For the sake of argument - and probably everyone thinks they are anyway - but let’s say you are a hard worker, you know your stuff, and you are highly motivated. Mainly, you deliver. But in spite of this, some boneheads still treat you like you’re Otis, the Mayberry town drunk (from the Andy Griffith Show.)
It doesn’t matter if we are talking about work, school, a social club or a church group. You prepare yourself, get educated about the work you do, have good experiences, and think you really know your stuff. One day a project comes your way that is right up your ally and it excites you so you dig into it.
This particular project, hypothetically of course, mostly affects other people that you are assisting. You jump on the problem, make contact with those who are involved directly in the issue, research the situation and then go out and show initiative by coming up with a real good potential solution and then go one step further and take steps to get the problem solved. Are you with me? Basically you see a problem, feel you are uniquely qualified to get it fixed, dive in, come up with a solution, and even start putting into place things that will fix it. Initiative, I think it’s called.
Since we all have someone that is the boss of us in every area of our life, this person at some point or other shows up on the scene. Our “solution” also affects them and maybe even more directly than it affects us. They want to be briefed on what’s up. So you brief them and tell them what you’ve done and the initial steps you’ve taken to solve this problem. As you do your update, the boss of us starts peppering you with questions about details of what you’ve done. You start getting nervous wondering what they are really after. So you restate the facts succinctly and end by explaining that you feel really good about what you’ve done and that you think you’ve come up with a real good solution. Then the boss of us asks a couple of questions you’ve already answered. This is starting to get irritating so you dig your feet in and reiterate what a great solution you think you’ve come up with.
The boss of us still seems unsatisfied with what you’ve done and asks you to compile some of the data involved with the project and look into some other aspects of this problem. Then they tell you they want to see some comparative information about how others are dealing with the same issues so we can verify you are on the right track. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh! When the boss of us leaves, you are irritated that you didn’t have all the information at your fingertips they wanted, you are frustrated that you maybe didn’t communicate it all a little better, and you mostly are just ticked off because you feel you just got jerked around and you don’t know why. In a nutshell you are a little angry and a little confused, to say the least.
This is all theoretical of course. It would never happen in real life.
When this happens all you can do is “stand and deliver”, like the movie title says.
Anyone risks making a bad impression because of failure to understand what is expected. For example, usually an inexperienced newcomer is not expected to make major decisions and change the direction of an organization. As a newcomer, a person usually does what the boss over them wants them to do. In this situation, if you want to make an impression, do what “the boss” wants done and tells you to do. Focus on collecting the applicable information on an assignment or an issue and presenting it in a way that an important decision can be made. Usually you won’t want to try and make decisions yourself or solve problems independently.
The flip side of this might be the situation when you have a lot of experience and are expected to make decisions and facilitate changes in an organization. The boss of you might be expecting you to solve problems and take appropriate action on your own and when necessary. In this instance, if you want to make an impression, you shouldn’t be bouncing every detail off the boss of you and asking others what you should do. Focus on the decision making process, make good decisions, and know how and when to present updates to the boss of you.
It really is all about service, isn’t it? The same principles that go into providing service to an outside person or group apply to how you provide service to those inside your group. With outsiders you have to manage expectations, so also with those inside. Any organization that produces a service that nobody wants is not going to have a purpose in life for long.
I will sum this up succinctly with the aforementioned movie title: stand and deliver. Deliver the bosses of you what they want, not what you want them to have, and while you do it, stand up and be confident and deliver the right thing for the circumstances.
The inability to figure out and then deliver what is expected is a byproduct of many things but the reasons are irrelevant because they still lead to “personal need” suicide or at the very least ruin your peace of mind. Shrinks attribute our helplessness in failing to understand expectations to part anxiety and part erroneous assumptions about productivity as the following examples illustrate. (I lifted them from a shrink handbook and put them into english):
Fear of failure can be real and causes us to not deliver correctly because we don’t want to look stupid. Wouldn’t we all rather be thought of as non-motivated rather than lacking in ability? Revealing as this is, looking back on school, I’d much rather someone think I didn’t study hard or long enough on a test than to think I needed some tutoring or extra help. We create defense mechanisms to avoid this tendency. Instead try to overcome it by simply being aware of it and avoiding the defensive behaviors. After all, now that you know we are onto you, being defensive isn’t very fun anymore.
Perfectionism is a great excuse to do whatever we feel like isn’t it? I know well that most perfectionists do so out of insecurity. (Oh no, what is everybody going to think of me saying that?) But we have to get over our insecurity if we truly want to do our best in every circumstance. We overcome it by taking measures to know beforehand what the expectations are in a situation and then focus on delivering them rather than critiquing expectations downward. You’ll have to think about the last part of that for awhile before you get it.
Self-control is the opposite of perfectionism (which is all about control.) If we are impulsive and lack discipline, I love unclear expectations. (I mean we love unclear expectations.) This allows us to ebb and flow wherever we want in or around assignments or projects or issues and never quite deliver exactly what is wanted or needed. What is needed in this situation is focus and self-discipline to do what is wanted.
False beliefs about what is wanted and needed can limit us. Couple this with false beliefs about what we can and do deliver will result in frustration and confusion. Finding out the expectations and being aware of the quality of our delivery will help us through this.
