The Problem of Too Much Willful Will

 

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

Pedro was a man who believed his work was of the utmost importance. Every day, even on weekends, he arrived at his office before dawn, ready to tackle the day’s challenges with an iron will. Pedro’s job, in his eyes, was not merely a job. It was a mission. He worked for a large corporation, managing a team responsible for a critical project that could determine the company’s future. At least, that’s what Pedro told himself and his wife as he canceled their seventh straight date night.

Pedro’s dedication was unparalleled. He drove his team relentlessly, pushing them to meet deadlines which they often did through sheer force of will. He was convinced that his team’s success — even the entire company’s success — depended entirely on his ability to control every aspect of the project. His personal mantra: “I can sleep when I die.”

As the days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, something began to shift. The more Pedro pushed, the more his team seemed to resist. Tensions rose, mistakes became more frequent and severe, and the project began to fall behind schedule. Instead of easing his grip, Pedro tightened it further, convinced that he could will the project to success through his determination alone.

On the first cold day in October, Pedro was called into the CEO’s office. He expected praise for his tireless efforts, but instead, he was met with the unexpected: he was fired.

Pedro was stunned!

“I’ve given everything to this project!” He practically shouted at the CEO. “I’ve worked harder than anyone.”

The CEO sighed. “Pedro, no one doubts your dedication, but sometimes, working harder isn’t the solution. You’ve driven your team to burnout. Nobody wants to work for you anymore. I had three people from your team give notice this week. Your unrelenting push has become a burden to everyone around you.”

The CEO stood and excused Pedro with a note that his personal belongings would be shipped to his home.

Pedro left the office, wandering in a daze.

How could this have happened?

At times, there is likely a bit of Pedro in all of us. In certain respects, I’m a willful person. Using sometimes extreme measures, I’ve gone long seasons of my life sleeping little more than 3 or 4 hours per night. The last marathon-length run I did was on 3 hours of sleep and a pulled muscle.

Make no mistake. There’s nothing heroic about what I did. It was foolish. There’s a real risk of injury that takes a long time to heal when you do something like that.

On the flip side, we often find inspiration in the stories of people who do the impossible with single-minded focus. Michael Phelps is a favorite example because of what he accomplished in the 2008 Olympics. Then, he kept doing it over and over again.

But, at what cost? It’s hard to have much of a life outside of training when you’re trying to break your own records all the time.

In 2016, Phelps officially retired, though he still maintains that with enough training he could be competitive against anyone in the pool. However, the cost is not worth it to him anymore. Rather than swim relentlessly, he’s chosen to be involved in philanthropic efforts and to spend time with his family.

Ryan Holiday recently wrote, “We think that to be great at what you do requires complete and total dedication. That there’s no time for anything else.

“Nonsense.”

He also shared the poignant story of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, who literally worked himself to death. Holiday then posits a question:

Is that what you want to be? A workhorse that draws its load until it collapses and dies, still shod and in the harness? Is that what you were put on this planet for?

Those are deep, existential kinds of questions.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to accept the reality that ending up in a place of too much willful will is always self-inflicted. Some people, in a fight just to make ends meet, make that choice out of a sense of duty to provide subsistence for the people they love.

For too many of us, however, it’s about pursuit of some vague ideal imposed by the society around us. In the 1900s (I’m from the 1900s), it was termed “keeping up with the Joneses.”

I often reflect on a sage bit of wisdom from a friend, that we are all running our own race. We’re not required to keep up with anyone. Of course, we can take personal care to an extreme just like anything else, but we do owe it to ourselves to care for ourselves first. That enables us to show up in more meaningful ways for the people around us.

The trouble of too much willful will is combated by, first, recognizing that the work we do is not so important that it’s worth sacrificing everything else for, and, two, that there are those around us who are eager to help lighten our load without unduly increasing their own.

I’ve been working on a development project for some time. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a DIY developer, leaning only on the non-interactive internet to help me solve my problems. Yesterday, for the first time, I engaged with a developer who has skills I don’t have but need.

I’ve known for some time that I needed to hire others to help, but my willful will has driven me to make an attempt at doing it all myself. My conversation yesterday truly opened my eyes to the idea that I can get more done by sharing the load with others.

Then, I can finally get out of the pool.

The Portfolio of Your Enthusiasm

 

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

I met a man recently who was built like a bodybuilder whose work for the last 30 years has been maintaining the casted dies in an aluminum extrusion facility. His job: check the dies to ensure everything is within tolerance so the shapes created by the dies are to customer specifications.

