Thoughts on bravery from a (partially) confirmed coward

Photo: qmnonic via Flickr

The past few months of work, health and renovation struggles have been ones I’ll be more than eager to wave goodbye when the ‘Better Be Great 2008′ year rolls to an end. One thing I have learned this year throughout all of the trials and tribulations, is that I veer more wildly than Britney Spears on the road to Starbucks when it comes to being brave.

When forced to deal with relatively minor things, I’ve got less backbone than a rubber chicken. For instance, a local arts journalists invited me to come over and meet her in person when visiting her workplace to pick up some CDs for reviewing. And yet, when I got there, the reception area was unattended and the distant sounds of a busy bunch of people working behind the partition was clearly evident. The desk had that standard little bell thingy to summon up the receptionist, but I have never, ever dinged a reception bell. I’m always afraid that when the person arrives and realises that it is merely me, their annoyance and disappointment in my assumption that I thought I was important enough to ding a bell for service would be too crushing to bear.

On the other hand, I can fight like a taunted Tasmanian devil if my job/career path/ability to pay a share of the mortgage/reputation is unfairly threatened. To be able to confidently yell down a phone, “I don’t give a FAT RAT’S CLACKER what your boss is going to think about the inconvenience of setting things right!” immediately transcends any fear I might have had when warily picking up the receiver with a squeaked-out “hellooooo?” Read the full story

Why looking back is a pointless and emotionally corrosive exercise

Most of us have a weakness for looking back and wondering what might have been. ‘Buyer’s Remorse‘ doesn’t just apply to purchases. It’s just as common for people to decide on one path, then spend time imagining what might have happened if they had chosen the other one. This doesn’t just waste time and energy on what cannot be changed; it tempts you into risky and questionable actions aimed at ‘putting things right’ or ‘getting the best of both worlds.’

It’s easy to rationalize a belief that what you didn’t do was bound to have turned out in a specific way. We all know that the future rarely turns out as we expected — our human ability to forecast what will happen (and how we will feel about it when it does) is minimal. Applying the same faulty forecasting and wishful thinking to past event to decide how they would have proceeded, if only Smith hadn’t made that error or our own cowardice blocked the way, is just as bad.

There’s no way you can know what would have happened — not even by looking at what did. There’s enough randomness in events to ensure that, even if you could rewind time and replay the past from the same starting point, the outcome might prove to be quite different. Read the full story

Is the best way to find meaning at work to stop looking for it?

Peace with pointlessness — maybe the best way of dealing with pointlessness at work is not to worry too much about it. That’s the provocative message from an article by Lucy Kellaway of the The Financial Times and the BBC, based on a talk she gave on British radio (” The best way to find meaning at work? Don’t look for it”).

“It pays the mortgage and gets you up in the morning, but these days workers want more from a job — they want meaning. Just don’t go looking for it,” she begins. Why not? This is her answer: “. . . we are in the middle of an epidemic of meaninglessness at work. Bankers, lawyers, and senior managers are increasingly asking themselves what on earth their jobs mean, and finding it hard to come up with an answer.”

And if that sounds glum, try this:

“This doesn’t mean that ambition is a mistake; it is just that there is no magic to advancement per se. The status and the money go up, but that’s it. And then, beset by affluence and by introspection we start to demand that our work has a larger meaning. This almost always ends badly: meaning is a bit like happiness — the more you go out looking for it the less you find.”

Read the full story

Six Ways to Boost Your Long-term Prospects for Success and Happiness, Starting Today

Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri (www.i-pix.it)

The US government is giving away millions of dollars in handouts in an attempt to stimulate economic activity. Fine. We all like to get money from Uncle Sam, but even a handout on this scale cannot provide more than a temporary sense of satisfaction. What each of us needs is to put together our own, long-term stimulus package, made up of actions that will add to our potential for enjoying life far into the future.

Here are six suggestions to include in your personal ’stimulus package’ — six simple ways boost your prospects for career success, enjoyment of life, and personal happiness.

1. Long-term success and satisfaction are nearly always best found in doing work that you love. It’s not always easy to discover what that may be, but it’s well worth the effort to try. Take the time to think about what is most enjoyable in your life; what you look forward to in whatever you do today; and what you maybe day-dream about doing, if only it were possible. Then make a firm effort to find ways to incorporate as many of these sources of enjoyment as possible into your life on a regular basis; some through work, some through things outside of work. If nothing succeeds like success, nothing produces success like loving what you do.
2. Many platitudes have been wasted on looking for greater satisfaction from your life. I suspect the best answer is the simplest: you’ll get most satisfaction from spending your time on things that make you feel good about yourself and what you have produced. Giving the quality of your life a boost will raise your spirits and improve your well-being. And quality of life doesn’t always depend on money. Sometimes the richest people have lives full of wealth, yet seriously deficient in true quality. Real quality of life comes from living according to your deepest values. Do that and you cannot go far wrong.
3. Your mind is a precious asset that needs stimulus to keep it vibrant and alive. If you let it become slack or dull, you cannot hope to be happy and successful. Your personal stimulus package should therefore contain ways to keep your mind alert and your thinking fresh and powerful. Reading is one of the best approaches, along with learning additional skills and adding to your knowledge on any topic that interests you. Don’t just enjoy things passively; get involved, research, explore, become a minor expert. If you find yourself slumped in front of the television, numbing your brain with the mental equivalent of the worst junk food, get off your butt and start giving that mind a work-out. Few things will pay you back more handsomely.
4. In your package, you should also include ways to stimulate your creativity. Ask questions. Try new things. Explore the unknown. Challenge yourself to come up with your own answers, instead of accepting what others tell you, no matter how expert they are or how much authority they are said to have. The truth can stand up to any amount of challenge, while half-truths, myths, and downright deceptions will all crumble sooner or later.
5. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that physical fitness plays a major role in personal well-being. You don’t have to become a fitness fanatic, or spend hours at the gym. Just get sufficient exercise appropriate to your age and circumstances; add enough sleep (many people are chronically sleep-deprived); and don’t make your physical state worse through drink, drugs, or constantly over-eating.
6. Last, but far from least, slow down and make time for the little things of life than can transform any day. Take the time to admire the beauty all around you. Spend quality time with friends and loved ones. Learn to appreciate art, or music, or nature. Make something beautiful. No life can be satisfying if it is lived in such a headlong rush that you are scarcely able to notice what happens between waking up and falling back into bed, exhausted, at the end of the day. Are you in such a hurry to meet death that you cannot spare time while you are alive to enjoy to the full whatever life has to offer you?

