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The Best Excuses Ever

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Have you noticed that people don’t like to say,

“I’m making this decision because it’s convenient for me. It may hurt others. It may even hurt them a lot, but my convenience is more important.”

They don’t like to say it because it forces them to face up to their own selfishness. While I’d love to say something warm and supportive, like, “You go, Girl! You deserve to put your convenience ahead of your responsibilities to your family, community, etc.”
Sadly, I don’t believe it.

Here are some of the excuses I’ve recently heard for people justifying doing crappy things to other people so they don’t have to take responsibility for owning their own actions:

  • Convenience. Yes, I believe loyalty is important to employees. But it’s hard to reduce costs in meaningful ways. Layoffs are just the obvious choice.
  • Groupthink. Everyone else does it, so if I’m wrong, then so is everyone else. (And yeah, you’re right about that.)
  • Someone-think. If I didn’t do it, someone else would.
  • Kids. My favorite. Blame it on devotion to the kids. I love environmentalists who claim to care about their kids’ future, while driving convenient minivans that help guarantee their kids will suffer with global warming, oil shortages, etc.

Oh, crap!! I just realized this entire post probably counts as a complaint (see a Complaint Free World below). I’ll stop here and move my bracelet to the other wrist. And I was going on 3 days, too. Rats!!

A Complaint Free World. Drats.

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My purple bracelets from A Complaint Free World. arrived today. Darn.

They’re based on the simple idea that it takes 21 days to break a habit. You wear one, and decide to change the habit. If you relapse, you switch the bracelet to the other wrist and begin again. After you’ve gone 21 days without switching wrists, your habit is broken.

This sounds fine and dandy, but gosh darn it, the habit in question is complaining. I love complaining. I complain about how screwed up politics is. I complain about the work world. I complain about executive pay. I complain about my messy office. I complain about how much I complain. And then, I complain about that. Just this morning during Power Yoga (read my humorous yoga essay here), I was doing my deep breathing, my Vinyasa flow, and mentally rehearsing everything to complain about today.

And ARGH! I just realized that this very post is, itself, a complaint. Fortunately, I haven’t put the purple bracelet on… yet.

What will I do with all my new free time?

Productivity has limits!

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Last night at my birthday party, a friend told me how his company insists he show up at work before 9 to make sure everyone’s productive. It seems we’re always trying to increase productivity. But this isn’t sustainable.

You see, productivity has its limits. Period. A woman can’t have a baby in six months by trying really hard. The process takes nine months. You can’t add a woman, hoping that two women working together can make one baby in four and a half months. The process takes one woman nine months.

Every task takes a certain amount of time to complete. If you’re manufacturing round metal paperweights, the metal has to be melted and then cooled. Those physical processes can only happen so fast without the metal breaking. We might be able to speed them up a little here and there, but at the end of the day, no amount of investment can speed the process beyond a certain point.

So it makes me wonder how we know when we’re as productive in an area as it’s possible to be? I have timed myself over and over, and I write about 400 words of finished draft per hour. My mood doesn’t affect it much, my typing speed isn’t the limit. That just seems to be how long it takes me to write a finished draft. Do I try to improve it, thus improving my productivity, or am I going as fast as possible already (since writing happens subconsciously), and I just relax and go with the flow?

It’s a question worth asking businesses, who often pour resources into misguided attempts at improvement, where the status quo is just fine on its own.

It’s also worth asking yourself. Some people look for their weaknesses and try to improve them. But your weaknesses may be just fine as they are. Maybe your time is best spent enjoying life, instead!

Why did a successful basketball team choose victimhood? Not Imus’s fault.

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I’ve written before on taking responsibility for your actions. It’s also key to take responsibility for your REactions.

The flap over Imus’s racial slur is amazing. Yes, he used a phrase that was offensive. But what’s amazing is the incredible, over-the-top display of utter hypocrisy and self-deprecation that’s come from everyone else involved in the controversy.

