The Farmer and his Horse
You have probably heard the Taoist story, often ascribed to Buddhism, about the farmer and his horse. Here is an excerpt from David Allan’s post on Medium, Who Knows What’s Good and Bad?.
The Farmer and his Horse
“One day his horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.
But the horse comes back the next day, and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”
And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses, and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”
Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in [the] war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.[And this story can go on and on like that. Good. Bad. Who knows?]”
Good, bad, terrible, wonderful are all subjective. My highs and lows are subject to experience, perspective, mood, etc. As my life and career unspool, there is plenty of room for both better and worse.
Subjectivity aside, I know two things:
- I have worked with some fucking awful people
- This is when I have learned an incredible amount about myself
Terrible Bosses: The Dysfunctional Duo
To date, the worst people I have worked for were the Dysfunctional Duo, a direct manager, and their peer/mentor/manager. I could go on at length about their failings (honesty, ethics, transparency, communication, cronyism/nepotism, fear, pettiness, process, empathy/sympathy, maturity, and professionalism). Instead, I’m going to focus on what I learned about myself. We all know it takes two to tango.
Who & What You Can Change
There is only one person you can change, you. From there, you can change your thoughts, your beliefs, your perceptions, and your actions. That’s it.
This can get confusing because a small part of us wonders how we can change to get the outcomes we want. There is a fine line between growth/self-improvement and an abusive relationship. I will spend a lifetime learning and relearning this lesson.
Using the example of the Dysfunctional Duo, I was almost always in trouble. I don’t know if I could do anything right, even if we explicitly defined success. I don’t like being in trouble, and like a good employee, I was trying to figure out how to stay out of trouble. Work harder? Work less? Show my work? Hide my work? Over-communicate? Under-communicate? I explored all sorts of variations with no apparent wins. My actions assumed rational actors. Unfortunately, human relationships aren’t rational. What the Dysfunctional Duo didn’t like was me, regardless of how I was showing up. As obsessed as I am with self-improvement, I’m still me.
Finally, this is also the functional definition of Stoicism and one of the core principles of Jocko Willinck (personal page) and Leif Babin’s book/principle Extreme Ownership: How Navy Seals Lead & Win (Jocko’s TedX talk on the subject here). I study and follow both stoicism (highly recommend Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living) and Extreme Ownership, they’re game-changers.
Human Resources* Can Be Worse than Useless
*Caveat: There are some fantastic human resource (HR) personnel out there. I think we all know how it feels when members of your profession drag you down.
I think there is some confusion as to what HR’s role is in many organizations. My initial assumption was that HR exists to protect, nurture, and develop human capital. That they’d be looking out for the long-term health of the organization through the organization’s number one resource, staff. I don’t think I have experienced this yet… What I see most is that HR exists to protect the organization and comply with regulations.
In the case of the Dynamic Duo, I was getting into “trouble” a lot. Early in my career, one of the valuable lessons is that if you’re in trouble, you need to create an agreed-upon action plan as fast as possible, regardless of validity. This action plan needs to address the chief complaint in a measurable and verifiable way with an objective third party, and it’s also good to include some extra credit in the action plan. A senior HR representative is often the best objective third party. Unfortunately, HR reported to my manager’s manager. In business school, we called this “competing commitments.” Long story short, I wasn’t going to get the support I needed, much less wanted from HR.
Big picture, I was exploring the functional organizational chart. Org charts represent hierarchy as defined by title, class, and report structure. Org charts rarely represent the day-to-day functional reality of an organization. Trust, communication, and decisions often flow very differently through an organization than the org chart represents.
My Personal Life
Work and career are a part of my identity, for better and worse. The daily abuse, real or imagined, was taking its toll. There are three areas where I know I struggled:
Mindset
I can be very hard on myself. It’s a terrible habit that I’ve been working on for years. I can toil for hours on what I did wrong to create a lousy interaction or outcome. This has held me back in countless ways. Even with years of therapy, over a decade of yoga, and love of stoicism and Buddhism, I’ve got a lot of work to do here.
The underlying problem is that once I get going, I can keep going. Daily reminders of my shortcomings quickly turned into negative momentum and a negative mindset. This is where I made a huge mistake.
