For those of you familiar with my first book, Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible, I talk about what I call the “problem pair,” or more familiarly, the “duck bunny,” after an old 19th-century optical illusion of a duck that looks like a bunny, or a bunny that looks like a duck, depending on your perspective.
These kinds of contrasts are very helpful in helping to start to shift someone’s perspective from what they’re seeing now to seeing the situation a little bit differently.
Whenever I find one of these contrasting pairs somewhere, I always try to make note of it—you never know when that might be useful, either for your own work or for one of your clients!
And just recently, I did!
While I was doing some assigned reading (I’m in a doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University)—a chapter from a book called In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life by a Harvard psychologist named Robert Kegan.
Suddenly there it was.
A beautiful duck bunny!
Kegan wrote that “irrespective of who invents and owns our job, we can still be the creator and owner of our work.”
He goes on to talk about how, often, the expectation in organizations right now is that people invent or own their jobs. As he says,
“We’re told we must come to see that ‘your job belongs to you, ‘you have some control over your work,’ ‘your job is part of who you are.’”
And then a couple pages later, he continues that line of thinking to say that,
“The question of who owns one’s work is not necessarily determined by that organization that determines your job.”
That, in fact, those are two separate things, even though a lot of times we use those two words interchangeably. But if you stop and think about it, they’re actually not interchangeable.
They mean two different things.
And wouldn’t you know it, just a couple of days later, I was working with a client on her message, which was very much about this difference between job and work. So, by having something like this is my mental SwipeFile, we were able to identify an important distinction in her perspective on the work she does.
So, I’m curious: what kinds of things go in your SwipeFile? What “duck bunnies” have you seen recently out in the world? Reply to this email and let me know!