Tag / life

by ericfridman

There’s no crying in finance

Or anywhere else in business, we’re told. It’s inappropriate behavior for serious people dealing with serious matters.

And yet, crying is the one experience we share with others that can communicate the full emotional impact of both the joy and the tragedy of our human experience.

That serious enough for you?

One of the after-effects of my recent bone marrow stem cell transplant has been graft vs. host disease (GvHD), a war between my donor’s immune system and my own. Fortunately, my symptoms have for the most part been limited to my eyes, where a severe case of dry eye is the result of my eyes’ inability to produce tears. My tear ducts are toast and will be forever.

It’s not that I no longer experience the wide range of emotions – joy, grief, sadness, awe, even anger – that used to bring me to tears. I still experience these powerful emotions fully, but at the very last moment they fail to express.

The result? I feel like an incomplete human being, since emotional connection to others seems to me to be what being human is all about.

When we discourage the full expression of our response to life’s unexpected joyful or distressing events at work, we repress the full expression of our humanity. This includes our creativity, curiosity, compassion, and our capacity to think intelligently about the complexities that ensue when imperfect people try to work together in dysfunctional groups to solve wicked organizational problems.

I’m not advocating for loud, dramatic public displays of uncontrolled emotion. I am advocating for – in fact insisting on – the freedom to shed a few tears discretely with close colleagues with whom we feel safe when life overwhelms us.

We’re under the misimpression that tears at work mean we have lost control of our emotions, that we’re acting irrationally. And of course, as we all know, workplace behavior is nothing if not rational.

Just kidding. My experience has been that workplace behavior is mostly irrational, and that fully expressing our emotions is one of the most rational things we can do to make sense of behavior that, left unprocessed, leaves us at a loss as to how to move forward in life.

The real reason there’s no crying at work is that many of us feel profoundly uncomfortable when others express powerful emotions in our presence. We don’t know how to manage all this messy psychic energy people are throwing our way when they’re brought to tears at the office.

In 2023, Gallup reported that only 33% of US-based employees reported feeling engaged and enthusiastic about their work. That’s a sad commentary on the quality of our work lives. When we insist that others repress their emotions at work, we’ll never know what they’re really thinking, and over time we’ll lose trust in each other. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last 50 years about optimal organizational performance, it’s that trust is the essential foundation of every high-performing team.

by ericfridman

Success

How do you measure the success of your career?

Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but each of us chooses the work we do for different reasons. That’s why each of us alone bears sole responsibility for whatever professional success we might or might not enjoy along the way.

Let that sink in for a moment. Success is a choice we make.

We choose the industry or profession we work in – healthcare, education, professional sports, or law.

We chose the organizational context within which we work – profit or non-profit, large corporation, start-up, or independent practice.

We also choose the kinds of tasks we perform within these industries and organizational contexts – engineering, marketing, quarterbacking, or consulting.

It’s not so surprising, then, that we might each measure success in different ways.

Some of us define success in terms of how much money we bring home at the end of the month. For us, the work we do is primarily an economic transaction.

Others of us measure success in terms of how much we enjoy spending time with our colleagues. We view work primarily as a social transaction.

Finally, some of us measure success by the extent to which the work we do is aligned with deeply-held personal values. For us, our work is what we might call a matter of the heart – a commitment we make not to a particular industry, organization, or discipline but to some sense of purpose larger than ourselves.

Ideally, we work for some combination of these three reasons. But even if our work life is less than ideal, it’s important to acknowledge that any one of these three ways of justifying the work we do is perfectly acceptable. No one is more noble than another. There is no one “best” reason to work.

And yet…

Human development theory suggests that we pass through a series of developmental stages as we mature and become well-functioning adults. Two of these stages include a phase in which we default to others’ measures of success and a subsequent phase where we become the authors of our own definition of success.

Research also suggests, sadly, that nearly half of us will get stuck in the first stage without ever making it to the second. We live our lives according to who others – parents, peers, or the culture-at-large – expect us to be, doing the kind of work they expect us to do.

The result? At the end of the day – and maybe even at the end of our lives- we feel empty, unfulfilled, and resentful, lacking any sense of purpose or satisfaction.

That’s why it’s not so much our personal definition of success – be it economic, social, or purpose-based – but instead how we arrive at that definition that matters most. It’s the “how,” not the “what,” of the way we measure success that gives our life meaning and determines whether, in the end, we can conclude that we’ve enjoyed a whole life well lived.

by ericfridman

Everything happens at once

Years ago, during my first stint as a graduate student, I came across the following reflection etched into the wall of a bathroom stall in the basement of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School:

“Thank God for time, otherwise everything would happen at once.” 

For this would-be philosopher, everything apparently did happen at once, which is how he came to be sitting in this particular place at this particular time. More importantly, what he hints at is revealing: even allowing for the existence of God, everything we experience in life happens at once, right here, right now, simply because it can’t happen anywhere else. 

We live only in the present moment. Past and future are figments of our imagination, narratives our minds fabricate to promote the illusion of a permanent, predictable self-identity we would like to believe persists, unchanged, over time. 

For those of us planning our careers, I think our lavatory philosopher’s observation begs an important question. If everything happens at once – as it unquestionably does – why plan anything at all, since the future is an illusion, and an unpredictable illusion at that? 

We make plans to wrestle the chaos of the world into some kind of coherence that helps us get things done. Planning allows us to feel as though we’re being productive, that we’re in control. But our plans offer us at best a false sense of security, since the rug can be pulled out from under our feet at any moment. 

Plans lead us to believe that what we want to happen really will happen. Of course, what we want to happen occasionally does happen, though not nearly as often as we’d like. 

Oliver Burkeman, in his brilliant book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” argues that the greatest source of our unhappiness in life comes from the simple fact that while our time on this planet is limited to 4,000 weeks on average, the different ways we might spend our time and the different choices we might make are unlimited. 

This tension, aggravated by the omnipresence of social media, has created the professional scourge of our time – the fear of missing out. 

What should we make of this? Here’s my take: let’s accept the fact that the future is an unpredictable fantasy in which anything can and will happen. We should plan our careers to the best of our ability, certainly, but we should hold our plans lightly. We should allow enough space in our plans for unanticipated miracles to occur. 

The most influential people in our lives always seem to show up unexpectedly, at exactly the right time. They were never part of our plan, but we welcome them into our lives graciously nonetheless. 

People who hold their plans lightly are often people whose lives follow the course of a meander, rather than a steep trajectory up and to the right. They leave room for the unexpected and the unforeseen. They’re by far the most interesting people I know and also, from best I can tell, the happiest.