Sometimes we just enjoy the adrenaline rush of moving like a bull through a china closet. This is the roller coaster methodology and let’s face it some have a wicked joy in approaching life and work in this manner. Sometimes you will deliver in this manner but sometimes you won’t. It’s hit and miss many times because nobody catches up with you until you are a mile down the road. Either way you’ve left an indelible mark. Usually and fortunately this tendency will be beaten out of you soon on your journey through life.
Sometimes we are just being human which means we go to extremes to avoid being bored or to tackle the difficult. Whatever our reasoning, just like service, we have to get over all of it and deliver regardless of the consequences. We just have to.
Key to the whole point – as I see it:
Forget about your internal evaluation of how good you are. There is a time and a place for that (like a personal journal) but it’s not good to do in the heat of battle. Pay attention instead to what is really wanted and what is really expected. Many times the task at hand requires far less skills than we might have. Just because we can do something or are capable of doing something doesn’t mean we always need to do things at that high level.
Sometimes we need to be in touch with the realities of our organization and adapt our responses accordingly. We may be the most capable person on earth but if that is out of touch with what is needed or expected, it will be irrelevant and work against your success.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you realized this after the fact, sit down with the boss of you and inventory the things you should pay attention to and the things that are truly needed from you. As far as I know, Otis, the Mayberry town drunk was the most likable guy on the planet but he never seemed to deliver anything and could seldom stand up. It wasn’t Andy's and Barney’s fault. It was Otis’.
My Procrastination Endpoint: Between books, chapters, pages and words... Between projects, chores, goals, expectations and living ... I end up here.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Forbidden Knowledge
Some things you are better off not knowing. If possible. Let’s call it forbidden knowledge. But in spite of knowing this, curiosity, loose lips, or having to know because of your job can place this information in your brain anyway. And then you have to deal with it. For example: I know what I make compared to some other people. Conversely I know how much I do compared to others. They don’t match. Sometimes they aren’t even on the same continent.
Having forbidden knowledge can eat you up. I’ve been there, done that, seen it up close and personal. Some get over it. Others don’t. It can be very upsetting when you find out someone less deserving is getting bigger rewards and more blessings. The more you think about these situations the more upset you get. It can keep you up at nights and distract you by day – maybe more than any other thing on earth.
To depersonalize the whole thing, let me tell you about two people I know. They both went into the same line of work. They sold drugs for one of the largest drug companies in the world. One sold a line of a dozen drugs for things like depression, asthma, and migraines. Whenever I saw him he always asked me if I needed anything. Yeah, right. I always gave him a list and never got me anything. He had been in the business and done well for a decade or so. The other person had only been doing this for about four or five years and sold a small line of oncology drugs; the ones for chemotherapy and cancer treatments. Both were paid salary plus bonuses based on sales volume. The first made a bigger salary but the second more than made up for it on bonuses.
I was with both of these folks when this revelation came to light and the one who’d been in the biz the longest almost blew a vein out the side of his neck. I probably talk to these folks four times a year and over the next month I spoke to the freaked out friend at least that many times. He was completely traumatized and tormented that the other friend was making so much. It ate and ate away at him and made him more and more frustrated. It was obvious to me that greed and envy are a real bad-boy combination!
The only advice I could come up with for my self-destructing friend was that he had to get a grip on understanding the forces at work on him; the forces that were invading his thoughts and destroying his happy place (the place with unicycles and little people.) Before the forbidden knowledge came to light, everything was fine. But once it surfaced, apparently my friend's compass was broken and had been broken and was pointed toward greed rather than thankfulness that he is able to do what he does and make what he made (which was not too shabby.) Both of them should have had pity on me, the poor public servant. The pain he was feeling ought to have been an indicator to him that he was off course.
This brings me to my point. Greed is a weed.
Weeds are considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome (except in the wacky world of zeriscaping), especially when they grow where they are not wanted.
Greed is undesirable, unattractive, and troublesome, especially when it appears where it is least needed. Greed is a weed.
Greed is a great big morning glory weed and if we don’t kill it, it will take over. Killing it, like morning glory you might know, can be tricky. It takes skill and perseverance. Until we kill it, though, greed makes us think we can’t move on unless or until we get what we want. In fact, it can make us think we want even more than we really do. Sometimes it can even trick us to thinking we can have whatever we want, even if it isn’t right for us.
I’m sure everyone caught the news story about the man and his sister who stopped at a McDonald’s in California while they were doing their Monopoly promotion? I think how it worked was you peel off something from your drink cup and you win stuff. I’m not exactly sure because I only go there to get the Happy Meals with Superheroes for my good-guy grandsons. In any event, somehow there are things you can win.
Well, this man in California peeled off his sticker and won $1,000 a week for the rest of his life. Not too shabby; $50,000 a year for as long as you live. What could be the problem? Nothing, of course, unless you worked for McDonald’s and you and your immediate family were thus ineligible. Well, guess what? He did and they were.
He and his sister hatched a plan though. He would give the ticket to his girlfriend and have her cash it in. The arrangement he brokered with her was that she would turn in the prize sticker and they’d share half of the winnings each. You can probably already guess the end of this story even if you didn’t read it. For six years it worked out fine to the tune of $330,409. But eventually they had a fight and were not getting along about something and the guy got ratted out. Ah, true love. What a beautiful story. Tale as old as time. The payments were, of course, stopped. And there was the pesky firing (why he stayed employed at McDonald’s is beyond me) and the court case to collect the winnings back.
Clearly greed got the best of this person and his friend and the sister. It trapped them and as the Greeks say, “Greed is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become.” True dat.
Key to the whole point – as I see it:
You’ve seen the oldie-but-goodie comedy routine where a man shows his doctor that every time he raises his arm in this unusual position, he gets a sharp pain. The doctor’s suggestion, “Don’t do that any more.” The point of the skit is that if something hurts, stop doing it.
Like with my friend, he just needed to suck it up and realize there is nothing he could do to change the fact that oncological drugs have a higher markup and are in more demand than his stuff. That’s life, dude. Get over it. If he focused more on his own great job and the good living he was making, he’d be much better off and would probably enjoy the time he spends out by his very nice swimming pool much more.
Having forbidden knowledge can eat you up. I’ve been there, done that, seen it up close and personal. Some get over it. Others don’t. It can be very upsetting when you find out someone less deserving is getting bigger rewards and more blessings. The more you think about these situations the more upset you get. It can keep you up at nights and distract you by day – maybe more than any other thing on earth.
To depersonalize the whole thing, let me tell you about two people I know. They both went into the same line of work. They sold drugs for one of the largest drug companies in the world. One sold a line of a dozen drugs for things like depression, asthma, and migraines. Whenever I saw him he always asked me if I needed anything. Yeah, right. I always gave him a list and never got me anything. He had been in the business and done well for a decade or so. The other person had only been doing this for about four or five years and sold a small line of oncology drugs; the ones for chemotherapy and cancer treatments. Both were paid salary plus bonuses based on sales volume. The first made a bigger salary but the second more than made up for it on bonuses.
I was with both of these folks when this revelation came to light and the one who’d been in the biz the longest almost blew a vein out the side of his neck. I probably talk to these folks four times a year and over the next month I spoke to the freaked out friend at least that many times. He was completely traumatized and tormented that the other friend was making so much. It ate and ate away at him and made him more and more frustrated. It was obvious to me that greed and envy are a real bad-boy combination!
The only advice I could come up with for my self-destructing friend was that he had to get a grip on understanding the forces at work on him; the forces that were invading his thoughts and destroying his happy place (the place with unicycles and little people.) Before the forbidden knowledge came to light, everything was fine. But once it surfaced, apparently my friend's compass was broken and had been broken and was pointed toward greed rather than thankfulness that he is able to do what he does and make what he made (which was not too shabby.) Both of them should have had pity on me, the poor public servant. The pain he was feeling ought to have been an indicator to him that he was off course.
This brings me to my point. Greed is a weed.
Weeds are considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome (except in the wacky world of zeriscaping), especially when they grow where they are not wanted.
Greed is undesirable, unattractive, and troublesome, especially when it appears where it is least needed. Greed is a weed.
Greed is a great big morning glory weed and if we don’t kill it, it will take over. Killing it, like morning glory you might know, can be tricky. It takes skill and perseverance. Until we kill it, though, greed makes us think we can’t move on unless or until we get what we want. In fact, it can make us think we want even more than we really do. Sometimes it can even trick us to thinking we can have whatever we want, even if it isn’t right for us.
I’m sure everyone caught the news story about the man and his sister who stopped at a McDonald’s in California while they were doing their Monopoly promotion? I think how it worked was you peel off something from your drink cup and you win stuff. I’m not exactly sure because I only go there to get the Happy Meals with Superheroes for my good-guy grandsons. In any event, somehow there are things you can win.
Well, this man in California peeled off his sticker and won $1,000 a week for the rest of his life. Not too shabby; $50,000 a year for as long as you live. What could be the problem? Nothing, of course, unless you worked for McDonald’s and you and your immediate family were thus ineligible. Well, guess what? He did and they were.
He and his sister hatched a plan though. He would give the ticket to his girlfriend and have her cash it in. The arrangement he brokered with her was that she would turn in the prize sticker and they’d share half of the winnings each. You can probably already guess the end of this story even if you didn’t read it. For six years it worked out fine to the tune of $330,409. But eventually they had a fight and were not getting along about something and the guy got ratted out. Ah, true love. What a beautiful story. Tale as old as time. The payments were, of course, stopped. And there was the pesky firing (why he stayed employed at McDonald’s is beyond me) and the court case to collect the winnings back.
Clearly greed got the best of this person and his friend and the sister. It trapped them and as the Greeks say, “Greed is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become.” True dat.
Key to the whole point – as I see it:
You’ve seen the oldie-but-goodie comedy routine where a man shows his doctor that every time he raises his arm in this unusual position, he gets a sharp pain. The doctor’s suggestion, “Don’t do that any more.” The point of the skit is that if something hurts, stop doing it.
Like with my friend, he just needed to suck it up and realize there is nothing he could do to change the fact that oncological drugs have a higher markup and are in more demand than his stuff. That’s life, dude. Get over it. If he focused more on his own great job and the good living he was making, he’d be much better off and would probably enjoy the time he spends out by his very nice swimming pool much more.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Fear Factor Rules
Continuing on the theme of raising the bar, we all sometime or somewhere have to cross the following bridge in life: Do you want to get a bigger reward for something you don’t like or a lesser reward for something you love? That is a situation we will all face one way or another.
