Tag: failure

A way to hide

FabrizioLeave a comment

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

The way things are done

FabrizioLeave a comment

.. is much more important that what gets done.

That is to say, if culture eats strategy for breakfast, tactics are not even on the menu.

If still somebody has doubts about this, after all that has happened with Uber and WeWork these past 12 months, here is a statistic that further supports the importance of culture (and of executives and management promoting culture with their own behaviour) on organisations’ and personal success.

In 2018, 39% of the CEOs losing their job were ousted because of unethical behaviour (vs 35% because of poor financial performance).

It was the first year in which unethical behaviour led the list of reasons why CEOs get fired. And it is an additional sign that more and more people, even at board level, start taking culture seriously.

The way things are done is much more important that what gets done.

Luck

Fabrizio1 Comment

Luck is a major factor in all types of success, and the failure to recognize this simple fact is a major factor in all later collapses.

Some people, at some point, start thinking that success is owed and inevitable.

They are perhaps very talented people, or people who put a lot of work and long hours into shaping something, or even incredibly creative people who have managed to change the rules in their industry, or again natural and charismatic leaders that suck others into their visions.

But should all this be a determining factor, there would be millions of billionaires and thousands of unicors and decacorns. And the best thing would be that once gotten there, there they would stay forever. They would own the recipe, after all.

Success is all of the things above, and yet it is mainly a series of unprecedented and unrepeatable circumstances that lined up to provide somebody or a group of people with an opportunity. If you are there, you most likely do not know how you got there, and you better not get too comfortable.

Appreciate the luck you have had, make it worth it (not only for yourself, ESPECIALLY not for yourself), and build resilience for when the moment will come for you to step out of the spotlight.

Change in mind and body

Fabrizio1 Comment

Change is difficult, of course. But there are two separate challenges that one faces when asking for change.

The first one is psychological. It’s the most common and evident one. It’s the resistance of the mind. We like comfort, we like things the way they’ve always been, we don’t know what we might get into by changing. Perhaps we also recognize that circumstances are not great, and yet we cling to them, as the unknown is scarier than an imperfect known.

The second one is behavioural. This is more subtle. It’s the resistance of the body. We have embraced change on a theoretical level, and yet we keep falling back to old habits, to old frameworks, to old practices. We know we need change, and we are struggling either because nobody has shown us how to change or because nobody is holding us accountable for the little daily things that are needed to fully shift.

Both challenges need to be considered, and one might only be halfway through when everybody nods to their ideas and says: “this is great, exactly what we need!”.

Futile

FabrizioLeave a comment

You know a person that advocates for recycling, and while driving she uses her phone.

One of your friends works for a non-profit organization, and every time she goes grocery shopping she is happy to pay €0,20 for a plastic bag.

Your boss is a great coach and mentor, and never misses an occasion to express her support for military intervention in the latest geopolitical confrontation.

A colleague of your partner always cracks hilarious jokes when she is over for dinner, and without fail she ends up getting drunk and forgetting huge chunks of the evening.

The CEO of that company that is creating a lot of jobs and who’s paying its fair share of taxes is only motivated by being on the first page of the newspaper and buying the latest model of sportscar.

As we are more and more prone to separate the world into “good” and “bad”, we are forced to pick one slice of someone’s life and let it creep all over their behaviour, motives, reputation, and identity.

“Good” and “Bad” are convenient, but living is much more than that.

If we are not exposed to all the aspects of someone’s life, then putting people into boxes is just a futile activity. And we are never exposed to all the aspects of someone’s life.