I visited with him in his shop for close to forty-five minutes. He wore a huge smile as he talked about the love he has for his work because of the new challenges it brings everyday.

His shop was inside a bustling factory, heated to uncomfortable levels by the furnaces that soften the metal prior to forcing it through the dies like the $500 million Play-Doh shape factory it is.

The late author Jim Harrison wrote, “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,” then followed that with a need that we have to seek “jolts of enormous electricity,” to “freshen up your feelings about being alive.”

In an elegant essay that quoted the same thoughts from Jim Harrison, John P. Weiss writes:

In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do things you used to.

It’s the case for many people that work consumes more than half of our waking hours. If you’re one of the lucky ones who manages 8 hours of sleep in a night, you might spend more than 50 percent of your awake time for 35 years working.

I don’t believe that most people love their jobs. I think most people work the job they can to provide for a family, to make ends meet, and to hopefully save a little for a rainy day. I think most people also have the cards stacked against them making escape from their current employment situation seem impossible. Fortunately, much of the time, people find fulfillment and happiness outside the workplace.

I believe it’s also true that the harder a person’s job is on them mentally, physically, and emotionally, the more difficult it is to expand the “portfolio of enthusiasms” at one’s disposal. Commercialism and consumerism have also made Western society, in particular, unsustainable. That is especially true as the cost of living in most places has far exceeded wage increases. Translation: you’re doing less with more money.

For almost every person caught in the consumerist tide, income will never keep up with the insatiable desire for more stuff.

Pursuing stuff diminishes our ability to expand our portfolio of enthusiasms in a meaningful way.

Imagine investing your time, energy, and resources in experiences that lift your spirit rather than in accumulating more possessions that do the opposite.

The man I met, drenched in the heat of his small die shop beaming with pride, reminded me that it’s worth chasing those “jolts of electricity,” and refusing to let enthusiasm be withered by things of little value.

In the end, our passions shape and define us in ways that possessions never will.

Confirmation Bias and the Apparency Paradox

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

In my day job, I’ve traveled a bit for work of late. I’m accustomed to carrying a water bottle with me most places.

On a recent trip, I went into the bathroom at the hotel to fill up my water bottle. Without checking the depth of the sink, I unscrewed the lid of my water bottle, set both bottle and lid aside, then took one of those paper cups wrapped in plastic, opened it, and began filling my water bottle one cup at a time. Three cupfuls in, I realized I was wasting more water between pours than I was getting into my water bottle.

“Huh,” I thought. “I wonder if my water bottle will fit in that sink.”

Turns out, it did. I was able to fill my water bottle the rest of the way without wasting another drop.

What happened?

There are two pervasive mental models that our brains employ unconsciously based on our life experience: confirmation bias and the apparency paradox.

Let’s discuss the last one first. The apparency paradox refers to a situation where something appears to be one way based on assumptions and initial experience, but when we look at it a little harder, we see things a different way. It’s a paradox because our perception and expectation based on our experience and appearances lead us to overlook practical or efficient solutions.

The apparency paradox is a common trope in movies where a super smart scientist-type can’t figure something out, then a junkyard mechanic comes in and with a whack of a hammer resolves the issue. The scientist couldn’t solve the problem because their own perception made the simple solution invisible to them.

Next, confirmation bias. This is when our initial beliefs about something cause us to overlook evidence that might contradict those beliefs. It’s also something that shows up when someone’s ideas often work out, so they always believe they have the best ideas.

In my case, my initial judgment was that the sink was probably not deep enough for my water bottle to fit. I’ve stayed in plenty of hotels where the sink wasn’t deep enough for my water bottle.

The example is a bit sophomoric, perhaps, but it highlights that the apparency paradox and my own confirmation bias limited how effective I was at filling up my water bottle, at least initially. I didn’t even consider that my water bottle might fit in the sink because of my past experience.

Neither of these world views is a bad thing. We’re faced with so many insignificant decisions and situations everyday that if we had to stop to analyze every one of them we’d never make any progress.

When we’re faced with more complex decision-making scenarios, however (whether personal or professional), becoming mired in these ways of thinking can make us less effective at solving the problems in front of us.

As far as I’m aware, nobody’s life was adversely impacted by the cupfuls of water that were wasted before I realized my bottle would fit in the sink. However, there are times when the apparency paradox and confirmation bias can cause significant personal or professional problems.

Here’s a more dramatic example. Let’s suppose an aged neighbor has often complained about chest pain that has largely been fueled by anxiety. One day, however, he comes over and seems a bit off, complaining about chest pain. Because of his prior history, it’s easy to brush it off as anxiety again.

