Trade-off honesty

A friend and I caught up recently after a while just before she heads off onto a different phase in her life and career.

As we shared updates about what had happened these past months, we talked about the things we were grateful for and then talked about the associated trade-offs.

Because there always are trade-offs. Her choices – different as they were – came with different trade-offs from mine. But they existed all the same.

The beauty in framing the conversation about the trade-offs is that we talked about which trade-offs we had made peace with and which trade-offs we were still struggling to deal with. We talked about how these trade-offs felt in comparison to everything that was good.

Conversations about trade-offs have a way of capturing the nuances in this life.

And the nuances are where the richness and meaning lie.

Pigeons and statues

“Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue.”

There are a few ideas that have been staples on this blog since the very beginning. This is one of them because of its wisdom and practicality.

Some days have a way of springing one unpleasant surprise after another. Best to move on, get a good night of sleep, and hit reset.

Spannungsbogen

“The Fremen were supreme in the quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” – which is the self imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.” | Dune by Frank Herbert

One of the fun parts about great works of fiction is the intricacies of language and phrases.

Spannungsbogen is a lovely meld of willpower and the gap between stimulus and response.

I could do with more spannungsbogen too.

Hungers and stretched minds

It’s been a few months since I stopped a 2.5 year run of intermittent fasting. But the practice of doing it has changed my relationship with hunger.

It’s been over a decade since I had a bad experience with a relationship. But the impact that experience had on me and my own emotional intelligence remains to this day.

I could go on.

If you’re experiencing a challenging set of circumstances today, it is helpful to keep this perspective. Often, we focus all our energy on changing the situation and forget that the best thing that can happen is to let the situation change us.

Challenging circumstances aren’t fun. They result in us walking around with that knot in our stomach. And they stretch our mind – often in ways we wouldn’t want to be stretched.

But they pass. They always pass.

And when they do, the best gift you’ll take away is that your mind, body, and spirit will be better for it.

Every challenging experience makes us stronger.

And a mind once stretched never goes back to its original dimensions.

Wabi-sabi

According to Japanese legend, a young man named Sen no Rikyu wanted to learn the ways of the Japanese tea ceremony. He went to a famous master who tested the younger man by asking him to tend the garden.

Rikyu cleaned up debris and raked the ground until it was perfect, then scrutinized the immaculate garden. Before presenting his work to the master, he shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers to spill randomly onto the ground.

In effect, Rikyu created an idea that came to be known as wabi-sabi. It is about embracing simplicity, natural beauty, and a perfectly imperfect feel.

We used to joke about how our friends reframed the blemishes we created as we settled into our home as “character.”

Turns out it was just wabi-sabi.

Sourest lemon

“I like to think that one day you’ll be an old man like me talking a young man’s ear off explaining to him how you took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade.” | Dr K, This is Us

It resonated.

The other end of the stick

“While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern. We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us.

We can decide to be dishonest in our business dealings. While the social consequences of that decision may vary depending on whether or not we are found out, the natural consequences to our basic character are a fixed result.

Our behavior is governed by principles. Living in harmony with them brings positive consequences; violating them brings negative consequences. We are free to choose our response in any situation, but in doing so, we choose the attendant consequence. “When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick the other.”” | Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I think of this idea* from time to time. Natural consequences – both good and bad – don’t always play out in short order or the timeline we might expect.

But, over a long enough horizon, they do.

When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick the other.

*I was about to start this post with “One of my favorite ideas from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits is….” I paused because I find myself saying that often. Another reminder of many of the sheer depth of impact the book has had on me.

Alarm clock

For a long while, my first action in the morning was to turn off my alarm, pick up my phone, and begin reading email.

I didn’t like the email behavior. It didn’t improve my mental state and degraded it on many days. So I attempted to figure out good replacement.

Over the past 2 years, I’ve made it a point to remind myself of a set of principles most mornings – stored in my phone’s Notes. In theory, ideal behavior would be to start by reading that set of principles, getting up, and then getting to email.

After many such attempts, I declared bankruptcy, stopped attempting to reinvent the wheel, and followed the many wise souls who replaced their phone alarm with an alarm clock.

It’s been a month. The alarm clock is fine but the new routine it enables – with the phone out of the bedroom – is great.

Sometimes, it’s best to burn the bridges and move onto trying something different.

Was it good

I started reading “Sonic Boom” – the story of Warner Brothers Music’s incredible thirty year run where they shaped the music industry via artists like Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, and Prince.

I don’t know much about the music industry – certainly not much about the industry in the 70s and 80s. I also can’t remember how this book ended up in my collection. But I love scrappy origin stories – so maybe that explains it.

I’m in the part of the book where Warner Brother’s Music is still the scrappy upstart hustling to prove viability. And one of my favorite anecdotes about the ethos of the group was their insistence that their focus was to not make hits.

Instead, they were run top-down by an ethos of trying to make great music. Even when they failed commercially, the question the team was asked was – “Was it good?”

As simple as this sounds, it is so hard to do consistently – especially when you’re under pressure to prove viability or to drive growth. The typical path is to just over-optimize your way to mediocrity. But, if like Warner Bros, you’re focused on making great products, the hits will follow.

Good outcomes follow good process in the long run. It is definitely one of those ideas that is easier to preach than practice.