Musings from the Beach

In the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, "If there's heaven for me, I'm sure it has a beach attached to it." As I recharge this week with the family at the beach, I wanted I wanted to share a few random thoughts with you.

For many years, my floppy hat (pictured above) has been my constant companion on our family beach vacations. Serendipitously purchased in a random shop in downtown Burlington, Vermont many years ago, it has survived surprisingly well. Saltwater. Sunscreen. Sweat. Sand. Perhaps that is why it is such a prized possession, and I can't imagine a beach trip without it. Due to its well worn visage, it clearly has no monetary value. But it is priceless to me. It's funny how some of the most precious things in our lives are like that. It is not the thing that has value. It is the memories and emotions we associate with the thing. We would do well to not forget that. After all, "a thing is just a thing," as the following quote summed up well:

• But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn't welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity - all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance... But of course, a thing is just a thing. - Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

After pondering “failing fast” or, if you will, “experimenting” recently (see Fail Fast), it left me with a question.? How do we know when to quit if something isn’t working?? There clearly is a difference between giving something your best shot and working hard towards a tough goal, versus not knowing when to quit and struggling long after it was clear you wouldn’t be successful.? It seems to me that this is again an issue where there is a spectrum, and past experiences and? mistakes should guide us in determining where we are on that continuum.? Persistence, grit, “stick-to-itiveness” in the face of a tough problem is clearly something we admire and prize in the workplace (The Obstacle is the Way).? On the other hand, being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge you need to change your approach to tackling a problem when you are failing is foolish and a waste of time, energy, and resources.? While we can debate the merits of “fail fast,” I hope we can all agree that “fail slow” is not good at all.? This dichotomy between persistence and stubbornness is interesting, and I suspect that the wisdom to know the difference between the two comes from the school of hard knocks.? Best selling author and psychologist Adam Grant recently summed this up really well by saying, “Sticking with a bad decision is not a triumph of commitment.? It’s a failure of courage.”? If you are interested in a good, quick read on this, check out this summary (Persistence Vs. Stubbornness).

Since I am staring at the ocean a great deal this week, I found this study very interesting (Reference 1). It appears that there is a benefit to your blood pressure and heart rate when you look at a body of water. It may only be transient, but I will volunteer for experimenting more around this hypothesis! A nice summary of this research can be found here (Reference 2).

As my floppy hat reminds us, "Life is Good." If you are looking for a bit of a primer on how to to embrace this concept more, I would encourage you to read The Good Life, by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The subtitle of the book is a nice preview: "Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness." I recently re-read it, and I hope you will consider adding it to your summer reading list.

To close, I will share this quote from Matt Haig’s book, The Comfort Book, entitled “Ladders.”? I am often guilty of viewing work life this way; being distracted by the past or future at the expense of the present. The emphasis below is my own.?

• We are often encouraged to see life as on continual uphill climb.? We talk about ladders without even thinking.? Career ladders.? Property ladders.? Of being on the top rung of the ladder.? Or the bottom rung of the ladder.? We talk of rising up.? We talk of uphill struggles.? In doing so we visualize life as a kind of vertical race, like we are human skyscrapers reaching for the clouds.? And we risk only ever looking above to the future or below to the past and never around at the infinite horizontal landscape of the present.? The trouble with ladders is they give you no room to move around.? Just room to fall.