James Lane Allen said:
adversity does not build character, it reveals it.
When the going gets tough, you really see peoples' true colors.
Everyone's seen this happen. When a highly stressful situation arises people transform like the freaking moon came out.
It's hard to blame anyone in particular or even in general. For instance, how many jobs have the following policy:
“Treasured Employees,
Effective immediately, anytime you begin to feel a level of stress that compromises the quality of your work, stop working.
Go home and do your wife. Twice. Then go meet your friends to drink beer and play guitar and sing songs from when you were all 17 (which was a very good year). Come home drunk and try to do your wife again. If she declines, leave said wife and find one more amenable to being done at your whim.
Also, in your inbox you will find a 6-month paid membership to the yoga place on Columbus.
If it's an especially gorgeous day outside, feel free to take a 3 hour lunch. Tell your client that he'll just have to fuckin' wait. But nicely. If he doesn't like it, tell him to go copulate himself.
Furthermore, the office will no longer supply shit food that melts your brain and turns your body into a shapeless mass, e.g. donuts, pastries, etc.
However, every friday there will be dark chocolate brownies made with Stevia and Cannibus available to all staff. Preemptive munchies.
The meeting room has been remodeled into a mini-grotto. Please feel free to use it to play guitar, fornicate and read.
Also – there will be no more meetings. They suck.
If you don't feel like coming into the office: don't. What can you do here that you couldn't do at home? Seriously.”
While I was in personal fantasy land typing the above, there is a point to my rant.
Author Tony Schwartz wrote a fantastic book called The Power of Full Engagement
“we live in a world that celebrates work and activity, ignores renewal and recovery and fails to recognize that both are necessary for sustained high performance.”
So we need to chill out sometimes. That's obvious.
More specifically, we need to “disengage”. From everything: The email, the blackberry, the cellphone, TV.
Perhaps listen to some hip hop and blog drunk.
It's counterintuitive but what if you thought of it from this point of view:
We're all mental and physical athletes in our work. Some perform better than others. True?
Professional athletes in sports spend the great majority of their time training intensely and intelligently and RESTING.
This way, when they do compete, their batteries are fully charged.
Are you allowing yourself to fully charge or are you sacrificing sleep, soul-nurturing goofiness, time with Mama Nature and hanky-panky so you can work more, get LESS done (with poorer quality output) and accelerate the aging process? Hmm.
“Fill a cup to its brim and it is easily spilled;
Temper a sword to its hardest and it is easily broken”
– Lao Tzu
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If you need to remember any kind of number, here's a sweet trick. You'll retain it for a long time, too.
Say you need to remember a phone number (but it can be any number).
What you're gonna do is picture a telephone dial pad.
If the number is 415.575.5325 simply trace the numbers across the dial pad several times.
You'll notice that each grouping has it's own unique shape and “feel”. 575, for instance has an indecisive quality: it lives in “5” but decides to move to the southwest – “7” – and concludes rather hastily that “5” had a better nightlife and a more temperate climate and returns.
This is total silliness and exactly why it works.
You might want to give each shape a different color, or a “thing it looks like”. Whatever. You know best what works for you!
Check out this other memory hack bound to freak people out.
Now go try and beat this guy's record! (Daniel Stammets)
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