THE LEAFLET

July 17 2025

the “but what about” list, the truest thing you can say, pebble thoughts

THE “BUT WHAT ABOUT” LIST

When my team was scaling COVIDCheck, our mission was to deliver a proactive and equitable response to COVID-19 so people could get back into community safely. Our tool for this at the start was diagnostic testing and, later, vaccine doses. 

In the early-middle days, after we survived a few existential scares and knew we’d be cooking for at least 3-6 more months, I got the humblest, “in it for the right reasons” folks on the team to talk with me about the “but what about” list.

This is the list of items that fill in the blank that follows: “We achieved our mission, based on the best data we have. But what about ______?”

• Taking the very best care we can of front-line clinical workers, day to day 

• Helping our team in the next part of their careers when this emergency response is over

• Using any profit we may eventually earn to compound our impact

• Making the experience for each patient feel actually good and affirming, not just tolerably short

This list was a way of heightening our ambition and digging deeper into our values. The orgs I admire most seem to have a list like this guiding their growth and choices. They see success as something richer and more interesting than “number go up.” Once they’ve built the team and system for their core mission, they look at other aligned assignments their values might offer or demand.

A risk of the list is the “but what abouts” crowd out your core mission, the thing you exist to do. In trying to complete the list, you serve a bunch of constituencies but lose the devotion to your most important customer or community. You shouldn’t swap your mission for this list. The list is a way of adding “beautiful constraints” that shape the way you chase the mission.

A list like this can unlock a competitive advantage for you, too. In a blue ocean strategy kinda way, it forces you to look beyond the game of the status quo. You can add a whole column to the chess board and that can make what you’re doing more noticeable, appealing, and helpful than what your competitors are doing. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

THE TRUEST THING YOU CAN SAY

I was striving to be a great teacher when I wasn’t even a particularly good teacher, yet. I went to professional development after school, on the weekends, over the summer. I read books. I observed other great teachers. I stole moves and tried to do all the little parental (or older brother) gestures of love and firmness I knew to make kids feel seen and respected and challenged. And still, years in, my classroom was not a great place to learn.

One problem I had was a surplus of techniques and a resulting deficit of focus. I was trying to manage too many pedagogical tactics and trying to manage too many kids’ behaviors in too many ways. To make matters worse, I used too many words to say almost everything to kids. 

The wonderful Adam Meinig helped me get through this and helped me to be better and more credible for kids with this bracing question, “What’s the truest thing you can say right now?” He’d lob that Yoda-grenade at me when I was talking in circles about the content of the lesson or the rationale for a new school policy or the requirements of the upcoming state test. 

The answer to “what is the truest thing you can say right now?” was usually simple and blunt. 

And Adam almost every time would say, “Just say that to them.” 

When I am facing a tricky communications puzzle now, Adam’s question helps. Sometimes finding the words for the team or the customers is like my bad teaching - you’re trying to juggle emotional intelligence and politics and resource shortages and and and. You lose credibility and fail to persuade because people can tell you’re striving to manage a bunch of things. You’re not telling them the truest thing you can.

-eric

Read the rest here.

PEBBLE THOUGHTS, PEBBLE QUESTIONS

Yiyun Li is the mother of two sons, both of whom committed suicide in their teen years. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the book she wrote after her younger son passed. She doesn’t waste words in this book. She doesn’t give advice. But between bladed passages that made me cry, she offers stark wisdom that is somehow gentle and unforgiving at once.

Li relays that a friend of hers stopped her short during a spiraling moment. Her friend, Brigid, tells her the question she was thinking about was a pebble question. Not worthy of her fixation and rumination. Better to simply kick out of her path. 

Li describes herself as someone who thinks her way through the world rather than feeling her way through. And she indicates, without saying so outright, that this thinking disposition can get one into trouble. Fixing the machinery of the mind on a question can generate a logic that demands the thinker’s obedience. You have to find the answer; the answer really matters; the answer must arrive within this system. 

Li says that if life is a Sisyphean endeavor, if we’re in a forever present, endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill, we should at least make sure we’re pushing a boulder and not a pebble. Let the tragedy of life properly run its course as tragedy, rather than hauling pebbles around. 

My early sense in reckoning with this is the pebble questions might be, most often, questions of identity. We can try to answer those in the abstract; we can try to get there from first principles. But likelier more useful to others and more satisfying to ourselves is answering “who am I?” and “what am I for?” with the dirty, provisional, stumbling logic of doing. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Peanuts guy Charles Schulz on building a body of work (h/t Kevin Kelly):

A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself.

Mother and novelist Yiyun Li on life and death:

If death is one reality and life is another, I would rather they were like two hands placed next to each other — barely touching or with fingers intertwined. The two hands are not arm wrestling; they cannot beat or dominate each other.

Habits guy James Clear on attitudes toward yourself:

Be forgiving with your past self. What's done is done. Take the lessons with you and release the guilt.

Be strict with your present self. Win the moment in front of you right now.

Be flexible with your future self. There are many paths to success. You don't need life to be a certain way to live well.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric