"Be patient with people. Everything you have to deal with today is going to seem so trivial, but to anyone out there, if they’ve had to call the police, it’s a big deal. So whatever’s going on inside your head, you treat people with the compassion and respect they deserve."
Catherine is a no-nonsense police sergeant who heads up a team of officers in a rural Yorkshire valley. When a staged kidnapping spirals out of control turning into a brutal series of crimes, Catherine finds herself involved in something significantly bigger than her rank, but unknowingly close to home.
We're having our share of things that are significantly bigger than our title, role, or place in the world right now. It's been a tough couple of years. And there's still plenty of sad news out there.
If you manage people, sometimes you find yourself in Catherine's situation. Perhaps in not as dramatic situation as her DS who got killed. But as dramatic when someone feels their prospects killed. A few days before the untimely death of a young sergeant, they had this exchange:
"I had to give her a bit of a talking to. Yesterday morning. I said, 'I’m not your mother. You’re a police officer, nobody bullies you.' So she’d be out to prove something. She said, 'This is all I wanted to do, all my life, and I’m sh*t at it,' and I should’ve said 'No you’re not. You’re fantastic, you’re lovely,' but I didn’t."
Perhaps you've had a similar exchange with a colleague, or a family member in the past. What's going on right now is hard to put in the background. Perspective comes with time.
To that, I say, "Be patient with people,
and with yourself."
This week, I curated stories that tackle this problem of reframing what's going on so you can make decisions that will make things better. You can choose to interpret reality in ways that are relevant to accumulating value, rather than dissipating it with your efforts.
See what you can do. There are different ways to translate culture into narrative. Choose the helpful path.
|
|
1
WWW
What for, why now and what else? "I’m trying not to burn out. I know the signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing those things in myself." Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students ( NYT.)
+ Insight: Here's what's keeping people on the wheel. "After a busy day, I want to sit and watch crappy Netflix TV shows, even though I know the data suggests that if I worked out or called a friend I’d be happier. But to do that I have to fight my intuition. We need help with that, and you don’t get it naturally, especially in the modern day. There’s an enormous culture around us of capitalism that’s telling us to buy things and a hustle-achievement culture that destroys my students in terms of anxiety. We’re also fighting cultural forces that are telling us, 'You’re not happy enough; happiness could just be around the corner.'"
|
|
2
ARE VIBE SHIFTS DYING?
“If vibe shifts are dying, something deep inside our culture is broken. And that would make culture very much the problem.
Here’s what vibe shifts did for us. They allowed us:
1) to experiment culturally, finding better ways to configure ourselves and the world.
2) to bring this experiment from the margin to the center.
3) to vote on it, scorning the bad ideas and embracing the 'new now.'
4) to dump that and make way for the 'next now.'
This was noble work” Grant McCracken on What if culture is the problem? case study 002.
++ Experimenting, culturally, is a vital sign of a healthy company, community, and society. Culture is what allows you to accumulate value, so that you can do more work that your organization can do.
|
|
3
SAYING 'NO'
"Admittedly it’s thin, but there is definitely a silver lining to the pandemic: for the best part of a year we have all been granted a bulletproof excuse to turn down pretty much any invitation, and I, for one, am grateful.Before long, however, we will need to restart the excuse generator and begin declining things awkwardly again." I hate everybody including you’: The art of saying no ( Letters of Note.)
++ Is there an elegant way to say "not at this time?" Saying no-thing seems to be a default when the other party won't accept the message. "If only I try harder" could be a counter-productive offshoot of 'hustle' culture.
|
|
4
RELATIVE ECONOMICS
"The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.; 'Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,' Christie wrote. 'But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.'" The Mystery of How Agatha Christie Could Afford a Maid and a Nanny but Not a Car ( Slate.)
++ On the importance of comparing apples to apples in relative terms.
|
|
5
PAY-TO-PLAY
Many companies want their public relations people to get them into Forbes. But Forbes is no longer what it used to be. "That 'rapper' accused of billions in crypto fraud was also a Forbes contributor. Is it finally time to move past the contributor network?" And "Let’s think about incentives for a moment. Only a very small number of these contributors can make a living at it — so it’s a side gig for most. The two things that determine your pay are how many articles you write and how many clicks you can harvest — a model that encourages a lot of low-grade clickbait, hot takes, and deceptive headlines." An incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism (Nieman Lab.)
++ 'Brand' is the result of the effort expended on the 3 things that will help you drive (how you act) the 1 thing you determine (whatever you call it) where you're headed. It's a continuous process that helps you accumulate value... or lose it. Your choice.
|
|
6
BETTER BUSINESS PRACTICE
I'm working on a couple of articles on how stories create beliefs. This is the infrastructure that support work and life.
+ Great stories are true to their audience. But they must be true to what the company can actually do first.
++ See if you're a good fit for working with me.
|
|
|
|
|
|
