Hi all,
I found this article from the WSJ interesting this week: Can You Get Ahead and Still Have a Life? Younger Women Are Trying to Find Out.
A key quote:
“For some, the last years have prompted a reassessment of how much they’re willing to give to their careers at the expense of family time or outside interests. For others, many of them younger professionals, seeing the ways other leaders have allowed work to subsume their lives is a turnoff.”
I have not made up my mind yet on the answer to this question. Is there a way to have both a “life” and a career? Certainly all is not lost… right? Is this even the right answer to ask? More thoughts to come on this….
In the mean-time, have a good weekend, enjoy the extra 1 hour of sleep, and enjoy my *shorter* note below,
Brendan
“Ooh baby
Things are changing now, and I can’t tell
Where I'll be from here on out
Ooh it’s hell”
—“Things Are Changing”, Gary Clark Jr.
Sing it, Gary.
There is a natural tension between our human desire for security and the cold, physical inevitability of change. Change threatens security and security resists change. “Ooh it’ s hell.” I’m naturally feeling the tension between these two things as I recognize how much things could change in the next few months or years. Is the solution to claw for more security and turn a cold shoulder to new changes? The writer Alan Watts warned against this in his book The Wisdom of Insecurity:
“If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want. To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.”
The more you resist change, the more you feel scared—and unprepared—for it.
Accepting change is easier said—or blogged about—than done. But one way we can all become more open to change is to recognize the biases that skew our own awareness of it. The “end of history illusion”, coined by the psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, is our own tendency to underestimate how much we will change in the future. As David Epstein explains it in his book Range:
“From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past, but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”
The end of history illusion implies that the fear of change may be a function of our habit of thinking we’re always through with it. “Sure, I changed a lot in the past, but that’s all done now.” Of course, that’s not true. We seem to not give ourselves enough credit for the past changes we have weathered because they often don’t register in how we anticipate the future.
If we can accept we often underestimate our tendency to change over time, perhaps we can also accept we might have more experience dealing with it than we think.