If You Are Someones Boss, Don't Be A Prick

I remember it like it was the day before yesterday, though some aspects may be slightly augmented for effect, I will admit. I was in his office for some tiny project related slip, though the blame was probably shared by others who had refused to do their jobs such as requirements developers who left gaps or failed to communicate the details effectively. He asked why I had made such a giant horrible mistake and I began to explaining, "Well, I assumed that . . . " and before I could complete my thought, he was up out of his chair and at the white board. There, he dramatically and with great proud flourish, wrote in giant capital letters, ASSUME. He then said "Never assume, for when you assume, you make and ASS", where upon he enthusiastically drew a huge circle around the A and the two S's and continued, "out of YOU", whereupon he circled the capital U, "and ME", as, you guessed it, he put a circle about the M and the E. He confidently finished with a smug smile, then snapped the marker shut, dropped it onto the rail under the board, and dusted off his hands for final emphasis, a move I . . . assume . . . is a holdover from when he lorded over employees in the age of chalk boards instead of the dustless white boards of the day.

I felt crushed, demoralized, demeaned, dismissed, and instead of leaving after a conversation where I learned how to better interact with coworkers to get information I needed and he learned where the gaps in communication among his people were such that he could better manage then, I dropped to my knees to kiss his scuffed crappy brown cheap leather shoes, and crawled out into the hallway to slink back to my desk and try to figure it out on my own. Actually, I probably rounded up a couple sympathizers and took a two hour lunch, but that is neither here nor there.

Assume. We must assume. It is a critical asset to daily life. We assume we are supposed to return to work each day and complete the project as defined weeks earlier and that if the scope or direction changes, our manager will tell us. We assume that people in other areas are doing their jobs and that our manager is keeping up with that so that our piece will come together with other pieces at the right time and in the right way. We assume that certain processes and procedures have been followed by others. We assume that in the best interests of all, we have been given the correct and true information and will have access to certain resources to do our job. And that we assume makes the manager's job easier. Repeat:  That we assume a set of things makes our manager's job easier because he or she is relieved of constantly having to reiterate the obvious and reassure us of continuity.

Imagine if I were to stop by his office every day and ask if I still was to come in to work the next day and continue work on the project. Imagine if every bit of information I got, I came to him for verification. Imagine if I stopped by several times a day and asked if anything had changed about the project. Imagine if I spent great parts of my day checking and double checking and second guessing and reaffirming. What a nuisance I would become.

No, dammit, John, we assume a great many things a great many times a day, in work and in every aspect of the real world, and I hate you for your lapse of management that day.

You seemed clever and powerful, but you were a toad. I hope you have warts. Actually, I hope you have somehow learned your lesson and found ways to manage that are not so demeaning to those whom you entrusted to manage.

If YOU are a manager, do NOT use the cheap trick of mocking your employee for assuming or for using the word.  Instead, do the managerial work of helping ferret out where the errors in assumption were and fix what you can as a manager and teach your employee to communicate more effectively in the future.  

Quiting Somthing Is The Hardest Thing

There are resolutions to change of all sorts, but the ones to DO something are far the easiest. If you are going to read more books or eat better, you get a thousand chances a day to put that into motion. Stop for a few minutes before heading off to work to read a chapter, read a little more before dinner and a little more before bedtime. Add some carrots to your lunchtime meal of a sandwich. Park father away and walk more. Clean a closet or a corner of a room and you are on the way to success. Take the steps. Do, do, do, take action, and so it is easy to score on the "do something" resolutions.
But giving something up is an entirely different matter. If you are going to stop eating salty things or stop drinking caffeinated beverages or quit smoking or give up a drug or cease a gambling habit or stop watching television or end your nail biting, you have a thousand thousand times a day to get it wrong. Even if you forego the morning coffee for a nice orange juice, the pot is still brewing when you get to work and even if you refuse to give in then, there are the multiple offers by the waiter at lunch and the drive past a half dozen Starbucks and Caribou's on the way to everywhere and the coffeemaker on the counter top when you get home. If you manage to get into the shower without that first cigarette, there is the drive to work and those poor souls smoking by the back door that would be glad to share one with you for the sake of your company and each time one of your friends takes a break and invites you along and the after lunch smoke you have to resist and at some point, you are sitting at your desk and every minute is one more minute you have to say no to getting up and going out for a smoke.
If you do that one in a thousand chances at the good thing, you have succeeded in your positive "do something" resolution, but you have to say no a thousand times each day to succeed in your "stop something" resolution and one of one thousand where you give in counts as failure for that day.
Making a "do something" change is a walk in the park compared to making a "quit something" change. And after a few days, the new "doing" starts to kick in as habit, but if you crave the thing you are quitting 10 fewer times each day, it is a hundred days before you have a single crave free day and even then, there are countless triggers in the world to pull you back.
The force of habit is an easy thing to make and a terrible hard long long road to break.

A Common "Disorder"?

