Just as a concert orchestra isn’t a race to the last note, life isn’t a race to some exalted state called success.
This is the point of a short talk by Alan Watts, which has been animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park. This unlikely meeting of widely differing talents is an inspiration.
Last week, an editorial in one of Denmark’s leading newspapers took aim at yours truly. Here’s the introduction:
Enforced mirth
The title alone guarantees some mirth: Chief Happiness Officer – senior happiness comissioner.The line between embarrassing and funny may be a fine one, but you certainly can’t take a title like that seriously.
Truth to tell, among many other ridiculous titles, it has to be a candidate for some award: stupidest title of the year or something like that.
(source)
It goes on at some length…
When I first spotted this editorial it made me sad. Nobody likes to be criticized – I certainly don’t – and this criticism seemed both unfair and a little malicious to me.
A blog comment like this one is another good example. They’re very rare, but they do crop up occasionally.
As I was thinking about how to react to the editorial, I remembered this graph by Kathy Sierra:
In one of her very best posts (and that’s saying something) Kathy talks about the physics of passion saying:
You don’t really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of “drinking the koolaid.” You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it’s the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion… or rather passion in the hate dimension.
This means that the kind of criticism I got in that editorial is great news. It is a sign that my message is sharp enough that some people take an active dislike to it. They may not care for it – but they care!
If all I got was negative feedback it would probably be time to rethink my work in happiness, but fortunately it’s not all hate – far from it! Many, many people tell me that they enjoy my book, blog and presentations and have used them actively to become happier at work.
I think we can all use Kathy’s excellent reminder to do two things:
1: Whatever you’re doing, get yourself and others passionate about it. Your project, product, company, process, leadership, work, salesmanship – whatever you’re doing will go better with passion.
This means that your message can be anything but bland. Don’t set out to actively piss people off – that’s just crude. But if you’re pleasant, moderate, mild and soft-spoken you also run the risk of being utterly forgettable. No one will oppose you – but no one will be passionate about whatever it is you do either. That’s why you must hone your message to the point where it’s possible to be passionate about it.
2: When people get negative about you, remember that this is part of the process. As Kathy puts it:
Should you ignore the detractors? Diss them as nothing but evidence of your success? Should you just wave them off with a “just jealous” remark? Absolutely not.
Somewhere in their complaints there are probably some good clues for things you can work on. But if you start trying to please them all or even worse, turn them into fans, that could mean death. Death by mediocrity, as you cater to everybody and inspire nobody.
I’d rather go down in flames than risk death by mediocrity. Kevin Briody said it best:
I don’t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, …
I want “f**king cool! Period.
I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16–on-afterburners-rip-by so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy.
What about you?
I was looking through Christine Kane’s wonderful blog (thx Mike) and lemmetellya, the lady can write. She’s smart and funny – and that’s in addition to being a great musician and singer.
On her site I found a post called 8 things you get when you order my new DVD. Reason number 8 is my favorite:
8 – You get to feel better about yourself.
So, the concert ends with a song called The Problem with Jazz. And we mess it up! Right at the end! Right at the last drum beat! The band falls to pieces. Not only do we mess up a song — but it’s the end of the whole evening!
Now, as you know, these things can be edited. We could’ve re-filmed it. We could’ve even cut to a different shot and taken out the sound. But I was in the editing suite, and I said, “Nah. Let’s leave it. It’s funny.”
Here’s why I left it, really: If I can screw up the ending of a show in front of 400 people and thousands of other viewers, then you don’t have to feel so bad if you mess up, say, at your office in front of five or ten or twenty-five people. Or when you give a speech. Really, it’s a way to make you feel better about yourself. Most music videos don’t offer such a raw glimpse of human foibles. They’re all edited and perfected, and so you don’t get a chance to see the human side of performing.
Well, now I’ve changed that trend! By next week, you’ll see videos of Celine Dion tripping over one of her dancers and falling face first onto the stage and then laughing it off as she hoists her sequin gown back over her left buttock. Just you wait!
That’s hilarious. And it totally sealed it for me – I had to order the DVD just to see them get it wrong :o)
Christine’s point is also a great reminder to allow ourselves to fail – and to be seen failing. This goes great at work too.
Peter Drucker’s said that companies should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because the only people who never mess up are those who never do anything interesting.
Prasad Kurian suggests we should promote people the way some ancient societies chose a new chief – pick the person with the most scars. That person has taken risks – but not enough to get killed.
Randy Nelson of Pixar says that “You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.”
And finally, there’s my own experience from learning to wakeboard over the last two months. I’ve been getting pretty good at it (as you can see here), but it has cost me a lot of falls. Some of them very public and more than a little painful. Like last Sunday, when I got a little overconfident and steered right into a pier :o)
And yes, these days anything is an excuse for me to mention wakeboarding. I’m hooked, dammit :o)
I was contacted by the nice people who run blog action day and asked if I would like to participate – and of course I would.
