For this month’s event, Brett Buchanan from Pathfinder Product delivered a talk inspired by Jonah Hill and the documentary he directed centered on his friend and therapist, Phil Stutz. The inspiration for the talk was Stutz’s thesis that, in life, we are never free from pain, uncertainty, and constant work. If you have some pain (physical, psychological, emotional, or some other form that it pains me to say I cannot think of at the moment) and you address it, well, it just gets backfilled by some other pain. The same goes for uncertainty. And for work! Brett realized that this applies to businesses, as well as to our professional lives, as much as it applies to our outside-work world.

Step 1 is to recognize that. But, step 2—the gist of the evening’s talk—was that the way to keep this reality from forcing us to operate at indefinitely sustained levels of high stress is to bring a relentless focus to our work. At a high level, that “just” means figuring out what really matters (to you, to your organization) and then aggressively prioritizing the things that impact that (and let things that don’t impact that fall by the wayside). Going a level deeper, Brett walked through examples of organizations—Uber, CarNext, and Gap—and how they have applied this idea. He provided a useful way of framing a lot of buzzy/popular business management tools—north star metrics, OKRs, business process mapping—through this lens: applying them as a tool to gain that focus.

Do we have the slides? You can be certain that we do!

And does it pain you to ask if there are photos of the evening? No need! The posting of those flowed through our constant work pipeline and are available for your perusal should you wish.