You can't care more than.....
The secret key to lower stress and better time management (The Best Advice I Ever Received - Part I)
For the next few issues, I plan to focus on some of the best advice I’ve ever received.
First:
“You can’t care more than your [pick your favorite] boss, client, friend, etc.”
Deep down, most of us are “people pleasers” or at least, people who want to do a good job. In addition, for most of us, we generally care about the outcome of things we are associated with. But do we care too much sometimes? Probably.
Unfortunately, this desire to do well and create great outcomes leads us to unnecessary stress when we seem to be the only ones on the island of caring.
Before I go further, this is not to say that you shouldn’t strive for great accomplishments and really care - because you absolutely should. But how much should you care when you are not the person making the final decision on the outcome (and you can’t influence the decision), or the other person is not as worried about their own consequences as you are, or if the person doesn’t share your commitment to proactivity and momentum? And how much should you be willing to allow their personal detachment to impact you?
Let’s start with some stories.
The “one with the ideas”
I have had a lot of really great bosses. Visionaries. Creatives. Passionate champions of employees. The first one inspired a “top secret” lesson I have carried with me ever since, and one that I will share with you now.
First, some context. He was an “idea guy.” Always had a great new idea of something to do, build, share, grow, etc. When I first started working for him, I followed him around, notebook in hand (we used paper and these things called pens back then), writing down everything he said. Then I would go back to my desk and work well into the night, writing white papers, creating plans, and basically operationalizing his every thought. I would hit SEND with a sense of pride in my work, silently telling myself, “You’ve got this. You are doing a great job in this stretch role.”
And then I would wait.
And wait.
And wait.
With each conversation, more ideas came, but never a follow up or even a second thought to all of the previous and now abandoned ideas.
I started putting “read receipts” on my emails.
And guess what?
He NEVER read them.
I was furious. Why was I spending so much time at work if this jerk was never even going to read anything? So I went home.
Then it hit me.
He thinks by talking.
Armed with this new insight, I made a secret page in the back of my notebook, where I would keep a list of things he mentioned. Each time he said it, I would put a checkmark beside it. When I got three checkmarks, THEN I would do something with them. And it worked! When I sent him information related to the ideas he’d repeated multiple times, he not only read it, he responded quickly and with great enthusiasm and commitment.
This was great training for all of the future “idea people” I worked for. One was so overflowing with ideas that I begged facilities to put me on the other side of campus from him (with at least two elevators in between) so that he would have to really think about what he wanted to tell me instead of just yelling out every random thought he had when it crossed his mind, knowing I could hear him from across the hall.
The lesson here is that sometimes we spend so much time and energy “solving” things without ever even confirming whether the thing we are working on is a priority for the person we are doing it for.
Nero Syndrome
But it’s not just “idea people” bosses whose own practices create unnecessary stress and time sucks for those around them. In what follows, names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent.
Recently, a “friend” had a “business issue” that was time sensitive, involved significant documents in preparation for negotiation, and could mean the end of her business. This “friend” sent documents that had been prepared by her other “advisors” to me on a Friday night.
Mind you, she had them for a week.
On Friday night, I started parsing through them, line by line, growing increasingly alarmed at the content. I shared my feedback by phone and email immediately, making sure she knew that there were significant problems with the approach and what catastrophic consequences might be on the horizon for her business. No response. I lost sleep and worried for her future financial security. Saturday came and went, still nothing. Finally, on Sunday she called, allegedly eager to hear my thoughts.
Five minutes into the call, she said “thanks for looking at all that. I can’t talk for long, I am headed to a Taylor Swift concert.” She submitted everything the following morning, exactly as prepared by her advisors. She is now in a world of hurt.
But I realized, I was creating stress for myself by caring more about her business and her livelihood than she did. She danced the night away to Tay-Tay, her business imploded (and she is still not especially concerned).
The martyr
“I am so busy”….”I work all the time”….”I don’t have time to [fill in the blank].” Sound familiar? We all know them. The people who have no problem asking for your valuable help, but then only want the help when it’s convenient for them. And by convenient, that means after they’ve been to the gym, gotten their nails done, and had a coffee at Starbucks. But guess what? You are busy too. You have your own priorities and goals, and likely a ton of responsibility that will matter more to your long term happiness and success. So take a deep breath, and guard your time and energy like you would gold bars in a zombie apocalypse. Meet these people at the same priority level they meet you at, and offer them windows that are convenient for you. If they choose to go to Starbucks instead, hopefully the barista will write the answers they need on their cup.
The ostrich
My recent investing series was inspired by the number of people I know who struggle with the basics of managing their portfolio. I only discovered this after making it my mission to talk openly and honestly about money, compensation, and other financial issues with anyone who wanted to (friends, students, colleagues, the lady at the grocery, you name it).
Warning: Be careful what and who you invite in, and make sure their issues don’t take up permanent residence in your own mental house.
In this example, once I opened the door to this brutal honesty, I started to hear about all of the 401k loans used to pay for fancy shoes and purses, rollovers gone wrong and lost somewhere along the way, cash in mattresses because banks are scary and investments are overwhelming, and the list goes on and on. I started to worry that everyone I know and love is going to be living in cardboard boxes because they had shoved their heads in the sand about money.1
Then I thought, maybe I should be less focused on the ostrich and more focused on the butterfly.
The butterfly
The idea here is that each time I help someone, even a little bit, there might be some larger impact (the butterfly effect). Maybe they will share what they’ve learned with someone else, and they with someone else, and all that exponential impact is what I can focus on (instead of the latest person eschewing the stock market for the safety of their sock drawer). By refocusing my attention on what might be a small but still valuable impact (one person at a time), I was able to stop carrying other people’s worry and take pleasure in the fact that I at least was lucky enough to have an opportunity to help.
And so we end where we began.
You can not care more than those you are trying to serve.
Why are we all making stressful and time consuming issues priorities for ourselves when they aren’t even a priority for the people who have the most (or only) real interest in the outcome? Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to step back and say to yourself, “This is not my problem. I want to help you, but I cannot care more than you do.” With those simple words, you will be able to reclaim time for projects that you can impact, reduce stress, create joy in your own world, and utilize your energies for the best possible value.
Have any great advice that you’d like to share? Send an email to prepovercoffee@substack.com or post a comment.
They won’t, but you get the idea.