1 big thing: Spreading kindness

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🛒 Back to the grocery line

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Welcome back. Keep chatting with us at FinishLine@axios.com.

Smart Brevity™ count: 729 words ... 3 mins.

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Axios Finish Line

1 big thing: Our secret sauce for better communication

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☕ Coffee with Finish Line

Welcome back. Today's host is Axios CEO Jim VandeHei — he's at jim@axios.com.

Smart Brevity™ count: 492 words ... 2 mins.

1 big thing: Short, not shallow

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📸 Say cheese!

Welcome back. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei is at the helm today. Reach him at jim@axios.com.

Smart Brevity™ count: 458 words ... 2 mins.

1 big thing: Take care of middle managers

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📊 Stunning stat

Smart Brevity™ count: 436 words ... 2 mins.

1 big thing: The strength of your weak relationships

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📖 Reader wisdom

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Welcome back. Reach us at FinishLine@axios.com.

We're amazed by your response to our kindness series. Keep sending us your best stories about random acts of kindness — that you've done, witnessed or received — and we'll publish them as a recurring series.

Smart Brevity™ count: 449 words ... 2 mins.

 The greatest free gift you can give others — and yourself — is time. 

Why it matters: An easy, universally applicable way to deliver this gift is to just stop. Just stop sending hazy notes. Just stop hiding soggy thinking in a vomit of words. Just stop writing and talking for yourself.

💡 Our new book, "Smart Brevity," will help you sharpen and shorten how you write and talk. These tips will help you be heard — whether you're a student, parent, teacher, manager or leader: 

Tip 1: Stop being selfish! It is self-indulgent to force me to sort through hundreds of words to figure out what you're trying to tell me.

Long-windedness and meandering are fine in fiction and poetry — but terrible for daily life. 

Think about your audience — not yourself. 

Tip 2: Grab me! Before you write anything for Twitter — or text your boss or friend group — think about the most important thing you want them to know. Then distill it into one sentence.

The first sentence of anything you write should include the most essential info, using as few words as possible: Here is the one thing I need you to know. 

Tip 3: Write like a human! Most of us are fairly normal in conversation. But when we sit down to write, we try to sound like Walt Whitman or a Harvard professor. 

Authenticity and simplicity are huge winners in this era of noise. 

Stop using SAT words, or any word you would never use at a bar.

Showing off words makes people want to throw something at you — not admire you. 

Tip 4: Keep it simple! Short, tight words and sentences are always winners. Subject. Verb. Object.

You would never call a banana "an elongated yellow fruit," or say "prevaricate" when a friend is lying.

Tip 5: Just stop! Use as few words, sentences and paragraphs as possible. Then stop. 

Remember: The data shows you'll be lucky to keep your reader for 200 words. So why waste time?

The big picture: You can train your mind to think and communicate more crisply. Watch how your ideas start to stick — and get acted on — when you do.

📚 Get "Smart Brevity." Proceeds go to Axios newsroom fellowships for early-career journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

5 tips from "Smart Brevity": Short, not shallow

The greatest gift you can give others is time, by being brief.

Leadership

The greatest free gift you can give others — and yourself — is time. <ul><li>Why it matters: An easy, universally applicable way to deliver this gift is to just stop. Just stop sending hazy notes. Just stop hiding soggy thinking in a vomit of words. Just stop writing and talking for yourself.</li></ul>

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

 I had one speed when we launched Politico 15 years ago: fast and furious.

That was terrific for muscling a new brand into existence — but terrible for retaining talent. Soon, we were haunted by a reputation for being a sweatshop with an untenable burnout rate.

Why it matters: One speed for all circumstances is a crazy, reckless way to drive through life. We all need to learn to swerve away from running too hot or too cold, too often.

A little too hot or too cold is healthy: The extreme highs and lows can sharpen us, and open our minds to new ideas and emotions. 

But we make our worst, impulsive, foggy decisions when our emotional RPMs are always redlining. This is true in leadership, at work and in relationships. 

