No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
A long time ago I worked in juvie, as they called it, the Juvenile Detention Center. Part of my job was to counsel (more or less) and count the kids (had to make sure they didn’t escape, of course). They’d get an hour in the gym every day and they would either play some sort of structured game, like dodgeball, or there would be open gym. Then they would play basketball. Some of these kids were actually pretty good.
I would ask them, from time to time, what they wanted to do with their lives. Almost invariably, white, black, or Native American, they would come up with, “I’m going to be Michael Jordan.” or Larry Bird, or Dan Marino, but it would be some well known sports star (I told you it was a long time ago – I was a mere slip of a boy myself). I’d ask them how they would go about it. The generic answer was, “Shit, I’m just going to do it.”
I often wonder, doubtfully, if any of them made it – at any level.
Let me finish that thought a few hundred words down the page.
Our Addiction to Oil – No, Not That Kind
We are addicted to oil. Fossil fuel aside, the oil I am talking about comes from the snake.
The next big thing.
The secret to end all secrets.
That one thing that’s going to make life perfect.
I’m not claiming I don’t fall into the same trap. We all seem to set it for ourselves. What we seem to want is that thing that is going to be the thing that will fix things for good. What got me thinking about this was a simple sentence in blogging coach Michael Martine’s blog, Remarkablogger. Of course, I was there looking for the secret myself. What he wrote was …
The most important question you need to stop asking yourself is this: “what is the real secret to <insert whatever here>?”
He’s right of course. Human’s spend a lot of time trying to get what feels good and avoiding what doesn’t feel so good.
Chasing the Elusive Success Dragon
So, we chase.
Buddhists call this dukkha, the source of suffering. Eric Hoffer, psychiatrist said it like this (by way of Russel Bishop – Lessons in the Key of Life).
“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.”
It is a little bit scary. There will always be someone out there, the next big guru, the person who knows, God, Jesus, Buddha, Beelzebub, Donal Trump, whoever, that seems to be, or claims to be, connected to the roots of the Tree of Knowledge.
Beware of Gurus Bearing Gifts
They are not all the same. Some of their messages are more profound than others. In common they all either claim, or are purported to have, the secret to happiness, the path to enlightenment, or clues to the enigmatic puzzle of gaining wealth.
Is it all snake oil?
Maybe si, maybe no.
We’re all at risk of falling under the spell of the promise, though. Why? Naomi Dunford, from IttyBiz, said it well. She happeed to be talking about a cupcake craze she was seeing in her neck of the woods. She gave several reasons why this was happening at this time in history. I was struck by her fourth -
Fourth, and most importantly, we are eating cupcakes because we feel really shitty right now.
And she goes on to say why we are seeking the relief of a sweet, yummy, cupcake.
Almost everybody I know is walking around utterly pole-axed. It’s not the economy, it’s everything. Everything is changing. We are in a total state of flux. We have very little down time. We don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing. Somebody changed the rules and never bothered to tell us what the new rules were. It’s like we woke up in a pleasant, NASCAR-paced 1984.
Back to the Kids in the Gym
It was the same for those kids that I worked with back in juvie a thousand or so years ago. They knew they wanted something. Actually, they didn’t. They knew they didn’t want what they had at the time.
So they wanted to be Michael Jordan.
They didn’t think about why the Michael Jordans and the Larry Birds, then and now, were so successful. They built on their own skills. It didn’t matter to them which team was better, which player was better or worse, who they could take on and who they couldn’t.
Athletes at that level only have one person they are competing with. Themselves. Their strive wasn’t to be better than other players. They wanted to be better today than they were yesterday.
The brains of these elite athletes and the elite in many fields are different. They are different not because they are better than you or me. Their brains are different through years of practice, the willingness to make mistakes and keep on truckin’.
So it isn’t the wanting that’s the problem. It’s the wanting a shortcut that is the problem. If a shortcut comes along, go ahead and take it. In the mean time, find what is truly important to you, and do the work to be the best you can be.
Success is built in the flexibility to have the willingness to fail, and the balls to get back up again.
Finally, a quote that just popped in my head was this, from James Bennis, who said,
Don’t just learn the tricks of the trade, learn the trade.
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