Progress – Achilles & Aristotle

Non Toxic

It’s hard work, but I feel like I’m making progress in my new job. And although I’m working flat out, people I’ve seen recently say I look well on it.

Of course people always say that. It’s pretty rare for someone to come out and say: “You look terrible”. But most of the people I’ve met from my old work, do say I look a lot happier now than I did there.

Which – given the large, in some cases huge and always myriad practical challenges in my new job – seems, on the face of it, quite surprising.

But, I as I said to someone this week; I think this simple chart explains it all:

Albeit they happen, my current job is dogged by far fewer ‘toxins’ than my old one.

It’s not all progress. Not everyone is a catalyst; there are plenty of inhibitors around. But the big difference is there are far fewer ‘deliberately discouraging or undermining events’.

What a relief – as another Harvard Business Review article pointed out this week, organisations should worry less about hiring ‘superstars’ and more about avoiding hiring ‘toxic people’. The benefits of stars are more than eclipsed by the cost of toxic folk.

But the problem in my old job was as much structural as personal; it’s hard work being close to government. All organisations have politics, but stating the obvious, government is all about politics – and that means ‘deliberately discouraging or undermining events’ are part and parcel of working in or with it.

I discovered this week that for all the moans and grumbles, universities have one of the highest job satisfaction scores of all sectors of the UK economy. 88% of people who work in universities say: “this is a good place to work”; only 56% do in government.

Less toxins, more progress – that’s all it takes to keep me happy at work.

Children, Life, Work

Blood, Sweat & Fewer Tears

Interesting to realise – on my last day of work in 2013 – that something I’ve been responsible for a long long time is no longer going badly.

In truth, it was never going quite as badly as some made out. But looking back on 2013, you have to say it is now going pretty well.

When a baby is crying, it’s hard to focus or get anyone else to focus on anything else. But, just like when a baby stops crying – or when your kids stop waking you up every night – you quickly forget and simply get on with everything else.

Still, it’s progress. So here’s to even fewer tears in 2014.

Life, Psychology

Marseillaise

Reading Csikszentmihalyi on a family Bank Holiday in sunny France, I was reminded of the tyranny of progress and performance.

Not that it was Csikszentmihalyi’s fault. We’d been talking with friends the night before going away about learning musical instruments and the merits of lessons and regular practice.

Now I firmly believe that the best way to improve at anything is to practice regularly – the action of water on a stone is gradual, but inexorable. I have also learnt that the best way to practice anything regularly is to integrate it your daily routine. The problem is there are only so many hours in the day. What to do? More, less often?

I remember from my time working in advertising in France in the 1990s that people have predictable daily and weekly habits. But we do not generally form monthly habits and signally fail to form fortnightly habits. This gave rise to the unspoken rule, never buy an an Ad next to a monthly or worse a fortnightly TV show – they never pull in a regular audience and generally fail. Even if they are well liked once, people forget to tune in ever again. We are creatures of routine.

So where does that leave us with practice, hobbies and busy lives. My conclusion is the only practical options are dedicating daily or weekly slots. My daily slots are all pretty much full: kids, work, kids, eat, dishwasher, potter briefly, bed.

The brief evening pottering – which recently was when I walked our ageing dog – is the remaining ‘purposeable’ slot. But a few minutes spinning the wheels, albeit aimlessly, seems a very small concession to relaxation. It’d take something ‘light’ and ‘fun’ to fit in edgeways in that small nook in a way that didn’t feel like a chore.

The ukulele used to be that thing. And for nearly a year I played five songs nearly every night and went from hopeless and tuneless to strumming comparatively competently. Then the dog got incontinent and the habit got broken. So I could go back to the uke. But here’s where the tyranny of progress kicks in. Our friends feel I should have lessons, improve, look to play publicly or at least in private duets and preferably drop the four strings and migrate to a proper six string guitar.

Phew. Where’s the eudaimonia in all that – the pressure to rapidly improve my skill to meet the challenge of musical excellence feels most unappealing. I said ‘no thanks’. They looked at me like I was mad – what’s the point of strumming the same five songs and never playing them with, or for, someone. Where’s the progress, where’s the performance. The point though – I think – is I quite enjoy it as a personal exercise for me, for ten minutes at night. The simple challenge I set myself is met by my rudimentary and very slowly improving strumming skill: producing modest, low-impact, private, musical ‘flow’.

Separately, on hols I was congratulated twice on my French – one woman said “Vous parlez très très bien Monsieur”. Another asked me if I was a French teacher in England.

I had given up keeping up my French. I’d given up listening to ‘intermediate French’ audio magazines I subscribed to when I first came back from France. There were no opportunities to match my once reasonable skill with any worthwhile challenge at home. Talking about nothing much in French, just to speak French, seemed pretty pointless. And over time I felt myself going backwards which made matters worse.

But ‘flow’ in French has returned. Family holidays now provide me the perfect opportunity to navigate the modest but important challenges of travelling, accommodating, feeding and entertaining my little family. And they seem quietly impressed and genuinely grateful for my efforts. Now I have a stage on which to perform, some modest (daily?) investment in progress and improvement suddenly seems worthwhile – I’ll be looking at what the web has to offer for ‘intermediate French’ these days.

‘Flow’, progress and performance are closely intertwined, so much Csikszentmihalyi amply demonstrates. But I conclude the recipe and mix aren’t always the same. There are things we do well, some we may do very well and many we could do better. I believe good day-to-day ‘flow’ lies in accepting that not everything we do has to be excelled at. Sometimes the only audience that matters is ourselves.