The idea is simple: On one date, October 15th, all participating blogs will blog about one topic – the environment.
If you have a blog, why not be a part of this – 1400 blogs have joined so far, this is going to be massive :o)
And what, I hear you ask, does the environment have to do with happiness at work? Lots, I tell you. Many companies are finding, that when they change their business to be more environmentally sustainable, their employees experience a growing sense of pride in the company – leading to more happiness at work.
These companies also find, interestingly, that customers become proud to place their business there and become more loyal – and that consequently the company makes more money.
Two great examples are:
1: Interface (the world’s largest carpet manufacturer) who produced a line of environmentally friendly carpets that, even though they were more expensive than their regular products, became their best selling product.
Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, had a rude awakening about the way his company had been polluting, saying:
It dawned on me that they way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.
So I said to myself “My goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail.”
2: Patagonia who make outdoor wear and mountain climbing gear and who donate 1% of their revenue or 10% of their profits, whichever is greater, to environmental causes chosen by their employees.
Much more on October 15th.
My most controversial post ever, is still the one where I support having open salaries in a company.
I was surprised by how very provocative this idea is to a lot of people, but I remain convinced that it’s the best way to ensure motivation, happiness and fairness.
And Today’s Dilbert strip supports me :o)
Recently I’ve been serving as an expert at The Job Lounge, answering career related questions. If you’d like to see some of the sage advice I and others are dishing out, go check it out.
Here are my answers so far:
What to Study to Make Money and Be Happy
Do you choose your studies based on money or on happiness? Do you even need to choose?
Bad Boss, Bad Reference
What if your boss is a horrible person – but quitting will mean that she will give you a bad reference?
Susan Ireland (author The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Resume) who runs the site has been getting together a lot of great answers – everything from explaining a gap in your resume to handling a job that ends badly to how to become a dealer in Vegas(!)
So – as I blogged about yesterday, emails have been piling up in my inbox to the tune of 200 unanswered emails, some of them – I kid you not – from way back in Februrary.
I really wanted to get down to an empty inbox, but lately when I sat down at my computer to get it done… I didn’t. I looked at that mountain of mail, many of which I really should’ve responded to long ago and felt really bad about, and kinda gave up in advance.
And this is where I could choose between two approaches. There’s the “Just get it done” approach. This means ignoring how much it sucks and just doing it anyway. Knuckling under, putting my nose to the grindstone and my shoulder to the wheel and some other body part to some other part of machinery and answer those darn emails.
Or I could ask myself the following question: How can I make it fun? How can I answer those emails in a way that feels effortless and makes me happy?
Being the Chief Happiness Officer, I couldn’t really go for the former option so I was forced to try to make it fun. I asked for advice on the blog yesterday and got some really good input.
After thinking about it I designed a strategy – and got all of my emails answered in less than a day. That also includes the 50 or so emails that came in during the day.
So without further ado, here’s the strategy that worked for me:
1: Accept myself
First of all, I stopped wasting time berating myself for getting into this situation. If there’s one thing experience has taught me it’s that I’m the kinda person who lets a mess build and then cleans it all up at once.
I know that other people ar way more organized and get stuff done as they go (the bastards!) – but I’m just not one of them and I’m not going to waste time beating myself up over it.
I’m a lazy person – and this is not a problem, it’s a huge advantage.
2: Track and publish the number of unanswered emails
I published the number of unanswered emails and kept updating it during the day. This meant that I could see progress all the time. Your inbox looks pretty much the same with 100 emails in it as with 200. Keeping track of the number meant I knew I was getting results.
Also publishing the number kept me going a few times when I felt like quitting because I reminded myself how cool it would be to end the day with 0 unanswered emails – AND brag about it here :o)
3: Move tasks to my todo-list
But possibly the single most important thing I did was use my todo-list. If answering an email required me to perform a more serious task, I’d put the task on my todo-list and answer the email saying when I would get back with the actual information.
This allowed me to stay in the flow of answering emails, without getting sidetracked by writing documents etc.
4: Get out of the house
And of course I went to my favorite café. But I always do that when I need to get work done.
5: Use snippets
I also used a tip from Michiel Trimpe who suggested using email snippets that can easily be inserted into an email. Specifically, I used the following text a lot:
I apologize for taking so long to reply to your mail – I’ve been drowning in email lately :o)
6: Don’t be afraid to say no (Updated)
I almost forgot this one: Making sure to say no, when no is the answer. I get a lot of invitations, links, ideas, proposals, etc. Most of them are very good, but some are just not suitable for me.
I’ve been training myself to “just say no”. In a polite way, of course :o)
One tactic I considered, but didn’t use
I did think about declaring email bankruptcy as George suggested but I decided that would be cheating :o)
The result of all of this was that I spent a nice, fun, productive day doing a task that I’d been dreading. A lot. For a long time.
