Author Archives: Beau Woods
Being Happy vs. Feeling Happy
I was thinking about people who eat fatty or sugary foods or indulge in drugs or who steal or who act solely on impulse in general. They’re doing it because it feels good at the time or they think it will get them what they want. And in the short term it does – a burst of adrenaline or endorphins or whatever they think will make them happy at that moment. But that isn’t sustainable and they have to keep doing those things to get the feeling back or to prolong it.
Other people, and I like to think I’m in this group, have an internal happiness that is naturally sustained. For these people, what they gain from doing the negative behaviors are small in comparison to what they already have. So there’s less real value gained, especially compared to the consequences.
Why do these groups of people differ? I think it’s because one group has, at some point, taken a step back from their day-to-day lives. They’ve had the opportunity to stand outside themselves and see things a little differently. And often they tend to see things from a higher vantage point where they can get a view of the bigger picture.
In your daily life you see yourself through your own lens. When you make a choice you always know the reasons and think that they’re good reasons.
Others are rarely privy to your reasoning. They see your behaviors without the knowledge that you have come up with a good reason for it. And many times their observation is more accurate than yours.
Many times these reasons are just rationalizations for making the decisions you have made. This is called cognitive dissonance and it’s caused when you have two conflicting ideas. On the one hand, you think of yourself as being nice and generous. On the other you’ve just done something that is mean or selfish.
In fact, many times we choose first and come up with reasons later. When you’re faced this conflicting view of yourself, you come up with a reason why you would have done it. These are tough to shake off. No one likes to think they’re selfish, rude, mean, thoughtless or evil, but sometimes that’s what it is when you take away rationalizations.
You have to take that step back to see your real self sometimes. And those who are truly happy with themselves are happy with who they are in the world. These people look at themselves from the outside fairly often and adjust their behavior to match what they want. In effect they shape who they really are to match who they think they are.
Moving Back To Atlanta
It was an odd feeling putting my socks in their drawer. I unpacked my bag and washed my clothes as usual. But instead of packing them back up, I folded them and put them in drawers. It was a solemn end to a long trip.
I haven’t put socks into a drawer in almost two years. I’ve traveled just about every week for the last 23 months. When I wasn’t traveling I was taking short trips or was parked in some foreign place. Although my house has remained in Atlanta over that time period, I have considered the “Away” my real home.
I initially passed on this new job because of the pains of staying in one place. Traffic. Living expenses. Ironing. Neighbors. Permanence. Stagnation. Complacency. It was many of the things I wanted to do next in my career. But…the same views of the same things and the same people in the same places…these things bothered me.
I wrestled with the idea of the job. I struggled with the idea of not traveling. I dreamed about the idea of taking my knowledge and creating bigger things. I came to the conclusion that it was time to either move on or move out.
It’s not that I couldn’t move up in the same path, but I decided to move on to this new position because consulting was beginning to show its own pains. Travel. Expense Reports. Ironing. Businessmen. Change became permanence, my personal life was stagnating and I was becoming complacent anyway. The consulting lifestyle still had a great attraction. But…the same views of the same things and the same people in the same places…these things bothered me.
So now I have an office. I have an office. A singular place in which to work. I’m moving back to Atlanta from Away. For good and for bad.
The Mission
“You will receive a package,” came across the phone thickly accented. The voice was too familiar to mistake. It was the Philadelphian. I knew what this was about.
“Inside the package there is an envelope. You will not open the envelope until you are on the plane.” And then the part I knew was coming. “It is your mission.” This was about my trip….
Batching Emails
For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to spend less time as a slave to my inbox and so I’ve disabled email notifications on my blackberry and iPhone. That makes it easier to resist the temptation to jump on every single email that comes in, personal or professional. Then I can go through these at my leisure when I have time to think and respond.
I used to pick up my phone anytime it buzzed or dinged or rang or made any other of 100 goofy noises. I’d gotten really used to that and once I stopped it was hard to get over the urge to grab my phone and check messages every 10 minutes like I used to do. I’d get bored quickly and my attention wandered to who might be sending me some critical email. But eventually the urges subsided and I realized I hadn’t missed any critical emails and the world hadn’t crashed to a halt. More importantly I was able to concentrate on a single task and get through it faster.
Most of the time when I was checking emails constantly, I was forth from task to task like crazy. It’s similar to the computer systems’ multitasking functionality, such as last-in-first-out (LIFO) processing (whatever piece of information has just arrived, process that first and delay the current task) and extreme hard drive thrashing (going from the inside to the outside of the platter on each subsequent read or write). Obviously this isn’t very efficient. You lose a lot of time changing tasks and it’s stressful having them all open at once.
When you look at every email as it arrives, you’re basically saying “Anything that hits my inbox is more important than whatever it is I’m doing right now.” That is almost never the case, and even when it is, anything in an email can usually wait 3-4 hours before you answer it. For the really critical stuff, you can still grab calls. Many times you’ll find that the problems solve themselves before you can take care of them.
Now I find that I am much more efficient and this has probably cut out 5-10 hours a week (that’s a consulting week of about 80 hours) in wasted time and I feel more relaxed and in control. You can apply the same principles to anything you find hitting you in intervals. And most likely you already do – unless you run to the store every time you need a paper towel.
meanderingwoods 