Let me put it this way, would you eat a maggot for the chance at a hundred thousand dollars? Not me. Not even a million. I wouldn’t get in a tank of spiders nor would I put a worm anywhere near my mouth. And forget anything about rats; na-gon-do-it. But some apparently would if you’ve seen the reality show. Go figure.
That’s a severe example of boundaries we set on physical stuff but what about the things we do day-in and day-out? Are you okay being miserable about your work or other aspects of your life if you are well compensated or well rewarded with intangibles? Or would you rather have less income or accolades but do something you love? These are questions as old as time; questions that affect the very core of our existence.
Unhappy people line the corridors of therapists every day because of one thing; they haven’t figured out that we can’t always have everything we want. The cliché (sorry) that comes to mind here is “having our cake and eating it too.” Sometimes we want to land in a job that we love with a great salary and a great title and supreme power without paying the price or having to make any choices. It could happen, I guess, but usually it doesn’t. Usually you have to choose and there’s a journey associated with it. Usually there are dues to that club.
Having to make choices can make us ornery because we keep getting told we can have everything and so we wonder what’s wrong with the world or what’s wrong with ourselves. But have you ever noticed that those telling us we can have “everything” are usually those who have everything? If we dwell on the complexities of having it all, we can turn our life into a drudgery because we refuse to adjust ourselves to reality.
It’s back to the broken compass. If our compass needle is bifurcated and pointing in opposite directions, we won’t know which way to go. We have to make sure our compass needles only point in one direction and doesn’t give us conflicting signals.
How, you say? Funny you should bring it up. Two ways.
1. Claritize.
This is a new word I think I invented. Maybe I pilfered it, it’s all blending together. In any event it takes clarity and combines it with prioritize. Sounds like a detergent, doesn’t it. It kind of is.
We’ve all seen those tear jerker commercials. I hate it when a commercial makes me cry. One showed a mom driving her daughter home from school. She was telling this cute little thing that she had to go on a business trip for a few days. The little girl was disappointed because her mom was going to miss her school play. She was pouting – the daughter that is – and the mom was explaining something like, “but don’t you like all the good things we have like this car we are riding in (it appeared to be the Mercedes S430 Sedan) and don’t you want a bigger house?” After a moment of thought the little girl said sincerely, “Do we really need a bigger house mommy?” I know, Ohhhhh!
Food for thought and from the “mouth of babes,” etc. The kid apparently was able to reach a reality the parent hadn’t. The daughter was faced with two mutually exclusive choices and was willing to make the one that fit her priorities. The parent hadn’t reached that claritization yet.
2. Being versus Becoming.
I had a friend once who graduated from college with a master’s degree in education administration. Everything about him screamed teacher/principal, perhaps superintendent someday. He was the real deal. He began teaching and then we lost touch. A couple of years later I ran into him and he was a regional manager for Domino’s Pizza. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, he was doing well and on a different fast track, but it wasn’t his life dream. I asked him what was up with the change of career and the seeming “tossing” of a master’s degree. This was the story.
His brother went to work for Domino’s and was a multi-state executive. They had been talking and his brother convinced him that the corporate culture at Domino’s was the greatest thing on earth. It was all about being in a work environment that was fun and teaching was all about a lot of work and a lot of grief and a lot of underpaid thankless activities. Domino’s started out paying him what a teacher would never make.
Domino’s whole philosophy was about not playing it safe and putting it all on the line - for pizza. He was doing it. I still remember going out to dinner with he and his wife. He was the first person I knew with a pager. He was paged in the time we were at dinner about a dozen times. I couldn’t imagine what for? Did they keep running out of cheese and didn’t know where to get any? He seemed stressed and anxious about each call. I was having more fun in life than him and I was eating out of the public trough (government work if you hadn’t heard that one) which is notorious for underpaying. He was conflicted though, that much was clear. I felt bad for him. Fast forward many years and skipping particulars, he is now back in education and is an elementary school principal where he should be. He figured out after awhile that there is a difference between being and becoming, about doing and having, and he got back into what he was meant to do and lowered his material expectations. Getting back into the education business was difficult once he left it but he paid the price and did it.
His decision to do this reminded me of a statement I read a couple months ago when Red Adair died. Remember him?
He was the famous oil well firefighter who John Wayne played in the movie Hellfighters. He’d been around forever but maybe his greatest accomplishment was just back in 1991 following the first Gulf War when he and his team extinguished 112 burning oil wells ignited by Sadam Hussein as they retreated from Kuwait. Estimates were that this work would take five years to accomplish; his team was done in nine months.
The statement he made that reminded me of my friend was, “Life isn’t having it made; it’s getting it made.”
Whatever we do will require effort and will-power. Each time we make the effort, we move from being and we grow and are strengthened to becoming. And hopefully it will be doing what we love and the rewards will take care of themsleves.
The key to the whole point – as I see it:
If we are fortunate we will be in situations in life where we can experience work and play from a variety of angles. (I first mistyped this as angels and wouldn’t that be great to experience things from a variety of angels?) This will give us first hand knowledge of what it takes to get different rewards and to achieve particular accomplishments. This is great because regardless of what we choose, it will be an informed choice and not just based on the fear factor. It’s usually more difficult than that because we can complicate it with financial obligations or interpersonal relationships that are hard to unravel but if we find out what we truly want, we should be brave enough to follow our compass there and be satisfied with the rewards it brings.
