THE LEAFLET

June 26 2025

find the asset, creative vs custodial, defending as building

FIND THE ASSET YOU’RE BUILDING OR DEFENDING

Assets increase in value over time. They get stronger with age. Maybe they even compound - their growth begets growth of its own.

Work with assets can be satisfying in ways that work without assets cannot. 

• When you work with assets, you’re in this zone: Investment, maintenance, maturation, slopes and smoothed curves.

• When you’re not working with assets, you’re in this one: Betting, discarding, consuming, peaks and valleys.

A question worth asking yourself: what is the asset that I am building or defending with my work? This might not be the thing your market or employer are directly paying you for. It may be the field, instead of the crop.

Awareness of the asset can unlock a sense of time that is grounding and motivating. Action you take today can have a very large and long tail. So it’s worth taking action today. Action you take today fits into a story that’s much bigger than you and your career ladder. You’re making a contribution to something that will outlive your present and maybe even your foreseeable choices, stress, and attention. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

CREATIVE VS CUSTODIAL WORK: A BINARY

Here’s a binary for you to gnaw on: let’s say there are two kinds of work — the creative and the custodial. In creative work, you create. You make new stuff, you make new categories, you make new connections. You start up, you iterate, you experiment and scale.

In custodial work, you tend and maintain. You care for. You defend what has already been made.

Team by team, mission by mission, I find that the most inspired and sustained work comes from those who infuse custody with creativity and vice versa. They accept the binary but don’t fall prey to a good/bad ; hot/cold view of the two types. They see the inherent worth of both and they seek to carry the values of one into the other.

Certain pros are drawn to one of these binary halves by default. Something about creation or about custody stirs their spirit and soothes their ego at once. They can build an identity on this preference, issue moral judgements of those who prefer the other. They can feel entitled to exclusive habits of mind that go with and entrench their preference.

I think what I’m getting at here is that last bit - the best creators and caretakers I’ve seen, the ones who build cultures that endure, where people can grow, they don’t feel entitled to ignore the other half. They’re energized by embracing both, folding one into the other.

-eric

Read the rest here.

DEFENDING AS BUILDING

It can be hard to muster the same motivation for protection that you do for creation. Culturally, the affirmative case is sexier and more celebrated. It can feel much better to build than to defend.

Watching the NBA playoffs this spring has been a pleasure. The Finals between the Thunder and the Pacers were suspenseful and highly competitive. We got a lot of the best of the narrative goods a 7-game series can offer.

One reason the games were so entertaining and suspenseful was defense. Both teams played clever, urgent, carnivorous defense. So often a brilliant offensive player or offensive team looks listless on defense. They take a break and make a bet when the other team has the ball. They haven’t left the floor but they’re present in the way someone watching someone else play blackjack is present.

Not so, for OKC and Indy.

The wizardly Sam Anderson (seriously, go buy and read Boom Town if you have not) interviewed the Thunder and their bald terrier of a guard, Alex Caruso, shed light on the mindset that makes the OKC defense crackle. Caruso: “We don’t feel like we’re trying to stop you from scoring. We feel like we’re influencing you to give us the ball.”

The Thunder and the Pacers found a way to turn defending into building. Passive receipt became active pursuit. They weren’t at the mercy of the other team’s offensive splendor. They chose and then asserted an identity, a story of who they were, when the ball was (ever more temporarily) in the other team’s hands.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Educator and civil rights activist Septima Clark on priorities:

You know the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life. Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults. But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward or change around completely—I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.

Author Eric Barker on social pressure at work:

When you take a job take a long look at the people you're going to be working with-because the odds are you're going to become like them; they are not going to become like you.

Writer Anne Lamott on ethics as language:

The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric