It’s been a long time since my last blogpost, about a year, and I think I’m back because of a great deal of thinking I’ve done about the demands of my dayjob, my life in general, and how contradictory it is with so many things I’ve read that offer up a list of 10 things one needs to succeed at such and such.
And I admit that I am a sucker for those articles too. I want to find out the 10 things that are going to help me do my job, be richer, manage my stress, etc.. If only…
The problem is that I generally end up forgetting all of the points very quickly after reading the article, or even when I do remember, they seem either irrelevant to my current situation, or I don’t know how to apply their small trinkets of wisdom.
The real trick to the whole thing is that these suggestions are most often things I already know, or think I know. I could have written the article myself perhaps, which makes me suspicious. I ask myself, do these people really know what they’re talking about, or are they just repeating something they’ve heard in a bar, or read somewhere, and have repeated to themselves so often they believe that it’s originated with themselves?
But the problem, what I’m trying to get to, is that life is a lot more complex than we like to make it out to be. Our lazy left brains like easy formulas, but even some of the most successful people writing these articles don’t really know how they produce their success. Very often it’s a number of things they’ve learned long ago working in concert, things they have so fully integrated into who they are that they’re no more aware of them than they are of the air they are breathing, or the fact that their hearts are beating.
Some of you who have read my posts in the past may remember that I tend to rail against the trend toward certifications for this and that: certifications for project management, for business analysis, etc., etc.. Okay, it’s not that I think that they are a complete waste of time – after all many organizations now require them, so it’s useful to have the cert on your resume, I suppose. I just think there is a better way to learn how to think and get things done.
A project plan is really only a compositional model. It tells a story about how things are supposed to get done. It’s generally a composite of events, risks, costs and time relations. If you’ve read enough really good novels, biographies, histories, you’ll have this sort of thing tattooed into your backbrain, and in many ways a richer model, with more variation, and more pathways to solutions, than anything you’ll learn in a cert training. All you need to do is think.
Ever notice how your project is sometimes, with its false starts, miscommunications and drama, more like a 19th century novel than your project plan? That’s because – if you’re doing the project work you’re worthy of, not some simple cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, do-it-in-your-sleep, type of thing, that a machine will be doing, instead of you, in a few years – it is.
Most of what comprises a business education is borrowed from other areas: the humanities, sciences and mathematics. It’s not really its own thing. You’re really better off going back to the source material, rather than the leftover bones remaining after someone whittles it down to its remaining skeleton. Not only does a real skeleton not have any meaning outside the whole system of nerves and musculature, but someone’s simplification of someone else’s great ideas generally miss the point, leave things out, or are confused with other oversimplified models.
My alternative? Beyond reading my blog, it’s follow your curiosity and desire, and do some real heavy lifting in those areas that drive you from the inside. While I’m not one of those who believe that following your bliss insures marvelous results, I do believe the work you do that broadens your mental and psychological agility in any subject increases the scope of what you can and will accomplish.
It’s also merely a better way of living.
Don’t fear poetry.