Striving or resetting?

‘Striving’ may have been hijacked.

This is a business forum. It is now anyway since Microsoft turned it into Facebook for businesspeople – it was meant to be a referral and connection site… ho hum, anyway, so I’m addressing a business or at least a mostly gainfully employed or self-employed cohort. I have a radical thought for ye…

To strive is to improve, to make better, one ‘strives for excellence’. It implies work, fortitude, effort. All of these things can be good things of course, but I suspect the hijacking is in the frippery and froth of wealth and status, the appearance of ‘winning’ or more accurately, satisfying the internal monster that is feed by the machinery of envy which ‘is’ social and populist mainstream media. The false peaks of a seemingly never ending climb which requires wagon-trains of debt, stress and worry to be dragged ‘upwards’, up, ever up, more, more impressive, more exclusive; and occasionally means we tumble over the edge of an unstable slope or down into a crevasse when we can be ‘stuck’ for some time. When it unravels, it’s a bloody mess.

I came to this thinking as I considered the fate, or rather situation, of the business peers I’ve had over many years. The chart would be interesting, plotting a line graph of our relative ascents and descents, how and where they crossed and where they are now. I wonder what the Y-axis would be? Interestingly, despite all that struggle, none of us are at the ‘top’ of anything. We used to be, not now. Actually, we probably never were. We ‘got on’, some of us were making decent wedge at various times. We had impressive titles, but probably never the ‘top’ of anything. That’s the point. The ‘top’ is a very narrow, lonely pinnacle which few remain upon for long. Some of my peers are currently, in their 50s, in hospital and some are dead.

So, for what is striven and, is there a bit of striving that is ‘good’?

Recently I found myself coveting a piece of land which was smaller than my own with no flat surfaces and which would mean building from scratch and I’d end with a mortgage again. I have magnificent views where I am overlooking the Kaipara harbour, this land had a good view of the same harbour. I couldn’t understand what was going on; what were these thoughts and why was I having them. On reflection I realised that I’d regressed into ‘I could if I wanted to, just watch me’, ‘I’m as good as you’ etc. I was however temporarily in some kind of perverse race with, well, no-one. It was a remnant of drive I thought I’d dealt with, the need to be ‘just a bit better than’ which is odd, because where I live is way better and I’m debt free. The old version of striving had crawled out from under a rock somewhere. I come from humble beginnings, I guess it’s understandable.

To strive without meaning or purpose other than trying to win some kind of race, therefore, is a way to drive yourself round the bend. It never stops. Recently watching CNBC I saw a segment about which billionaires had the most billions. Bezos has the most of them, Musk has nearly as much, both more than Zuckerberg and Gates. A list of billionaires, in the current order of billionaireness… sheesh! This was only a snapshot of their most recent position in the league of mega-wealthy Americans… it could all change, what could they do?

Good striving then, if we can agree the above is bad striving (if we can’t, you’re reading the wrong thing, or the right thing just at the wrong time), good striving is for things which do have real personal meaning and purpose. N.B. Purpose is not ‘more’ of anything and meaning isn’t ‘because’ anything. The thing is, how do we know what is personally meaningful and purposeful? Luckily, I have some tips ??

This where ‘Reset’ comes in, reset is the ‘why’ of the ‘what’. Resetting ourselves into a situation where we are prepared to reflect honestly on why things are important, what purpose they have and why that is meaningful. The ‘latest’ anything… to impress whom and why is that important? If the latest something ‘makes you feel good’; why? Really why? Latest is not the same as ‘new’ by the way, new can be good, you need something and what you had isn’t functioning as you now know you want it to, that’s fine. The 27th pair of sneakers this year… that’s not ‘new’, that’s a problem with your Conditions of Worth (a thing, from psychology). A reset is to ground you, to stop and catch yourself, to understand if what you’re doing is…

… praise from the praiseworthy or just impressing the Jones’s

Everything we do in the story of us (the story of us is not the same as ‘us’, it’s just an account of what we did), is part of our legacy. No matter how many times we win, how much money we had (oh, families with great wealth where the money was so important because family is everything and you’re doing it for your kids… you have a high chance of turning your next few generations into people you really don’t like, just saying…), how many things we collected, how many draws full of trinkets, toys and finery we accumulate – you’re going to end up somewhere in a list of people in the who had ‘stuff’. Our legacy is the property of the people who will regard us in our lives (you can have a legacy while you’re still here) and after we are dead. Our legacy belongs to those people, we are not in control nor can we be, so best to make sure we’re impressing people that really matter, now and in future.

Who really matters and why they matter is the key to our reset. We can strive I suggest, to be as good as we can, in the estimation of people who’s opinion of us actually really matters now, and after now if that’s important.

I’m going to suggest that such things as creativity, caring, originality, honesty, thoughtfulness, scholarliness, impact, love; are worthy things, purposeful things, meaningful things. The people that really matter also exhibit these things, these qualities and characteristics. These are things of which there is no league table but a pantheon into which inclusion is worthy of strife.

We are not all going to be ‘great’… and there are lists of great people, according to popular culture and fashion of the day. Eve the lists of great people is ephemeral. We can however carefully take time to decide alongside whom we are counted, do they really, really matter to us, to the people who’s opinions matter to us and why do they matter to us? What is it about them that’s to be admired, what makes it worth striving to be ‘one of them’, spoken of in the same breath?

There is no enduring ‘richest person’, even the list of richest people changes over time. There is no measure of ‘most successful’ person. Certainly, striving to impress the nameless or feckless – even peers in which you find yourself in ‘competition’, it’s pointless. Reset, figure out what’s worth striving for. Strive for that.