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.