When you broadcast a message, some will get it and subscribe, while others will resist it and deny it.
You can either foster and engage with those who get it, or you can attempt to convince and prove wrong those who resist it. Sometimes it will look like you are doing both at the same time, but do not fall for it. It’s either one or the other.
Spend your limited time wisely.
What is it that you are good at, and that you genuinely enjoy doing?
What type of companies would be interested in that?
Career and job seeking are areas in which past commitments do great damage. We get stuck looking at our worth through the lens of boxes everybody got used to look at: education, experience, field, language (for expats like myself).
Perhaps we put a lot into those boxes in the past, and therefore we are unwilling to let them go easily. And yet, years pass, things change, roles go by. We know something is not quite right, but as we have already invested so much into our path (and everybody is telling us that was, and still is, the right thing to do), we fail to veer from it.
What is it that you are good at, and that you genuinely enjoy doing?
What type of companies would be interested in that?
These two questions have the power to unlock change. Ask help to answer them. Those who have worked with you know what you are better at; those who have more knowledge of the job market know what opportunities might lie ahead.
The world is yours.
Diversity is a tough sell because in the short term it only adds complexity.
In a context in which all that matters is what you achieved yesterday and what you are going to be doing tomorrow, adding someone to the team that might have different habits, different thoughts, different ideas, a different language, different ways of doing things is only problematic.
What is everybody else going to say? How are they going to adjust? How can we deliver against the targets if most of our time is spent aligning our views? Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire somebody like us, someone we don’t have to explain everything to?
Of course, if your mind is set on the long term, instead, the benefits of diversity are very easy to understand.
What team do you want when everything you have done so far is not going to work anymore (I promise you, it will happen)? How many points of view are you going to consider when that difficult problem nobody can crack is going to be presenting itself once again? What background should your organisation have the next time an interesting new market is going to open up in front of you?
Diversity is always enriching, you just have to give it time. As with most good things, truly.
When you are in an argument, understand this: as long as the two sides stand firm in their respective positions, no progress is possible.
If you just keep repeating your view, even with different words and from a different perspective, even if in time that view gets substantiated by additional facts and events, even when you get to the point in which you raise the ante certain it’s going to be the final move, most likely nothing is going to happen. Except, the other part is probably going to be even more convinced you are wrong.
Get into every argument open enough to be able to say “you are right”. Accept that the person in front of you is not idiot, delusional and mean. At the very least, try to ask questions to understand what they care about, what’s their sets of values, how is it so that they see the world so differently from you.
And then, try to build on that. Find common ground, things both of you find important, see their arguments as an opportunity for you to learn something, thank them for raising your awareness on something you were totally blind to.
Should that really not be possible, change the narrative. Run from the argument, reach for a topic that is not so directly in contrast with the other’s point of view, focus on explaining what you want to achieve.
Staying in the argument would just be a waste of time.
For years, I have built a narrative for which everything that happened was done to me.
I had the feeling everyone and everything was against my legitimate pursuit of happiness and success, I was constantly complaining about any tiny little difficulty, I would break relationships because in front of my grandiose gestures the counterpart would not reciprocate.
Now I am lucky enough to see that was a convenient way to hide.
Hide from my responsibilities as human being, employee, partner and friend, and most of all hide from my feelings. If others and external circumstances were responsible for them, why should I bother investigating them further? The most reasonable thing to do would be to simply build a wall around myself and make it as impenetrable as possible.
We are powerless with respect to what is going to happen tomorrow, and yet we can have total control on the way we are going to face, absorb and narrativize it. That’s where we should spend most of our time: building this form of control.
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
Epictetus
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