Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
So I get in the elevator with the mail carrier today. We’re both excited it’s Friday, but I mention that it’s raining (which doesn’t suck, but I’d prefer sunny weather. Who wouldn’t, right?) And he says to me, “It’s better than snow.”
“That’s true,” I respond.
Then he said, “Gotta think positive.”
He said that to a man (me) whose motto is Stay Positive. It was a subtle reminder that while we can be experts on anything, even experts fail. And that’s a good thing.
The fault is all on you.
Quite recently in my career as a journalist, I decided that I would not do an interview that goes over an hour. Collectively, the interview may take more than an hour, but the total would not be one continuous effort to get all that I could out of it. I also hold this rule for team meetings or anything one does in groups.
When the hour is up. It’s up. Not a minute over. Sometimes – and preferably – it ends a few minutes short of an hour.
People are exhausting. So is caring, listening, and interacting with other people. I’ve come to the conclusion that speaking for an extra three minutes or asking people to stay late or staying on one topic when it was scheduled to change 10 minutes ago does more harm than good. Why does this matter?
Think about your work. What do you do? There are very (very!) few jobs that don’t require you to interact with another person or group of people. (For those few jobs that don’t, I guarantee they would only benefit by having human to human interaction.) The thought behind this is that while an extra two minutes may mean nothing to you, those you interact with may view their time as more valuable. (Not to mention, your inability to recognize this leaves those who you interact with with the impression that you don’t care about them, which is exactly what you set out not to do.)
To stay parallel with my recent writing on consumerism and positive emotionalism (that people buy products that make them feel certain ways and sacrifice leisure time to do so), overtime needs mentioning.
The concept behind normal working hours and being paid a larger amount if you worked over those hours (overtime) was introduced in 1937 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The development overtime has taken in the workplace is outstanding, both in terms of higher pay for working overtime and pushing employers to heavily restrict the ability for workers to work overtime. In turn, offering workers more leisure time.
I argue that with this additional leisure time, people still participate in overtime. With “overtime” being defined as our pursuit of that which makes us feel the way we want to feel through working more than is reasonable and beyond meaningful. (Work, by my definition, is anything that we put effort into doing without passion.) One does not need to have a full-time cubicle job with benefits for one to be considered working. Many times, just doing dishes and vacuuming is work.
The pivotal point here is that overtime is an average object covered with a cloak of hope. Hope that if one works hard enough, that what is under the cloak will turn into something that makes them feel better; be it a bigger car, a better type of coffee brew, or just new dishes.
What puzzles me most is that we work overtime to perform this cloak-covered magic when we are better off performing the real magic of working with passion (making art).
The wand is in your hand.
Stay Positive & You Don’t Need An Object Just To Wave It
Garth E. Beyer
Ironically, Seth Godin touched on part of this post this morning. Full disclosure, I had the idea and began writing about this prior to my viewing of his blog.
Photo credit
Recently I’ve written a lot about materialism and how uninformed we are of our own real desires and intentions.
We the people do not want more things. What we want is to feel. We don’t buy energy drinks because they are full of sugar, taste good, or because other people buy them. We buy energy drinks because they make us feel energized. They make us feel productive. You and I both know how great of a feeling that is.
This is positive emotionalism at its finest.
And positive emotionalism (seeking out and leveraging what makes us feel good) is expensive. Our desires are manipulated by marketing, but what’s more important is that we do seek out items that make us feel one way or another, regardless of being marketed to. In more simple terms, if we were never marketed to, we would still find energy drinks that make us feel productive because the feeling is what we really want.
How does this affect you and me?
Research has shown that we don’t necessarily work more each week. If anything, we work less and have more leisure time. On the other hand, I would argue that during the hours we do work, that we work harder. Furthermore, the hours that we don’t clock in, we find ourselves still working. For what?
We’ve exchanged leisure time with our pursuit of how we want to feel. The defining principle here is that our pursuit has lead us to consume rather than enjoy, to buy instead of play, and to fall into instantly crippling debt when we could be doing something remarkable with our leisure time.
Marketers don’t control us. Materialism doesn’t control us.
But our ignorance of “how” we can feel the way we want to feel – that’ll be the death of us. After all, it already is the cause of our “non-existent” leisure time.
We have to search for less consuming ways to feel the way we want to feel if we ever want our leisure time back. Problem is, true leisure is the most likely place we’ll find it.
Stay Positive & Oh, The Irony. Sensitivity Has Left Us Senseless.
Garth E. Beyer
Photo credit
If you looked at why we consume, you would discover that nowadays we buy into how things make us feel.
As far as I can remember, reading a newspaper has never left me feeling too good.
Common sense…
In a world that defines the importance of everything by placing it in a list, one more list won’t hurt, right?
1. Seth Godin
2. Malcolm Gladwell (also find his writing in the New Yorker)
3. Paul Krugman
Breaking them down
Seth Godin: You may wonder why I have “self-dissatisfaction” in the title. Godin is the reason why. I work to emulate Godin on a daily basis, to write in a way that equally encourages people to challenge the status quo (by creating a ruckus) and inspires them to be creative about it. Godin writes in the way that says “you can do better, here is how you can be better – go and combine the two.”
Malcolm Gladwell: Ah, Gladwell. No person can say “you’re an idiot, start asking why things are the way they are so you quit buying into the status quo and being manipulated” like Gladwell. His way of writing answers the question of why with grace, common sense, and resolve. He inspires me to not only question everything, but actually seek out the answer – the full answer (and share it!).
Paul Krugman: He has attitude. Actually, a firefull combination of expertness and bias. I read his wonkish writing to understand how to state facts in a direct, “duh!” kind of way. While I don’t care to know all of the facts of economics he has to share, I adorn the way he shares them. Additionally, I admire everything that he writes that is non-wonkish, such as why he doesn’t use Twitter, or his reflections on family and life. He reminds me that although you can be one of the top-most professionals in your niche, that you’re human and people love reading the works of people who are human.
Take a moment to think of the details of daily life that help you move on and feel better.
In the early days, we consumed to meet our needs.
Then we consumed to meet our wants.
What most people miss is after we met our wants, we didn’t want more; what we wanted was to feel.
People don’t buy a BMW because it shines. People don’t buy Starbucks because it’s the best tasting coffee. People don’t buy bigger houses because they want more, more, more.
People buy into how items makes them feel.
Businesses have gone from advertising (more, more, more) to marketing (feel, feel, feel). We’ve gone from buying what we want, to buying how we want to feel.
Looking at it this way makes consumption seem more positive. The more you consume the better you feel. But let’s not forget that the less we consume, the more leisure time we will have.
Ask yourself, how would more leisure time make you feel?
Stay Positive & Better Than Consuming?
Garth E. Beyer
Photo credit
