Putting honest poetry into the world, even under pressure

In 1940, a few months before she passed away in Toronto at the age 71, the anarchist activist and author Emma Goldman published a pamphlet entitled “The Place of the Individual in Society.” Like so much of her writing, it contained some remarkably prescient observations. Here’s one of them:

The minds of men are in confusion, for the very foundations of our civilization seem to be tottering. People are losing faith in the existing institutions. …

Individuality may be described as the consciousness of the individual as to what he is and how he lives. It is inherent in every human being and is a thing of growth. …

The very essence of individuality is expression; the sense of dignity and independence is the soil wherein it thrives. Individuality is not the impersonal and mechanistic thing that the State treats as an “individual.” The individual is not merely the result of heredity and environment, of cause and effect. He is that and a great deal more, a great deal else. … [H]e is not a part of this or of that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole.

In trying times like those we’re immersed in today, mass movements—fascism, communism, etc.—come along to impose an identity that significant numbers of people who are struggling to find themselves in society sign up for. Emma Goldman reminds me that going the other direction—helping each person have a meaningful, values-aligned, vision-focused life—is a far more regenerative way to work. Rather than immersing ourselves in a mass movement in which adrenaline and anger energize, we can embrace the harder but far more rewarding work of slowly but surely becoming ourselves.

Organizations that can effectively support that work over time, both culturally and systemically, are almost certain to be healthier and happier places to be a part of. Ultimately, helping to make that happen is our work. As Emma and her colleague Max Baginski said at a talk in Amsterdam back in 1907: “[T]he true function of organization lies in personal development and growth.” Or as my friend and longtime customer Carly Sharp keeps telling me about our work here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), “You don’t just grow businesses. You grow humans!”

How does one help others stay true to who they are? One unexpected possibility is to approach the world as a poet. Last year, I wrote a lot about learning to take a poetic approach to leadership. But in today’s enews, I’m taking that one step farther and applying a poetic approach to the whole of our lives.

In the spirit of seeing life as art, which I wrote about in the pamphlet “The Art of Business,” I’m reminded of what Gustav Landauer said of anarchists: “We are poets.” Like most of the ideas this turn-of-the-20th-century German Jewish pacifist-anarchist brought into the world, I like it. It’s an expansive entrée into figuring out how to lead the lives we want to lead. And into making a difference in the world. Thinking poetically allows us to more effectively bring together the magic and the mundane. As poet Carl Sandburg—who, like Emma Goldman, once spoke from the famous soapbox in Chicago’s Washington Square Park (aka Bughouse Square)—described it, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”

Per Emma Goldman’s encouragement to find meaningful paths to become ourselves—or, as she put it, “an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole”—I’d like to suggest that thinking poetically makes more life paths possible. It encourages us to look in all sorts of remarkable directions. As the Doors’ Jim Morrison once said, “Real poetry opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”

The door that’s been suiting me of late leads me to the somewhat mysterious, historically fascinating, now-Italian town of Trieste. Back in 1911, the Triestino poet Umberto Saba published a manifesto that, even 115 years later, has caught my attention. Saba was born in March of 1883, and he was 28 when the manifesto made its way around Trieste’s literary community. His mother was Jewish, which would later become a far bigger factor in his life than anyone had previously anticipated. Saba was considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century in Italy. His published poems were known for their vulnerability and honesty. In 2009, in a New Republic piece entitled “Life Is a Poem,” poet and essayist Rosanna Warren wrote that Saba was “a poet of mysterious and difficult simplicity. … Like his native city [of Trieste], he is difficult to situate and to define.”

Saba’s 1911 manifesto, “What Remains for Poets to Do,” contained a recommendation that seems straightforward: “[P]ursue what until now has only rarely and partially been accomplished: honest poetry.”

The last two words of Saba’s statement have been on my mind for weeks. When a government regularly makes massively untrue statements, making honest poetry becomes a rather radical act of resistance. As novelist George Orwell warned in his 1949 book, 1984, “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country.”

The idea of writing honest poetry in our lives—literally, metaphorically, or both—may seem easy. A single concept, two simple words, five short syllables. Who wouldn’t want that? But writing—and living—honestly, even under the best of conditions, can be difficult. Doing it under duress, especially in settings where autocratic leaders (in companies, countries, or both) are pressuring us to abandon our values in order to conform to their views, is infinitely harder.

Sometimes people’s lives quickly and clearly coalesce around making honest poetry. From the outside looking in, the shift appears intuitive. These “poets” seem to have little hesitation in doing what their inner voices are calling them to do. Myroslav Marynovych, one of the only living Soviet dissidents left in Ukraine, seems to be one of those people. Marynovych is one of Ukraine’s leading public intellectuals and an educator at Catholic University in Lviv. He’s made a life out of writing very honest poetry, often in the face of great adversity. In fact, the honesty of Marynovych’s lived “poetry” put him in prison. As Marynovych said in a speech at Catholic University last summer, “Just being yourself … that was the main crime at that time.”

Per George Orwell’s warning, this is a truth that everyone living in the autocratic reality that is Russia knows all too well. One does not just share honest poetry in public. As the amazing early-20th-century poet Osip Mandelstam once opined, “Only in Russia poetry is respected—it gets people killed.”

Back in the mid-’60s, Myroslav Marynovych tried to protect himself by telling his friends not to say anything in his presence that might be deemed suspect by Soviet security services. He wanted to be able to state, with honesty and conviction, that he didn’t know. That helped for a bit, but the pressure to conform grew ever stronger. Over time, he explains, the “‘loop’ of lies became unbearable.” The KGB tried to bribe him by offering him a well-paying job and a nice apartment, but he continued to turn them down. In frustration, one of the agents looked at him and said angrily, “Who is not with us is against us.” In response, Marynovych said, “O.K., then I will be against you.” Marynovych paid a steep price for his honest poetry: seven years in extreme-security camps and another five in what Russians refer to as “internal exile.” While in the camps, Marynovych continued to be true to himself, speaking his truth to Soviet power by participating in a wide range of hunger strikes and other resistance actions in support of human rights.

In the forthcoming pamphlet “Why Democracy Matters,” I share how I have been carrying Timothy Snyder’s small book On Tyranny in my shoulder bag pretty much everywhere I go for nearly two years now. Leaving it in there all this time was an early sign that, at some not-quite-conscious level, I knew that things were not going well in our country. That tyranny, aka autocracy, was becoming a real possibility.

Lesson #1 on Snyder’s list of 20 things we can all do to resist tyranny fits well with this discussion. Snyder, who also authored the foreword for Marynovych’s 2021 book The Universe Behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Soviet Dissident, urges us all to do the following when autocrats come to power:

Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

In other words, don’t cave in just because it seems convenient. When our actions are out of alignment with who we are because we’re giving in to pressure to conform, we are indeed obeying in advance.

Of course, saying we should stay true to ourselves is, in my experience, significantly easier to say than it is to do. Thinking about Myroslav Marynovych’s simple and decisive act of courage, and his determination to stay true to himself under enormous pressure to abandon his values, gives me chills. “Just being yourself” in autocratic, abusive, or unfair settings can be a crime in and of itself. This means that staying true to ourselves is an act of active resistance.

The second element of dignity is to be authentic without acting out. And to give other people the encouragement, support, and space to do it, too. As Snyder writes:

The risks that [Marynovych] and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. … In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

It’s this last point that’s on my mind. What it’s like when singing an old folk song or telling someone you love them in the “wrong” language can mean going to prison. I can’t say for sure that I would have the courage that Marynovych did if I found myself in the same circumstances. Many people, I know, do not. The 20th-century psychologist Rollo May seems to agree. He writes about what makes it hard for many of us to write honest poetry of our own:

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

…

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs—not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

This last bit—“persons who have a center of strength within themselves”—seems a positive prerequisite for the creation of honest poetry. Marynovych clearly has this center of strength. I hope I can follow in his courageous footsteps. When I start to feel overwhelmed at work or when thinking about the state of the world, I remind myself that finding and regularly returning to that center of inner strength is the key to almost everything I hope to do.

The idea of writing honest poetry with my life reminded me that the freedom to be true to oneself is more important than ever. It matters to now-well-known public figures like Marynovych. It also matters to young people struggling to grow into themselves (as we all do), people I admire such as Carly Sharp’s amazing 14-year old daughter, Amaya.

To be clear, I know this is a freedom I’ve been fortunate to have in a society dominated by straight white males. I’m aware that I have a better income than most and get to work in a caring, creative workplace I co-lead and have spent 44 years helping to create. I know that the way I experience things is very different from what most other people experience. People of color have been subjected to racist biases, negative beliefs, and an array of legal codes and restrictions that are based on those biases and beliefs. Same for the many people whose sexuality does not conform to the “norm.” Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” written after the killings of Black Americans in that year’s Red Summer, is one poignant and powerful example.

The bottom line? Autocratic settings make it very risky to live in ways that feel true to oneself, at least outwardly. Staying rooted in values and vision, in making our own honest poetry a practical reality, becomes a radical act of resistance.

The same challenge can come up in companies as well. People tell me all the time that they can’t even come close to being themselves at work. Keeping quiet, pretending, and posing become the norm. A Zingerman’s alum who recently moved to Minneapolis to take a position in finance in a large company shared a story about this last week. In the days following Alex Pretti’s killing, demonstrators were filling the streets en masse. Meanwhile, in this person’s office, “No one shares even a single thought. It’s like little-to-nothing is going on outside.”

This thinking about the courage and clarity to be oneself also reminds me why, as a University of Michigan student so many years ago, I immersed myself in studying anarchism. One of the main things that convinced me to do this—and still calls me to do it today—is anarchism’s focus on encouraging people to be themselves. As Emma Goldman writes in her 1934 autobiography Living My Life:

Anarchism insists that the center of gravity in society is the individual—that he must think for himself, act freely, and live fully. … If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others.

Speaking of anarchism, Nestor Makhno was one of Marynovych’s spiritually aligned Ukrainian ancestors. Makhno led an anarchist resistance army in Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, effectively fighting off the Bolshevik regime in Moscow for longer than any other resistance. In his 1920s essay “The Anarchist Revolution,” he noted that “the idea of anarchism, the teaching of a renewed life for man as an individual and as a social being, is therefore bound up with man’s self-awareness and his awareness of … injustice in modern society.”

Makhno also understood one of the things that I hope to convey in “Why Democracy Matters.” The work we do to make democracy a reality in the workplace is a prerequisite for making democratic constructs possible on a much larger scale. The more we’re true to ourselves, the more centered, grounded, inclusive, and effective our society is likely to be. It’s true in the workplace, and it’s true in the world around us. As Makhno writes, “The freedom of any individual carries within it the seed of a free and complete community.” From free-thinking, self-actualized staff members we make great organizations. The inverse is also true: Great organizations encourage the development of self-actualized, free-thinking individuals!

The 10th of Timothy Snyder’s lessons in On Tyranny is to embrace the truth. As he writes:

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

If we aren’t living in ways that are true to ourselves, we are starting, even unwittingly, from a place of untruth. I’ve done it. There is so much pressure not to do what Myroslav Marynovych did. The untruths can start in small ways. Over time they add up to big problems. In the Substack newsletter he published last Sunday, Snyder wrote that, “One answer to a big lie, to a Nazi alternative reality, are the small truths.”

During World War II, when the Nazis came to Italy in 1943, Umberto Saba found himself in an especially tough position. As a Jew, he was in great danger, but he refused to leave the Italy he loved or do a fake conversion to Christianity. He practiced what he preached. He went into hiding in Tuscany and continued to write throughout. After the war, Saba returned to Trieste, where he continued to write until his death in the summer of 1957.

Over time, the great poet of Trieste continued to work at being true to himself. In the context of all of what I’ve written here, these lines from Saba’s 1929 poem bring my main point alive:

The separate threads of life my parents gave me
I twisted in a single thread, in peace.

Part of what we’re able to accomplish in our lives, of course, depends on where we’re doing it. To a great extent, I am who I am because of the contributions of the ZCoB. Looking at Umberto Saba’s great work, I’m reminded that Trieste has always seemed like a magical town to me. Truth is, I’ve been fascinated with Trieste ever since I was a kid. I had its stamps in my collection! And I’m still drawn to it now.

In part, I was taken by Trieste because the city, like me, didn’t seem to fit in. It was moved from one country to another over the years, ruled at various points by Austria, Yugoslavia, and Italy. Between 1947 and 1954, it was a free city, the 20th-century equivalent of medieval city-states. Somewhere I still have a binder that includes postage stamps from that era.

Jan Morris, who wrote one of the best-known books about the city, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, described it as a place that existed “in the fold of the map”, a city that seems to those who don’t know it to be insignificant, and yet, has a special essence: Trieste’s energy, its authenticity, its honesty, enchants those who take time to know it. Morris described it as an “existentialist sort of place, and its purpose is to be itself.” Sure enough, over the centuries Trieste has somehow stayed true to itself, an imperfect but intriguing town that’s unlike any other, a city that exemplifies the idea of writing honest poetry, something that one of its own, Umberto Saba, challenged all of us to do.