It took me 40 years to realize it — and the past decade to truly put it into practice. 

Instead, modulate — and moderate — your reactions in tense times. Here's how:

1. Be aware: Do a self-inventory of how you respond when stress or good times hit. Do you freak out or yell in bad moments? Do you suffer delusions of grandeur in good ones? 

2. Know thyself: Identify your triggers. In past jobs, I'd tend to lose it when people acted in a dishonest or lazy way. On the other hand, when someone shined at one thing, I tended to assume they'd rock at everything. In both cases, I've worked on calibrating my response. 

3. Tame thyself: You can't just muscle yourself into self-control or growth. You need to know specific things that give you calm or clarity. Mine are a mix of faith, meditation, daily exercise and self-appraisal. 

4. Practice good-times paranoia: This is particularly true in leadership — temper your optimism or self-love when things are rocking. Realize some of it is luck or good timing. Enjoy the moment, but be a little paranoid about how it happened — or how long it can last. 

5. Practice bad-times optimism: You learn the most about yourself and others when things go to crap. In the mud of life is where character blooms. So when a bad moment hits, see it as a great learning moment. 

As we told you in an earlier Finish Line: When shit happens, shine! 

The bottom line: Tiny fixes add up to big change.

In leadership, be like Goldilocks

It took me 40 years to realize it — and the past decade to truly put it into practice.

I had one speed when we launched Politico 15 years ago: fast and furious.<ul><li>That was terrific for muscling a new brand into existence — but terrible for retaining talent. Soon, we were haunted by a reputation for being a sweatshop with an untenable burnout rate.</li></ul>Why it matters: One speed for all circumstances is a crazy, reckless way to drive through life. We all need to learn to swerve away from running too hot or too cold, too often.

In the summer of 2004, hours before John Kerry's nomination speech at the Democratic convention, Washington Post political editor Maralee Schwartz gut-punched me with some brutal feedback.

I was covering Kerry for The Post. But she said I didn't write fast enough or think big enough to capture this historic moment. John Harris (a Post star who later co-founded Politico with us) got the call instead.

Why it matters: "Feedback is a gift," the management gurus say. But in my experience running two companies, it's a gift most don't truly want.

It's true at work and in relationships. Every time my wife gives me feedback, I respond defensively, telling her all the reasons I rock 😉. 

But learning to accept the gift with wisdom and humility is a superpower we all need. It's the gateway to growth.

Whether in a workplace or a relationship, feedback — honest, no-B.S. insight on what you could do better — is priceless. Too many people mess it up by talking instead of listening.

 Here's my blunt feedback about taking blunt feedback:

Listen! Don't make excuses or talk about the past. Actually, don't talk at all. Soak up, with self-confidence and humility, what the person is saying and take time before responding. When they're finished, you can say, "Good point" if you agree … or, "I hear you" if you want to think more about it. Or just: "Thank you." 

Assume positive intent. The selfish approach for the other person would be to suppress what they really think. If someone has the guts to be frank with you, embrace it and thank them. When Mike asks for critiques from people, he says: "I promise to take it in the spirit it's intended."

Don't be defensive. That's the worst response to helpful feedback. It makes the person giving it feel unheard — and less likely to shoot straight with you in the future.

Ask for it. You're more likely to get feedback if you ask peers or superiors — in a sincere, humble, open-minded way — how you could be more effective. That projects strength, not weakness. 

Act on it. If you show you're responsive, you’ll get more input. And you’ll get better at life and on the job. 

Case in point: Often when you're giving a face-to-face review, people will validate and vindicate areas of weakness in the written eval.

"Jim doesn’t listen" or "Jim makes too many excuses" or "Jim doesn’t welcome constructive criticism."

If I then start excuse-peddling or butt-covering, I've kind of made their point.  

The bottom line: Life is about forward motion. Elicit and take feedback to make your personal and professional performance tomorrow better than today.

How to take feedback

"Feedback is a gift," the management gurus say. But it's a gift most don’t truly want.