They tell us in school that we are not normal, that we don't conform. They tell us that we can't pay attention like the other kids, that we are distracted, distractible, that our minds wander. They tell us that we have too much energy and need to learn to sit still. They disapprove when we sit and stare out the window, lost in thought, thinking through questions or traveling in our mind to a far off place or living in a story of our own making. They are frustrated that we cannot finish a worksheet or long set of problems past the point where we get it and any more of the same is just tedious. And when we get absorbed into a project that we DO like, and lose track of time, and do not want to be interrupted or distracted on to something else, they get angry and call us stubborn and blockheaded. Sometimes, if locked into thoughts or concentrating on a treasured activity, we don't even notice their request and they wonder at our ability to hear or they doubt our intelligence. They called us melodramatic for our overly sensitive feelings, the ease with which we are hurt, and for our eager enthusiasm for beautiful and interesting and new things, our overexcitement in a rewarding social event.
Some of them insisted that we be medicated to make us normal, that we spend our school days in a conforming trance of boredom and vague disinterest, void of enthusiasm for much of any of it, waiting it out until we can go home and the drugs wear off and we can engage in some building or making or exploring activity on our own time. For some of us, the meds are a constant numbing dumbing thing and we never know we are failing to escape them.
But some of us got good teachers who left us alone to learn by doing projects exploring ideas and left us to read book after book about the subjects we loved and let us leave the worksheet unfinished if we could satisfy them that we understood the material and they let us fill our time with art projects and making things and trying things and leading others in study sessions.
If we are not so lucky, we have jobs that we hate that make us conform and do repetitive tasks that are torture to us. If we are lucky, we have jobs that are varied and challenging and interesting and we can thrive under bosses who value our quirkiness and creativity. And we have coworkers that forgive that we miss a meeting now and then because we lose track of time absorbed in the project.
If we are not so lucky, we have families who force us into routine pattern and make us conform to normal, but is we are lucky, we have spouses and children who tolerate our nighttime prowlings, our late nights some times and our early mornings others, who tolerate our project spread over the dining room table for weeks on end.
In the old days, we were the watchers, the keepers, the seekers.
We stayed up and watched for predators or invaders or bad weather and sounded the warnings. Only at the first faint light of dawn were we able to sleep peacefully, sure that the tribe or village had survived safely through another night. We lead the celebrations of the seasons and of the bounty of the world around us. We told the stories and made the art and brought pretty things into the village or camp. We were perceptive of the signs that said it was time to move on to some other area, that it was time to go out in search of game or to gather the food or other materials that nature provided for us. We remembered the signs of where to find these things and lead the expeditions to them and worked with fervor until the last nut was gathered and the last berry picked and the last rice grain harvested.
There are not a lot of us so statistically, we ARE not 'normal' but certainly to fall outside the norm must provide the village, the tribe, the family, society, some benefit. It must make society more adaptable, more flexible, more able to recognize signs and trends and to adapt and change to meet them. Surely we have some value today in the modern world. Can we stop calling it a 'disorder' and start valuing the watchers and keepers and seekers of today? Can we stop drugging our children and find ways to educate them that conform to their quirkiness and to their needs for hands-on and involvement instead of worksheets and memorization? Can we find jobs that are not driven by the clock and routine and that utilize our creativity and flexibility and dogged dedication to that which interests and challenges us? Can we find ways to appreciate that which we now label Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and begin to view this way of being as different but completely normal? Can we maybe even begin to accept that people like us might have some evolutionary benefit to society and some irreplaceable future value to the survival of humanity?

Just One Thing

I learned a trick from a friend yesterday. She has a chronic illness that robs her of energy and puts her in pain a great deal of the time, and when things are just overwhelming her, she makes an effort to do 'just one thing'. You know, when you take a look at the living room and it is just a giant crappy mess and you are too tired to clean it and so you turn on the TV instead? You know, when you need to do laundry and you look at the baskets in the various rooms and the stuff in the basement laundry chute and it is all just too much to contemplate so you take a nap instead? You know, how the back yard is a mess with downed branches and weeds and trash blown in so you go back inside and pretend you didn't notice? You know, you have that paper to write and it is just too too much to wrap your brain around, so you read a novel instead? Well, if you walk into the living room and do just one thing, like gather up all 18 of the Mountain Dew cans and take them to the recycling bin, or just pull all the whites out of the laundry, or just pick up the branches out of the lawn, or gather up all the reference books for the paper and write down the outline, you will find you DO have the energy for that one thing. Then later you can do just one more one thing and pretty soon, things start to look better all around. Or, after you get the whites pulled out, you might have energy right then and there to pull out all the jeans and then maybe actually start one load. After you gather up the Dew cans, you might gather up all the dishes and take them to the sink. After you pick up the branches, you might go after the litter. After you write the outline, you might take a crack at the intro paragraph too. One aspect that makes "Just One Thing" work is that you allow yourself the satisfaction of achieving a small part of the whole goal instead of beating yourself up for not getting the whole job done. Another aspect is that often, once you get one little thing done, you find you actually have energy for one or two more little things and you make even more progress on the big task. But maybe the most important aspect to "Just One Thing" is that it will train you to break a big overwhelming job into smaller achievable tasks. It will teach you to think of it not as a big hard deal but as a cluster of totally doable little things. It is a mindset that can help take the overwhelming out of life and lead to getting more done, even if that more is done in bits and pieces. And that is how life works. The tree doesn't grow in one day, but a little bit at a time. The bird doesn't build the nest all in one session, but a little bit now, then some snacking, then a little bit more. "Just One Thing." Like I am writing this down now, in the afternoon, and later, maybe in the morning, I will find a photo and post it. This can work for me!

Pick Axe

I must be using it wrong. Clay sticks to the pointy end of the pick axe so that when I swing it back up over my head to drop it again, little chunks of dirt drop off into my hair. Did I ever mention that I would much rather design a landscape than install it?