my mental “team” handles them with far less reactive panic and much more relaxed, creative thinking.

“It turns out that whatever is loved relaxes. And it turns out that most of what I thought “I” was is just different layers of tension all bracing against the basic unpredictability of life, pretending that maybe if I push experience away hard enough I won’t be hurt.”—Jake Bornstein

Maybe life is a dream, too. And it’s all practice for a higher purpose.

I think everything happens for our benefit—if we let it.

Every obstacle is the way.

Our leadership work can help us master the art of living.

If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

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1. I first heard this phrase from entrepreneur Shaan Puri. See his #7 here: https://www.mfmpod.com/from-the-vault-these-are-the-frameworks-every-entrepreneur-should-learn/