Let me put it this way, would you eat a maggot for the chance at a hundred thousand dollars? Not me. Not even a million. I wouldn’t get in a tank of spiders nor would I put a worm anywhere near my mouth. And forget anything about rats; na-gon-do-it. But some apparently would if you’ve seen the reality show. Go figure.
That’s a severe example of boundaries we set on physical stuff but what about the things we do day-in and day-out? Are you okay being miserable about your work or other aspects of your life if you are well compensated or well rewarded with intangibles? Or would you rather have less income or accolades but do something you love? These are questions as old as time; questions that affect the very core of our existence.
Unhappy people line the corridors of therapists every day because of one thing; they haven’t figured out that we can’t always have everything we want. The cliché (sorry) that comes to mind here is “having our cake and eating it too.” Sometimes we want to land in a job that we love with a great salary and a great title and supreme power without paying the price or having to make any choices. It could happen, I guess, but usually it doesn’t. Usually you have to choose and there’s a journey associated with it. Usually there are dues to that club.
Having to make choices can make us ornery because we keep getting told we can have everything and so we wonder what’s wrong with the world or what’s wrong with ourselves. But have you ever noticed that those telling us we can have “everything” are usually those who have everything? If we dwell on the complexities of having it all, we can turn our life into a drudgery because we refuse to adjust ourselves to reality.
It’s back to the broken compass. If our compass needle is bifurcated and pointing in opposite directions, we won’t know which way to go. We have to make sure our compass needles only point in one direction and doesn’t give us conflicting signals.
How, you say? Funny you should bring it up. Two ways.
1. Claritize.
This is a new word I think I invented. Maybe I pilfered it, it’s all blending together. In any event it takes clarity and combines it with prioritize. Sounds like a detergent, doesn’t it. It kind of is.
We’ve all seen those tear jerker commercials. I hate it when a commercial makes me cry. One showed a mom driving her daughter home from school. She was telling this cute little thing that she had to go on a business trip for a few days. The little girl was disappointed because her mom was going to miss her school play. She was pouting – the daughter that is – and the mom was explaining something like, “but don’t you like all the good things we have like this car we are riding in (it appeared to be the Mercedes S430 Sedan) and don’t you want a bigger house?” After a moment of thought the little girl said sincerely, “Do we really need a bigger house mommy?” I know, Ohhhhh!
Food for thought and from the “mouth of babes,” etc. The kid apparently was able to reach a reality the parent hadn’t. The daughter was faced with two mutually exclusive choices and was willing to make the one that fit her priorities. The parent hadn’t reached that claritization yet.
2. Being versus Becoming.
I had a friend once who graduated from college with a master’s degree in education administration. Everything about him screamed teacher/principal, perhaps superintendent someday. He was the real deal. He began teaching and then we lost touch. A couple of years later I ran into him and he was a regional manager for Domino’s Pizza. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, he was doing well and on a different fast track, but it wasn’t his life dream. I asked him what was up with the change of career and the seeming “tossing” of a master’s degree. This was the story.
His brother went to work for Domino’s and was a multi-state executive. They had been talking and his brother convinced him that the corporate culture at Domino’s was the greatest thing on earth. It was all about being in a work environment that was fun and teaching was all about a lot of work and a lot of grief and a lot of underpaid thankless activities. Domino’s started out paying him what a teacher would never make.
Domino’s whole philosophy was about not playing it safe and putting it all on the line - for pizza. He was doing it. I still remember going out to dinner with he and his wife. He was the first person I knew with a pager. He was paged in the time we were at dinner about a dozen times. I couldn’t imagine what for? Did they keep running out of cheese and didn’t know where to get any? He seemed stressed and anxious about each call. I was having more fun in life than him and I was eating out of the public trough (government work if you hadn’t heard that one) which is notorious for underpaying. He was conflicted though, that much was clear. I felt bad for him. Fast forward many years and skipping particulars, he is now back in education and is an elementary school principal where he should be. He figured out after awhile that there is a difference between being and becoming, about doing and having, and he got back into what he was meant to do and lowered his material expectations. Getting back into the education business was difficult once he left it but he paid the price and did it.
His decision to do this reminded me of a statement I read a couple months ago when Red Adair died. Remember him?
He was the famous oil well firefighter who John Wayne played in the movie Hellfighters. He’d been around forever but maybe his greatest accomplishment was just back in 1991 following the first Gulf War when he and his team extinguished 112 burning oil wells ignited by Sadam Hussein as they retreated from Kuwait. Estimates were that this work would take five years to accomplish; his team was done in nine months.
The statement he made that reminded me of my friend was, “Life isn’t having it made; it’s getting it made.”
Whatever we do will require effort and will-power. Each time we make the effort, we move from being and we grow and are strengthened to becoming. And hopefully it will be doing what we love and the rewards will take care of themsleves.