Our secret sauce for better communication

Organizations are blowing the chance to retool their communications for this era of distraction.

Our new book, &quot;<a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Smart Brevity" data-vars-click-url="https://smartbrevity.com/" data-vars-content-id="feb446b5-164e-459b-ad35-59354cd8a33a" data-vars-headline="Our secret sauce for better communication" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://smartbrevity.com/" target="_blank">Smart Brevity</a>,&quot; lays out what the data, science — and our own experience — show about how to be heard on what matters most to you.Why it matters: We see, up close, how many people and organizations are blowing the chance to retool their communications for this era of distraction.

Business leaders everywhere are scrambling to reverse work-from-anywhere policies. At Axios, we are not: We are all-in on allowing everyone to work where they choose. 

Why it matters: This approach is not without controversy and complications, so I wanted to share this rethinking of work and lifestyle.

🖼️ The big picture: I have talked with dozens of CEOs and hundreds of workers about this raging debate. 

The CEOs privately say they are convinced that with work from home, productivity dips, culture softens, creativity wanes and a few but not inconsequential number of employees will get paid to do yoga and chill.

The workers retort: This is nonsense. Most adults are fully capable of working better without time-sucking commutes and noisy, distraction-filled offices. Sure, they might exercise more or take breaks at home, but that ultimately makes them better employees. 

🧠 Between the lines: I do worry about two big risks of working from anywhere: 

Younger workers benefit more than they realize from being in the trenches, in person, grappling with tough, teaching moments. There is a magic in human interaction. 

It is way harder to create strong emotional bonds with colleagues and your company from your couch. People stay in jobs and thrive when they feel tight connections. 

Here are four steps Axios takes to mitigate the risk: 

Hire self-motivated, driven people. You need to screen hard for those who naturally blend work with life, motivated by passion for their craft, not money or rules. Clock-punchers or check-cashers are very problematic in a WFH world. 

Create new human interactions. We take the money reserved for office space and spend it on company retreats, team off-sites, and regional and local meetups. We encourage employees in the same city, regardless of their job, to get together at a bar or for coffee. 

Communicate until you annoy yourself. A good CEO or manager should be writing to — or Zooming with — their teams at least weekly and ideally more to amplify the purpose, the strategy, the goals, the common pursuit. This is more than most employees ever got when everyone was in person. We created software — called HQ — to do this easily and effectively. 

Create new performance measurements. Each of our leaders is in the process of coming up with better data to make sure everyone is doing the right thing, in the right order, at the right speed. The bigger you are, the more important this is. We will share it with staff so they know the expectations — and how to beat them — at home 😃. 

Every employee needs to know that with great freedom comes great responsibility. If you work from home, the more you see colleagues in person, the better. The more you connect by something other than text, the better. 

My personal view is that if you are lucky enough to live near a physical office, use it. I go in every day I am in town. 

If you are not near an office, force yourself to connect with others often and consistently, on the phone or Zoom.

The bottom line: I am big on living in the world we have, not wish we had. The truth is people moved away, started new lives and habits, and often have a lot of choices where to work. 

It's our job to tap into this and turn it into the best virtual, dispersed workplace ever.

A work-from-anywhere blueprint

We are all-in on allowing everyone to work where they choose.

Remote work

Jobs

Business leaders everywhere are scrambling to reverse work-from-anywhere policies. At Axios, we are not: We are all-in on allowing everyone to work where they choose. Why it matters: This approach is not without controversy and complications, so I wanted to share this rethinking of work and lifestyle.

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5 tips from "Smart Brevity": Short, not shallow

Our secret sauce for better communication

In leadership, be like Goldilocks

A work-from-anywhere blueprint

How to take feedback

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🏁 Axios Finish Line: Be heard

🏁 Axios Finish Line: Middle manager misery

🏁 Axios Finish Line: Strong weak ties

🏁 Axios Finish Line: Spreading kindness

🏁 Axios Finish Line: Our secret sauce