Trieste, Morris writes, has a hard-to-place sort of magic: “Visitors tend to leave it puzzled, and when they get home remember it with a vague sense of mystery, something they can’t put a finger on.” That magical, or maybe mysterious, feeling is what Morris came to call “the Trieste Effect,” or “Triesticity.” As she explains:

When a suggestion of Trieste is summoned so exactly into my consciousness that wherever I am, I feel myself transported there… It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere … a sweet melancholy [that] illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations, too.

Jan Morris, it turns out, was someone who, for most of her life, didn’t fit. Born James Morris in Wales in the fall of 1926, Morris married, had children, and built an exceptionally successful career in journalism. She climbed Mount Everest as a reporter, published nearly 20 well-received books, and came to be called “The Correspondent to Everywhere.” In 1972, at the age of 46, Morris had gender-reassignment surgery in Morocco. Then, living true to herself, she continued to write and work for another 20 years. Morris published Trieste in 2001. In it, she describes herself as a “lifelong aspirant anarchist.” Jan Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94. Two years later, the Times Literary Supplement published a piece about her entitled “Capturing a life less ordinary … a writer who crossed every frontier, geographical and personal.”

So, how do we stay true to who we are? I have no easy answer to offer. I have written a lot about it in Managing Ourselves, in particular in Secret #31. Staying true to ourselves is also about honoring our essence. It’s about clarity around ethics and values. In particular, getting clear on your philosophy provides a good frame for figuring out your ethics, values, essence, and more. Spending time in self-reflection and solitude helps a lot. In the pamphlet “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” I arrived at the belief that “philosophy = values + mission + beliefs.” The clearer we get on all that, the quicker and more honest the “poetry” is, the better we feel, and the healthier the ecosystem we belong to becomes.

As I wrote in “The Art of Business,” every choice we make, every sentence we speak, every time we roll our eyes, and every word we write is, in essence, akin to another brush stroke on the painting of our lives. As business and leadership thinker Carol Sanford, another person who persisted in being true to herself with creativity and determination, suggested we can do this work best and in a regenerative way when we “reconcile toward elegance.”

That elegance is generally not well received by powerful authoritarian leaders. Writers of honest poetry like Marynovych, Snyder, Saba, and Morris really seem to piss off autocratic rulers. Then there’s Mohamed Tadjadit, a young Algerian fruit seller who started writing poetry in his spare time at his market stall. In 2019, he went to protests and began to read his poetry aloud, an act of bravery. One piece included this pointed comment on the authoritarian rulers of his country:

The ignorant took power.
They placed justice under money’s weight
And made freedom forbidden.

In a late-November Observer article about Algeria, Steve Bloomfield explained that Tadjadit faced life in prison or even the death penalty for the honesty of his poetry. Being true to himself had put him in the autocratic government’s crosshairs. He is not alone. Whether it’s in companies or countries, people who write honest poetry appear to provoke people who have too much power. As Bloomfield writes:

Poets don’t threaten democrats … but dictators feel differently. Over the past few years, poets in Eritrea and Iran, Russia and Egypt, China and Myanmar have been locked up because their words were deemed too dangerous. It is the paradox of dictatorships that they are enormously powerful and yet fear they can be undone by verse.

To me, all of this means that the current situation in our country calls on any of us who are willing to continue to make our poetry and our lives as honest—and hence as powerful—as possible. When we do, business will be better, communities kinder and more collaborative, countries more caring.

In a sense, Trieste could be a poetic image, a way to symbolize the calling we have in our hearts to be true to ourselves. In the current, stressed-out state of the world, Trieste is a place I want to imagine and internalize. A place where, instead of pushing people out, everyone is welcomed in. As Morris writes in Trieste, “Honesty is still the norm here, manners are generally courteous, bigotries are usually held in check, people are generally good to each other.”

Tying all this together, Morris describes what is possible in a wonderful way:

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

At the end of Trieste, Jan Morris issues a call to action, calling in all of us outliers, people who push themselves to keep writing honest poetry, even under duress, to come together to create something peaceful, something special, someplace positive, a place where aspiring autocrats have no following and where every person present is supported and encouraged to stay true to themselves:

Citizens of nowhere, unite! Join me in Trieste, your capital.

Honest poetry for the ages. I hope to see you there!

Find your truth and live it

P.S. On March 25 and 26, I will be co-teaching with my good friend Gareth Higgins! Gareth is an Irish author whose life is inspiringly honest poetry. He authored the amazing How Not to Be Afraid and also co-wrote The Seventh Story with Brian McLaren. This will be the third straight year we’re doing this special two-day ZingTrain seminar, “Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs.” It is an uncommon opportunity to learn from Gareth’s great work on the power of storytelling in our lives and blend it with deep work on beliefs, the kind I detailed extensively in The Power of Beliefs in Business. Both Gareth and I speak and teach regularly around the world, but this is the only time we do it together. Telling better stories is a powerful way to support the start of what you want to make in your organization.

P.P.S. In the context of what I wrote above, consider coming to ZingTrain’s two-day Managing Ourselves seminar! The next one is April 27 and 28. It’s guaranteed to leave you closer to living your own life!

Jelly Bean was an amazing tri-colored Corgi who I had the honor of spending 17 great years with. She brought me so much joy, caring companionship, and comfort over the years. Jelly Bean helped me through any number of hard times and she showed me what resilience could be like as she worked through her own medical challenges over the years. Over the years she taught me about unconditional love and how to live life happily and fully every day. For most of her life, Jelly Bean ran with me each afternoon. Even now, many years later, I can’t help but smile as I think about her positive, generous-of-spirit presence.

The grief that followed Jelly Bean’s death on May 27, 2015, was very difficult for me to deal with. Anyone who has lost a dog they loved like that will likely know the feeling. In an effort to make something positive out of the pain of her passing, we decided to start a fundraiser in her memory. At the suggestion of Marsha Ricevuto, who helped care for Jelly Bean over the years, we named it “The Jelly Bean Jump Up.” We decided that we would use the Jump Up to raise money for SafeHouse Center, the local shelter for victims of domestic abuse here in Washtenaw County, for a few reasons. Providing safe spaces for victims of domestic abuse is so critical in modern society, Tammie and I live very close to SafeHouse, and many members of the SafeHouse staff would see me and Jelly Bean out and about each afternoon as left for, or returned from, our run.

For many people trapped in violent home situations with no place to go, SafeHouse offers exactly what its name implies: a safe shelter that takes in those in need. With the current state of the country, with so much funding being cut from not-for-profit organizations that help those in need, and with tensions up nationwide in what writer Elif Shafak calls the “Age of Anxiety,” victims of domestic abuse are even more at risk than usual. Which means that supporting SafeHouse Center and other comparable causes has become even more important than ever.

Jelly Bean Jump Up 2026 Calendar 

This calendar features photos of a dozen or so local dogs and cats, including a few of Ari’s! Dollar Bill Printing generously donates the printing work, so the entire $20 purchase price of each calendar goes directly to SafeHouse. 

The Jelly Bean Jump Up calendars are available for sale at the Coffee Company, Deli, and Roadhouse. If you live out of town and want to buy some calendars to be shipped, email Melaina Bukowski, coordinator of our community giving program, at [email protected].

Special Event: 11th Annual Jelly Bean Jump Up Dinner 

We officially wrap up our annual fundraiser in support of SafeHouse Center with a special dinner at Zingerman’s Roadhouse and an online silent auction. 

This year’s event is focused on an ingredient beloved by humans and pups alike—BACON!

We’ve had the great pleasure of cooking, serving, and eating Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon every day at Zingerman’s for over 40 years. So we’re understandably thrilled to welcome our friends from Nueske’s for a very special evening featuring what we think is the best bacon you’ll ever eat. Chef Bob has created an incredible multi-course dinner showcasing just how good Nueske’s smoked bacon is in a variety of ways. Join us to hear stories about what the Nueske’s family does best—bacon.

Tuesday, March 31 at 7:00 pm

Zingerman’s Roadhouse
2501 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, MI 

Reserve your seats

Why the power of making tops the power of taking

I would prefer to dwell in denial. It certainly seems easier, in a sense, to pretend that none of us has seen the news out of Minneapolis over the last few weeks. That, though, does not seem like a sound idea. Whether we like it or not, reality remains what it is. For insight on how to handle the situation, I go back to Brenda Ueland—the freethinking writer who lived and worked in Minneapolis most of her long life—for guidance. Ueland is, after all, a prominent voice in the huddle in my head. What she said in her 1937 book, If You Want to Write, seems a good reminder about why writing from the heart right now is the soundest way to approach the situation. As Ueland put it nearly 90 years ago:

You have talent, are original, and have something important to say. … It is a privilege to get to do this. Your motto: Be Bold, be Free, be Truthful.

This past Monday morning, journalist Jonathan V. Last (or JVL, as he is widely known) honored Ueland’s words as he addressed the state of the world in a Bulwark column entitled “Our Gettysburg Moment.” To say the least, Last got me thinking.

As someone who majored in Russian history, not American history, drawing a parallel to Gettysburg was definitely not my first impulse, but it is a powerful way to frame what’s happening in the greater ecosystem in which all of our organizations currently operate. As Last explains it, “The people in the battle could not understand its significance. It would take time for everyone to grasp exactly what the events of Gettysburg meant.” He is drawing the same conclusion about what’s been taking place in the Twin Cities. His column’s subtitle says a lot: “The stakes in Minneapolis are higher than even the participants may realize.”

While we consider the weight of what Gettysburg might mean in our current context, we all also need to get back to work. Our customers and coworkers are counting on us.

How we handle those two in tandem—the momentousness of a modern-day Gettysburg and the mundanity of starting work tomorrow morning—is what’s on my mind this week. We can, I believe, make a difference in both of these situations. In fact, the same efforts might be equally effective in each of these seemingly disparate settings.

Twenty-six years ago, back in 2020, Wendell Berry released his 20th book, which he lovingly entitled Life Is a Miracle. In it, Berry, who would later teach me and others that “the leaders will need to be led,” wrote:

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well, or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make.

To my imperfect eye, Wendell Berry’s entire paragraph is an inspiring framing for what we at Zingerman’s, and so many of you as well, are trying to do. My emphasis in this essay is on his last sentence, the part that starts with “We can make them.” It is another way to work with Jonathan V. Last’s idea that we are in a Gettysburg moment. We can make what we make—our lives, our organizations, our communities, our country—well or poorly. Berry reminds us that the choice is ours.

The folks at Project Threadways, including founder and longtime friend Natalie Chanin and outstanding associate director Olivia Terenzio, are just the sort of artists that Wendell Berry is writing about. They are all about making. The only qualifier I want to add is that the people at Project Threadways don’t really stick things together; they sew them.

The point, of course, is still the same. What they make confers health on the people that gather around them in their small, wonderful, and wonderfully out-of-the-way hometown of Florence, Alabama. This past weekend, Project Threadways kicked off its weekly enews with this line:

We believe in the power of making.

Succinct and, without question, well said. As it has many times in the past, Project Threadways’ insight inspires me.

Here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), we can say much the same about why making matters so much. We have been, from Day One, committed to craft, artisan production, and the belief that skilled makers produce some of the most amazing flavors out there. And also that skilled coworkers can come together to collaboratively craft creative, caring, dignity-centered organizations. Our work was never to just show up, see how things go, make as much money as we could, and then, as the late and much-loved musician Vic Chesnutt used to sing, “Get the fuck out of Dodge.” Rather, it’s to shape, to create, and to craft an organization that makes a positive difference, an organization that appeals to the authenticity of each individual and encourages them to be themselves in wonderful ways. We want to make things that are, as Wendell Berry writes, “intelligible, memorable, and lasting.”

The opposite of the power of making, I would suggest, is the power of taking. Generally, per the Zingerman’s Statement of Beliefs, I’m a big believer in an abundance mentality, the spirit of generosity applied in mutually aiding action. There are, though, a few exceptions. The relationship between making (as in making magic) and taking (as in taking others down) is one of them. Making and taking are not compatible. The more making, the less taking. The more people are taking to benefit themselves, the less making there’s likely to be. And taking is in the news right now far more than I would want it to be.

Making, by contrast, is what Project Threadways and everyone in the ZCoB have long been committed to. Maybe you have been comparably committed to it, too. The more we make, the more we spread magic. Or, as my friends at Indigenous Resistance in Uganda shared with me recently, making helps us all to “Multiply the dub.”

I have come to see, during the writing of the forthcoming “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet, that democracy is also something we make. Democratic constructs, in companies or countries, cannot be bought and sold any more than love or dignity or hope or humility. We have to make them. Democracy, when it comes down to it, is much the same. It doesn’t just happen by accident. It is always about active, engaged, caring, generous, dignity-centered making.