The key to the whole point – as I see it:
If we are fortunate we will be in situations in life where we can experience work and play from a variety of angles. (I first mistyped this as angels and wouldn’t that be great to experience things from a variety of angels?) This will give us first hand knowledge of what it takes to get different rewards and to achieve particular accomplishments. This is great because regardless of what we choose, it will be an informed choice and not just based on the fear factor. It’s usually more difficult than that because we can complicate it with financial obligations or interpersonal relationships that are hard to unravel but if we find out what we truly want, we should be brave enough to follow our compass there and be satisfied with the rewards it brings.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
"Raising the Bar"
Sometimes I like clichés, sometimes I hate them. Mostly I hate. The other day, though, I caught myself daydreaming in a meeting at work. It went something like this:
"I need to “level the playing field” and “think outside the box” because it’s a “hard and fast rule” that I should deliver “world class” “customer service” or “the long and short of it” is it’ll be “the kiss of death” unless I “tie up all the loose ends” and “dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.”
“In the blink of an eye” I will “pull myself up by the bootstraps,” “grit my teeth,” “live and learn,” so that I can “fight another day.” “That’s half the battle” until I hit the “turning point” by “swallowing my pride,” “letting bygones be bygones” and put the “ball in the court” of those that are “dyed in the wool.”
I knew it was all “food for thought,” “in the long run” anyway. But I didn’t want to “beat a dead horse.“ I knew these thoughts were only worth a “dime a dozen” to someone unless they’ve “seen the light” and unless something’s “fallen through the cracks” but by then you find you’ve “crossed the line.” At that point though I realized that “word of mouth” and “idle chitchat” took me to my “hour of need” and I knew if I placed all my “cards on the table” and “entertained high hopes” “wild horses could not keep me away” from “coming up smelling like roses.”
I guess I could have “drawn the line” at being “all talk and no action” because with “every tick of the clock” there was “hell to pay” if I didn’t have “peace of mind” or at least “give it the old college try.” That was just the “tip of the iceberg” though: “Nothing to write home about,” “in a word” you could say. But if you “check it out” what I’m saying is I’m “not too shabby” since “there’s no fool like an old fool.” At the very least “it’s better than sliced bread” if you can just “wake up and smell the coffee (postum).” “Time will tell” I guess. “yada, yada, yada.” “Blah, blah, blah.” I’m not “pulling your leg,” I’m “on the up-and-up.” “For what it’s worth.”
Regardless of what I think of clichés I clearly use them, maybe too much, and maybe too much in jest. I guess it’s a love-hate thing. I’m titling this blog by a cliché though because the practical reality is that “raising the bar” is the only way I can figure out how to get across the point of how we all need to set high standards to get us from wherever we are in life to a higher and better place.
So what I’m saying is clichés do communicate messages to us. The only problem with them is that we get used to hearing them so often, we stop considering what they really mean. So let me try and break “raising the bar” a little more so it isn’t just a cliché, though it is.
Growing up, I shared a room with two brothers. Nights were not a job, they were an adventure. At a young age our ridiculous bedtime would give us like 9 or 10 hours to kill before we could surface back on earth. We did all sorts of stuff. I distinctly remember one activity was to play this card game we had. It was called authors. It had nothing to do with authors, other than you had to collect all four of the same author cards to make a set. What it did though is introduce to me the names of some of the greatest authors who ever lived and inspired me later, out of curiosity, to look into their works and find out more about them. Alfred Lord Tennyson was one of these authors. His name and grizzly appearance made him memorable.
The guy was amazing. At 12 he composed his first epic poem of 6,000 lines. At 12, I hadn’t read 6,000 lines. After that he got prolific. One of the last things he wrote, considered to be his epitaph, was my favorite. It’s a short poem called "Crossing the Bar." It’s could have been called “raising the bar.” Alfred loved it also and left instructions that it was to be placed at the conclusion of any collection of his writings. Consider some of his words:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
When we “cross the bar” we will probably hope we had it “raised” as high as possible. I recently read an interview about a young and very successful man in Tel Aviv. His name is David Tur and he is one of a new generation who are putting the violence and sadness of the Jews and all that is going on in the Middle East behind him and pushing himself upward and onward to new heights.
He is a fascinating character and I would never embrace or encourage others to celebrate their bar raising efforts as he does but his style was interesting. Each time he felt he raised the bar in his life and accomplished something, he got a tattoo. That’s not too unusual these days, but his are very personal to him and had a lot of meaning. He considers his tats stars and he has five already in his less than thirty years of life. Most are just for him and not visible to others.
Under his arm is an ace of spades reminding him that during a real tough time in his life he had a surprise up his sleeve (he doesn’t share what that was however.) Above his wrist (the only visible one) are the words “senseless conflict”. He had this one done at seventeen, much too his parents dismay. The reason seems obvious. His parents thought this was his first but he actually had one done a year earlier. His parents didn’t know because it was on the inside of his lower lip. It is the words “No Pain,” ironically he said “it was one hell of a pain to have it done.” There are two others he won’t talk about. His point is he will always strive to raise the bar and each time it’s raised in a monumental way; he will celebrate it in this unique way.
Don’t do what David does but take the inspiration from his experience about striving for personal bests.
The supreme rule of survival on the high seas was always to follow your compass and where it would lead you. We should do the same. We should discipline ourselves to always follow what we know is the right thing regardless of what we see or hear about what others think the correct action might be. I think the best word describing this compass is integrity.
Integrity is Latin from the word integritas, meaning "whole" or "oneness." It is the discipline to follow one’s moral and ethical compass regardless of circumstances. It might be the one common denominator of all great people.
