Business Insight Zone

Sometimes you have to fight for every inch.

Ever have one of those days? I’m having one of those weeks.

I’d like to blame the fact that I just got back from vacation, but the trip was restful, and long enough that I’ve enjoyed getting back to the office. (It helps that I work in a very friendly office.)

Lots of productive work conversations over the past few days . . . lots of good projects on the plate . . . just very little apparent ability, at the moment, to think a task all the way through. Which puts me in mind of two things:

1. The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Four hundred years ago, the Jesuit courtier Baltasar Gracián offered loads of good advice in his classic treatise, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. One of the aphorisms that has most stuck with me is this one:

Recognise unlucky Days.

They exist: nothing goes well on them; even though the game may be changed the ill-luck remains. Two tries should be enough to tell if one is in luck to-day or not. Everything is in process of change, even the mind, and no one is always wise [...] To turn out well a thing must be done on its own day. This is why with some everything turns out ill, with others all goes well, even with less trouble. They find everything ready, their wit prompt, their presiding genius favourable, their lucky star in the ascendant. At such times one must seize the occasion and not throw away the slightest chance. [...]

The corollary of this idea is “Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” Ah, but our employers rightly expect us to come in day after day and put in a good effort — one that brings results.

The best thing I’ve figured out to do, for those days or weeks when “everything turns out ill,” is to find the things you can do — be they ever so few or humble — and then do them. Do them methodically or mechanically or by simple muscle memory, if that’s all you can manage. But keep putting one foot in front of the other. Which brings me to the second thing:

2. Grinding and Dashing.

Great athletic champions — whether individuals or teams — often excel at both “grinding” and “dashing.”

When they can, they “dash” to victory: they go Showtime on their opponents; they blitz the daylights out of them; they flow around their opponents in ways that can’t readily be understood, much less stopped.

But when they must, they slog it out, grinding out play after play, game after game. A paragon of this approach was Ivan Lendl: he wasn’t an elegant tennis player, but he was fitter than all of his opponents, and he would grind out hard, accurate baseline strokes by the dozen, probing the defenses of flashier, more fluid athletes like John McEnroe until he built an impregnable advantage.

The moral of this story is simple: You can be fruitful without being jaw-droppingly awesome.

When you’re living out a week like this one’s been for me, you have to be.

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(Photo by Kiwi Flickr.)