When most of your time is spent doing things you were doing yesterday.
When the most common answer to ideas is “something to keep in mind for the future”.
When you get lost in planning and details, postponing what matters in search of perfect.
When you and those around you are busy, and yet that busyness does not bring you any closer to what you want to achieve.
It’s time to leap.
Not being an asshole is a daily choice.
Not letting your mood affect the way you treat others. Not setting the agenda of a company, of a department, of a team on the base of your current focus. Not having the stress derived from your position permeate every interaction, every decision, every exchange. Not allowing busyness to become the answer to all requests of help or information or attention or care. Not giving a bad day, an unsatisfactory job, a regretful life the power to determine the days, jobs and lives of those around you.
It’s not an If-This-Then-That type of situation. We have an active role in deciding how we follow up with actions and words to the circumstances of the world.
There might be mitigating circumstances, and yet we own this.
I have a tendency to get tired of things quickly.
Not that it’s always been my own choice to leave a job, yet this tendency has reflected on my professional experience so far.
For a while, I have thought that the next role, the next company, the next boss, the next team would be the “breakthrough”, the one that would stick with me and keep me motivated for long. Of course, it never was.
And so, I had to start asking some difficult questions.
What do I want? What is important to me? What would make me stick around? Why is it so that I get tired of jobs so quickly? Is there a problem with commitment? Is there a problem with purpose? Is there a problem with focus? If the choice would completely be in my power, what things would I make happen to call it a success?
When you identify a pattern and you have troubles understanding it, the absolute best thing you can do is to turn within and ask yourself some questions. It’s never the job, the people, the colleague, the managers, the roles, the tasks, the offices. Almost never, at least, and it’s a much safer bet to look at yourself in the mirror to see what you can do about it.
When you start looking inside, it’s possible that you won’t like what you find.
It’s a mixture of feelings, thoughts, ideas, memories, plans. Some land close to the picture of ourselves we have created culturally and relationally, some land quite far away. And that’s ok.
Looking inside, though, gives you quite a different perspective on the outside as well. When you begin to appreciate that deep down you are that insane and chaotic mixture, the good and the bad, the expected and the unexpected, the acceptable and the unacceptable, you realize that people around you are just the same. Their intentions are mixed, their feelings are mixed, their thoughts are mixed. They change trajectory within the same breath, they are insecure, scared, unprepared, variegated. Just like you are.
And so, what to do?
Most of us, spend their days fighting this, suppressing and denying what they do not recognize and cannot appreciate. Eventually, they bring the battle outside, because it’s easier to see the fault in others and pursue it relentlessly rather then acknowledging it in each one of us and make peace with it.
Few simply let go. They stop clinging, they stop holding on, they stop wanting to change, themselves and the others, they accept things for what they are, they navigate life to the best of their current possibility, making the most of each situation, realizing that it might not last (and in fact, it probably won’t).
Is this giving up, or is this the only way we have to actually change the world?
Annie Duke: We have this trade-off. We can kind of feel the pain in the moment, but the pain is going to be better in the long run, if we use it well, because we are going to be better decision makers in the long run, because we are experiencing the pain.
But the pain in the moment is pain. It doesn’t feel good. We have these competing problems: what’s best for me now, in terms of the way that I feel, versus what’s best for future me, in terms of how my life turns out. I think we can agree that the better my decisions, the more likely my life is going to turn out in a way that is good.
Shane Parris: It’s almost like the hindsight of your future-self becoming the foresight of your today-self.
Annie Duke: It’s getting the future version of you to get involved in the decisions of the present version of you.
From The Knowledge Project Podcast, ep. #37
When you make decisions in the moment, continuosly distracted by what is shinier, within reach, effortless, you often avoid negative feelings. And yet, you lose a little bit of who, deep down, you want to become.
What would your future-self say about what your today-self is doing?
Get that clear sooner rather than later, and accept the fact that not all the roads are going to take you where you aim. It will make it easier to accept defeats, say no, and be kind to yourself when some things will inevitably not pan out.
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