We’ve probably all seen how effective this one characteristic is and the difference it makes wherever it is found. People with integrity “raise the bar” throughout their life and it gets real high and they keep it there. Nobody makes them do it. How could they? And once you have the bar at a certain level, you don’t cave in or lower it for anyone or anything.
But every day in the world, in a hundred different ways, some lose their compass and get lost. Some pile up waste-high fibonacci troubles while others navigate brilliantly through the same challenges and keep the bar up high and even raise it higher.
Those “raising the bar” have this internal compass and follow it. Those who don’t ever “raise the bar” have compasses, but they are broken. Isn’t that the worse situation we could be in? To have a compass and think it is working and you discipline yourself to follow it, but you are headed for a disaster because your compass is broke. Clearly we all have the responsibility to make sure our compass is working and then follow it. This will keep us safe and on track and only then will we have the confidence to “raise the bar” “higher and higher.”
"I need to “level the playing field” and “think outside the box” because it’s a “hard and fast rule” that I should deliver “world class” “customer service” or “the long and short of it” is it’ll be “the kiss of death” unless I “tie up all the loose ends” and “dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.”
“In the blink of an eye” I will “pull myself up by the bootstraps,” “grit my teeth,” “live and learn,” so that I can “fight another day.” “That’s half the battle” until I hit the “turning point” by “swallowing my pride,” “letting bygones be bygones” and put the “ball in the court” of those that are “dyed in the wool.”
I knew it was all “food for thought,” “in the long run” anyway. But I didn’t want to “beat a dead horse.“ I knew these thoughts were only worth a “dime a dozen” to someone unless they’ve “seen the light” and unless something’s “fallen through the cracks” but by then you find you’ve “crossed the line.” At that point though I realized that “word of mouth” and “idle chitchat” took me to my “hour of need” and I knew if I placed all my “cards on the table” and “entertained high hopes” “wild horses could not keep me away” from “coming up smelling like roses.”
I guess I could have “drawn the line” at being “all talk and no action” because with “every tick of the clock” there was “hell to pay” if I didn’t have “peace of mind” or at least “give it the old college try.” That was just the “tip of the iceberg” though: “Nothing to write home about,” “in a word” you could say. But if you “check it out” what I’m saying is I’m “not too shabby” since “there’s no fool like an old fool.” At the very least “it’s better than sliced bread” if you can just “wake up and smell the coffee (postum).” “Time will tell” I guess. “yada, yada, yada.” “Blah, blah, blah.” I’m not “pulling your leg,” I’m “on the up-and-up.” “For what it’s worth.”
Regardless of what I think of clichés I clearly use them, maybe too much, and maybe too much in jest. I guess it’s a love-hate thing. I’m titling this blog by a cliché though because the practical reality is that “raising the bar” is the only way I can figure out how to get across the point of how we all need to set high standards to get us from wherever we are in life to a higher and better place.
So what I’m saying is clichés do communicate messages to us. The only problem with them is that we get used to hearing them so often, we stop considering what they really mean. So let me try and break “raising the bar” a little more so it isn’t just a cliché, though it is.
Growing up, I shared a room with two brothers. Nights were not a job, they were an adventure. At a young age our ridiculous bedtime would give us like 9 or 10 hours to kill before we could surface back on earth. We did all sorts of stuff. I distinctly remember one activity was to play this card game we had. It was called authors. It had nothing to do with authors, other than you had to collect all four of the same author cards to make a set. What it did though is introduce to me the names of some of the greatest authors who ever lived and inspired me later, out of curiosity, to look into their works and find out more about them. Alfred Lord Tennyson was one of these authors. His name and grizzly appearance made him memorable.
The guy was amazing. At 12 he composed his first epic poem of 6,000 lines. At 12, I hadn’t read 6,000 lines. After that he got prolific. One of the last things he wrote, considered to be his epitaph, was my favorite. It’s a short poem called "Crossing the Bar." It’s could have been called “raising the bar.” Alfred loved it also and left instructions that it was to be placed at the conclusion of any collection of his writings. Consider some of his words:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
When we “cross the bar” we will probably hope we had it “raised” as high as possible. I recently read an interview about a young and very successful man in Tel Aviv. His name is David Tur and he is one of a new generation who are putting the violence and sadness of the Jews and all that is going on in the Middle East behind him and pushing himself upward and onward to new heights.
He is a fascinating character and I would never embrace or encourage others to celebrate their bar raising efforts as he does but his style was interesting. Each time he felt he raised the bar in his life and accomplished something, he got a tattoo. That’s not too unusual these days, but his are very personal to him and had a lot of meaning. He considers his tats stars and he has five already in his less than thirty years of life. Most are just for him and not visible to others.
Under his arm is an ace of spades reminding him that during a real tough time in his life he had a surprise up his sleeve (he doesn’t share what that was however.) Above his wrist (the only visible one) are the words “senseless conflict”. He had this one done at seventeen, much too his parents dismay. The reason seems obvious. His parents thought this was his first but he actually had one done a year earlier. His parents didn’t know because it was on the inside of his lower lip. It is the words “No Pain,” ironically he said “it was one hell of a pain to have it done.” There are two others he won’t talk about. His point is he will always strive to raise the bar and each time it’s raised in a monumental way; he will celebrate it in this unique way.
