Will It All Work Out?
You feel that?
It’s the relentless feeling of uncertainty in the back of your head. The anxiety of not knowing what the future holds for you, your family, or your career.
We live in a society where rewards are delayed. We do the work upfront for the hope of some sort of prize in the future — a good job, financial security, a house, or a spouse.
We make investments that take years to pay off or fine tune a craft that might not be in demand 10 years from now.
The question is and will always be — will it all work out?
I know someone who doesn’t feel this constant anxiety at all:
My cat.
Her life is simple. She’s only on high alert only when there’s a threat (or another cat). She goes from zero to one hundred extremely quickly.
However, when the threat leaves, it’s done. There isn’t a residual sense of anxiety that’s constant — the what if it comes back again? What should I do to protect myself in the future?
Nope. It’s just “I’m hungry now — I’m going to to eat. I’m sleepy now — I’m going to go to sleep. There’s a storm — I’m going to find shelter.”
And humans were like this too.
The society that we live in now is an extremely small span in all of humanity’s history. It’s the argument that I always have with SJW’s who think nurture whoops nature in every regard and that we should change how we behave to be more consistent with their thoughts on what’s right.
It’s nice to think about but you can’t ignore the whispers of 200,000 years of evolution.
If you look at 199,500 of these years we didn’t have a society of delayed rewards — it was an immediate return society.
If you were hungry, you hunted. If you were tired, you slept. If you were threatened, you fought.
You didn’t have to worry about your RRSP or 401k.
If you made a decision based on a stimuli — you were rewarded very soon for that decision or punished for not making that decision. It wasn’t up in the air.
In the last 500 years we’ve transitioned to a predominately delayed rewards environment. The life we currently know is only the last 100 years of human existence. The change in our society has been exponential — there are kids right now who don’t know what it’s like to be offline.
Yet in terms of evolutions — this is absolutely nothing; not even a drop in the pan. Our neocortex — the part responsible for higher level decisions is still the same size it was 200,000 years and operating at the same capacity.
Our anxiety is designed for us to solve short term, acute problems.
Like if you heard a storm in the distance, you need to find shelter and you’re anxious to find it. When you find shelter your anxiety is gone.
You seen a predator stalking you and your friends, you feel stressed, you get away, anxiety gone.
The stressors were immediate and you could solve them. Now we have long term stressors that cause chronic anxiety that we don’t know will be solved or not.
Will I have enough money to pay the bills, will all this overtime get me a promotion at work, or will doing all this repair my broken relationship?
The Solution
So here’s how you manage it: instead of worrying about what the future will hold, refocus that worry on things that are happening now.
What I find works best to solve this chronic anxiety, is to not fight it but to play by it’s rules.
For example, we all know we need to be healthy — and there are few things worse than deteriorating health.
Instead of worrying about what the future will hold, worry about taking that walk today. Focus on something you have control over.
Focus on the smallest thing now and worry about it in the present moment.
That’s why I’ve broken down all my long term goals into quarters, and then those quarters into everyday tasks that I have to do.
I break down all my long term goals in every day tasks, put it on a board and make sure I hit those every single day. This has been my way of shutting down that anxious feeling because I’m doing whatever I can at this present moment and letting the chips fall as they may.
When I worry about the success of instaMek and if we’re going to hit our target for the month — instead of sitting there anxious and hopeless — I mark 30 lines on my board.
Then with each call to a customer I erase each line until there is nothing left. This helps me focus on the present and it also distracts me in a way that will get me closer to my goal.
1 line = 1 call
I bring this concept to my team as well — at the end of the day we can only control ourselves so I setup a dashboard that shows how many calls we made and leads we visited. As long as it’s in our power — whatever happens after that happens.
Measurement of your activity gives you a sense of control in our new delayed return environment. Even though you can’t predict the future or know how it’s going to turn out, you know how today will turn out because you did what you could do.
