Pave The Road and Stay In Your Lane

My friend’s kid was really upset the other day. It seemed her hormones were popping (she’s 13) and she had just finished doing a play with a summer camp. It must have been an intense, fully absorbing experience, but she doesn’t really show any of it while many other kids cry and burst out with dramatic fervor of emotion when the performance ends. It obviously means a lot to them and they put their heart in it. However she holds it in until much later when she finds herself crying and not understanding why.

Why? I am not going to try to answer that question. First, is it necessary to examine every emotion we have? Does the reason always matter? There’s a lot going on in our bodies after millions of years of evolution. It’s uniquely human arrogance to even try to make sense of it.

Well, let’s humor the notion anyway. I am going to pose the question of why we are so interested to know the reason of our sadness, but less interested to examine the reasons for our happiness? If happiness (whatever happiness really is we can tackle for another time) is the ultimate goal, we should analyze the heck out that rather than dwell on the etiology of the opposite.

The other day, a CEO of decent sized business was anguishing to me about these 5 employees who had formed a seeming alliance in opposition to the vision or function of the company. They were lower level, fairly recent hires that were completely squatting in the brain space of this CEO. He was focusing on this small group that vexed him rather than the 99.9% of things that were working in the business. They were 5 out of 50 employees. Ok, that’s 10%, but what about the other 90% that are driving the success? I mentioned one thing. “You can’t focus on the crazy.” In every business and life, there’s going to be some crazy. Some customers, employees or people who just don’t get you. You can’t control them, but you can control your mindset and perspective. You can choose to focus on what works for you, what brings you the positive results for which you are aiming. This doesn’t mean you should ignore issues, but the attention they deserve needs to be proportional to their influence. It clicked with the CEO that his focus on the crazy was nothing, but a distraction.

It’s trying to figure out the causes of failure instead of analyzing the reasons for success which arguable could be even more valuable because they’re proven strategies that work.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to analyze the reasons for the positive rather than the negative? It’s probably instinctual from our evolution to learn to not repeat dangerous detrimental behavior. But, it can work against us in our modern society.

The benefit of being human is that sometimes we can override the programming and employ logic. We could focus on refining the parts that aren’t working like a machine. After all, there’s nothing to learn from the parts that are working. Right?

Rhetorically no sir (and ma’am). Focus on what does work, find the reasons why and quadruple down on those. That’s the path to expanded happiness.

Don’t focus on your weaknesses. Focus on the strengths; the abilities you’re good at and bring you joy. There are a multitude of ways to compensate for the other stuff. This is an enhanced and expedited path to a consistent and growing journey of life. This will force you to stay in your lane on the road of your paving.