We may not like to admit it, but Imus used a phrase straight from gangsta rap culture. That culture is primarily created and driven by the African-American community. They write and produce the songs, they sell the songs, they buy the songs. They play the sounds millions of times. Everyone makes money, and no one seems to care at the societal consequences. Even with Imus’s comment, the rest of the media has ironically repeated it two thousand times, thus driving home the association between his comment and the basketball team, in case anyone might have missed it first time around.

But the most horrible part about this episode is the stampede as everyone lines up as a victim. A TV anchor commented, “These wonderful athletes had their victory ruined by a racist slur…” Excuse me? How did 3 words from Imus ruin their victory? They have free will. They can choose to focus on their victory, and it becomes a victory. Or, they can choose to focus on Imus’s slur, and their life becomes a slur. If they choose to ignore the achievements they’ve trained for for years, and instead let one radio DJ’s comment set their entire tone, that’s their choice.

This is your choice, too. When someone insults you, makes a bigoted slur, or puts you down, you can choose how to respond. Respond from a place of victimhood, and that’s the life you write for yourself. Respond from a place of confidence and power, and that script is yours, as well. It’s your choice; choose wisely.

(African-American journalist Jason Whitlock addresses the issue in a nice article.)

How far ahead do you plan?

As I write this, oil prices topped $78. In January of 2005, gas was selling for around $1.75/gallon. Now, it’s over $3.

For any business that depends on transportation or petroleum, we just doubled that line item.

Are you assuming this is a temporary spike, and ignoring it? Are you factoring this into your long-term planning? How long-term? Are you assuming prices will keep rising or will fall?

I’m betting that most people are treating this as a new set level. But the assumptions you make about the future, and the time horizon of those assumptions, will lead you to vastly different conclusions and actions.

So choose wisely. Choose thoughtfully. And it may even make sense to do some scenario analysis, a decision tree or two, and facing unpleasant realities. You might event want to look at data, rather than just thinking wishfully (or pessimistically, for that matter). You might be surprised.

Buggy whip manufacturers got blind-sided when the world shifted to automobiles. Don’t let yourself be blind-sided because you aren’t paying attention to where the world is heading.

Does hard work bring success?

A reader wrote:

So my parents and friends insist I work harder to be more successful. But I can’t concentrate for another hour. I just zone out. Do you have any advice?

Two things jump out at me: first, you may be letting others set your goals. You say your friends and family are telling you how to be successful. Whose definition of success are they using? If they’re talking about their definition of success, be thoughtful. Decide what success means for you, and pursue that in the way you find best. Often, what we want for a happy, fulfilling life is not what others want us to have. At some point, we need to shift from following their dreams to following our own (for many people, this shift takes decades if it ever happens at all).

Even if you agree on the definition of success, however, they may not know the best way for you to get there. Not everyone can simply push themselves harder. For many of us, overwork doesn’t work. The book “The Power of Full Engagement” presents research showing that people aren’t more productive simply by working harder. We need time to rest, recharge, and build our capacity. We work best by alternating hard work and recharge time. If you’re at your work limit, go rest. Then you’ll be able to work harder again later.

One last thing, however. If you can’t concentrate at all, you may have a short attention span or even attention deficit disorder. For short attention spans, I’ve heard that meditation and concentration exercises can help you develop the ability to focus for longer periods. When it comes to ADD, I’m not qualified to discuss it with any authority, but you can contact the Attention Deficit Disorder Association for more information.

Is our addiction to Ownership giving us less all around?

I’m sitting in my Milan hotel room, preparing to pack. I open the safe and take out my laptop, BlackBerry, and iPod. I retrieve my bill, check over the charges, making a note to tell them my morning’s breakfast didn’t appear on the bill. I gather up my wallet and prepare to leave.

Counting.

My world has limits. Limited time. Limited resources. And it’s amazing how much time and resources I waste counting and tracking to make sure all the accounts balance.

My entire morning was spent counting. My laptop is in a safe because someone might steal it. So we forge a safe from metal and energy, and I now use my life time and energy to remember the combination, open, close, pack, and unpack the safe. Every time I enter or leave the room. After all, my Blackberry, iPod, etc. were expensive! Must count and recount them. Otherwise, some evil person might make off with them. And then where would we be? My life might become meaningless.