In that sense, making democracy, in either a company or a country, is not all that different from the way that Alabama Chanin makes a dress. Start with a commitment to dignity in every direction (staff, suppliers, the products those same suppliers make, the people who buy those products, the planet, and the community). Make a dignity-aligned plan to make it—democracy or a dress—with the material we have on hand. Then get down to it and make it come alive. It’s not particularly glamorous during the making, but when it all comes together well, the results can be wondrous.

Alabama Chanin’s clothing is made one stitch at a time. Democracy is made in a similar way. There’s no such thing as a “ready-to-wear” democratic construct. You can’t just order one online in advance of opening your business. If democracy, at work or in the broader world, is what we want to create, we can’t spend our time waiting for others to get their act together. We need to make it.

Autocracy, in companies or countries, is essentially the opposite. It’s not about making. It’s all about taking. Taking charge. Taking over. Taking advantage. Taking away rights and freedoms. Taking more for the people who are part of the in-group, leaving less and less for those who are left out. Taking, over time, makes trauma.

Right now, it is not obvious on a national level whether making or taking will take precedence. I am determined to keep working hard to help making come out ahead.

Difficult as these days are, I am neither down nor depressed. Only determined to do better. As YouTube newsperson Keith Edwards said when reporting on the tragic killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis:

I am going to remain strong and unafraid, and I’m going to continue to fight.

My lone alteration to Edwards’ exclamation is that, as I’ve written here many times in the past, I’ve always lived with fear. I am, in fact, almost always afraid, so now isn’t all that different. Over the years, I’ve just taught myself to go forward anyway when I believe what needs to be done is the right thing to do.

I know I’m not alone in this sort of emotional struggle. Project Threadways’ Natalie Chanin has often shared her version of the same struggle. In her beautiful book, Embroidery: Threads and Stories, she writes:

Creating can be painful and vulnerable, or at least slow, which explains the constant search for “inspiration” or “secret sauce” or perfect setting—anything at all that will simplify and expedite the process. But in my experience, there is no shortcut; however, if I keep showing up, day after day, the work and inspiration arrives. I make a rule with myself that I will show up in fear; I show up in love, and when it rains, and when the sun shines, and when I’d rather be a thousand other places but here. I show up in doubt, and grief, and joy. I show up to do the work—even if the work is one sentence or a single board or a stitch. Showing up is a commitment to something greater than ourselves; showing up is the commitment to ourselves. As Rollo May puts it in The Courage to Create, “Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” Doubt doesn’t go away with time, but it does go away some days. Either way, we still show up.

Making democratic constructs is challenging in the best of times. Making anything of exceptional quality in collaborative and caring ways becomes significantly more difficult in an autocratic setting. Which is, in part, what has helped me see that what happens on a national level is a whole lot closer to our organizational home in Ann Arbor than I would ever have understood 10 or 12 years ago. It is nearly impossible, I now understand, to make a dignity-centered, democratically run organization in a country that is ruled by a brutal, arbitrary autocracy.

In his most recent book, On Freedom, Timothy Snyder argues that “to resist big lies, society requires institutions that produce ‘millions of little truths.’” It’s my hope that we in the ZCoB will be one of these institutions. Loads of little truths, piled high on really tasty, traditionally made, metaphorical loaves of Jewish rye bread. Truth in advertising, truth in artisan making, truth in anarchism, truth in full-flavored food and drink, truth in deliciousness, truth in trying our best to make democratic constructs come alive in our everyday lives.

In situations in which small actions often feel superfluous, irrelevant, or even pointless, I take the opposite tack: The little things can make an enormous difference. That’s much the same point that Timothy Snyder makes. Last Sunday, he released an essay about the situation unfolding nationally and, more specifically, the horror of what’s playing out in Minneapolis. Putting our current national situation into the appropriate historical contexts, Snyder notes:

Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize—or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.

Minneapolis is, of course, only the latest and perhaps most painful piece of the national situation. Most everyone I know is struggling with how to wrap their minds around what we’re seeing and experiencing in our greater ecosystem. Much of the horror of what we’ve witnessed in the news this week is, I believe, about taking. Taking away people’s sense of safety and security, then replacing it with arbitrary exercises of power and authority that are mostly about proving that the people in charge can do it. To be clear, this is also a style that small companies burdened with autocratic bosses often use. It is never, in my experience, a good thing. When taking takes over as the organizing philosophy of anything we’re a part of, trouble lies ahead.

The contrast between taking and making is playing out in the tragic taking of lives in Minneapolis. What we make of it remains our choice. As author Rebecca Solnit wrote in LitHub a year ago last fall, “We’re here to make history.”

I’ve been speaking a lot of late, both by text and by phone, to a friend in the Twin Cities. She is, like most everyone there that I know, struggling to stay centered. All the while, she’s attempting to keep her business viable and work under a sort of duress, stress, and uncertainty that reminds me of what it was like when Covid came into our lives back in March of 2020. No one I knew was sure what to do then, and they don’t know what to do now, either. In truth, I don’t think any of us could have been prepared for what’s happened in the U.S. over the course of the last year, unless we’ve lived in another country, a place that was governed by a harshly autocratic regime. I mean, no business school I know of offers a class called “Leading Progressively When Autocracy Is on the Rise.” Not yet, anyhow. Which means we are all working in wholly uncharted organizational territory, leading while feeling more than a bit lost, trying our best to figure out the best way forward.

As she has been for many years now, my friend is trying to run her business, be a good person and a good leader, and do the right thing for her staff, for the community, and for the country. As she said later that same morning in our text exchange, “I’ve long avoided the dystopian genre of film and literature. Now we’re living it.”

I checked back in on my friend Friday morning, the day of the general strike, to see how she was doing. Her business, like thousands of others, was closed. It was seemingly a “normal” day for her, as normal as it can be living in what is increasingly akin to a war zone. “So far so good. I had a good cry this morning—surprisingly, the first time since this all started. Then I led a very grounding yoga session. And I gave a ride into work to one of our dishwashers,” she told me. As is true of watching the pain and struggle of people in any war zone, being empathic, actively supportive, and really, really far away is a frustrating combination. To show a little support, I told her Zingerman’s was going to send some rugelach—apricot, of course, since it’s the symbol of dignity and democracy—to her team next week to let them know that they’re not alone and that someone somewhere else is thinking of them.

I decided to check in on her once again the following day. I was thinking, optimistically, that things might be a bit more stable. I was totally wrong. In truth, it turned out, they were way worse. “How’s the morning?” I asked. “Not good,” she answered almost immediately, adding, “I just learned that a man was wrestled to the ground by five agents, kicked in the head, and shot and killed by agents. It’s one block from my business partner’s house. She’s out there now getting tear gassed.”

My friend is, of course, a really fine person and a longtime independent business owner who works long hours and whose business employs hundreds of people. She loves to learn, has been to ZingTrain a couple dozen times, and cares deeply about the world. When I read her note on Friday morning about crying, doing yoga, and picking up the dishwasher, I smiled at her resilience and her self-management skills. A certain sense of self-awareness lets a leader do yoga before taking the risk of driving a long way to pick up a dishwasher who’s afraid to come to work on public transport. It’s inspiring.

When I read her note on Saturday, I cried. I did not do yoga. Nor did I think about Gettysburg. Instead, I went to work. After getting myself recentered, I sat down to do what I so often do when I’m at an emotional and intellectual loss. I started writing, working hard, fingers moving fast and mental wheels turning almost as quickly, to figure out what the heck we can all do when this is the state of the country in which we are all caringly but confusedly living. What she was describing is the horrible, arbitrary sort of taking that I studied when I was in school. I’ve been reading about Russian history regularly since I was something like 17 years old. The autocratic story there has stayed very much the same over many centuries: Police pummeling protestors, authorities arresting people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, increasingly extreme violence committed against innocent individuals. It has happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg tens of thousands of times in the course of many centuries of autocratic rule. Now it’s happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In Bread of Angels, poet, performance artist, author, and punk rock pioneer Patti Smith writes, “At times I mourn the worlds I knew.” Exactly halfway into the book, she adds, “Eventually we must act.” Her words resonate. Gettysburg moments in Minneapolis. Bread of Angels. Apricot Rugelach. Writing. Trying hard to figure out the right thing to do in very difficult times. Wendell Berry wrote that “Farms, families and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings and symphonies.” So, too, are businesses and, I now see, democracies. Imperfect forms of organizational art.

The kind of “acting” Patti Smith is talking about is really about making. Making music, making love, making poetry, making records. It’s about making paintings, making organizations, and making democracies. Maybe she’s right, and it’s time for me, and for you, to mourn the world we once knew and then to get down to work making what we want in its place. I love Vic Chesnutt’s song, but Dodge is where we live. “Getting the fuck out” may sound fine, but me, I’m not going anywhere. Rather than departing, it’s time to double down on democracy. At our organizations, we may need to start small and in the metaphorical cellar. We can begin, in our everyday interactions, to make democracy the way Project Threadways teaches people to make a dress. One small stitch at a time, one small action at a time.

This past Thursday, the amazing Minneapolis artist Ifrah Mansour published a great essay in Hyperallergic entitled “On Being a Somali Artist in Minnesota.” I love Mansour’s artwork. And I’m fully aligned with what she wrote:

Violence has a way of turning familiar places into guarded ground. And yet, I ask not what has been taken, but what we will continue to build from what remains. … My work draws on the tools of the past to heal the present and to design the future. It is rooted in radical imagination; in abundance, in kindness, and in collective care.

What Ifrah Mansour is making clear is the positive power of making. I’m with her. More making, less taking. More radically cool imagination, more abundance, more kindness, more collective care. More work that helps create democratic constructs. In her Instagram post about the article, Mansour said something I also believe to be true about the magic of the moment and the positive future I choose to believe in and work for every day:

When tomorrow comes, kindness will too.

Having spent most of my adult life studying autocracy and advocating its more democratic and anarchistic opposites, it is clear to me what is happening. It’s not good, I am all too aware. The more that autocratic actions appear in the headlines, the higher my anxiety goes. Others this weekend affirmed my anxious assessment. The writer M. Gessen, who was raised in Russia, said it’s time to call it what it is: “There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.” Conservative attorney George Conway said it’s “about destroying any sense of that safety.” Jonathan Rauch, longtime writer for the Atlantic and senior fellow for governance at the Brookings Institution, said this last Sunday: “Yes, it’s Fascism. Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.”

All of that authoritarian activity is, at its core, about taking.

Here in the ZCoB, by contrast, we want to be making. We can, though, stop for a few seconds to take stock. For me, our national situation stopped being about politics a while ago. As I write in the “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet, democracy is about people, it’s about dignity, it’s about positive beliefs. It’s about kindness, collaboration, and creativity. If fascism is what we’re dealing with, then, to Timothy Snyder’s point, it’s better to own the reality and do what we can. Denial won’t be any more helpful than pretending that the giant storm that blew through Ann Arbor (and a bunch of other communities) this past weekend didn’t happen.

Nobody I know welcomes storms, but we do know how to deal with them. Unlike winter snowstorms, which nearly everyone in our part of the world has worked through many times, this is a first encounter with fascism for many of us. For most people in the U.S., it’s wholly unfamiliar. And yet, here we are. When we go to work next Monday morning, fascism will still pretty surely be the word of the day out of Washington. Which means that you and I, if we choose, can build democracy back better in the basement or maybe the back room. Not next fall, not in four years. I’m talking about today, tomorrow, and the next day. No need to wait for big names or big plans. As Augustus Pablo, the revolutionary Jamaican reggae artist, said in an interview with Ian McCann in the January 1988 issue of Echoes, “We do it a small way first and try it out. That’s the way I want to go still, go a small way and then come big, that’s the way we a fe do it.”

What’s a good way to get going in an organization? Start doing Appreciations. Open your meetings to more people. Change to Open Book Management. Come together to think through your organizational governance. Consider more inclusive methods of decision-making. Teach the six elements of dignity to everyone in your organization. Better still, make them a job expectation. There are dozens of other down-to-earth ways to start doing this work. None are perfect, but all make a difference. I’m happy to make time to trade thoughts—drop me an email any time. We can work together to make the most of a very difficult time.

In the postscript of the new “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet, I shared my belated glimpse of the obvious, the realization that the commitment to making that Project Threadways states so passionately in its recent Manifesto is completely akin to what it would mean for each of us to make democracy. What it means to believe in the power of making, not just with cloth but with companies and countries. As you’ll see in the pamphlet, every belief that’s stated with such beauty and passion in their document can easily be adapted to the making of democracy. Which is why I wanted to add it to the pamphlet—to show that the same craft, care, and diligence it takes to handsew a beautiful garment is the same craft, care, and diligence it takes to make democracy.

