Fight Wisely
I must confess this letter already assumes the obvious – That you will inevitably come across conflict in your daily working lives. Yes, let me be a realist here and say that conflict is inevitable. Embrace that ugly fact and move on.
How, then, do you fight wisely?
Firstly, learn to pick your battles. There’s no point in fighting every war, winning every argument and fighting every battle. It’s exhausting, pointless and dare I say, arrogant.
You cannot win every fight. In fact, there’s no point in winning every fight. Learn to let things slide and see the bigger picture. If the fight is trivial, if someone is better than you, or if winning the fight is going to be destructive to your well-being, don’t do it. Sometimes the greatest acts of humility come in deliberately losing so you can rest, recover and focus on winning a battle that is worth fighting.
Sometimes I feel that people are preoccupied with winning. It’s an ego thing - They can’t let anyone beat them or admit defeat. But fighting battles is much more than this. You’re not fighting a one-off, but rather a series of never-ending, interconnected fights that all add up to create a bigger picture.
Indeed, Bill Gates is quite right when he says:
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
You don’t need to win all the time. Become comfortable with losing.
Secondly, embrace your ignorance. Everyone is a work in progress. Realise this deeply, and you will be able to weather many storms. To acknowledge your ignorance is to rid yourself of your ego. It opens you up to so many solutions that would have otherwise been closed off to you had you strongly believed that you weren’t ignorant.
Finally, put your career in someone else’s hands. Become someone else’s apprentice. Find someone you trust and devote yourself to their teachings. Learn from them, be open to their wise words of wisdom, for they know more than you do and you will become a much better person because of it. The ‘fight’ starts early. There is little point in fighting against big fish in the world of work when you do not know what you should be fighting.
Mark my words:
FIGHT WISELY
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If I were to be brutal, I would say that work occupies more of our time, our mental stamina and mental bandwidth than anything else, whether it be family, relationships or hobbies. No sooner are we asked, “what do you do?” when people first strike a conversation with us. Work is more than just an activity we leave behind after 5pm; it is our passion, and more fundamentally, our identity.
Perhaps it is more apt to think of work as its own living ‘thing’; a living, breathing monster in and of itself. We become that monster.
How, then, do we tame the monster of work so it does not consume us? That is something we shall attempt to answer in the next five letters. This is the fifth of five letters that I shall be writing on work.
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