And the bill! Goodness, now that I’ve been here four days, we use a Manager’s time, computer, printer, paper, toner, and a bellman’s time to deliver the piece of paper insuring we all know how much time I spent and everything is tracked to the last penny. What a grand use of our life, time, paper, and ink: counting things. At least it provides employment (and meaningful employment, at that. Counting things. Our most valuable activity.)

I’ve heard most of the expense of the phone systems isn’t in the physical infrastructure, but in the accounting and billing systems to track who called whom for how long. I can believe it.

We’re addicted to ownership, and to the counting and tracking we do to make sure all the right things are owned by the right people. Some degree of ownership may be hardwired, but that’s no excuse. We’re not hardwired to wear a suit and conform to our job description, yet billions of us do it flawlessly every day for 40+ years. We can overcome our hard-wiring. Instead, we’ve raised it to an artform. The flow of money–nothing more than counting–keeps Bill Gates worth as much as the bottom 175 million Americans, keeps billions in poverty, and distorts our very governance processes from creating nurturing communities. Instead, we nurture the sources of money.

I sometimes wonder how much infrastructure, time, lives, and effort we would save if we simply mellowed out and found a way to share as needed without this frantic need to own own own in unimaginable quantity. I suspect the “chaos” caused by relaxing our controls wouldn’t cost us humans a fraction of the resources currently sucked up by accounting firms, receipt printers and processors, billing systems, transaction processing, etc. What if all those resources that go into the relentless tracking were made available to feed, clothe, and help people be happy. It would certainly be billions (accounting firms alone make billions every year). Maybe it would be trillions. Perhaps enough to finance America’s looming Medicare crisis.

Counting. Things.

When my mother was dying, the day came to take her to hospice. She looked around her room. I asked what we should bring. She waved her hand dismissively and replied, “Stuff? These are only things. They don’t mean anything.” She took nothing. And she left this world with nothing except two children who loved her.

On the drive home after she was gone, I noticed her “Rodney Raindeer” beanie baby on the car dashboard. It’s the only thing of hers I kept. It was soft. It was loved, and she smiled when she saw it. At the end, that’s all that counted.

The eyes have it… Body language and the Body Politic

Last night (April 7, 2006) we were watching Scott McClellan in the White House press room responding to an onslaught of questions from reporters about leaks, classified information, and whether President Bush has declassified information for his party’s political gain (versus for the good and safety of the country).

Scott was a masterpiece of composure and a masterpiece of rhetorical wordgames. I find it funny that people decried Clinton from playing semantics, yet as far as I can tell, every politician from both parties pushes semantics to the hilt. Clinton wants us to know what the meaning of “is” is. Bush wants us to know that “declassified today” means “released to the public today” and that leaks aren’t leaks when he decides to leak them.

The funnest part was watching Scott’s body language. Check out Paul Ekman’s book “Emotions Revealed.” Ekman tells us that we have microexpressions that reveal our true emotions, even when we’re trying to hide them. Through the miracle of our DVR, we were able to freeze-frame and slow Scott’s face during critical questions. He was a veritable case study for Ekman’s micro-expressions. Our favorite came when a reporter asked Scott about the President’s reaction to the news story. We replayed it on super-slow-motion about a dozen times. He had sudden tightened lips, brows drawn slightly together, and his lower eyelids tightened. All signs of anger.

At this point, politics is so broken that I’m even losing the will to act. I have no faith in either party to understand, much less act in, the country’s long-term best interest. I have no faith in either party to understand, much less act on, the truly catastrophic dangers of our time: peak oil and global warming.

Values-wise, I happen to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Relatively speaking, that means I side with the Democrats. (At least during my lifetime, the four Republican administrations have racked up $7 Trillion in debt, and I highly disapprove of such fiscal recklessness. Give me tax-and-spend over borrow-and-spend any day. At least you feel the pain immediately rather than burdening your grandchildren for life!)

I don’t know what to tell you about politics, and it doesn’t matter, because it won’t change your mind anyway. But certainly check out Ekman and body language. At least you’ll get some entertainment out of the circus.