Something in the Air (again)
Cut Across Shorty
Magic Bullets. We’re always looking for them, aren’t we? It’s almost addictive.
I guess it’s hardly surprising, given that we are bombarded with offers for them.
Life hacks. Get-rich-quick schemes. Online courses promising “10 steps to nirvana”. Network marketing programmes. The National Lottery (I mean, the clue’s in the title, right?). Celebrity culture, generally.
And it’s just the same in business. All sorts offers to solve your problems and buy you success, from a ‘can’t fail, get you to top of Google’ SEO strategy to McKinsey’s 7 steps to Happiness (or whatever variant they are currently touting). Along with the mountain of business books touting everything from Grit to Vulnerability, from Radical Candour to Emotional lntelligence as THE key, the magic ingredient, the fundamental thing that you need to succeed.
Beguilingly simple solutions to complex, messy, awkward, issues. A quick fix to avoid the painful and challenging slog that is what we really need to undertake. A dash for certainty that skates over the sea of ambiguity and uncertainty that lies ahead of us.
Of course we go for it. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to take the shortcut?
Only it doesn’t work. Every shortcut is a dead-end in disguise. I know, I’ve been down plenty.
I’ve tried to find my purpose. Because when I know that, life will become clear, won’t it?
I’ve done Simon Sinek’s ‘Find your Why’ course. Because if I know my why, everything else will just fall into place, won’t it?
No. Because they are just shortcuts. It doesn’t work like that.
This came up in a conversation with ‘Drinking Dialogues’ buddies Aman Zaidi and Tiffany Zamot the other day, when we talked about someone who decided to be a writer, against all the advice of family and friends who wanted them to pursue a more conventional career. They made many sacrifices to pursue this path, to give themselves the greatest chance of success, and they are now an established journalist and writer.
But they are an outlier. They found their purpose, or their ‘why’, or their passion or whatever you want to call it, which gave them the motivation. Most of us don’t.
Even then, they had to commit to their path, both by putting in the hard work and denying the easy options in life. Things only ‘fell into place’ because they persevered and were intentional in their choices.
Steve Jobs famously talked about looking back and joining the dots but people often overlook that he said it can ONLY be done in hindsight. At the time, he was stumbling through life, experiencing it as a series of random events and capricious choices with no idea where he was headed, how any of it linked up, or even if any of it did. He didn’t know if it was all utterly pointless or not until he’d been through enough of it to discern a pattern - to be able to join some dots.
People aren’t successful because they find their purpose, or their why, or have a career or life plan or any the other magic bullets that are touted or written up in their hagiographies. They mostly have privilege and luck. Often, but not necessarily, they have some smarts and a good work ethic.
Whilst we’re running around desperately looking for magic bullets, we’re not seeing the opportunities in front of us and we’re diverted from what life is really about - living, loving and being.
Forget the magic bullets. We’re only in these meat suits for a little while, let’s be sure to enjoy it.
Holiday!
I’ve just been away for a couple of weeks, which is why there was no newsletter last week. It was good to have a change of scenery and pace, to spend some time with friends and be out in the natural world. We did a lot of walking, a bit of boating, supported the local economy (well, the pubs, at least) and generally chilled.
We need holidays, they enable us to recharge and reflect, to broaden our horizons and to have new experiences. Even in Norfolk!
And yet someone posted on LinkedIN this week saying that Bank Holidays (as public holidays in the UK are known) were a joke and should be suspended until COVID was over and we had put in the graft to get the economy back on its feet.
I don’t know if he thinks we’re all still working in the pin factory, or whether presenteeism has now become an official output measure.
Working more hours is a simple solution to a complex problem. It’s also not a solution, as it’s been shown to be counter-productive in anything other than simple, repetitive tasks - which knowledge workers don’t do. It’s about as useful as telling people to think harder, as if we can will our brains to go faster.
The mechanistic, factory thinking runs deep in our culture and our psyche.
Of course, what we should be focused on is outcomes, and on value. This requires people to perform at a high level, something that can only be sustained for short periods. The cognitive effort is tiring and we need to have breaks to enable us to refresh and recharge. That includes having holidays.
The Bank Holiday Act was passed in 1871, and before that factories had regular shutdowns, co-ordinated locally to make a common holiday. Even in the land of dark satanic mills they saw the value of holidays, they’ve been mandated for over 150 years and yet this idiot still thinks they are a bad idea.
The tide may be turning on attitudes to work but we’ve still got a long fight on our hands to change some people’s minds.
Never Going Back Again
We’ve seen another wave of announcements from big firms, including the tech giants, delaying the return to the office to the beginning of next year.
The UK Treasury have said that staff can continue to work from home permanently, which is somewhat embarrassing for their ‘boss’, Chancellor RIshi Sunak, who has been leading the crusade to get everyone back into the office. However, he seemed unaware that working from home had already been established as Civil Service policy as it enabled them to reduce city office space and save cost. They couldn’t all go back to the office now anyway, because there aren’t enough desks for everyone.
It now going to be near to two years before people start to go back in any numbers. New habits have been established, new patterns of work, new tools and techniques. Organisations have learnt how to work without being in the office or even office centric.
The offices that people left are no longer suitable for the way they work now. Or rather, they are even less suitable than they were, as they weren’t exactly fit for purpose back then. Add in the extra requirements of COVID safety and everywhere needs a rethink.
We’re beyond the point of return. We’re not going back.
But we’re also not staying where we are. Work from home is not optimal, especially for those organisations that have simply moved synchronous working into a virtual environment.
So the question now is what future do we want to create.
September Song
Summer’s gone (I’m not sure it ever came to the UK) and we’re into Autumn, which Keats described as ‘The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. It’s the time when we harvest the fruits of our labours, and prepare for the winter.
COVID has disrupted our lives and taken away the regular pattern of events. Life has become both more unpredictable and more featureless. The majority of ‘events’ seem to be plans being abandoned and things not happening. We are in a state of frantic stasis.
This makes the rhythms of nature even louder than normal, as the usual noise and clatter of life has been quietened. The turning of the seasons is something we can rely on, a point of certainty in an uncertain world, a source of comfort.
I quite like Autumn, I like the changes, the promise of crisp, clear days and dark, enfolding nights. This year in the UK we expect to have an especially vibrant display of colour as the leaves turn. Nature will put on a spectacular show for us once again.
It’s the time to go and enjoy Nature’s spectacular who and to look for conkers. Not magic bullets.