Later, the neighbor suffers a fatal heart attack. Because of the many “false alarms,” confirmation bias led to the conclusion that nothing was seriously wrong with him.

Or, maybe it’s the apparency paradox causing a business leader to put too much confidence in their own idea against the advice of other key employees that leads to major financial issues for the company.

The challenge with business, in particular, is that the scenario of the leader who goes against the tide of advice who then secures a major win is touted as heroic.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with these mental models inherently. Where the problem resides is when we rely too frequently on our own judgment and nothing else. A good practice is to regularly challenge our own assumptions.

Before settling on a solution or conclusion, it’s often instructive to consider alternative perspectives. I could have solved my water bottle problem easily by quickly checking the depth of the sink. The time cost would have been far less than a single cupful of water.

Another help can be asking other people for their opinion. This is particularly true when tackling something new in life or business. By discussing ideas or assumptions with others, we can gain insights that challenge biases.

Steve Wright said, “experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.” While perhaps a bit sarcastic — and somewhat ironic considering the topic — our own prior experience can be beneficial in solving problems. The key, again, is to ensure we don’t blindly take our own advice if challenging our own assumptions would serve us better.

These mental models are useful shortcuts that make everyday life possible but also risk leading us the wrong way when more complex problems are in front of us unless we’re willing to challenge our own way of thinking on a regular basis. This will not only help us avoid potentially costly mistakes but also enhances our capacity to make good decisions.

If Today Was Tomorrow

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Years ago, I participated in a graduate level course on sociology. There were only seven of us in the class. We met in a dusty, old room of the health sciences building on Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. Class sessions were roundtable discussions of the material we’d studied the previous week and an opportunity for the professor to ask us philosophical questions.

We read several books during the semester, all of them dealing with both chronic and acute social disorders. The professor indicated in the syllabus that we could write a two-page paper every week or any other combination of paper lengths as long as we wrote a total of 30 pages’ worth of well-researched papers by semester’s end.

All seven of us wrote a 30-page paper at the end of the semester.

As you can imagine, writing a 30-page paper during the last two weeks of a semester with other finals looming added a lot of unnecessary stress especially considering the avenue that had been afforded all of us.

I ended up getting a C in the class. I suppose the professor didn’t approve of my 25-page paper extended to 30 with the use of some minor spacing and margin adjustments and the addition of considerable fluff.

In reality, I think we, the students, were a case study in procrastination for the professor who was visiting from another university.

When I had 15 weeks ahead of me, it was easy to put off writing the paper. I reasoned that a 4-page paper would be simple enough every other week. Then it was an 8-page paper. Then the slow, steady demands of other professors continued to nudge that paper to the bottom of my to do list until it was too late to do anything other than write a 30-page paper.

I wish I could say that the whole experience was a pivotal moment in my life; that I conquered procrastination and became the poster child for getting stuff done.

I’m not, but like many people, I am driven by deadlines. For me, any project without a deadline is something I intuitively know can be put off over and over again. I reason that I can wait until a more opportune time to get started.

However, when deadlines loom, I perform quite well, even when the deadlines are imposed late in the game.

In my day job I had the opportunity to help a client write an extensive grant application. We had just over a week to put it all together with a deadline that could not be missed.

The end result was the client was awarded millions of dollars in grant money.

Rare are the times when most of us can focus most of our efforts on just one thing. Pressure to help other employees, pressure to show up for family, pressure to care for ourselves, and other social pressures are the norm.

While the pressure of a looming deadline can spur us into action, it’s often not the deadline itself but the mental shift it prompts that drives productivity. The mental model of “think-about-tomorrow” is not a new idea. Projecting just one day into the future can be useful as a tool for harnessing the urgency we feel before a deadline.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law, first described in 1908, is a psychological principle that describes the relationship between arousal and performance, but only up to a point. If the pressure becomes too high, performance decreases. Too low, and the pressure isn’t enough to create motivation.

We often overestimate how much we can get done in a day (or year) and underestimate what we can get done in five years. But, by considering tomorrow today, we can create a sense of urgency without overdoing the pressure. It’s about creating just enough pressure to get things done without creating overwhelm.

William James once said, “We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead. . .By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”

The “think-about-tomorrow” model encourages us to project ourselves just far enough into the future to help us visualize what we can accomplish and the satisfaction that comes with it. This small shift in perspective helps us prioritize what’s important, potentially reduce unwanted stress, and enhance our overall productivity.