The key, for me at least, is that I didn’t ask myself how I could get the job done the fastest or the most efficiently – my focus was on making it fun and pleasant. If I can do that, I know I can get the job done and I think that aspect is missing from most of the productivity systems and advice out there, which is focused entirely too much on the mechanics of productivity.
Make a task fun four yourself and you will be productive.
What about you? How do you take tasks you’ve been putting of for way too long and make them fun? I’m not talking about how you get them done – but how you do it so that you enjoy yourself? Got any great ideas? Please write a comment!
Related:
Consultant and author Rowan Manahan has gathered together the ultimate list of resources for job hunters everywhere.
Every aspect is covered, from deciding to look for a new job, to interviewing, to negotiating and actually starting in a new company. I contributed a post of my own on how to make sure you find a job that makes you happy.
If you’re at all considering switching jobs – and according to studies 60% of us are thinking about it at any given time – go check out The Definitive Job-Hunt Guide.
I’m taking a short break from blogging until I’ve done something about the staggering amount of unanswered emails in my inbox :o) I’m telling ya, it is totally getting out of hand…
In the meantime I could really use your ideas: How can I make answering all those emails fun? How can I do it in a way that will make me happy? Any and all ideas are welcome- just write a comment.
I’ve already thought of one thing I’ll do: I’ll post the current number of unanswered emails right here. Right now the count stands at:
202 unanswered mails (10:30 PM, Aug. 14)
214 unanswered mails (8:15 AM, Aug. 15) – Yikes, that’s what I get for going to bed :o)
172 unanswered mails (10:01 AM, Aug. 15)
100 unanswered mails (11:10 AM, Aug. 15) (WOO-HOO!)
67 unanswered mails (11:57 AM, Aug. 15)
43 unanswered mails (2:22 PM, Aug. 15)
17 unanswered mails (3:23 PM, Aug. 15)
5 unanswered mails (3:34 PM, Aug. 15)
0 unanswered mails (3:50 PM, Aug. 15) WOOOO-HOOOOOOOOO!!!
Phew, I made it. Tomorrow I’ll be posting on my strategy and on what tips I used or didn’t use.
And please don’t let this post hold you back from sending me email – I would LOVE to hear from you. And my inbox suddenly looks so… barren :o)
Jill read my post about why constant complaining is so toxic in the workplace and then experienced a moment of synchronicity:
I broadly agree with your post, except that, well, right after reading it, my feed reader served up a post from another blogger I enjoy reading called “The Right to Complain“. She and I are both academics, and there’s certainly a culture among many academics to complain about the system we’re in. I’ve found your blog, among others, helpful in trying to figure out what it is that I’m not happy about in my job, and what I am happy about, and which things, if any, I want to change.
Anyway, coming just after each other like that, two posts on complaining that argue very differently. Dr. Crazy argues that academic jobs are extremely difficult, because of the large investment in time and money you’ve put into getting there (thank you Norway for better funding), the large amount of “invisible” work that goes into research, publishing, administration etc, and your lack of choice in where you live, among other things (I’m lucky, I work where I want to live). Yet people tend to think it’s a cushy job, “you only work 12 hours a week”! (that’s the classroom hours).
If you have time, I’d love to hear your opinion after reading her post. Could there be a kind of complaining that’s not directed to someone like the boss, but – well, with an idea that perhaps one should complain to the people who can change things, and those people are sometimes yourself and your colleagues?
Thanks for the link, Jill. That is indeed two very different views on complaining – at least at first glance.
I agree with Dr. Crazy that we all have the right to complain. It’s not like I can tell anyone else that their problems are not worthy of complaining about because what seems a molehill to me might well be a mountain to them – and vice versa.
In fact, if you want to increase workplace complaining, all you need to do is to tell people not to complain because their problems are so trivial they have no right to complain. That‘ll get them complaining for sure :o)
So it’s not really about whether or not we have a right to complain (if somethings’s wrong, you have the right) it’s about how we choose to complain. As I wrote in my post, I believe that there are two fundamentally ways to go about expressing your dissatisfaction: Constructive and destructive.
Broadly speaking, constructive complaining leads to change and destructive complaining leads to more complaining (more here).
I also disagree with her assertion that “if nobody complained, then nothing would ever change, then none of those sucky things would ever be eradicated. ”
Dissatisfaction and complaining is one way to go about changing things – a deep appreciation of what is and a positive desire for the future is another, and in my experience, more effective way of bringing about change. I often refer to this quote by Patch Adams which points to this dilemma:
Change that is deeply effective and positive presents a paradoxical challenge.
On the one hand, there needs to be an appreciation and acceptance of how things are in the here and now. On the other hand, there needs to be an active intention to make things better.
Nothing needs to change, and everything can improve. This is the way to avoid the two extremist traps of activist’s frustration or pessimistic complacency.
– Patch Adams
However I agree totally with Dr. Crazy’s final statement that “if one can’t bitch on a blog, where exactly can one bitch?” :o) It’s like blogs were made for it.
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