Nobody Roots For A Topic

An electric motorcycle went past me on a county road, made almost no sound, and I had no feelings about it at all.

Which is strange, because I have every qualification for caring. I love motorcycles. I love the craft of them, the stubbornness of the people who build them, the way a good one is a hundred arguments settled in metal. Anything with two wheels gets my attention at a stoplight. Electric ones got a nod and nothing more.

Then I bought stock in LiveWire.

Suddenly I was reading range specs at night. I had opinions about charging infrastructure in states I have never ridden through. (Nobody asked for those opinions, and yet.) The bikes had not changed. The engineering did not improve between Tuesday and Thursday. I had simply acquired the ability to be wrong about them.

That is the part I keep turning over. It was not ownership, and it was not really the money. It was that the subject now had a scoreboard and I was standing on one side of it. Before, electric motorcycles were a topic. A topic is something you hold opinions about the way you hold a menu. After, they were a position, and a position stares back.

Love of the craft did not do it. Proximity did not do it. Years of riding did not do it. It took something I could lose.

So when we ask what our people have at stake, we go to the wallet first, and when the wallet does not explain it we reach for the next familiar thing… a promotion, a title, the jump to the bigger role. All of that describes what somebody wants. Wanting is not stake. Wanting is still the menu.

Stake is having a side. It is having said a thing out loud that the next ninety days will either confirm or embarrass.

Most jobs are excellent at handing out responsibility and terrible at handing out exposure. You own the launch. Nobody will ever publicly establish whether you were right. The number lands, the quarter closes, the deck gets replaced by a newer deck, and your judgment goes unscored. That is not safety. That is the menu again, printed on nicer paper.

The work of leading is not discovering what each person secretly loves. It is making sure each person has something on the table with their name on it, early enough that being wrong survivable, and visible enough that being right counts for something.

It is the same reason a champion is not a customer who likes you. A champion is a customer who said, in a room with their boss in it, that this would work. They have a side now. That is why they answer your email in February when nothing is on fire.

Somebody asked me in an interview recently what I actually want out of work, and what came out was that I want something I am excited to tell my girls about at the end of the day. I said it like it was a reward. It is not. It is an audience… it means there is a table where I could show up with nothing to say, and they would notice. That’s stake in the work.

Stay Positive & Don’t Hate The Topic, Find Your Stake