Team OPB: I hope the start to your new year has provided you the space to reflect upon last year, and to think critically about what matters most to you in the year ahead. I hope that the content your read here helps you along way towards becoming the best version of you.
Here's to a great year ahead -- I'm excited to be a part of your journey.
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Performance, Peace, and Knowing When to Stop Chasing
I know how my grandmother likes her bread to be sliced. Bread slicing may not be as insignificant as you initially believe. Case in point, if you’ve ever found yourself saying something like “who wants dessert?” while wielding a pie server as you peer down upon a cake or pie, you’ll know the importance of that first slice. The same appears to be true for bread.
During a visit with my grandmother about a year ago, our conversation was interrupted by a neighbor who had stopped by with a half a loaf of bread and a bread knife. In her neighbor's septuagenarian wisdom, she asked my grandmother, who’s well into her 90’s, how she’d like her bread sliced. I sat back amused and surprised – “who would ever care to ask such a specific question?”, I thought. Her world, now significantly less busy and hurried than mine in my 30’s, has been re-scoped to prioritize bread slicing preferences – a kind of simplicity that feels reserved for those that survive to see their 90’s.
It’s not just bread slicing particulars that appear more important when you’re older. I met a woman named Barbara the other day who was in her 70’s. She sold me a handlebar upgrade for my road bicycle off Facebook Marketplace – a virtual marketplace where sellers and buyers of goods can message one another through the Facebook platform and arrange to pick items up at mutually convenient locations and times. Most conversations on Facebook Marketplace are curt, impersonal, and might feel a bit like bumbling through a conversation with someone on a subway as you assist them with their luggage from overhead. Not Barbara though – Barbara wanted to welcome me in her home, chat about her morning run, and had to be sure to arrange her errands for the day around my impending arrival.
When you get older, the world seems to slow down again. From bread slicing accommodations to welcoming strangers you found on the internet into your home, it seems like the older you get the simpler things become. Maybe in fact, life doesn’t actually get more simple – maybe your frame of reference changes – maybe the older you get the less you keep wriggling and squirming to chase the life you want because it’s already happened whether you like it or not. Maybe you just settle down into a state of peace.
I think as leaders and growth chasers, we could take a page out of my grandmother’s book or learn from Barbara and her carefree hospitality.
So many of my conversations with high performers and failure to launch (the term used to describe young adults who haven’t “launched” into an independent life) 20-somethings center around an existential pressure to perform. To outwork their failures. To deepen their understanding of why – why isn’t it working – why can’t I do it – why is it (life) so hard? My clients are consumed with overcoming self-doubt, finding self-worth, and reaching for metrics, rationalizations, and intellectualizations to help them feel better.
The same might be true for you – as it has been for me. If you’ve found yourself tying your worth to your success, to outcomes you’ve achieved, to the fame or fortune you accumulated – well, you’re in that rat-race right alongside many of my clients and even myself. Importantly, there’s no judgement here – no “good” or “bad” – no, it’s just a call out to be mindful. Because here, in the space of chasing, reaching, and growing, one can get lost as to the “why” behind it all.
Some of the male clients I work with wallow in self-doubt and self-pity. They drink too much, smoke too much, and stay stuck in the belief that their efforts are all for naught. Theirs is a problem of rumination – overthinking, depression, self-loathing, all together afraid to take risks, and yet all the while risking it all by staying in place.
Other men I work with have ego inflation – their inflated self-importance on full display during moments of discomfort. These men are wealthy, may have lots of sexual partners, know what it means to grind through difficult times, and yet feel alone in the ever growing abyss of life’s lack of meaning. Outcomes seem to come easy, purpose – not so much.
As author, professor, and speaker Arthur Brooks recently described, the “therapy industrial complex” is designed to rid ourselves of these problems:
Feel anxious? – do “x” to take care of it
Feel depressed? – try “y”
Stressed and uncertain? – have you tried “z”?
Brooks doesn’t appear to be off base here either. According to the CDC, one in six Americans have taken a prescription drug in the last year. Companies like TelaDoc, parent company to BetterHelp, an online software platform that pairs licensed therapists with therapy-seeking clients, was projected to make over $2.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2025. In a recent podcast, Brooks, who specializes in understanding meaning making and happiness, references a Buddhist teaching, stating:
Suffering = Pain x Resistance
He goes on to note that, “you need to be fully alive, because that is your teacher. You can go to the therapy industrial complex in the Western world today to try and lower your pain, or you can try and be fully alive, and lower your resistance.”
So herein lies the lesson that so many elders have that the rest of us don’t. So much of life’s suffering, the troubles that plague us – that plague me – the worries, doubts, fears and concerns – they are amplified by resistance.
The call to action here is simple – it is, in fact, based on no action at all.
It’s in acceptance.
Acceptance that life is full of uncertainties, that people do not always respond in ways that we would have hoped, that we don’t always respond in ways that make sense, that it is possible to try incredibly hard at things and still not be rewarded or recognized, that you are not that special, that you’ve been hurt, and that you have hurt others.
The new formula would look something like this:
Mental Health = Event + Flexible Interpretation of Event + Adaptive & Productive Response
If we are to lead and grow in the direction we all feel drawn to – towards our most actualized and accomplished selves – then we must appreciate pain is to be welcomed just as we welcome joy. When good things happen, we welcome the experiences and bask in the magic of those moments. The same may need to be true for when bad things happen too. To be “fully alive” as Brooks states, is to accept suffering as a part of your life.
Thus, in a way, true leadership comes in the form of knowing how you want your bread sliced and not worrying about anything else. It comes in welcoming strangers into your home because after all, you’ve seen plenty of them to know how to handle these encounters.
The challenges that follow you throughout adulthood get shed later in life. Maybe – just maybe – it’s worth remembering that now and to stop resisting the challenges so much.
Thanks for reading as always and if this resonates with you, forward this edition to a friend!
Time to win the week 🏆
See you next week :)
– J
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