The Human Condition

Musings

ORTIYKMWOYBNTO

Balancing Act: The Newsletter

(No. 243, November 2019)

Balancing act is in four sections this month:

Techniques for Balance (Current Thinking)
The Human Condition: Agendas
Musings
ORTIYKMWOYBNTO

Current Thinking

1. Whatever time you’re given for a trip (from the airport to the hotel, from an airline club to a gate, from the hotel to a restaurant) add at least 25% to it and spend any extra time to have a drink or just relax. Running late creates huge stress.

2. You’re only allowed the small bag for liquids, but you’re allowed to put that bag in a larger one to prevent any leaks from damaging your possessions.

3. Asking for high-end liquor in a mixed drink may be stylish but provides no distinctive taste and simply costs more. I can discern different vodkas pretty well, but not when they’re mixed with tonic.

4. The app Shazam will quickly tell you what music you’re hearing that you want to identify.

5. The most boring people I find in meetings are those who, when not speaking themselves, “tune out” and stop paying attention and/or check their email.

6. If you simply wrote two pages every day, in about three months you’d have produced a complete and substantial book.

7. The fewer notes you take in a class or workshop, the easier it is to focus on the most important points for you.

8. If you don’t believe that pre-check and Clear are worth it at airports, then you either don’t travel much or relish inconvenience.

9. I’m not sure that fining millionaire celebrities even hundreds of thousands of dollars, a couple of months in jail, and “community service” sends any kind of positive message about fraud prevention. I think every one of them is getting off lightly and we’re further creating disparate justice.

10. It’s more than ironic that, in an age of complex credit scores and bank conservatism about consumer loans, an auto dealership can arrange a loan for any car you’re buying in about three minutes.

Agendas

I lose interest in others’ opinions and remarks when they’re agenda-laden. By that I mean, there is a cause which must be raised despite the immediate topic. If we’re talking about dog food, or basketball, or sports cars, the other person has to raise climate change, or politics, or income redistribution.

Don’t misunderstand, I admire passion and fervor. I don’t mind if you want to try to influence my thinking because I’m an adult, fairly intelligent, and can make my own evaluations and judgments. (Don’t you love it when people say, “You’re much too judgmental” when that very conclusion is so judgmental?! It’s like screaming, “I am NOT defensive!!”)

But I draw the line at zealotry, which is a rather fanatic and uncompromising pursuit of a cause, political view, or religious position. Persuading is one thing, proselytizing is another. Why do I have to be hit over the head with someone’s agenda with every interaction?

We seem to believe today that every cause, concern, and condition demands everyone’s attention all the time. That every grievance, no matter how personal or trivial, must be acknowledged and attended to by the rest of humanity. There are great and challenging issues of our times, but we are dull people when they are the sole items of conversation. We can’t become a Puritanical society where we all live in the dread fear that “people somewhere, at some time, are enjoying themselves."

By all means concern yourself with the climate, or politics, or abortion, or immigration, or infrastructure, or racism, or education, or whatever. But also concern yourself with improving the current day and helping others by not arguing, not evangelizing, not demanding conformance with your cause or position.

I, for one, am more persuaded by people who help and whom I can trust much more than people who demand I’m “for them or against them.”

We bemoan the disparities in income in the country, and the ridiculous multiples that some executive salaries represent in terms of advances over the average worker salary in the enterprise. I’ve been a consultant for 30+ years, and I’ve never seen a company that needs someone to make $120 million to run it well, and I’ve seen some people at that level run companies into the ground—Mark Hurd of Oracle comes to mind as someone grossly overpaid.

But we’re very hypocritical about this. We expect our most junior, inexperienced, and/or underfunded attorneys to represent the indigent in legal aid. We don’t require the large law firms to commit their partners to representing those in need even once or twice a year.

We’re now in the middle of a campaign season for the highest position in the land where the newspapers report fundraising success in the tens of millions monthly instead of new ideas and bold initiatives. We concede that candidates with the most money will have the most potentially successful media campaigns, and we let it go at that.

In sports, it’s not always the teams with the most money which win, but it’s usually those paying the most for a few superstars. We judge Hollywood performances not by how good the acting is but rather by how much of the gross revenues will go to the stars of the movie.

Teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, and newspaper reporters are some of the relatively lowest paid people, but they’re drawn to their jobs because they love the work. We don’t, for some reasons that escape me, try to pay teachers (or the rest of these people) higher salaries even though they are safeguarding our present and protecting our future. How does an offensive lineman for the Colts earn more than an operating room nurse (or even the surgeon in the operating theater)?

We need to be more honest with yourselves. Income disparity isn’t going to disappear in the culture of organizations if it doesn’t disappear in our general culture. Perhaps we need to look at the larger picture.

We were in a huge suite in Croatia’s Excelsior Hotel. We didn’t explore it all, arriving late afternoon and having a dinner commitment. That evening, I was incensed that one of the many doors to the suite had no lock on it. I kept playing with the handle, to see if changing the position would lock the door.

I finally decided to go through the door out into the hall to examine the handle on the other side. That’s when I found myself in the next room of the suite.

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