There you are. Six simple elements of a stimulus package you can give yourself — a package that will provide a massive, long-term boost to your life, success, and career satisfaction. What better way could there be to beat today’s economic gloom?

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Much of today’s anxiety comes from the belief that there is a right answer to be found for every question.

‘The Last Judgment’ by Hans Memling
Wikimedia Commons

You hear it on all sides: people asking themselves, again and again, “What do I do now?” The question isn’t the problem; it’s the feeling that, somewhere, there has to be a single, right answer — and that you ought to know what it is.

There have been many articles pointing out the down-sides of perfectionism: from a pervasive sense of low self-worth, because you didn’t manage a perfect job, to repeated nagging of others to produce the perfect piece of work you have in your mind. Yet perfectionism isn’t, I believe, the major difficulty people face. Most of us can easily accept that we aren’t perfect, and never will be.

Belief in one right answer

What eats away at the back of the mind is the belief that there’s a right answer to every difficulty and we ought to know what it is.

Management’s cry of, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me answers” is the most obvious version of this insidious belief; a statement superficial to the point of silliness — and totally self-indulgent.

We would all like others to bring us nothing but answers to our difficulties. Of course we don’t want to hear about problems we haven’t yet found for ourselves. But the world isn’t like that, for all our bluster. The truth is simple: many problems don’t have answers — or, if they do, no one knows what they are.

Sometimes, it seems, any answer will do

Mankind has always tried to make more sense of the world than it actually presents. From myths to folk-beliefs, history is full of attempts to find simple answers to what worries or frightens us.

Storms can be both terrifying and dangerous; it must be angry gods throwing their weight about, so pray or offer sacrifices to them. Some people are luckier than others; they must have someone, or something, helping them, like a god or guardian angel. The innocent suffer sickness or disaster; there must be a reason in their past to make sense of the “punishment” they are suffering — they are paying for the sins of their ancestors or former lives.

Science itself is not free from this way of thinking. One of the strongest motivations behind much research is the belief that there must be a logical reason for everything we observe. Given enough time and effort, we will surely find what it may be.

People and ambiguity

People hate ambiguity and fear uncertainty. They long for clear, comprehensible answers; not more unintelligible questions and random observations. They pay lip-service to the idea that many things in this world happen randomly, but don’t want to believe it, so they try to find reasons for everything. And, since most prefer simplicity to complexity, they look for easy answers, however complex the question.

Want to prosper in this life? Just believe it strongly enough and it will happen. That’s “the secret” being sold on various web sites. Want to be the kind of leader who gets results? The answer’s simple: just demand them from your subordinates. Hell, it beats thinking and maybe accepting that neither you, nor anyone else, can produce what you are seeking.

Doing the best you can

In many ways, there is a simple answer to just about every problem: you do the best you can with what you have.

I’m not suggesting you don’t try to find an answer, if one exists, or seek new ways of doing things. If you’re a scientist — or have a bent that way — doing the best you can may mean precisely that.

What I am suggesting is that the belief that there must be an answer, and we ought to know what it is, is a false belief. There may be no answer. There’s certainly no guilt in not knowing what it is, especially if no one else knows either.

Go easy on yourself — and everyone else too

Once you accept that doing the best you can is all that is required, you are freed from most of the guilt and anxiety that goes with expecting a “right answer” to be available. You are no longer tempted into the self-righteousness some show as they try to force their chosen answer on everyone else. It’s hard to be a bully, a martinet, or an over-demanding boss, if you accept that people cannot rationally be expected to do more than one thing — to keep trying to do their best in the circumstances.

Best of all, realizing this prevents you from turning into the kind of insensitive, endlessly-demanding, thoughtless bastard that seems to be the role model for all too many leaders today. If all you do is ask people to do the best they can, you can stand alongside them, helping and encouraging, instead of setting yourself above them to pass judgment on their failings, while you yell for more answers.

So go easy on yourself, and everyone else. Do the best you can with what you have and be content with that. In reality, you have no other option, saving giving up — or running around in a froth of yelling and shouting for an answer that isn’t there.

The plain truth is that it’s up to us to handle our world, whether in our workplaces or anywhere else. If you give up the belief that there’s a right answer always there to be found, you can stop wasting energy beating up on yourself or others when you don’t find it.

Who knows? Maybe some of that saved energy will allow you to get closer to the only practical solution there is for the problems that matter most: to go on doing the best you can with whatever you have — and hoping it will be enough.

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