Choking on a hairball by Steve Lance

For many years, I was a terrible manager. People who worked for me loved me—and many remain friends to this day. People I worked for had a love/hate relationship with me—and some I remain friends with to this day. But I always struggled with the complexities of being a senior manager. I could delegate. I could let the people I hired do their job. But I could never separate one problem from the next. I’d be thinking about an upcoming assignment, which would get me thinking about another project we were working on, which would get me…well, you get the picture.

It wasn’t until I partnered with the late Paul Kurnit that I got called out on my management style. The first time we were reviewing an upcoming assignment, halfway through, I started talking about something completely different. He let me go on for a bit and then said, “Steve, you’re choking on a hairball.” I stopped. Puzzled. He went on. “You keep piling one project on top of another on top of a completely different problem. You’ll never be able to get anything done. Stop. Make a list and prioritize, and keep the problems separate.”

Many of us are choking on a hairball called Donald Trump. He’s been doing so many unpleasant, illegal, and unconstitutional activities that he is making all of us nuts—and we don’t even know where to start.

Take a lesson from Black freedom fighters in the 60s. Each faction picked its battle(s). The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King? Yes, he made magnificent, broad speeches about freedom for Black Americans—but his “boots on the ground” tactics were targeted, specific actions. The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Birmingham Campaign. The March to Selma. Meanwhile, the NAACP and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) led lunch counter sit-ins, voter registration initiatives, and Freedom Riders.

As my late business partner said, “Stop it!” Stop behaving like Chicken Little (“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”) and ask yourself, “What is the single action Donald Trump has taken that I want to reverse or end?” Is it cutting funding to public television and radio? Is it letting masked, unidentified ICE officers raid and arrest non-violent, innocent people of color? And break that down into even smaller bites. Is it the fact that they are masked and unidentified, or is it the fact that they are raiding workplaces, or is it the fact that they are detaining people?

Do you see where I’m going with this? Running around protesting everything Donald Trump is doing (or has done) is an unfocused, amorphous exercise. Reverend Dr. King knew the importance of mass rallies, but he also did boots-on-the-ground work, as well. Find one thing that matters to you more than anything else—or, better yet, one thing you believe you can make a difference in—and pick up the banner of that issue.

Is there a lawsuit that’s been filed to stop a Trump action? Go to that website (everyone and everything has a website these days, or at least a Facebook page) and make a donation. Or reach out to the organizers and ask how you can help. Or pick an issue, a cause, or a victim that doesn’t have an organized resistance and get that page started yourself! I’m focused on the environment. While I’ve always been a regular donor to the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), I increased my donations and respond to their alerts and appeals.

Back in my corporate days, we used to mock all the managers who kept making small, seemingly meaningless changes to our writing. We’d say, “I’m not getting eaten alive by sharks, I’m being nibbled to death by ducks.” Either way, you end up dead.

Lingchi—the ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’—originated in China around the year 900. Its purpose was not just to punish someone but to rob the victim of a peaceful death. Small cuts were inflicted on the victim over the course of days until they died of, well, take your pick. Blood loss. Shock. Exhaustion. It was so cruel but so effective that it remained an official form of punishment for almost 1000 years! It’s time we turned the tables and inflicted those cuts on this administration.

Be one of the Thousand Cuts nipping away at Donald Trump’s regime. And don’t stop until you’ve hounded him—and all his co-conspirators and enablers—all the way out of office.