It’s hard to say how I might have responded to something like our current national situation many years ago. The notion that autocracy could be a real life possibility in the U.S. seemed like the sort of science fiction my friend in Minneapolis is not inclined to read. The studying, reflection, and writing that I’ve been doing on democracy over the last few years has shifted my frame. It’s a shift from the feeling of “Man, we got sold a lemon by that guy we bought this from. It totally sucks, and someone needs to fix it for me” to the feeling that I have here in the ZCoB when we fall short. First, I get down about it. I feel terrible. Sometimes I’m frustrated that it went the way it went. Then, fairly quickly, I take a deep breath and get to work on fixing whatever we messed up. I acknowledge the error. Apologize. And start working, to the best of my imperfect ability, to make things right.

Journalist Jackie Hernandez nicely summed up this difference between buying a readymade product and instead making one’s own in a Remodelaholic article entitled “What to Do When You Make Something and Don’t Like It”:

When you buy decor and don’t like it when you get it home, you always have the option to return it. … With do-it-yourself projects, it doesn’t work that way.

…

DIY projects are usually more involved than we think they will be. If you enjoy problem-solving, creative-thinking, don’t mind doing some re-work, and can handle occasional project failures, then DIY projects are a good fit for you.

…

Through a failure you’ll probably come up with a whole list of ways you could make the project or end result better. Even if you never want to do this particular type of project again, this is still a good question to answer.

I actually do want to do this particular type of democratic project again, which means that it’s time to get down to it. Someone needs to. No blaming, no finger-pointing, no “I was off that day” or “I told them to be careful, but they weren’t.” It’s more like, “Damn, I’m sorry. Let’s make this all right.” We have work to do. As Augustus Pablo once said, “You have to have someone holding the vibes.”

Anyone in business, whether it’s my friend in Minneapolis or your mother in Phoenix, will almost certainly have experienced failure a few times, or possibly a few thousand. We’ve been failing with great frequency here since we opened the Deli’s doors for the first time on March 15, 1982. Most of us know all too well how to get up, dust off our metaphorical behinds, and get right back at it. You start working harder to make it better. You don’t blame. You take a deep breath, get grounded, and get down to business. Every small act of dignity and democratically inclined improvement we make in our workplaces will make a difference. A thousand small truths accumulate one tiny truth at a time.

Which is how I feel right now about the current state of the country. It is not going the way I would have suggested had anyone sat me down to ask. But, like it or not, someone has to get going. Like Augustus Pablo said about the music of Jamaica almost 40 years ago:

There’s been a lot of breakdown in the music over the past few years, the music has been broken down a lot because you don’t have no-one guiding no-one, it’s just like left alone and dismantled. Someone [has] to bring it back, someone has to try. Everybody waiting on the next man to make his move, and nobody’s making any move.

We can begin the work. As Augustus Pablo posited, “We have to set a foundation first, if we don’t set a foundation … how can we help anyone?”

A little over a year ago, on November 9, 2024, Timothy Snyder wrote this about the end of the separation that the Berlin Wall symbolized:

Thirty-five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall.

Thirty-five years ago today, some people made history, amidst other people making history, thanks to some prior cooperation, and some good thinking about what freedom means.

We cannot change the world all at once. But we can change the way we think. We can clear away the clichés and make ourselves more lively. We can work together and then, when other things are in motion, be ready to turn the change in the right direction.

Tomorrow morning, autocracy or not, we all need to get up, Gettysburg in the back of our minds, and get to work. What we decide to make of the situation at hand, as Wendell Berry writes, is up to us. I’m with Natalie Chanin, who says:

I’ve come to believe that craft, making, and creative endeavors toward producing sustainable products will create an enduring future for our community.

Here in the ZCoB, we remind each other—good days, bad days, days filled with winter storms or wonderfully sunny summer Sundays—“You really can make a difference!” We have always put the emphasis on “can.” We have more influence to make an impact than most of us have historically been led to imagine. You really can make a difference. I, too, believe in the power of making. Let’s get to work.

Create hope during hard times

P.S. Two months from now, on March 25 and 26, I will be co-teaching with my good friend Gareth Higgins! Gareth is an Irish author who wrote the amazing How Not to Be Afraid and co-wrote The Seventh Story with Brian McLaren. This will be the third straight year we’re doing this special two-day ZingTrain seminar, “Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs.” It is an uncommon opportunity to learn from Gareth’s great work on the power of storytelling in our lives and blend it with deep work on beliefs, the kind I detailed extensively in The Power of Beliefs in Business. Both Gareth and I speak and teach regularly around the world, but this is the only time we do it together. Telling better stories is a powerful way to support the start of what you want to make in your organization.

A new pamphlet, the impact of inches, and more

In Steven Spielberg’s now-famous 1999 film Any Given Sunday, the coach, played by Al Pacino, gives an inspirational pre-game speech. The players have been struggling, and he knows that they need to get their act together to get out of the hole they have dug for themselves. There’s no quick fix, but, he assures them, it can be done:

We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And, we can stay here … or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell one inch at a time.

Thirty years earlier, on New Year’s Day 1970, Wendell Berry published a piece in Orion that strikes me as similar to Pacino’s pep talk: State the difficult reality, offer the positive path forward, which, though it’s hard to make happen, is nevertheless still possible. The Orion essay opens with five words in all caps, in which Berry states, bluntly and boldly: “WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY.” He emphasizes that, as grim as things are getting, we retain the power to change course. The decision, like the one Pacino frames for his football team, Berry says clearly, is ours to make:

If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

Whether you’re inspired by a fictional football coach, one of the most amazing American thinkers of the modern era, or both, the message is pretty much the same. Things around us may look grim on any given day, but we always have the freedom and power to choose what we’re going to do about the situation going forward.

The following year, Wendell Berry released his third book, The Unforeseen Wilderness. (He’s gone on to publish nearly 50 more!) The second chapter is entitled “The One-Inch Journey.” In it, Berry suggests that one way to stop the destruction he’s warning us about is to engage anew with “lessons in what to look for and how to see,” lessons that help us regain “access of delight, vision, beauty, joy that entice us to keep alive and reward us for living.” All of which, I’m reminded here, are regular subjects for anyone who becomes accustomed to what we’ve long called Appreciations here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). We’ve been using Appreciations as an end-of-meeting ritual for over 30 years now. The more consistently we do Appreciations, the more delight, vision, beauty, and joy we experience.

The remarkable writer, friend, and all-around wise human being Peter Block reminds me regularly that despite our best efforts to the contrary, “Cooperation never makes the news.” It does, though, make this enews all the time. This week will add one more positive piece of cooperative newscraft to my very long list. Regardless of what may be going on in the world around us, here in the ZCoB, our situation feels far more positive than the ones Al Pacino and Wendell Berry were framing. We may want to improve in many areas of our work, but we are definitely not “in hell,” nor are we “destroying” our companies. As I wrote last week, we’re mostly just working hard to make more magic happen.

Josef Albers, the artist who led Black Mountain College from 1933 (less than a year before Wendell Berry was born) until 1949, made so much magic through painting, writing, and teaching. He once penned a poem entitled “More or Less.” In it is this lovely set of lines:

To distribute material possessions
is to divide them

to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them

I’ll leave the work of division to those who are currently leading the country and focus instead on what seems much more meaningful to me: multiplying our spiritual possessions. In this case, that multiplication is made to happen without drama or difficulty or really any cost, through the practical practice of ending ZCoB meetings with a few minutes of Appreciations.

What follows is, in a sense, the sort of writing and reflection that Manchán Magan, of whom I wrote so much last week in my essay on magic and loss, had mastered so thoroughly. Manchán’s Deep Understanding came out of his extensive studies of the Irish language; mine right now is emerging from studying what it means to make democratic practices part of our daily lives within our organizations. An example of Regenerative Study, that work has me paying attention anew, excited about the future, and taking notice now of things that would otherwise have gone past unremarked upon. In this case, how a seemingly small, easily missed, and almost irrelevant-seeming (to the unknowing) organizational practice can change a company, a community, and maybe even a country. If I were to write a headline about cooperation here, it would be something like “Doing Appreciations Regularly is Even More Important Than I’d Ever Imagined!”

To be clear, I’ve long known—and written about—how great the practice of Appreciations is. They are certainly not new news to anyone who’s been around the ZCoB. That said, I had two eye-openingly positive insights about Appreciations, both within a period of two days last week, that struck me as newsworthy. I want to start a new statement for Peter Block to share: “Cooperation regularly makes for good news.” Here are those insights:

1. Appreciations are an awesome, down-to-earth, easy-to-implement democratic practice. That’s right: This simple end-of-the-meeting ritual every ZCoBber knows so well is a great way to make democracy come alive! Our practice of Appreciations is many decades old, but the understanding of it as an implicitly effective democratic practice has been with me for only the last couple days. I’m still sort of in shock about it, but in the best and most inspiring of ways!
2. Appreciations are one of the most effective ways to spread dignity and democracy through communities. Peter Block is probably right that cooperation may not make the news very often, but it does, most definitely, make for healthier organizational cultures! When we do Appreciations for five minutes at the end of a meeting, we multiply spiritual possessions. The appreciated, the appreciator, their colleagues, the organization, and the community at large all come out ahead.

What are Appreciations? I learned about them oh so long ago—back in the early 1990s—from my good friend Lex Alexander. He’s the one who taught me to call them Appreciations, and we still use that name all these years later. Doing them couldn’t be much simpler. Formal meetings will have “Appreciations” written on the agenda. More informal sessions will likely just have someone bring it up: “Appreciations?” Either way, we take at least a few minutes to let anyone present who feels inspired to appreciate anyone or anything they want. It may be work-related, it may not; it may be appreciating someone who’s in the room or someone who isn’t. It may be something that seems huge or someone who brought them coffee a couple days earlier.

Newcomers or meeting attendees who are in a hurry, I’ve found over the years, may well suggest skipping Appreciations. When that happens, someone who knows better will nearly always remind them that, though they’re welcome to head out, it’s important for us to devote at least a couple minutes to Appreciations. The process is remarkably simple, but it’s hugely powerful. To an untrained outsider, it may seem as if there’s really no overtly big action involved, but almost everything feels different after we do them. The whole energy of the room can shift in what we might think of as only a metaphorical emotional inch.

The value of doing Appreciations is not just anecdotal, and it’s not only an organizational flight of fancy. There are reams of data in neuroscience and psychology that speak to the enormous benefits of gratitude practices. In “The Neuroscience of Gratitude and Its Effects on the Brain,” a PositivePsychology.com piece published last fall, psychologist Melissa Madeson writes extensively about the impact of regular application of gratitude practices like Appreciations. The studies Madeson points to in her article have found associations between gratitude and lower cortisol levels, better cardiac function, more emotional resilience, higher levels of happiness and well-being, increased levels of gray matter in the brain, better immune system functioning, higher levels of creativity, and more.

The point, then, is simply that by inserting Appreciations into your meetings and sticking with the ritual of it for a few years, you can have all of these benefits accrue in your organization. And you don’t need me to calculate what all of those things could mean: fewer sick calls, lower turnover, increased interest in the organization’s work, not to mention long-term lowering of health care costs. All for a few minutes of “work” at the end of the meeting. I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. Oh yeah, I already did, 30 years ago!

While that Appreciative magic is being made here in the ZCoB, it’s critical to remain realistic about the challenges we are facing right now as a country. The health of the greater ecosystem around us seems neither awesome nor appreciative, and whether we like it or not, context always counts. It would be both naïve and eminently unhelpful to gloss over the glaring tensions that are dominating international relations—and making headlines—right now. In fact, that difficulty of dealing with what’s going on around us makes the work of Appreciations all the more important. It grounds us away from the negative, bringing us back into the many positives of our own ecosystem.

Although the particulars of our present national situation do seem to be unique, to my sense of things as a history major, this is hardly the first time the country has been under duress. The great investigative reporter Sy Hersh, still actively reporting at the age of 88, has been through any number of national challenges before. His investigations, his courage, and his often-unorthodox perspectives have earned my respect over the years. Last week, in an insightful and inspiring interview with The Ink, Hersh did not hesitate to share his deep concern about the current state of the country: “It’s chaos. We’re in a total crisis.”

Hersh is a marvelous role model, pushing forward even when there are a hundred good reasons to hide. He is not put off or overwhelmed by the challenges at hand. To the contrary, Hersh adds with adamance, “You have to keep at it. How can you not have that fire? I don’t get why people don’t understand the extent to which we’re in an existential crisis.” Crisis or not, I, for one, am committed to keep going. Appreciations alone aren’t going to fix the whole situation, but they are, I’ve come to see, a meaningful small step—or at least a shift of a couple inches—in a better direction.

