Creating worries for yourself.
When I was in college, I was moved by Dr. Judith Rapoport’s classic book on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. OCD sufferers engage in compulsive rituals like hand-washing as they try to alleviate obsessive thoughts centered on, for instance, germs.
We’ve come to use the term “OCD” flippantly, as in “Don’t touch Dave’s records — he gets OCD about his vinyl collection.” The real McCoy, as you can imagine, is much worse than our glib appropriations of it. This goes likewise for another condition, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OPCD), which sounds similar to OCD but has important differences.
Folks who suffer from OCD and OPCD can’t help themselves — they feel that they must adhere to certain standards of order, cleanliness, or the like.
But the rest of us? My sense — and this is hardly a professional psychological opinion, mind you — is that we subject ourselves to unfruitful rituals and arbitrary standards simply out of habit.
Obsessing over social-media standing
What prompted me to think of this: a few weeks back, I got into a conversation on Twitter with a fellow who expressed his disappointment about people unfollowing him after a certain set of tweets (i.e., messages) that he posted. I couldn’t see why he was so quick to care — and to judge others’ motives — about something that I found so trivial.
The guy, it turns out, has an elaborate tracking setup that alerts him immediately when people start or stop following him, so he believed that he could trace the cause-and-effect relationship between his messages (which were, to be fair, unobjectionable) and the choice of folks to stop following his messages.
I tried to suggest to him that people have many reasons for following or unfollowing someone on Twitter, and that he had so many followers (i.e. thousands of them) that the unconnected choices of half a dozen of them could easily look like a trend when it really wasn’t.
Oh, and one more thing: what’s the point of expressing dissatisfaction — or even feeling it — because a handful of people you don’t even know happen to decide that your messages aren’t quite their preferred flavor?
I use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn regularly, and I know how easy it is to obsess over them, and even to get competitive about how many connections you’ve made, whether people you follow have opted to follow you back, and so on. But when I find myself heading down this path psychologically, I try to stop and ask myself “Wait, what’s the point?”
Obsessing over the time clock
Some years ago, my wife worked in an office run by a manager who was an old pro at creating new things to worry about. Folks had to be at their desks by a very certain time (even though it didn’t really matter) and they had to be out the door at a very certain time (ditto) and they had to keep their office doors open at all times and they had to . . . well, it just went on and on.
The manager had a way of taking the most trivial things and turning them into themes for new daily crusades — crusades that were mostly carried out against all the smart people trying to work hard in that office. If it hadn’t been so pointless, it would have been funny to track the steady exodus of talented people (including my wife) out of that company.
The morals of this story:
- I have enough to worry about in my life without concocting new worries based on my social-media use, or my ascription of motives to my fellow Austin drivers, or whatever-the-heck else I might choose to worry about.
- Businesses usually have enough to worry about without also worrying about precise clock-ins, narrow dress codes, meaningless “mandatory” behaviors, and so on.
So, folks, please share:
What are some of the worries you’ve seen individuals or businesses create for themselves?
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(Photo by Todd Baker.)
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Perhaps the most universal, but no less “created”, is the concern about what others think. This goes for businesses as much as individuals.
I’m sure you’ll remember, Tim, from Collins’ stellar book Good To Great, that one of the themes among companies who got to great was that they quit worrying about what people who didn’t really matter thought. They didn’t NOT care *categorically* what ANYone thought, but rather they concerned themselves only with the opinions and data that would help them improve the company for the long haul.
It’s way too easy for any entity — individual or collective — to care about the opinions of the wrong person or group of, and conversely just as hard to keep from caring even when you realize you shouldn’t.
Again, preaching to myself as much as anyone, we would do well to pay attention to how much weight we give others’ opinions and set up some cognitive behavioral type reactions/questions to help us decide if we’re caring too much.
Overcoming this is, I think, one of the biggest keys to being free to follow what we really want in life or business and even appreciating successes (or admitting failures?) we might otherwise dismiss.
Actually people with OCD can help themselves at the cost of enormous mental effort. See: The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley which is an early example of the application of cognitive neuro-science/psychology, James’ neuroplasticity and mindfulness to learning to be aware of your thinking and changing the most unconscious behavior. That book dates from the earliest days of the discipline at a time when 98% of the received wisdom was that the brain was mechanical and fixed. An understanding which has undergone revolutionary revision as the result of modern technologies leading to this more recent popular book: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves by Sharon Begley.
It turns out that James was indeed correct, we are 98% unconscious and build up our affective mass without thinking about it over decades. But with proper training and discipline one can learn to be aware (mindful) of what’s going on, displace harmful thinking with more positively focused and gradually evolve away from being trapped and into a more fully conscious existence. If the analog to business decision-making isn’t obvious let me ask – how many companies just go along as they have relying on tribal knowledge without developing the management systems necessary to change themselves and adapt to the world ? Darn few but, ala Collins, amazingly correlated with high-performers. For some specific application examples you might consider this recent post: http://tinyurl.com/6hf52d
Chris — Right on. We have to choose the metrics or feedback loops that are *genuinely* important, then stick with those. What’s hard is figuring out what’s genuinely important.
Dave — Thanks for the book recommendations. Actually, the second Begley book is on my Amazon wish list. And you’ve touched on one of my grand goals for this blog: to uncover some of our implicit assumptions or habits around the way we work so that we can render them explicit and then decide whether or not we’re getting what we think we should be getting from all our hard work in business.
Tim…would you care to expand on that a bit ? Could be taken a lot of ways and one would be enterprise habits. That’d be an interesting discussion.
Dave — I think it *should* be taken a lot of different ways, b/c I think that many organizational issues are merely more-complex versions of personal issues.
E.g. many individuals don’t really get what they want out of their careers because they don’t (a) seriously and clearly articulate what they want and then (b) follow some sort of steady path in that direction. And I think that EXACTLY the same thing is often true at the enterprise level.
I really needed to read this today. I’ve been stressing about why some folks had stopped following me even though it is a small, small percentage of people I interact with. Then, I started second guessing myself, inventing all sorts of reasons when it so doesn’t matter.
Not everyone is going to like you and as long as that person is not a boss, co-worker, friend, or loved one, does it really matter?
I appreciate knowing that I’m not the only one to occasionally “goes” to this mental place. Relationships can be so fragile at times.
Liz, it’s great to read your comment, as it stirs up some old and new thoughts for me on the issue.
1. EVERY one has their detractors, critics, the dismissive or disinterested. There are some people who just don’t like/get Mozart, Kubrick, Cezanne, Steinbeck, etc. Each of these artists and more faced their own dismissers in their day and there eternally will be those who can do without them — weird as that seems.
2. I would even contend your list of individuals who “matter”, i.e. the “boss, co-worker, friend, or loved one” as categorically true, particularly (and ironically) as you get “closer to home” in that list. They matter in some ways, but not others, and usually not in as many ways as we allow them to matter.
This is one of the dangers of caring too much about what may LOOK like the “right” opinion. We can try to please or desire the approval of a brother, a mother, or some other loved one when we may need to put it in the “ignore” pile. God bless ‘em, but they don’t have to answer for my life.
We can be open to their feedback, their opinions, but we have to be careful to parse out what our loved ones do and DON’T have a say in as far as how we feel about ourselves and whether we’re succeeding. Certainly, there are some things where they do have a say, but we do tend to give even these people more power than we should, power they only have because we give it to them.
And I’d like to wrap this up with the theme from “Bosom Buddies”? Sing amongst yourselves.