Don’t do what David does but take the inspiration from his experience about striving for personal bests.
The supreme rule of survival on the high seas was always to follow your compass and where it would lead you. We should do the same. We should discipline ourselves to always follow what we know is the right thing regardless of what we see or hear about what others think the correct action might be. I think the best word describing this compass is integrity.
Integrity is Latin from the word integritas, meaning "whole" or "oneness." It is the discipline to follow one’s moral and ethical compass regardless of circumstances. It might be the one common denominator of all great people.
We’ve probably all seen how effective this one characteristic is and the difference it makes wherever it is found. People with integrity “raise the bar” throughout their life and it gets real high and they keep it there. Nobody makes them do it. How could they? And once you have the bar at a certain level, you don’t cave in or lower it for anyone or anything.
But every day in the world, in a hundred different ways, some lose their compass and get lost. Some pile up waste-high fibonacci troubles while others navigate brilliantly through the same challenges and keep the bar up high and even raise it higher.
Those “raising the bar” have this internal compass and follow it. Those who don’t ever “raise the bar” have compasses, but they are broken. Isn’t that the worse situation we could be in? To have a compass and think it is working and you discipline yourself to follow it, but you are headed for a disaster because your compass is broke. Clearly we all have the responsibility to make sure our compass is working and then follow it. This will keep us safe and on track and only then will we have the confidence to “raise the bar” “higher and higher.”
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Crowds
I caught Coldplay on the HD Cable station the other night. They were live at Clint's old mission hangout: the Isle of Wight.
It was amazing to watch this concert. The crowd was one mass of people as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of thousands of people I'd guess. All of them standing, pumping their fists in the air in unison to the music and most singing along word-for-word.
I wanted to join in. You feel like you want to be there and be apart of something. But I wonder if this is a "great and spacious" concert? It certainly is fleeting and when it was over it was done. You don't have the urge or the urgency to go out and do something meaningful. It doesn't make you feel like you want to be a better person. It is something just for that moment - cooler than heck, don't get me wrong - but just for a minute or two.
I think of other gatherings that have happened and some yet to come that are much different in nature and outcome.
When Christ came to the American Continent after His resurrection, a large crowd had gathered. The entire crowd got to approach the Savior, one-by-one, and feel the imprints of the nails in His hands and feet and the scar from the sword in His side. I imagine this crowd wasn't jumping up and down and pumping their fists. I imagine it so quiet you could hear an ancient bone-pin drop. The evidence of the effect it had on the people was that the whole society lived in righteousness and peace for 400 years afterward.
Then there was the crowd that gathered to listen to King Benjamin's farewell address. So converted were they all by being in this crowd on this day and the next that none had a dispostion to do evil ever again. Of course, some eventually did but the remembering of this event years later spawned an unbroken chain of righteous leadership that went on for 500 years and 9 generations: From Alma to Alma to Helaman, to Helaman to Nephi to Nephi to Nephi to Amos to Amos & Ammoron!
Then there is the crowd that will gather at Adam-Ondi-Ahman toward the end of the pre-millennial earth. Everyone to have ever held priesthood keys will gather at this place, give an accounting, and turn over their keys to Adam, who will turn over all of the keys over to the Savior. That's going to have a lasting effect on all of earth. Maybe that's what gives the people the boost to be righteous for the thousand years of the millennium.
There are crowds and there are crowds. Some are cool and some are way cool.
It was amazing to watch this concert. The crowd was one mass of people as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of thousands of people I'd guess. All of them standing, pumping their fists in the air in unison to the music and most singing along word-for-word.
I wanted to join in. You feel like you want to be there and be apart of something. But I wonder if this is a "great and spacious" concert? It certainly is fleeting and when it was over it was done. You don't have the urge or the urgency to go out and do something meaningful. It doesn't make you feel like you want to be a better person. It is something just for that moment - cooler than heck, don't get me wrong - but just for a minute or two.
I think of other gatherings that have happened and some yet to come that are much different in nature and outcome.
When Christ came to the American Continent after His resurrection, a large crowd had gathered. The entire crowd got to approach the Savior, one-by-one, and feel the imprints of the nails in His hands and feet and the scar from the sword in His side. I imagine this crowd wasn't jumping up and down and pumping their fists. I imagine it so quiet you could hear an ancient bone-pin drop. The evidence of the effect it had on the people was that the whole society lived in righteousness and peace for 400 years afterward.
Then there was the crowd that gathered to listen to King Benjamin's farewell address. So converted were they all by being in this crowd on this day and the next that none had a dispostion to do evil ever again. Of course, some eventually did but the remembering of this event years later spawned an unbroken chain of righteous leadership that went on for 500 years and 9 generations: From Alma to Alma to Helaman, to Helaman to Nephi to Nephi to Nephi to Amos to Amos & Ammoron!
Then there is the crowd that will gather at Adam-Ondi-Ahman toward the end of the pre-millennial earth. Everyone to have ever held priesthood keys will gather at this place, give an accounting, and turn over their keys to Adam, who will turn over all of the keys over to the Savior. That's going to have a lasting effect on all of earth. Maybe that's what gives the people the boost to be righteous for the thousand years of the millennium.
There are crowds and there are crowds. Some are cool and some are way cool.
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