Perhaps my biggest pet-peeve of all time is when people cut in front of me while driving in the highway express lane. But not for the reason you think.
Here I am driving around 90 miles per hour, while coordinating my wrist, eyes and lower body just to stay inside the lane and avoid going splat into a wall when…
Some jerk cuts the positive space between us.
According to the Department of Transportation, “in addition to providing enough stopping time, proper [space] allows for more time to make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Over 7,000 large truck crashes are due to driving too closely to other vehicles.
“in addition to providing enough stopping time, proper [space] allows for more time to make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Compare that to the Project Time Off Coalition’s findings, expressed in infographic form, about how overwhelmed we feel at work and you’ll start to see we need positive space in our vocational lives as well.
In fact, I believe Marketing Managers, Marketing Directors, and VPs of Marketing experience their own “marketing overwhelm” evident in the nagging guilt they feel for not completing all their various strategic plans, social media posts, partnership conversations, and blog content in one simple swoop.
When you think of the speed of your working life, would you compare it to an enjoyable drive in the country where you’re wonderfully engaged and taking in the sights or a reckless bolt down the autobahn at breakneck speeds?
Whether considering the byway or the boardroom, spaces of nothing are essential for improving ourselves and helping us “make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Here are some reasons for why you should be doing less and creating some positive space in your work life.
HOW TO BE BETTER AT MARKETING (AND EVERYTHING ELSE) BY DOING LESS
Success is found working happier
We drive ourselves to work harder because we assume that putting in hard days at work will lead to a time when all is well: we achieve that elusive success and feel happier. We believe that one day we will sing in harmony with Florence and the Machine that “the dog days are over.”
However, according to research, detailed in Happiness Researcher Shawn Achor’s “the Happiness Advantage,” we’ve been mistaken for quite some time.
“For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success. That if we worked hard enough, we would become successful, and only if we are successful will we become happy. Success was thought to be the fixed point of the work universe, with happiness revolving around it.
Now, thanks to breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, we are learning that the opposite is true: when we are happy, when our mindset and mood are positive, we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.”
Success is not about working against competition
There are few things sadder than people obsessed with competition. Outside of all the other reasons that focusing on competition in our working lives is not helpful, it also happens to make us miserable.
Remember that linked infographic from the Project Time Off Coalition above? 21 percent of workers push themselves into overwhelm because “they are afraid they will lose their job or be seen as replaceable.”
Even Billionaire Investor and PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel, finds in his book “Zero to One” that competition doesn’t work for the future of business and entrepreneurship either.
“For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year,” writes Thiel, while earning “only 37 cents per passenger trip.”
He continues:
“Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 versus $160 billion for the airlines but it kept 21 percent of those revenues as profits more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.”
“The airlines compete with each other. But Google stands alone.”
In business, there will always be the temptation to gather focus extensively upon our competition:
“What promise is our competition making that we’re not?”
“Are we matching their amount of social media updates?”
“What media are they buying? We need to do the same!”
While there is arguable value in gathering competitive intelligence, let us also take the time to remember who we’re working for and why.
Yes, we desire to trounce our opposition in the workplace and in the marketplace—but even more we (hopefully) desire to be of service to others in an authentic way while creating value that can’t be easily imitated.
“We don’t tell a 17 year-old kid that Nike sucks, because the fact of the matter is, Nike doesn’t suck. They’re actually very good at what they do”
-Kevin Plank, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of UnderArmour
Success requires making space for thinking
If we’re looking to justify spending long hours at work separated from our loved ones and stuffed in our offices, we won’t find help from history’s heroes. Many household names spent as much time taking long walks, long lunches, and time to think as they did working diligently.
Writing in his piece, “Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang notes:
“Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus.
Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.”
Common legend tells us about the power of taking the time to think about the knowledge we push ourselves to grasp. It was said that Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity as a result of thought experiments conducted on long walks and Sir Issac Newton stumbled upon the concept of gravity while resting under an apple tree.
Two world-altering ideas initiated in leisure? Not a bad argument to get some yourself.
The biggest successes are not working to beat competition: “The airlines compete with each other. But Google stands alone.”
Success means taking the time to listen
Many times we think we can solve our problems by keeping our ‘nose to the grindstone,’ that somehow if we kick up enough dust our problems will run away for fear of our resolve.
There are times for putting our shoulders to the plow just as there are times to watch the grass and see how it’s growing.
In his book, “Pour Your Heart Into It,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz explains how in the late 1980s while Starbucks seemed to be growing like gangbusters, they were still coming to a major impasse: whether or not to serve coffee with nonfat milk.
On one side, Schultz saw himself a purist with a strong desire to bring Italian coffee drinking habits to the U.S.—and that did not involve nonfat milk concoctions, while consumer advocates within the company led by Howard Behrar believed Starbucks should do whatever the customer wanted.
It was as if the siren famous in the coffee shop’s logo had ceased her singing.
Then as Schultz remembers it:
“One morning I woke up early, still wrestling with the idea after a restless night. I got dressed and drove to one of our Starbucks stores in a residential neighborhood of Seattle. I paid for a double espresso and took a seat at a table…I was reading the newspaper but also keeping my ears alert to hear what people ordered.”
A young woman ordered, “I’ll have a double tall latte, with nonfat milk.”
“’Sorry, we don’t have nonfat,’ the barista replied politely but firmly. ‘We only have whole milk.’
I could hear her sigh in frustration and then ask,
“Why not? I always get it at the place down the street.” The barista apologized, but she strode out of the store, apparently headed for a competitor.
A lost customer is the most powerful argument you can make to a retailer.”
ENCOURAGE POSITIVE SPACE IN YOUR WORK LIFE
When you think of the speed of your working life, would you compare it to an enjoyable drive in the country where you’re wonderfully engaged and taking in the sights or a reckless bolt down the autobahn at breakneck speeds?
It is within your ability to help change that.
The ability to creative positive space in your work life is a skill inherited over centuries of technological advancement. Our technology, the kind of which you probably have in your pocket at this moment, automatically handles more processes than advanced computers 60 years ago.
It makes sense then that you should be able to utilize this power, along with reasonable thinking, to create positive space in your own work life so that you may benefit from the ability to “make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”