Two weeks ago, I was out with some friends and pointed out a ramen shop.
“Have you tried it before?” I asked.
“No, not yet but I want to!” my friend replied eagerly.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Jake (her fiancé) doesn’t want to eat anything. He’s fasting”.
“But he is okay to hang out while you eat, right? He does that most of the time,” I said.
Upon probing, it turned out that she did not indulge in the ramen. She felt guilty because her fiance did not want to eat with her. Even though her fiance explicitly says that he doesn’t judge her, it turns out, she judges herself.
Just by being around others, we subconsciously take on people’s values and use that to judge ourselves.
The good news is that everyone has a choice. Turn it off. Walk away. Clear the decks. Then, from an empty place, we can build our mise en place, piece by piece.
Today is just as good a day to get started. Choose your circle. Choose your outcomes.
If money is a motivator, then why are the hardest working people employed in nonprofit organisations. Some work in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable — disaster recovery zones, countries gripped by famine and flood and earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet its rare for these managers of nonprofits to complain about getting their staff motivated.
It turns out that the theory of incentive is not really accurate. Frederick Herzberg has published an updated theory – hygiene factor and motivation factors.
Hygiene factors are status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies and supervisory practices.
Motivation factors includes challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that we are making a meaningful contribution to work.
It is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. Beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.
As for leaders, here’s a better set of questions worth pondering about. Is this work meaningful? Is this job going to develop the person? Are they going to learn new things? How can we create opportunities for recognition and achievement? How can I give more responsibility?
Answer works. It’s the shortest route to our problems. The cookie recipes, math formulas and sometimes even travel guides. That’s because someone has come up with using theories or their first-hand experiences.
Today, we don’t think twice when we’re flying. Looking back at history, it wasn’t the case. Many men have attempted flying by strapping on wings, replicating what they believed allowed birds to soar: wings and feathers. It is not until Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernooulli outlined the theory of fluid dynamics, that explained the concept of lift. We had gone from correlation (wings) to causation (lift).
Of course, that wasn’t enough to make flight perfectly reliable. Researchers still needed to understand the weather, angle of the aircraft, the landing sequence and much more. Then, define the playbook for pilots to follow in order to succeed in each circumstances.
Answers are quick to solve problems in exact circumstances. Theories, on the other hand, are slow but it provides the understanding to derived answers when circumstances change.
You could probably tell who you’ll hire when we are in a fast-changing landscape.
“You don’t want to do what they do, you want to see how they see”. – Nate Green
Nate Green, is an author of multiple books, marketing strategist at Precision Nutrition and a recovering fitness junkie.
Nate barely graduated high school with 1.7 GPA. Despite all odds, he became one of the most sought after writers and strategists in the fitness industry.
We run into situations where we worked a few extra hours into the night, and we wake up the next day unable to function. The work project, and the people, get stuck relying on us. Especially when we can’t afford it.
The reason is that we want to stretch a bit more, make the project go faster and please more. We do that by spending our extra resources on the project’s (or person’s) behalf. What’s happening is that we are looking for a magical way to get more time and energy in the day.
Of course, the person we’re helping doesn’t need five more minutes for a small request. They have five more requests after. But it feels like helping them with a request (that is not agreed upon) is a way of showing them that you care.
The alternative is a simple as it is difficult: Say no.
Say it without rushing and without stress. “I’m sorry, that’s not going to work for me.” You can explain, “This is not so healthy for me because…” and suggest an alternative, “I think what would be in our best interests that we do it this other way”.
An overloaded truck isn’t a more efficient way to move gravel (or anything else). And when you overload your day by treating your engine as indestructible based on how much you care, you’ll become inefficient and thus disrespectful.
Lots of other things in our life aren’t squishy. Gravity, for example, or the load capacity of the lift. They are what they are.
So is boundaries if you let it.
The hard part about stating your boundaries is standing up and moving on. But the cost of being squishy is that you’re not only disrespecting the next person or project. You’re stressed all the time.
Stand up and walk out.
People will learn, and they’ll end up respecting you for it because it’s not personal. Just as it’s not personal when the train leaves on time. The alternative, which is squishiness, is personal. Because if you like someone, you’re willing to be even more late than usual.
Tynan, is an entrepreneur, personal coach and minimalist nomad. He is also the author of best selling books, Superhuman by Habit and Forever Nomad.
Tynan pioneered the idea of Empire housing, to share home ownership with friends. With this, he brought an island in Canada and homes in Hawaii, Budapest, Tokyo and Vegas.
In a former life, Tynan is a pickup artist and instructor, best known as Herbal in The Game by Neil Strauss.
If you talk to someone who is good at surfing or powder skiing, they’ll tell you that’s the moment that they seek. And that once they get good enough at a certain kind of activity, they have to go find another one because it’s boring to do one of those sports if it’s the same. And we acknowledge that makes perfect sense.
If we talk to a jazz musician who does improv, we say, “well, why don’t you just play, you know, Autumn Leaves again?” And they say, “cause I know how to play that”. That’s obvious. That the tension of this might work and this might not work at the same time.
When we are dancing with something, we don’t say, “you must go away for us to be happy”. We say, “I am dancing, therefore I am happy”.
What if the goal isn’t a tensionless state? It is to learn how to dance with tension and do work that matter for people who care.