While the state of the nation does, indeed, seem to be as Sy Hersh says it is, here inside the ZCoB, there is neither chaos nor crisis. There are always, of course, shortfalls and problems to work through, but mostly there’s calm determination and a continued effort to make meaningful magic happen every day. Which is, I suppose, part of why I’m able to both absorb the terrible truth of what Sy Hersh is telling us and, at the same time, study the quiet but powerfully creative impact of Appreciations playing out here in the ZCoB. What’s more, they’re a meaningfully effective, very grassroots democratic practice. I can put the two together to remind myself, and maybe you, that we don’t have to despair when faced with autocratic cruelty and indignity. As folksinger and artist Carrie Newcomer writes:

Living well with gratitude and joy is an act of resistance, a claiming and affirmation of all that is still good and still true.

I don’t have any tattoos, but if I were gonna get a couple right now, they could well be the two phrases that have been serving as my mantras in recent months. Each has been helping me stay centered and inspired while the world is swirling around us, yet still focused on moving forward in the face of whatever adversity appears.

The first line, which you’ve likely heard me say many times by now, is from the theologian Richard Rohr: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Rohr’s words remind me that simply doing the work that we do here in the ZCoB, in the dignity-focused, caring, gentle, honest way that we try to do it every day, is in itself a meaningful act of resistance against the imposition of autocracy. Kind of like ending meetings with Appreciations.

The other words are from above-mentioned Mr. Berry, a greatly respected figure in the world of those who are trying to improve the health of our communities, planet, the people we work with, and ourselves. Berry reminds me that, although I, like many others, want the people in charge of the country to get their collective act together, that’s not how real democracy is likely to work. Rather, as Berry puts it, “The leaders will have to be led.”

Berry’s line comes from a terrific talk that he gave to the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth back in the summer of 2013. For context, that means he was already aware of and addressing this issue long before the ascent of autocracy that is now so readily apparent:

We must reject the idea—promoted by politicians, commentators, and various experts—that the ultimate reality is political, and therefore that the ultimate solutions are political. If our project is to save the land and the people, the real work will have to be done locally. Obviously we could use political help, if we had it. Mostly, we don’t have it. There is, even so, a lot that can be done without waiting on the politicians. It seems likely that politics will improve after the people have improved, not before. The “leaders” will have to be led.

Leading with appreciation instead of antipathy and anger is a wonderful way to do that. Spiritual possessions really do multiply, almost magically so. Or, one could bring the worlds of profit and magic together and say that, when we do them regularly, Appreciations appreciate.

Going back to the two stories that got me into this appreciative rabbit hole in the first place. This first serves, for me, as a bit of evidence of said Appreciations. It drives home just how much cultural impact we can have through these sorts of small, undramatic, dignity-centered actions. The story unfolded this past Friday, a bit after midday, when a group of us came together at the public library for what was something like our 100th construction meeting for the Roadhouse over the course of the last couple years. The sessions bring together a series of Roadhouse leaders (managing partner Lisa Schultz, longtime head chef Bob Bennett, and more), plus our builders, our architect, our finance crew, my business partner Paul Saginaw, and Paul’s talented wife, Lori Saginaw, who’s doing the design work in the dining room. Because our meetings are open, various ZCoB folks will show up on occasion. As one example, Yvo from our IT team came once, got into the conversation, and just started showing up every week. Before we knew it, he was integral to the work, making sure that all the wiring for the computers was going to be correct and more. (I appreciate the beauty of making our meetings open so that Yvo could even consider coming in the first place!)

Even though ⅓ to ½ of the folks in attendance are not formally part of the ZCoB, we continue to run the renovation meetings the way we run all of our other meetings. The Roadhouse’s Felipe Diaz is doing a fantastic job with facilitation. We end these meetings, as we do all our other gatherings, with a chance for people to share announcements, and then, last but not least, Appreciations. In a seriously magical moment on Friday, I noted that, of the 15 or so folks at the meeting, the first person to offer an Appreciation was Mark Hiser, owner of Phoenix Construction. He shared a beautiful and powerful Appreciation for the crew, both the Roadhouse team and everyone working on the construction end of things. It was awesome, all the more so coming from someone who’s not really part of the ZCoB. Before anyone else could say anything, Louie Marr, our longtime construction manager and liaison, chimed in with another Appreciation. With magic on my mind, I smiled inside. Seriously, if you’d have told me 30 years ago that a construction crew would be leading the way with Appreciations at the end of a meeting, I don’t know that I’d have believed you! Which reminds me that although the national news may now be grim, the best criticism of that “bad” can simply be to continue to do real, good, and very caring work. (Oh yeah, the big material news from the meeting is that the renovation project remains on time, so we’re still scheduled to reopen the Roadhouse in mid-February. Fingers all crossed!)

The second story is about how, after many months of trying to work to get the project going, we are now nearing completion of the next pamphlet in the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Series. The title is “Why Democracy Matters: A Deep Understanding of Democracy in Our Everyday Lives.” As is always the case, I have learned an enormous amount in the process of writing. The great writer Joan Didion once noted what I also have experienced many times over: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Writing opens intellectual and emotional doors to new understandings of the world. It’s helped me see how much of a difference down-to-earth and democratic practices can make in the world, how big a part they have played in making the ZCoB what it has become, and how we can use them to make those tattoo-worthy lines I mentioned earlier a reality. The new pamphlet, at its core, is all about committing to the practice of the better, no matter what else is going on around us. And it’s all about moving ahead, without waiting for higher-ups in the social hierarchy to start the process for us. All of which means that people like you and I, and maybe your great aunt in Arizona, can start to lead the leaders in far more positive directions!

Another one of the beauties of writing, for me, is that a book or pamphlet coming back from the printer means that I will get to teach from it soon thereafter. The learning experience, with a generous dose of magic, comes next. In my head, I’ve been working to clarify the main messages about my new beliefs about democracy. While I’ve been doing this, the amazing artist Jerry Zeniuk has given me even more insight still. Zeniuk, a lifelong adherent of Josef Albers’ philosophies around art, has seen a great deal of both magic and loss over the course of his 80 years on the planet. His beliefs and painting practice have helped me better understand the impact of Appreciations, both inside our organization and out.

Jerry Zeniuk was born sometime in 1945, in a refugee camp near the north German town of Luneberg, to parents who had escaped Ukraine during the war. Later, like millions of others, the family was displaced by the war. When Jerry was 5 years old, the family moved from Germany to the U.S. He grew up in Colorado and went to work in New York in 1969. In 1992, he moved to Munich, where he has lived and painted ever since. Zeniuk’s abstract work, which is often referred to as Radical Painting, is an inspiration, and his 2017 book How to Paint quickly became a classic for people interested in avant-garde and unorthodox approaches to art. In a brief period of time, I’ve already learned a bundle of things from his philosophy. For instance, Zeniuk says that making sense of what you see in a painting requires patience:

To look at a painting, to understand what you see, takes time. Since we look at images from before we can remember, we think we know how to look. But there comes a time when we realize that there is more to see than we are used to seeing.

I think what Zeniuk says about painting is also true for organizational frameworks. If we stick with them long enough and pay close attention, there comes a time when we suddenly see that there is way more to them than we’d ever imagined in the first place. When Zeniuk says it “takes time,” he means years. Maybe many years. I see now that that’s what happened to me last week with Appreciations: Sure enough, after doing them regularly for over 30 years, I suddenly saw Appreciations in a whole new way. It happened when I was working on what seemed like they might be the final paragraphs of the pamphlet this past Saturday morning. For the first time in my life, I realized that Appreciations are one of the quiet but effective ways we make democratic practice a gentle daily reality in our lives here at Zingerman’s.

Appreciations are, I see now with surprising clarity, an awesome example of down-to-earth democracy in action. They involve everyone—no one is excluded, all are welcome. At the same time, no one has to say anything. Some people appreciate just one other person; others mention 10 or 15. Some people appreciate folks they know at work, but others will appreciate their family, friends, suppliers, etc. Others still, their dogs. It’s all free choice, it’s all collaborative, it’s all about the collective.

In the new pamphlet, I write extensively about how integral the practice of day-to-day dignity is to making democracy happen. And when I check the Appreciation process against the six elements of dignity, this gratitude practice seems to answer the call quite beautifully:

1. Appreciations are all about honoring the humanity of both the appreciated and the appreciator.
2. Appreciations are very authentic and real. People often tear up, even though they’re smiling when they speak. Folks take this sharing very seriously.
3. Everyone gets a voice since anyone who feels moved can speak.
4. Appreciations are all about positive beliefs!
5. Appreciations support people’s effort to get to greatness. The more Appreciations we share, the more other people’s positive beliefs about themselves improve, the more confidence increases, and the higher the odds they will get to greatness.
6. We do Appreciations in a way that actualizes equity. People don’t share in order of rank or anything to do with an org chart—rather, it’s done only in the order that moves them or the order that the facilitator calls on them.

Jerry Zeniuk’s artwork is, in a way, also very democratic. The artist Michael Brennan, whose paintings hang in some classic California restaurants, writes of Zeniuk’s pieces:

It is interesting how generous these paintings appear, particularly in light of their context. … These paintings in their incomplete manner allow the viewer considerable room to move about, and perhaps even enter these works more deeply.

This seems very much aligned with some of what I’ve learned about democracy. What matters most isn’t who gets the headlines, but rather how you and I behave every day. Democracy, in the context I have focused on in the new pamphlet, is not about politics; it’s about people and ethics and everyday activity. It doesn’t give answers; it opens doors to conversation, to caring, and to connection. Using effective frameworks like the six elements of dignity can and does guide us in designing our organizations and our lives in ever more connected and collaborative ways.

Zeniuk really got me thinking, though, with this line:

The painting is not about the color. It’s about the space between the colors. And the painting is not about paint, it’s about the space I create.

Most people are, per Zeniuk’s point, looking at the world’s metaphorical equivalent of the colors in a painting. They see newly appointed CEOs, record profits, leveraged buyouts—or big crises, failures, falloffs. They look to bold achievements like “Best Reuben,” or our incredible Sour Cream Coffee Cake made better by Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter, or the dramatic downsides of financial collapse or ethical failure. It’s becoming ever clearer to me that democracy lives, per Zeniuk’s point, in the spaces in between those attention-grabbers! Which is why the democratic work that made them possible—the meetings, the emails, the non-hierarchical thinking that went into the conversations, etc.—is missed by most folks.

Appreciations are one of the most awesome examples around. In that sense, they are hugely powerful, but they aren’t what gets in the headlines. The Roadhouse renovation work is akin to Zeniuk’s use of color. It’s what people will look at. Mark Hiser’s Appreciation at the meeting last week lives in the space in between. Few people would notice its deeply democratic, humble nature, yet it is a big part of what is making the project go as well as it is going.

In “Democracy,” an essay in the Fall 2020 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber wonders what would happen if we were to shift our focus away from the darkness, drama, divisiveness, and the drive to dominate that fills the headlines—or, as we might say in the context of what I wrote last week, to focus first on making magic. It’s a call to shift from problems to possibilities, away from waiting for heroes to show up and settle instead into what we can do ourselves in the here and now. According to Graeber:

One result is that the human past would start to look very different, because once you begin searching for it, evidence of democratic practice is actually much more common than one might think … Often it is hiding in plain sight.

And sure enough, after 30 years of using them, Appreciations are a deeply democratic practice of the sort Graeber is writing about. It’s very clear to me now. It’s also clear that by doing Appreciations diligently, consistently, and caringly over time, we have a positive impact on the organizational cultures of others around us.

With both of those insights in mind, I see that, per David Graeber’s observation, democracy breaks out somewhere in the ZCoB every day! More power to voting on election day, but why wait for that infrequent opportunity to actualize democracy when we could just be democratic this afternoon? Appreciations are a great way to practice. While headlines are swirling, we can get centered. Appreciations, I know, are not enough to singlehandedly right the course of the national ship. But they are a start, a bigger one by far than I’d understood up until last week. When you use them regularly, it’s hard to imagine not wanting to do Appreciations forever. They move us forward just an inch or at a time, but those inches, over time, absolutely add up.

The point of the “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet really is my own shift to understand that democracy is mostly not about voting (but please do vote). It’s about what you and I do every day. It’s about making democratic practice part of our daily routines. It’s about building democratically oriented organizations, organizations in which people are encouraged to think for themselves, to participate, to push for what they believe in, to engage in conversation even when there is conflict. To care. To come with compassion. To make cooperation a big part of the daily news. It’s also that:

• We can start where we are and make democracy the lived experience of more and more people rather than waiting for the right leader to take charge.
• While the loss and darkness do exist, and, as Sy Hersh has said, absolutely need to be dealt with, they do not have to dominate our days.
• Appreciation and joy and dignity are acts of healthy resistance, and we can use them to model that the best criticism of the bad is indeed the practice of the better.
• By modeling things like Appreciations at the end of meetings, we can help to lead the leaders. Though 18 Appreciations at the end of a Zingerman’s huddle will not, on their own, make the state of the country do a 180, they’re a step in the right direction.

