Abraham Lincoln
“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.”
Kahlil Gibran
Karl Edwards
I’m out of my routine.
Not that I’m much of a person of routine, but even I feel adrift.
This week was already structured. It was structured around an out-of-town visitor who is not coming to town after all. It was structured around certain tasks from last week being completed… which they are not.
I find myself having to practice what I preach… I have to adjust.
I could let it be discombubalating (yes, that is a word). Or I could quickly settle on a new structure.
It’s easy to allow oneself to be thrown for a loop by unexpected changes. The mind is still trying to figure out what happened, trying to recover what should have a happened, and speculating on what might have happened next.
The sooner we can settle on what we choose to happen, the sooner we can be on our way and back to effectiveness.
I don’t need to start my planning all over again. I simply need to make an adjustment. I simply need to make another choice. I simply need to make my next choice.
The longer I dwell on the changes and their effect on me, the greater their effect will be and the longer it will take to return to effectiveness.
I‘m going to shake this off and begin a different project now.
Let me know how your Monday morning adjustment went.
“The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there—you build yourself. Those are the high ones, the thick ones, the ones with no doors in.”
Ursula K. LeGuin
Karl Edwards
Decisions.
It’s common and not an entirely bad thing to want to make the “right” decision instead of the “wrong” decision.
We all want our decisions to be validated in the crucible of reality.
But it is fallacious to assume either that there are only two alternatives (the right one or the wrong one), or that the reason that some decisions don’t work out has to do with a fatal flaw in the original decision.
Let’s take the two problems one at a time.
First, that there is a “right” decision to be made and all other decisions are flatly “wrong”.
This either-or, blank-and-white thinking is naive at best if not outright dangerous.
Instead of a fork in the road, imagine a chess board. There are many possible moves to make. There are multiple strategies one might select and/or switch between. There is also another player involved who is making decisions with varying degrees of precision, shrewdness and finesse of their own.
Imagine then an (as yet not invented) eight-person chess game with an octagonal gigantic chess board. Multiple decision-makers and multiple dynamics (more…)
Bad bosses. Stultifying office cultures. Boring job descriptions. Suffocating bureaucracies. Ambiguous career paths. Petty co-workers.
There are plenty of triggers for a bad day at work. There are plenty of perfectly understandable justifications for a bad attitude.
Plenty of reasons but no excuses.
What?!
That’s right… no excuses. There are no excuses for the attitude we choose to wear each day.
Lots of impacting factors… yes. But excuses… no.
The point is not to be harsh, but realistic. I am not trying to lay blame, but embrace responsibility.
When circumstances align themselves against us, we always have a choice as to how we will respond.
No one can take that choice away from us.
Here’s the key take-away: there is enormous power in being able to choose one’s attitude. That’s a good thing.
The realization that I have the power to choose in spite of all that might be happening around me, is hugely uplifting, empowering and renewing.
Think about it.
At the very moment when we might be feeling powerless, picked on, or buffeted, we still are the only ones who can choose with what attitude we will proceed.
What attitude have you chosen to wear today?
On your side,
– Karl Edwards
“Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.”
Will Durant
Karl Edwards