Celebrate or Over-Celebrate?

I often wanted to address this particular people behavior on LinkedIn, as was highlighted by a video titled “If LinkedIn was real life?”

The satirical video presents a few friends in a restaurant and the dialogues go like:

A: I am excited to announce I’ve finished my beer.

B: Congratulations

C: Thumbs Up

D: Keep up the good work

?

C: I am embarking on a new chapter and Ill be buying the boys a round of beers

A: I endorse this round

B: Fantastic news

?

C: Looking forward to partner with the boys again for another round

A: Fantastic news

B: Valuable insight

C: WoW.

?

A: Big things are coming: Beers

B, C, D (together): Congratulations on the beer anniversary

?

F: ahem..ehm. (a woman clearing her throat)

A: Wow

B: Fantastic

C: Valuable insight.

D: I am so excited to share this with my team.

And the video goes on with a satirical funny ending, but I hope you got the message.

The video depicts accurately what is going on this platform.

1. A hyped up language: reflecting an over-emotional state than that in reality. As a business and performance coach, I have always believed that our words MUST reflect our emotions as accurately as possible.

This is why there are different words expressing different levels and types for sadness, such as grief, resentment, sorrow, sadness.

You don’t get excited to send an email , but you get excited to see your son or wife after six months of off shore duty.

You get a slight headache, a headache, a migraine, an exertion, a cluster, a thunderclap or a head throbber.

We cannot use the same term for all types. If we are always saying, my head is throbbing, then we either are not much adaptive at use of vocabulary, or we cannot differentiate between the severity levels or the worst case, our body has started to respond to our extreme choice of words, by always creating a head throbber as soon as you say it.

2. Pseudo Success: is something which is not, but seems like success.?

If your football coach is giving five stars to each player, he is giving five stars to no one. It is the same as KG teachers, forced by parental pressure to put a Star on every kid’s face or notebook, despite that the kid has hardly done her school work. (There are remedies to this behavior, but it is off topic, so I'll share in some other relevant post).

Yes, finding a job in a dull economy is good news, but it is not fantastic, or a wow. Climbing Everest or K2 is wow or fantastic. Landing on a job as an HR manager isn't.?

Publishing a book is fantastic. Getting to the best seller list is “phenomenal”. Getting an Emmy is “landmark”, getting a life time achievement award is “epochal”.

It is not that we should stop celebrating success, we should and we must, even if it is small, but we should not over-celebrate an undervalued event.

Try depicting with accurate words the different levels of success; this will feel realistic and actually be closer to reality and appreciated by others.

3. Keep Success Confidential: Up till it starts to shout itself. Then you may not need to reveal it. It is one of the greatest formulae for achieving greatness. Work in silence. Work humbly. Do not share pseudo success. Do not focus on the number of people responding to your "fantastic" news. Just focus on yourself.

4. If it is really great, you won’t have to put a post celebrating it. People will know themselves. Nadeem Arshad did not have to put a post about his Olympic gold.

?5. Learn to connect genuinely, meaningfully and truly with other people.

Appreciate their achievements sincerely, but make sure they are achievements, and not mere an effort to gather some attention.

6. Finally, Celebrate. Learn to celebrate well.

Celebrate on your personal success even more, even alone. Give yourself a small treat, a gift of a great massage, or a long-awaited purchase of your favorite wrist watch.

Celebrate the success of others, but make sure, a person who praises everyone equally, praises no one.

Learn to see things as deep as they really are, not what they seem to be.

See things clearly, with clarity.

Blessings

Hassan Bukhari (pen name)

Syed Hassan Abbas

Chief Editor

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