In the current national context, the work of Appreciations also reminds me of these lovely lyrics from the ’60s jazz singer Jeanne Lee:

In these last days
of total
disintegration
where every day
is a struggle
against becoming
an object in
someone else’s nightmare
there is great joy
in being
Naima’s mother
and unassailable strength
in being
in the way.

While I know that Appreciations are exceptionally effective here in the ZCoB, I do, on occasion, like to imagine what would happen in other settings. If the leaders are going to be led, what would it be like if every congressional session concluded with Appreciations? If everyone in the room, not just the congresspeople, could participate, meaning that staff members and court reporters could also raise their hands and be called on to appreciate others? If congresspeople who were full of bravado 15 minutes earlier would suddenly show vulnerability and appreciate their mothers for all they’ve done, or someone on the other side of the aisle for showing compassion as their child deals with cancer? If tears could be shed, voices could quaver, joy could become normal, not at the expense of someone else, but in honest, heartfelt appreciation for how others have been of help? It can’t hurt to hope, right?

The fact that two years of study, writing, and reflection about democracy has brought me back to a practice we’ve used every day for decades does make me chuckle. It took all of this to get me to appreciate this long-standing organizational ritual in a whole new way. It all makes me appreciate Appreciations even more than I already did. And it gets smiling over this other insightful observation from Wendell Berry’s The Unforeseen Wilderness:

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

Jerry Zeniuk says that “A masterpiece never seems to have been painted, but rather to have always existed.” And that is certainly what it feels like to reexamine the impact of Appreciations at the start of 2026—a practical democratic practice, a positive way to model what we do. It’s a future I look forward to inching my way into and being Appreciatively part of for many years to come.

Don’t forget, we’re all in this together! I appreciate you!

Create a culture of appreciation

P.S. While we’re not quite done with “Why Democracy Matters,” we are close enough to put it up online for pre-order now! Order today, and as soon as it comes in, we’ll mail it to you!

P.P.S. Speaking of tattoos, one of the very good vendors at the Specialty Food Association’s Winter FancyFaire in San Diego, Sam from Burlap and Barrel, was especially excited about the Apricots for Dignity and Democracy project. So much so, she told me, that she’s contemplating adding an apricot tattoo to her already impressive ink! Darned good idea, I thought! If you do the same, be sure to send photos! And by the way, if you live, like I do, in cold-weather country, we now have Carhartt jackets available on the site! I’ve been wearing mine regularly in recent weeks. The embroidered apricot drawing by Ian Nagy regularly invites cool and caring conversations!

Making magic while living between, in, and around the loss

Last Sunday morning, I was sitting in a sunny corner of a café in central San Diego. Focused and working hard, I was trying to get a bit of writing done before slowly making my way over to the Specialty Food Association’s Winter FancyFaire. I was beginning to explore a hard topic, writing about the death of my friend Manchán Magan, the writer, performance artist, ardent advocate for the Irish language, and amazing human being. I was in the middle of double-checking the date of Manchán’s death—it was October 2 of this last year—when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something completely and wholly unexpected. I did a double-take, then doubled down, shifted my focus, and looked more closely. Sure enough, it was indeed as I’d imagined: a man walking by with a white parrot perched on his right shoulder.

It seemed almost magical at the time. You certainly don’t see tropical birds like that around these parts very often! Pigeons? Sure. Parrots? Not so much. Maybe, though, this was mostly a matter of my paying attention, not magic per se. If I hadn’t caught the bird out of the corner of my eye, the parrot would have passed by completely unnoticed. Reflecting even further, I realized the two could actually be one and the same. Paying attention can be an entrée into magic-making—especially the kind of magic that Manchán was widely acknowledged to have made in such insightful and thoughtful abundance. Like the white parrot, the magic would have been there no matter what; most people just let it pass without ever taking notice.

To be honest, I almost missed the parrot altogether. I was absolutely not expecting to see one. I’d sat down simply to sip coffee and get some work done, not for exotic West Coast bird-watching. If the omens are accurate, though, it’s a good thing I saw it. A white parrot is said to be a symbol of peace, hope, and new beginnings. All of which we could use right now, given the current state of the country around us.

Speaking of hope and inspiration, 34 years ago this week, Lou Reed released his remarkable 16th album, Magic and Loss. I know that Lou Reed and Manchán Magan might seem like two radically different people, people who might never before have appeared in the same sentence. The former was a Jewish poet and musician, intimately immersed in the dark sides of New York City street life; the latter was deeply drawn to centuries-old nuances of the Irish language and culture rooted in the countryside. And yet, each was, in his own unique way, amazingly adept at making magic, acknowledging loss, and helping others to live magical, meaningful lives of their own.

Like almost all of Lou Reed’s music, Magic and Loss was panned by some people and, at the same time, adored by others. As with most everything Reed has done, those who already loved his work, like me, loved it a lot. David Fricke, writing in Rolling Stone, was clearly in the same category:

Magic and Loss is Lou Reed’s most affecting, emotionally direct solo work since The Blue Mask, a stunning consummation of that album’s naked guitar clamor, the hushed-chapel intimacy of the third Velvet Underground album and the barbed reportorial vitality of Reed’s best songwriting. He offers no great moral revelations and no happy ever after, just big questions and some basic horse sense. “There’s a bit of magic in everything,” he sings at the very end of the record, “and then some loss to even things out.”

Reed’s album title, and that last line of the lyrics, sum up the current state of my mind, the state of the world, and the essence of this essay. There is, like it or not, both magic and a whole lot of loss in the air right now. For me, the loss began with Manchán’s death at the far-too-early age of 55 last fall.

Speaking of New York City, I want to tell you about three thought leaders who are a big part of a new grassroots organization, Friends of Attention, which is affiliated with the Brooklyn-based Strother School of Radical Attention. D. Graham Burnett is a historian, Alyssa Loh is a filmmaker, and Peter Schmidt is a director at the Strother School. They do not, to my knowledge, make records, speak Irish, or write anything about parrots, though Burnett did recently author a book whose title fits this essay: In Search of the Third Bird. Together, the trio authored a powerful and poignant op-ed in the Saturday New York Times. In a piece entitled “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie,” they pushed back hard against the 21st-century mind-as-machine focus on measurement of attention, which many people think of in the context of social media. Here’s an excerpt:

Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead.

The impact of the trends they are talking about is not insignificant. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt argue that tragically, this “slice, dice, measure, and make metrics” approach is leading us into ever more difficult and more divisive times. It is also, they add, leading toward the loss of democracy. People with low and divided attention, it turns out, don’t do well in the kind of deep discussion that’s called for in democratic constructs.

The writers do, though, offer an alternative, a way forward one that’s far more grounded and productive than the shape-shifting and attention-splitting that’s increasingly been dominating so much of so many people’s days. They suggest that rather than segmenting attention into milliseconds, we aim for:

A theory of attention rooted in love, care and commitment, an ethics of attention that cannot be sold or stolen. … Call it attention activism or even, as we have come to think of it, a new politics of “attensity.”… The fullness of our authentic human attention, shared with others, is the power with which we make the world. It’s worth fighting for.

At its best, this type of kind, generous, and emotion-centered attentiveness opens a door to making magic. It is absolutely the sort of attention Manchán Magan gave to Irish language and culture. And the results of his hard work and the attensity he poured into it were more than magical.

Manchán, to be clear, didn’t fight for attention. He simply made it happen by doing interesting work, not to mention by being a beautiful writer and a passionate student of the history and language of his homeland. Folks who do work as fascinating as Manchán’s are the sort that other people are eager to tune in to.

I first encountered Manchán, as I did the white parrot, almost entirely by accident and simply by being in the right place at the right time. I was not looking for him any more than I was the parrot. Manchán was simply the very tall, very kind, very smart, and very creative significant other of Aisling Rogerson, cofounder of the very magical Fumbally Café in Dublin. At the time I met him, Aisling and I were just beginning to form what has become a rewarding, long-distance friendship. We’ve been sharing ideas about business and life and food and cooking for many years now. It’s through Aisling that I got to know Manchán’s writing and then, eventually, the man himself.

Manchán came here to Ann Arbor a few years back to visit in person and perform his one-man show about traditional sourdough bread and butter, Aran Im. It’s by reading Manchán’s remarkable writing that I—and many thousands of others who speak no Irish at all—was able to access the amazing, nuanced beauty of the Irish language.

If you have not yet read the man’s books, now would most definitely be a good time to do it. They are the exact opposite of what Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt are urging us to avoid: stuff designed for short-term attention. Thirty-Two Words for Field and Listen to the Land Speak are both fascinating, attention-getting deep dives into the kinds of complex cultural nuances I am so intrigued by. My copies of each are heavily underlined and abundantly bookmarked. I go back to them regularly to revisit the intricate beauty of the Irish language and the history that is so beautifully revealed in them. Manchán’s 2022 release, Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature, is as amazing as its title sounds!

Many hundreds of tributes to Manchán have been written and spoken, and probably painted and poeted as well, in the three-plus months since he passed. They were often put together by people who knew him far better than me, in their efforts to navigate the pain and loss that accompanies the death of someone so special at the entirely too young age of 50. Ireland is not a big country, and everyone seems to know everyone else! The Irish Times’ obituary for Manchán notes how he “radiated infectious curiosity, cultural nuance, and a sense of the mystical undercurrents in life.” The obituary writer even called him “a national treasure”—rightly, I think—in great part for his work with the language. Musician Liam Ó Maonlaí, from the band Hothouse Flowers, offered that “There was a gentleness to Manchán. He was an otherworldly guy.” Journalist Anthony Murphy, who has himself written extensively about Irish tradition and culture (and is currently writing his next book on a very traditional 1952 Olympia SMS typewriter), added about Manchán:

He had all the appearance of eternal youth about him. He was a man upon whom it seemed no stress or angst or sorrow or regret could find rest. He was constantly bursting with the enthusiasm of a child, eager to tell the adult world about all the things he was passionate about. He was ever impassioned, effusive; even glowing.

I hope that anyone who encounters Manchán’s words will appreciate the magic to be found in his books and recorded performances. Believing, though, that Manchán himself was the magical entity, a presence that others can admire but not emulate, misses the main point he would have made. Manchán did not actually make the magic any more than I made the white parrot. The magic was actually there all along. In the case of the Irish language, it waited centuries for someone like Manchán to bring it to light for the rest of us to learn from.

There is, to state the obvious, a whole lot of loss all around us right now. The potential loss of democracy in the country, loss of traditions we have long counted on, loss of a sense of security. Many of us are feeling a deep sense of loss following the killing of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old poet and mother of three who was shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Professor Kent Wascom, who taught Good at Old Dominion in 2019, told the New York Times: “What I saw in her work was a writer that was trying to illuminate the lives of others. I very much remember her being someone who made others feel better in that moment.” In a similar way, Manchán always seemed to manage a more positive approach. As he would say, “I see a world where people realise they have more in common than ever divided them.”

Manchán was also adept at identifying magic in others, maybe because he was so skilled at noticing the subtle nuances of the natural world. After hearing Liam Ó Maonlaí’s story of childhood struggle and loss, Manchán quickly transformed it into a tale of magic. Ó Maonlaí shares that Manchán’s response, “Oh, so you had to fly at a young age,” made him “look at life with a critical eye. In other words: to learn to fly.” I had a similarly lovely experience after I sent Manchán a link to an essay I wrote about appreciation that references his amazing work. He wrote me back:

A beautiful exploration of an Fóidín Meara and … a gorgeous parallel between Ireland’s reliance on myth as much as history, and Zingerman’s ability to bridge both conventional business practises and the almost magical realistic elements of visioning and believing strongly in a win-win, people-focused mode of business.

This ability to identify the magic and also to make it is, I believe, a trait common among those who’ve engaged with what Manchán calls the “other world.” It’s also what Carol Sanford taught me to see as Deep Understanding. People who arrive at Deep Understanding, like Manchán, seem strikingly different to those who encounter them. Their energy is ethereal, upbeat, lighter, livelier. Their insight and their ability to communicate it to others appear exceptional. The truth is, while these folks all live in the same world as the rest of us, they somehow see more, share more, and enlighten others in amazing ways.

The main message of this whole piece is that the magic that Manchán Magan, Lou Reed, Carol Sanford, and others we know manifest is something we can all make happen. The magic is there, waiting for us to learn how to work with it.

To confirm the point, I reached out to someone who is an expert in magic. Acar (AH-jar) Altinsel, a longtime and loyal Zingerman’s customer and the humble and the wise founder of Penguin Magic, has turned his own Deep Understanding of the magician’s art into the country’s most popular mail-order purveyor of magic-trick supplies. Seth Godin is a big fan, and so are many thousands of others around the country. “Can anyone make magic?” I asked Acar over email last week. “Yes,” he answered almost immediately. “Definitely anyone.” Which means to me that the white parrots of the world are almost always present, or at least about to appear. We just need to pay more attention. In a way, perhaps the subtitle Listen to the Land Speak says it all: We can take “A journey into the wisdom of what lies beneath us.”

