The Promotion Curse

The records of almost 40,000 salespeople across 131 firms were studied and researchers found that companies have a strong tendency to promote the best sales people. Convincing others to buy goods and services is a useful skill, requiring charisma and persistence. But, as the authors point out, these are not the same capabilities as the strategic planning and administrative competence needed to lead a sales team. The research then looked at what happened after these super-salespeople were promoted. Their previous sales performance was actually a negative indicator of managerial success. 

People get promoted until they reach a level when they stop enjoying their jobs. At this point, it is not just their competence that is affected; it is their happiness as well. The trick to avoiding this curse is to stick to what you like doing.  Beware the curse of overwork and dissatisfaction. 

The Economist’s Bartleby column

where you slipped

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped. -African Proverb

education

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. -GK Chesterton

the Resistance

Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is. -Steven Pressfield

The Adventure Risk

Andre Gide once said, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." Explorers of new worlds will always have times of ambiguity where they wonder if they are getting anywhere and whether the voyage was really worth it. 

Stephen Goforth

invincible?

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. -George Orwell (born June 25, 1903)

inner peace

Because nothing promotes inner peace like being bombarded with a constant stream of information about other people’s lives. -Markoff Chaney

The Chains of Victimhood

Glorying in victimhood is a favorite path for people hurt in relationships (especially the divorced). When someone has been wronged (and wronged many times), it is easy to keep seeing life through those pain-filled moments and “define” yourself by what others have done to you. Instead of moving on and creating your own identity, your past pain becomes an excuse for not taking responsibly for today.. and a means to gain sympathy. When you meet new people, you find yourself quickly working your way to an explanation of what happened. You want it front and center so that others to see you in that light. You want that shadow of the past to fall over your face when they look at you. How much better it is to let them get to know the person you have become rather than what you once were! It’s a risky but healthy step toward breaking the chains of victimhood.

Stephen Goforth

How I take sorrow

As to how I take sorrow, the answer is 'In nearly all the possible ways’. Because, as you probably know, it isn't a state but a process. It keeps on changing — like a winding road with quite a new landscape at each bend. -C.S. Lewis

Do you like Cake? Delaying gratification

“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experience the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.” ~  M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

A financial analyst was locked into a cycle of procrastination.

Peck asked, "Do you like cake?" She replied that she did.

"What part of the cake do you like better, the cake or the frosting?"

"Oh, the frosting!"

"And how do you eat a piece of cake?"

"I eat the frosting first, of course."

Having gained this insight, Dr. Peck started probing her work habits. Invariably she would devote the first hour or so of each day to the most gratifying and easiest of her tasks and the remaining hours never quite accomplishing the more onerous chores. He suggested that she force herself to do the objectionable tasks during the first two hours, then enjoy the remaining time.  

There is a critical moment early in your day when you make the decision as to whether you will plunge into the difficult tasks in front of you or not. Don’t allow yourself to decide – just act.  When taking the easy road is not an option, and you just plunge into the difficult tasks, you save yourself time and energy.. and make it easier to avoid those detours.

Sitting Quietly

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. -Blaise Pascal (born June 19, 1623)

Boundaries

Boundaries help us to define what is not on our property and what we are not responsible for. We are not, for example, responsible for other people.  In short, boundaries help us keep the good in and the bad out.  Sometimes, we have bad on the inside and good on the outside. In these instances, we need to be able to open up our boundaries to let the good in and the bad out.  

Boundaries are not walls. But in every community, all members have their own space and property.  The important thing is that property lines be permeable enough to allow pass and strong enough to keep out danger. 

Boundaries are anything that helps to differentiate you from someone else, or show where you begin and end.  The most basic boundary that defines you is your physical skin. The most basic boundary-setting word is no. It lets others know that you exist apart from them and that you are in control of you. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices.  

Setting limits on others is a misnomer.  We can’t do that. What we can do is set limits on our own exposure to people who are behaving poorly; we can’t change them or make them behave right.  The other aspect of limits that is helpful when talking about boundaries is setting our own internal limits.  We need to have spaces inside ourselves where we can have a feeling, an impulse, or a desire, without acting it out.  We need self-control without repression.  We need to be able to say no to ourselves.

Henry Cloud, John Townsend writing in Boundaries

Our proper work

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. -Mary Oliver

An imagined inner story

We are so attached to an imagined inner story about who we are, causing both anxiety and fear, that we forget that the world in front of us isn’t at all dictated by this story; it simply is, in both its beauty and its simplicity. -Zat Rana

quarrels

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. -WB Yeats (born June 13, 1865)

Each Step

The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens - or better perhaps, comes alive.  

Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action.       

On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for people to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.     

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil    

Active Idleness

We live in a culture that seems obsessed with eradicating boredom, as if it were Ebola or global poverty, and replacing it with a peculiar modern form of active idleness oozing from our glowing screens. -Maria Popova

I'm listening

Too often we find ourselves thinking ahead to what we want to say next, not what the person we’re speaking with is saying. -Sasha Quintana