Meaningful work can be fun and easy. It’s when you’re in the state of flow. You’ve got the rhythm. Inspiration finally decided to show up because you did.
This applies to the art of creating.
But it doesn’t apply as easily to the art of connecting to someone.
Connecting to someone when it matters most (when they have an issue, when they are struggling, when they need something from you) is not fun or easy.
But we set aside our assumptions and uphold our empathy because we’re good people and it’s what’s needed of us. To listen and respond, not hear and react.
Stay Positive & We Can All Be Customer Service Experts If We Want
If everyone is using your tool, it becomes saturated and people drop off or it becomes broken because it wasn’t designed to handle this much all at once) and people drop off or something else happens and.. you guessed it, people drop off. Too much is too much.
If no one is using your tool, however, it becomes something no one wants to adopt. People might sign up but they’ll drop off right away because there’s not enough connections. People need the reassurance of not being the only one.
The challenge of every marketer is to get to the sweet spot in the middle of too little and too much.
This tension isn’t just applicable to the network effect, either.
Too much stress with work and there’s no flow. Too much boredom and there is no flow.
Life is too depressing to work. Life is too good to work. (Austin Kleon for HT.)
The spectrums are infinite, but the truth is the same: masters are found in the middle.
More often than we probably acknowledge or appreciate, the way things happen is actually often aligned with what we were hoping for.
Of course, we often put focus on when something doesn’t go the way we were hoping for.
We try to rationalize it after the fact. Find a place to assign blame, perhaps.
All at the loss of doing one or two better moves.
The first being finding the lesson. Perhaps you didn’t get the job because of a missing attribute. You have control over adding that in and learning from the experience.
The second being finding a way to move on. Perhaps a coin was flipped and you didn’t luck out with the job. That’s out of your control and there’s nothing to learn from that, which means it’s time to spend the energy on hoping for something new than sulking in how things didn’t go how you hoped.
Funny how instruction manuals and part lists and how-tos can have the wrong language in them or be missing a piece or some step isn’t quite aligned with what’s in front of you as you’re trying to complete it.
When this happens, you’re left with two options.
Invest a lot of time to figure it out (and any time there is a time investment, you’re undoubtedly getting frustrated or enraged, too). You might discover there was a missing piece or find the missing step in some thread in the deep web. Key word, though, is might.
The second option is to evaluate if it’s truly needed to still get the result you want. If you think about it, the language is wrong, the piece is missing or the step is misaligned because it’s not critical in the first place – it was the last prioritized element of someone’s role.
Rather than investing time to figure it out, it’s worth investing time to evaluate if you can keep going with the task anyway, first. Perhaps this entails simply leaving that void a void or it’s quick thinking on how to fill the gap with an alternative.
More often, shipping the work, completing the task, moving forward is more important than getting it absolutely perfect (especially when it doesn’t need to be).
