Why being the grit in the oyster hurts—and why it matters so much

The BBC recently ran a tribute to the late, great, British TV journalist Charles Wheeler. Predictably, the plaudits came thick and fast for a man of integrity, who applied his gift for communication that we might all be better informed. Amongst his many qualities was an innate curiosity and doggedness. He wasn’t a man to keep his head down, whatever the pressures to do so.

I was privileged at one time to have a senior colleague who was not unlike Wheeler in his ‘old school’ approach and regularly exercised his superbly developed talent for cutting through fashionable jargon and politicized tosh. Yet his polite requests for explanation or clarification rarely produced more than stony expressions and poorly disguised exasperation on the faces of the speakers. The subsequent silence was only broken by the scratching of a pen as it fought to find space for making another negative comment in his personal file. At his retirement send-off, he was described by his head of department as having been, for many years, the ‘grit in the oyster’.

Grit is uncomfortable and irritating. It’s also the source of a pearl. Not grit, no jewel. Read the full story

How do you know who you really are?

René Descartes, the French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and writer, known as the Father of Modern Philosophy, coined the phrase, “I think, therefore I am” (From the Latin: Cogito, ergo sum). Fast forward to today, and most people live according to a variation of this phrase: “I am whoever and whatever I think I am.”

On what basis are you who and what you think you are? Is it even true? Who is really pulling your strings?

Picture a mother-board or a system-board: the group of electronic bits and pieces that runs everything from cell phones to computers. It has numerous chips, circuits, nodes, diodes, and other small metal and plastic structures soldered to it which contain all the ‘working parts’ that allow an electronic device to function.

When you were born, your motherboard (your brain) had few of the necessary structures and working parts you need to function as an adult. So how did it happen that you now have all the thoughts, beliefs, world views, assumptions, expectations, inferences, biases, and most importantly, the values, that you use every day? Where did all your neural nodes, diodes and structures on the motherboard of your brain come from? Who installed your programming? Read the full story

Some thoughts about one of today’s fetishes: setting clear life and career goals.

The conventional wisdom is that we all need clear and challenging goals for our lives; that life without goals is leads to failure and dissatisfaction. I wonder if this is correct? After all, many people give up on the goals they have set themselves. From New Year’s resolutions to ‘new me’ decisions, it’s goal setting that seems to lead to failure more often than to success.

Why should this be? Why should people find that giving themselves something to aim at leads to being in a worse position than when they started? Setting goals seems to be such a simple process. You take a look at yourself, decide what you want to change most, think about how to get started, then do it. What is it that goes wrong?

Here are some thoughts about potential pitfalls. They don’t happen to everyone, but they are definitely common enough to be worth avoiding. Read the full story

When someone’s committed, it shows in the way they care and how deeply they are engaged — even at work

“Harmony Before Matrimony (Gillray 1805)
Wikimedia

What is a commitment? A commitment is an agreement that is (1) a fact demonstrated by observable and measurable behavior; and (2) an attitude that reflects a consistency and alignment in thought and belief.

For example, a committed relationship is one wherein your behavior demonstrates commitment in an operational and observable way and your thoughts and beliefs about the relationship are consistent with, and in alignment with, the notion of commitment. If you say you are in a committed relationship but never have time for your partner, that is not commitment.

If you spend 95% of your time with your partner, but are consistently wishing or wanting to be elsewhere, not sure if the relationship is the right one or fantasizing about being with another person or persons, that is not commitment.

Harmony is a state in which there is a tight alignment and congruence among what you say, feel, think and do. When one or more of these elements is not in alignment with the others, no one will experience harmony. What he or she will feel and experience is imbalance without real joy, happiness, meaning or purposefulness. In a state of imbalance, a person is moving drone-like though life at work, at home or at play. Consider those who consistently say they are unhappy at work, at home and at play. What’s most often lacking is commitment. Read the full story

Few people are as busy as those seeking to distract themselves from what really needs to be done

It’s easy to imagine that you are busy when all you are truthfully doing is attending to various social calls — especially when those activities can be indulged in without moving from your desk and computer. E-mails, instant messaging, and social web sites like Twitter all demand time and attention, and no other type of attention will do in our ‘instant world’ save the immediate kind.

For some time, I’ve made it my practice never to answer e-mails right away, unless they are so obviously urgent that nothing else will do. I’m not intending to be rude to those who contact me — quite the reverse — since my immediate response would have to be superficial and poorly considered. What I would have written right away and what I eventually write a day or so later are rarely even similar. The intervening period has allowed my mind time to take in what the other person wrote to me, mull it around, and produce something in return that is more worth reading.

Many writers on time management and productivity will urge you to check your e-mails and similar messages only at set times, rather than spending all day jumping to see what has arrived when the computer makes whatever noise signals a fresh e-mail. Few go the extra step and urge you not to reply until at least 24 hours have passed. But if refusing to break off whatever you are doing to read an e-mail when it arrives saves you from needless distraction, waiting a while to respond will often prevent you from writing what you may regret only a little while later. Read the full story