One of the standing rules that I have told my friends and employees for almost as long as I can remember is that if I am not actively laughing, making jokes, and being generally jovial, the situation is actually rather bad.
My approach to life pretty much falls into the buckets of:
1) Make everyone's day better.
2) Ten years from now, 90% of this will not matter.
Life is stressful enough as it is, let alone in the modern work world where the principal of "More with Less" has been raised to a fine art form. To the extent that by joke or song or the mockery of myself (which is now become second nature to me) I can somehow encourage or lighten the load of others, I will do it.
The second part - that ten years from now 90% of this will not matter - is driven by years of working with products and documents which eventually go into banker's boxes to sit at storage facilities until they can be destroyed, unremembered and unknown except by those that worked on them (now, the banker's boxes are replaced by electronic pixels, which get deleted per the company's retention policy). How many nights and days were spent on these items, how much worry and energy were spent on "these things that are super important" - that were not, in retrospect, really important.
I will say that one outcome of this sort of view of life is that allows one to maintain a fairly happy outlook during the day. Yes, it can get bogged down with the occasional incident or emergency, but generally it makes the days more pleasant.
The counter item, of course, is that I perceive myself to not be seen as a very "serious" person.
Which is fine, especially now. I have almost zero need or want to ascend the ladder of corporate world at this point, and given my choice, I would rather be happy than corporate.
This all works, except for those moments when suddenly someone turns to you and asks for your actual opinion or for you to make the critical decision. If that is where we are then indeed, we are in a very bad place.
Find it most interesting to read reports of life in the corporate world, having been employed by the Feds (Social Security Admin) myself. Had NO interest in moving into management ranks to have to deal with co-workers and their foibles. It was enough to handle the public five days a week.
ReplyDeleteNylon12, I have been at far higher levels than my current position. At this point, there is no real reason to go further, both because I am at the tail end of my "career" and the fact that at a large employer, there is a lot that goes into going above a certain level, things I have no interest in.
DeleteI had a much different experience since most of my work ends up on factory floors or in the homes/businesses of others and I still occasionally see them when out and about. It would be hard to design something only to have 90% of my designs end up in a box and destroyed.
ReplyDeleteEd, once I figured that particular point, it made the urgency of things much less "urgent". Hard to take things at all the same intensity when you know 90% is going nowhere.
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