My tripod of stability is exercise, nutrition, and sleep. I immediately started to cut back on all three to dedicate more time and energy to address the surface-level feedback. As you can imagine, this is a negative feedback loop. Worse yet, I knew better.
Stress Management
I manage stress the way most successful people do: exercise, nutrition, and sleep. I also fail to manage stress the way most people do: skipping workouts, finding solace in food/booze, and ruining my sleep. As much as I think it can be productive to hit the self-destruct button on occasion, I was mashing that button way too often.
I was sleeping roughly 5-hours a night. I stopped going to CrossFit. I barely rode my bike. I was overeating. I was drinking too much too frequently (alcoholism runs in my family).
The result was that I was a physical and mental wreck. I was failing to take care of the basics, and it showed with the bags under my eyes, the 20lbs of extra weight, and my capacity to show up as my best self every day. I took it out on myself. Predictably, I wasn’t any happier or any closer to my goals.
Personal Relationships
All of this personal mismanagement made me a pretty miserable person to be around. I was grumpy, obsessed with the work problems, and out of shape. I was shitty company.
This phase was hard on my friendships and my family. It was the worst for the people closest to me, namely my wife. My ability to manage my lows was a direct threat to one of the most important relationships for me. Outside of obvious regrets, this created yet another negative feedback loop. Isolation and neutral/negative relationships only added more stress and prevented me from getting the perspective and support I really needed.
Accepting the Consequences
One of my strengths is tenacity (stubbornness). An element of tenacity/stubbornness is fear. Fear rarely helps perception and decision making:)
A huge challenge in this process was correctly identifying and weighing consequences. On the one hand, I was arbitrarily punished nearly daily. On the other hand, I was sure that the most significant consequence was leaving this “dream job.” (How I deluded myself into thinking this was a “dream job” is a story for another time…) What we’re talking about here is loss aversion. Loss aversion states that humans interpret losses much more intensely than gains. The kicker is that we also get to define what is a loss and what is again.
In this case, I defined loss as losing this job even if it was 100% my choice. I failed to identify the day-to-day abuse, stress, and all of the challenges it created personally as anything more than the status quo. Despite these perspective issues, the number one thing I had to work towards was wrong or right. I had to accept the consequences of leaving.
Tim Ferriss’s Seven Steps for Overcoming Fear is a great exercise and is mostly what I did. I had to sit down and write out what I was losing and what I was gaining. I had to step away from the human dynamics, the personalities, my emotions, and objectively look at the real consequences and accept them. Regardless of how I felt or what excuses I could generate, it was abundantly clear that I had to leave this job.
I drafted my resignation, slept on it, and handed a signed copy to my manager.
Engaging in Rumors
Almost six months after I had left this job, a member of the Dynamic Duo went nuclear on a nonprofit I was running, purely on rumor. As far as rumors go, we’re talking about the definition of defamation as well as ethics violations that should have ended at least one councilmember’s term. This was bad enough that I was talking to multiple attorneys to assess my exposure (none), recourse (limited), and my next steps (expensive). On rumor alone, I was in deep.
So what do you do? The short answer is nothing.
There is an excellent interview with Steve Jurvetson (Tim Ferris Podcast: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures #317). Steve was talking about media rumors and managing the blowback and cited that the best practice is not to engage. To paraphrase, the basic premise is that any interaction adds energy and validity to the rumors/crisis. The best practice, as put forth by public relations professionals, is to do nothing.
While I didn’t know it was a best practice going into this mess, this is mostly what I did. After I had verified what I needed to with attorneys here is what I did:
- I included 3rd party individuals in all meetings and communications (I was fortunate they had clout)
- All communication was via email or well-attended meetings
- I operated transparently
- I communicated promptly, professionally, and only on the tangible issues via written communication
- Aside from a close circle of support, I said very little about what was going on and who was involved
- I cut some key people out of my life permanently
I made it through this with most of my reputation intact. It strengthened some key relationships, destroyed some relationships, and I learned a ton.
Conclusion
As for the Dynamic Duo, there is a part of me that quips “fuck em” and there is a voice, a little deeper down, that is really sad for both of them.
Who knows what’s good and bad?