While loss is in the air right now, there is still, per Lou Reed’s song lyrics and Manchán’s sense of the world, a lot of magic to be found all around us. Last week, I was fortunate enough to see a photocopy of a letter a local 10-year-old boy wrote to his cousin. This was not just an ordinary message from one young cousin to another who’s a year or two older and struggling, as so many are in the world today. This wonderful kid told his cousin how much she matters and how much he loves her in such a lovely way. I had tears in my eyes the whole time I was reading his letter. When 10-year-olds can write letters like that, then I know for sure that, regardless of what you might find in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal, magic really does exist in the world. The problem is that most people miss it.

You don’t, I’m pretty sure, get to the sort of Deep Understanding Manchán had about the Irish language or Lou Reed had about pain, loss, rejection, and life on the edge by following society’s suggested life plans. Patti Smith shares in her new autobiography, Bread of Angels, that as a young child she was regularly “scolded for straying.” In truth, people need to stray from the straight and all too narrow to dig into something that could evolve into the exceptional. Straying seems to be a prerequisite for Deep Understanding. Manchán would regularly say that when he reached his late teens, fear of being forced into some kind of mainstream office job was part of what made him flee for the Far East, where he took up filmmaking and travel reporting! A few years later, Manchán was back in Ireland studying the ancient roots of his own culture, as he had studied so many others in his travels.

The Irish language, and many parts of Irish culture that Manchán studied so deeply, were banned in centuries past by British colonial rulers, much as Native American language and culture were treated here in the U.S. Manchán spoke and wrote regularly about “the indigeneity of Irish culture,” and the insight to be gleaned from it. The magic of Manchán, I would suggest, emerges from his Deep Understanding of the Irish language and his efforts to bring its nuanced detail and depth back into everyday awareness. As Manchán said so often, “Our people have always known that there’s only a very, very thin veil between us and the Netherworld…but to encounter it… It’s just beyond us, just between, just above and beyond the threshold, but it’s near to us.” And this is, indeed, the lesson I’ve taken from reading so much of his efforts!

Drawing on Carol Sanford’s good work, I’ve distilled four characteristics that make Deep Understanding practical and usable for nearly any subject:

1. It emerges within an area of knowledge that already exists.
2. It reframes that knowledge in new ways, creating new insights and ways of being in the world.
3. It positively impacts the lives of others who are connected to the person doing the understanding.
4. It helps the understanders become themselves in more meaningful ways.

In my view, this is very clearly what Manchán did with his deep studies of Irish. And it’s with Manchán (and Lou Reed) in mind that I’m now inclined to offer a fifth characteristic: What comes out of Deep Understanding, regardless of who has it or what it’s about, tends to feel like magic.

Magic, I realized last week, could well be an entrée into helping us understand our approach to what others experience as the hard-edged world of business. I’ve often tried to explain to people over the years that the truth of my work life is that I never started a business because I thought it would make me a lot of money. I know that may sound odd to many. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely didn’t want to start a business to lose money. Nor am I down on money per se. I have certainly made some over the years, which makes it possible for me to live with a lot less financial stress than most. It has never, though, been my motivator.

“Why else, then, would you start a business?” many wonder. I try to explain that for me, it’s mostly about making a great business. I’m more like Lou Reed, who, when asked many years ago if he was bothered by the Velvet Underground’s lack of commercial success, said, “We just wanted to make great music. The other stuff would have been nice, but we would never have changed the music to do it.” Same story here. This past weekend, it struck me that I might make better headway if I told them my intent was to make magic. What, I began to wonder then, if instead of the standard business Profit and Loss statements, we might publish regular Magic and Loss statements. The more magic we make, the better we’re doing!

Magic, well done and well managed, can, in fact, make you money. More importantly, it makes for a meaningful life. It means doing work we believe in, that we’re learning from, that others are leaning into, that is slowly but surely changing lives for the better. Money alone may sound great, but ultimately it all too often seems to send people in the wrong direction. As Seth Godin says, “People are measuring the wrong thing. Scale isn’t the point. Magic is the point. You want to find the right scale that lets you make the magic you want.”

The authors of the other day’s New York Times op-ed point out that when people dig deep and really pay close attention over a long period of time, the results often appear to you and me as magic. Attention, I see now, opens the door to Deep Understanding, which many later understand as magic. Whatever we call it, it is very clear that it reveals new and wonderful things, things that have been there all along, but that far too many people have chosen not to look at long enough to see. Here’s an excerpt from their “Twelve Theses on Attention”:

I. The astonishing reality of things and persons—this is the object of pure attention.

II. True attention does the work of bringing forth. It is the aperture through which the latency of things and persons becomes present. … unmixed attention—pure attention to what cannot be used, to what no one already wants, to what promises no knowledge or gain—does not require doors, because it walks through walls.

III. This true attention, given to objects, unerringly reveals the presence of others.

. . .
What is needed is an ethics of attention. This is akin to a practical mysticism. Practical mysticism is not impractical. It is no more and no less than the effort to draw closer to the astonishing reality of things, through those forms of pure attention that are unmixed with evaluations of utility and judgment, and free from the deforming grasp of a seizing hand (or eye or mind).

So what do we do to make this kind of magic happen? While I’m not totally sure, I know that you have to start somewhere. As Seth Godin’s voice in the huddle in my head reminds me regularly, “It’s better to ship imperfect work and build on it than it is to push pause and wait for near perfection.” I’ll share something of a start here. With Manchán, Acar Altinsel, Carol Sanford, and Seth Godin all in my mind, here are six steps to making magic. Or six steps to developing Deep Understanding. Or, maybe better still, a recipe for entering into a world where Irish fairy stories and white parrot sightings are an everyday occurrence:

1. Pay more attention. Manchán, obviously, did not invent Irish, and Lou Reed definitely didn’t develop loss, rejection, and social “outcastism.” The material for the magic is there. We just have to embrace it, uncomfortable as that may be. There are, after all, metaphorical white parrots, real-life Manchán Magans, and caring 10-year-old cousins all around us, waiting for us to tune in.
2. Go back and attend again. Instead of scrolling to the next item, stay with the image. Study regeneratively. Go deeper. And deeper. And deeper still. When you think you’ve done all you can, go back and find ways to do more again, still. Repeat regularly. You’re at the beginning still, but at least you’re going in a good direction.
3. Connect things. There is much more about this in Secret #39. But yes, connecting things that are not otherwise connected can often make magic. Connect what’s in your head with what’s in your heart, or what’s in the news with what’s new that you’re learning. Manchán brought ancient Irish words into modern conversation by writing about them and speaking about them so regularly and so beautifully. Lou Reed connected pain, rejection, and emotional crisis on the street with popular music.
4. Put it all into new frames. Take what you find and frame it, fit it, or refit it into your own world. Shape it to your own sensibility while letting your sensibility be shaped by it. As Manchán would say about the start of his deep work with Irish, “I decided I want to take back the Irish language and my connection with my surroundings, but not have it be about violence.”
5. Sort out how to share it. Figure out how to take this magic that you are assembling in the secrecy of your own mental spaces into the wider world.
6. Practice in public. Put it out there regularly because, as Acar Altinsel says, when it comes to magic, practice really matters. You can’t make magic by simply sitting at home and not sharing what you’re imagining with others. As Seth Godin reminds everyone who will listen, we have to ship good work. He adds this:It’s not complicated, but it’s surprising.
   The work makes us who we are.
   …
   Do the work, ship the work, now you’re creative.
   Not the other way around.
   Don’t wait for it to be perfect.
   Don’t wait to be inspired.
   And don’t wait for someone to give you a badge or a diploma or a label.
   Simply do the work.
   Ship the work.
   Repeat.
   …
   We do the work and then we become creative.

My message, then, is that as magical as Manchán, Lou Reed, Acar Altinsel, Carol Sanford, and Seth Godin can seem to the rest of us, there’s nothing they have done that you and I aren’t able to make a personalized, unique-to-you-and-me version of ourselves. In “Manchán and Otherworld,” a performance that Manchán did for and with the filmmaker-musician Myles O’Reilly (also a magic maker) three years ago and then released online half a year later, he spoke of insight from the Irish classic Tir Na Nog:

It seems that all these accounts are trying to tell us that it’s not the simplest thing to get there despite the fact that it’s everywhere. But the challenges of getting there are worth overcoming.

Manchán’s words are a summation of why we would want to let go of the road more traveled, the ordinary, mainstream jobs that Manchán and I both managed to avoid, and instead tap into the magic. As Manchán says, this idea of magic “makes no sense, no logical reason sense in a world that’s based on the clock on time and space foreign.” Many withdraw when they encounter a bit of magic, quickly returning to the safety of the straight and narrow. As Manchán points out, though, it might be too late to escape what the magic offers: “Part of you was in the other world from the moment you first thought about going there from the moment you decided to go there you were there.”

Manchán’s presence is already sorely missed by many, many people, but his magic continues on apace. Asked in an interview whether the passing on of his poetic ancestors, Aogán O Rathaille and his great grand-uncle, The O’Rahilly (or Mícheál Seosamh Ó Rathaille, his full Irish name), meant that their work was lost to the world, Manchán answered quickly and confidently: “They aren’t lost. I feel like they remain alive through their writing.” This is, of course, also true of Manchán. The magic and the loss move forward together.

In a world where both magic and loss are always present, interwoven, intertwined, and overlaid, it becomes increasingly important that more and more of us work hard to make magic, that we don’t let the losses get us down. The magic, as Manchán would remind us, is always there, somewhere near the surface. Our role is to dig in, to study hard, to immerse ourselves in learning, and then to be ready to receive whatever magic appears. If we’re patient and persistent, positive, and perceptive, sooner or later it will come. White parrots, ancient Irish words, and an array of old Lou Reed songs are all waiting for us to find them and put them to work. As Lou Reed invited all of us to do so many years ago, we can all “Take a walk on the wild side.”

One thing I’m now certain of is that when we’re looking in the right direction and approaching things like Manchán did—working hard, refusing to give up, and reflecting regularly and deeply—magic surely awaits us. And as Acar Altinsel makes clear, “Anyone can do it!”

Delve into Deep Understanding

P.S. Speaking of magic and Irish writers, on March 25th and 26th, I will be co-teaching with my good friend Gareth Higgins! Gareth is the author of the amazing How Not to Be Afraid and also The Seventh Story (co-written with Brian McLaren). It will be the third straight year we’re doing this special two-day ZingTrain seminar, “Reframing Your Leadership Stories & Beliefs.” This is a chance to learn from Gareth’s great work on the power of storytelling in our lives and blend it with deep work on beliefs, the kind I detailed extensively in The Power of Beliefs in Business. Both Gareth and I speak and teach regularly around the world, but this is the only time we do it together. And, said humbly, it is a magical experience. Spaces are limited. Hope to see you there.

P.P.S. As if by magic, while I was working on this piece, I heard from John Carver, who started the Second Chance venue in Ann Arbor in 1974. I wrote about him a few weeks ago in the essay that started with the Ramones playing in Ann Arbor in the first week of October 1981. In the photo, Joey Ramone is wearing a t-shirt that says “Second Chance, Magic City.”

Pint-sized ideas, the struggle of self-doubt, and learning to take action anyway

“The revolution must begin with each one of us and not with external, environmental influences. … All great things start on a small scale, all great movements begin with you and me as individuals.” —Jidda Krishnamurti 

In an interview on the On Being podcast this past summer, author and activist adrienne maree brown said something that’s stuck with me ever since I first heard it. Although I often feel the pressure to find “big” solutions, brown reminded me that there’s “something about smallness.” Grand sweeping plans sound, well, grand, but long-term greatness so often comes, instead, from small and well-intended actions. We may feel uncertain when we take small steps, and they’re rarely really glamorous, but over time, they do make a difference. Instead of waiting for the grand sweep of history to have its way with us, these sorts of small actions are more like whisk brooms we hold in our hands. On their own, they seem insignificant, maybe even a bit silly. Over time, though, they get the job done far more effectively than many might imagine. Small acts of generosity, daily dedication to dignity, running a healthy meeting, a bit of kindness here and some compassion there… they may all appear, at first, to be far too small to matter, but these small positive acts of resistance engage the people around us in quietly meaningful ways. 

Small stuff, I remind myself regularly, can add up to make a really big difference.

Maybe you can relate. Throughout my work life, I have very regularly felt like I’m falling short. Like we’re faced with big challenges—both at work and in the larger world—and like I’m not doing anywhere near enough. Thankfully, I’ve had enough therapy and have done enough work on my beliefs that I know better—on an intellectual level, at least. I know how to reground, to regroup, to reassure myself that these self-critical thoughts are only a feeling. I often remind myself that even though what I’m working on may not feel like it will be that impactful, it is, nevertheless, far more significant than my deeply rooted fears might lead me to believe. I just had someone from another city who’s in town for a ZingTrain seminar walk over to me to tell me how much his boss has been influenced by what we do here, and that the great growth his own organization is currently experiencing is, to a great extent, due to philosophies and frameworks that they adapted from us. That was a humbling and happy moment. Two minutes of impromptu, in-the-moment conversation energized me to keep going strong for the rest of the day. 

As I look at the enormity of our greater ecosystem’s challenges right now—the increase in the number of autocratically-inspired activities around us and the accompanying diminishment of democracy—I keep coming back to this thought about the size of our actions. When I feel self-doubt, the smallness of my own actions, or the seeming insignificance of these actions in the scheme of the big world, I consider, for a minute or two, not taking any action. Then I repeat what has become something of a mantra for me of late: “It’s a small thing, but it’s something.” Uncertainty, in my head at least, is almost inevitable. This is my encouragement to myself to take action anyway. I remind myself regularly of what author Rebecca Solnit writes: ​​

History is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways.

Whether we’re talking about organizational improvement, self-development, or resistance to autocracy, the truth of the matter is that big things almost always start small. Grand strategies sound great, but the reality of real-life change is that it’s mostly a series of small things. Each, on its own, can easily be ignored. If the initiator descends into self-doubt, the actions might never happen. This essay is an encouragement to act anyway, to look self-doubt in the eye, take a deep breath, and take positive action. What seems small, I have come to learn, is far bigger than we have been led to believe. As adrienne maree brown said in the On Being interview, 

It’s all these small activities that we need to get great at if we want to actually have anything that would be a real democracy.

We never know what actions will alter history

On January 6, 2023, historian Timothy Snyder posted a piece reflecting on what had happened at the Capitol two years previous. As he points out, had a few people taken action instead of staying on the sidelines, the story in the months that followed might have played out very differently. Snyder’s main message gives me solace when I’m struggling, feeling like I’m failing when I don’t find “big,” clear answers or determine which large, decisive actions will resolve most of our issues at work and beyond. When I’m starting to slip into self-doubt, I come back to what Snyder wrote:

A tiny bit of courage, a tiny bit of truth, can change history. 

Looking at the magnitude of the issues all around us, it’s easy to feel irrelevant, insignificant, defeated. As adrienne maree brown writes, “The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive. And we are small.” Still, brown is clear: “starting small” is an excellent antidote to overwhelm. I, as you can tell, agree. 

If you do feel overwhelmed, know that you are not alone. Last fall, journalist Katie Couric asked Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard, to assess the state of our nation as autocracy seems to increase its reach with each passing week. Lepore, Couric thought, would have a good sense of the emotional state of the nation. After all, Lepore had just done several weeks of book events around the country. Unfortunately, her answer was not very uplifting. People around the country are “defeated, confused—there’s a great sinking feeling.” 

I am not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure that this cannot be a good thing. When people who work in a business, or any organization, believe they’re about to lose, they are almost certain to descend into the failure they have so effectively, if unintentionally, already imagined for themselves. I am determined not to descend into feeling defeated. If ordinary people like me won’t take action, who will? Which is, in great part, what’s pushing me to stick my neck out and make the newly available “Apricots for Dignity and Democracy” t-shirts. They feature a lovely scratchboard drawing by Ian Nagy and are produced by Underground Printing here in Ann Arbor. We’re donating the proceeds to the non-partisan, nonprofit news organization Democracy Now! In the grand scheme of things, it sure seems small. But, still, I remind myself, it’s something.

The voice in my head that keeps telling me that I ought to be able to come up with “big,” bold solutions is just another self-doubting, anxiety-centered way to arrive at inaction. When I struggle with it, and when Timothy Snyder’s quote doesn’t shift my energy from worrying to getting down to work, I turn back to adrienne maree brown. Her 2017 book, Emergent Strategy, is one of my favorites of the last eight years. In it, she is very clear that the little things are ultimately what make the biggest difference. It’s not about the “next big sale” or finding “hiring the perfect manager” or hitting the business equivalent of a hole-in-one with our next new product. The first item on brown’s “Principles of Emergent Strategy” list sends the same message loud and clear:

Small is good, small is all.

In a conversation with her sister Autumn on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast, brown noted:

If I take my mind off of the massive crisis and bring it down to the small thing that I can care about, there’s magic, and it’s available right now. What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.

Eventually, brown’s wise words help me work my way back to reality. My anxiety and sense of helplessness may be big, but the little things still matter. A small “extra mile,” like bringing a first-time guest a taste of something they didn’t ask for, helps them to feel welcome. Sending a regular customer home with one of our croissants (newly improved by the addition of Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter) could make their day. Or emailing a ZingTrain client I haven’t heard from for a while, just to see how they’re doing, often turns out to offer some surprisingly timely support. None of these actions alone will fix our national issues or even all of our challenges here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). But they do, as Timothy Snyder and adrienne maree brown remind me, make a difference.

Some small actions can turn out to help even more quickly than we might have hoped. Bridgette Carr—University of Michigan law professor, co-director of both the AI Law and Policy Clinic and the Human Trafficking and Immigration Clinic, and longtime Zingerman’s customer—reached out to tell me that the enews I wrote early in the autumn about the import of leading dignity-centered and inclusive meetings had a huge impact on her and the departments she leads. She forwarded the essays to a host of colleagues. (Email me at [email protected] and I’ll send it to you too! Deep conversations have commenced, and these folks have already begun working to make their meetings better! Her clients—and the community and the country—will all feel the impact as she and her team improve the effectiveness of their incredibly important work. 

Likes don’t count

In other instances, it may take years to realize what our seemingly small, almost irrelevant, actions inspire. My research for the pamphlet “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace” (at Zingermanspress.com) made this all too clear. I’ve shared this story many times, but it sums up beautifully the significance of small actions. It also reminds me that what seems like a tiny, uncertain action could actually start a revolution. 

In 2013, Mustafa Nayyem, then a 32-year-old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, took a small step that turned out to have a huge national impact. Nayyem’s father had been a progressive teacher in Afghanistan. He escaped when the Taliban came to power, bringing Nayyem and his younger brother, Masi, to Ukraine. Nayyem arrived there in 1990, becoming an awkward immigrant at age eight. By 2013, he had established himself as an effective and progressive journalist, but he was not a well-known national leader.

On November 21, 2013, the Russian-sponsored president of Ukraine pulled the plug on a long-promised agreement with the European Union, one that was supposed to connect Ukraine more meaningfully with Europe. Hopes in Ukraine, especially among young people, had been high. The sudden switch in national direction dashed those hopes and drove many into deep despair. I’d imagine many Ukrainians felt much like the Americans that journalist and Harvard professor Jill Lepore referenced above. Mustafa Nayyem, though, decided to do something. It was a small thing, but it was something. 

Late on that cold night—it was in the mid-30s in Kyiv—Nayyem posted on Facebook:

Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight?

Wisely anticipating what many would do in response, he added:

“Likes” don’t count.

My point here is not that Mustafa Nayyem is some sort of magical superhero. He was just another caring, competent person who was concerned about the state of his country. Instead of retreating into indifference, as many others would have, he leaned in and decided to take a small action. When he made the post, Nayyem may have anticipated that a few dozen of his friends would show up on the Maidan, bundled up to protect themselves from inclement weather, and that this gathering would have been the end of it. Instead, Ukraine found its footing in a philosophy rooted in dignity and democracy. This belief is core to the country’s 21st-century being.

Two years ago, friend and writer Gareth Higgins taught me that it’s impossible to know how the story of a small action will play out over, say, the next 10 years. In other words, we need to take action without any assurance of impact. The idea of which brings me back to a lesser-known story from the life of Mustafa Nayyem that illustrates the point of how good work can, unwittingly, later create remarkable outcomes that we would likely never have imagined!

In January 2023, Nayyem became head of Ukraine’s War Reconstruction work, repairing roads, buildings, and bridges as quickly as possible after Russian drones and rockets destroyed them. That summer, his brother Masi, fighting on the front, was badly injured. He lost his left eye, but it could have been much worse had his Nayyem not made headway so quickly with the road repairs. As Nayyem explained, Masi was “delivered to the hospital by a road which we had repaired previously, and he was delivered in two hours. Before the repair, it took four or six hours, and he would not have survived.”

Stop waiting to get picked

The unexpected significance of Nayyem’s work on Ukraine’s roads also brings to mind the story of Bobby Cain, who passed away last week at the age of 85. Back in 1957, he was a high school student in a small town near Knoxville. When the Brown v. Board of Education ruling came down from the Supreme Court, he was a 14-year-old kid living in the Black neighborhood of Clinton, Tennessee. Two years later, Cain and 11 other Black teenagers from his town were bused to what had always been an all-white school. They suffered both verbal and physical abuse from other students, being beaten, provoked, and put down continually throughout the year. Cain could have opted to quit. It would’ve been an easy decision, I think. His impact in the school, on its own, probably seemed small. He was just another high schooler struggling to get through his final year before applying to college. But by sticking it out, Cain ended up making a mark. He became the first Black student to graduate from a public high school in an integrated setting in the American South. The impact of Cain’s isolated act of courage changed the course of history.

Mustafa Nayyem and Bobby Cain’s small actions turned out to be significant, but it’s only years later that they, or anyone else, would realize their historical import. In the moment, they were just two people trying to figure out if they should take action in the face of uncertainty and adversity. As Rebecca Solnit has shared a related point that’s of equal import: “Nobody can know the full consequences of their actions.” 

In his Beyond the Brand podcast, Bryan Elliott thanked author and marketing maven Seth Godin for giving some great advice along these lines. Anxious and frustrated that his work was not taking off, Bryan reached out to Seth. Though Seth could have smiled and nodded and simply encouraged Bryan to keep going, he responded with surprising directness. As Bryan recalls, Seth said:

Bryan, there’s no Prince Charming in this story. There are no rescue boats. No one’s coming. Stop waiting to get picked.

On air and with tears in his eyes, Bryan shared how much Seth’s simple statement meant to him: “That just pierced my heart like no other, and in that moment, my whole point of view changed.”

What Seth said to Bryan is a good reminder for me, and maybe for you. Whether it’s about the state of our companies, the quality of the energy on a shift we’re working, or the state of the country around us, no one is coming to save us. It’s up to us. Take a chance. Lean in. Speak up. Big things might well come of it.

This understanding of small actions’ significance also shows up in academic settings as well.. Back in the winter of 1984, two years after we had opened the Deli, U of M professor Karl published a paper in American Psychologist. It highlighted what he called “the import of small wins”: 

By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. … Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win. When a solution is put in place, the next solvable problem often becomes more visible. This occurs because new allies bring new solutions with them and old opponents change their habits. Additional resources also flow toward winners, which means that slightly larger wins can be attempted.

Even within our own organizations, we often don’t realize how meaningful our work can be. A guest who runs a business of his own on the other side of the county shared with me how great a visit to Ann Arbor had been. He’d brought along his entire leadership team. To convey to his crew what ZCoB culture is about, he asked their server at the Roadhouse to share her story. She related that she’s been here for over 20 years. Aware that high turnover is typical in the food business, he asked her why she’d stayed so long. Knowing how quiet she usually is, I was curious to hear what she’d said. Her answer took my breath away: “Because I have agency.” It’s true. Here in the ZCoB, she really does have the power and authority to take action to improve her guests’ experiences. She doesn’t have to wait for a thumbs-up from on high. Her response is a great reminder that, awkward or uncomfortable as it may be to take action, the rest of us also have agency. If—and it’s a big if—we opt to use it, that is.

Take a chance Tuesday, or any day!

So, what can we do with these points about small actions’ big impact? Maybe we should take a cue from The Ark, Ann Arbor’s much-loved, longstanding folk music venue. It’s the home of “Take a Chance Tuesdays,” a series of performances by little-known acts. I like the idea of creating a little and maybe silly ritual to encourage people to take small, positive actions in the face of self-doubt. Perhaps every Tuesday, we all decide to take a chance on some small idea that we liked, one that self-doubt might well have led us to pass on. 

If you give this technique a try, let me know what happens. What you do might just end up changing the course of history. So take a chance, try something, get moving. Resistance, change, the future, starts with us. As Timothy Snyder says, “It is important to take action, even in a small way, every day.”

One more small thing to add to the story: When I’m deep in doubt and need some emotional backup for Timothy Snyder and adrienne maree brown, I like to call up a little humor to help stay centered. This line from the Dalai Lama makes me laugh:

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.

This originally appeared in the January/February edition of Zingerman’s News—check out the rest of the newsletter!