November,
2003 - Life lists
Why are some people good at things
and others less so? I'm sure we would all like
to know this when selecting work teams. I would
like to know because, in sport at least, I have
always struggled to make the team. Not only that,
I have a talent for inspiring in others a lack
of confidence in my abilities.
When anyone was picking a football
team in the schoolyard, I was usually the last
one leaning up against the wall. I could think
a good game, even talk a good game but seldom
played one. I was really not so bad, but people
rarely passed to me.
In cricket matches I would dread
the skied shot towards my lonely spot, fielding
on the boundary. The ball would bounce from my
hands like a hot potato, accompanied by groans
from the rest of the team. If only I could have
caught it just once.
My latest failure happened last
weekend at a pheasant shoot. The birds were tumbling
out of the sky among the other guns but the majority
of my shots missed their target.
At one stage I heard a pheasant
behind me. It was a healthy hen bird just 10 feet
away. She looked me in the eye for a few seconds,
then trotted past as calm as you like back to
the woods.
The other thing I suffer on these
occasions is constant admonishments. If it's on
the football field, it is for losing the ball.
If I'm sailing, I have tied the wrong knot. It
is as if my role in life is to be the self-selecting
fall guy.
But think about it: whatever
the team, whatever the event, someone has to be
the worst player. If you are not so hot yourself,
you need someone such as me to be superior to
(this, incidentally is the "Bs pick Cs"
argument I have heard advanced by Microsoft and
McKinsey).
Well, I hear you say, you should
get out and practise more. I have tried that but
it does not deal with anxiety. The best players
are able to rationalise a fluffed shot at goal
and concentrate on the positives.
Yogi Berra, the former New York
Yankees batter, would blame his bat when going
through a bad patch. "If I know it isn't
my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad
at myself?" he said.
I have played enough sport to
know that practice has to be combined, most of
all, with an unfailing confidence in yourself
that seems to communicate itself to others. Innate
ability must count for something too, but I suspect
that it is less than we think.
Of course, practice matters.
The immortal Don Bradman used to stand in his
backyard as a child and hit a ball against the
wall with a stick, repeatedly, constantly improving
the hand-eye co-ordination that made him excel
as a batsman.
Gary Player, the golfer, famously
remarked that "the more I practice, the luckier
I get".
Some have questioned the perfectionist
approach of Jonny Wilkinson, England's rugby fly
half. Wilkinson has a natural ability to kick
a rugby ball accurately with either foot. This,
added to his perfectionism, creates his own confidence.
One of my problems may be slow
reactions. In the early days of intelligence measuring
it was believed, erroneously, that your thinking
ability was associated with your reactions. So
the first psychometric tests, devised by Francis
Galton in the 19th century, were based on measuring
reaction times. (Galton had odd views: he thought
that only men could make a decent cup of tea).
There is another, less studied
area of skill attainment covering the need to
sustain motivation with fresh challenges. Some
people enjoy the challenge associated with excellence.
Some of the best game shooters,
for example, will leave easy birds and just go
for the high ones. This should be an important
constituent of job design. If work does not have
the potential for growth and increasing complexity
or skill, there is a risk that people will become
bored and unfulfilled.
But there are many jobs that
require a consistent, disciplined, measured approach.
It would hardly be appreciated if an air traffic
controller played with the dots on the radar screen,
reducing the safety margins for course alterations
simply to make the job more interesting. The continuing
growth in air traffic is piling on enough pressure
as it is.
In these jobs it would help to
utilise the most competent employees in job development
and training, partly because it makes sense and
partly because it keeps them interested. Outplacement
specialists, who help people find new careers,
work on the belief that people do their best work
in areas where they have a real interest. This
is one reason why recruiters should not ignore
the hobbies sections of CVs.
One way any of us can focus on
our interests is to produce a "life list"
of things to do or see before we grow too old
to act. This is a great exercise for working out
where you want to be at whatever stage of your
life or career.
The window of opportunity for
certain things on my own life list is closing
fast. I have never been skiing or surfing, for
example.
Some things, such as bee-keeping
and reading Tolstoy's War and Peace I think can
wait a while longer. Others, such as spending
a night in a snow hole, defy explanation. Anyone,
however, must understand the satisfaction to be
gained from making fire by rubbing two pieces
of wood together.
And some of the things on my
list, such as walking up a volcano, will need
a second try. A visit to a volcano in the Philippines
had to be cancelled when it erupted. Finding a
Great Crested Newt, another of my "must do's"
sounds simple but it has so far eluded me. Relating
this desire to my career is less elusive because
my voluntary work happens to include the environment.
The most important point is to
have some kind of list, even if it has nothing
more than a single reminder to "get a life".
Some may think that such lists are not important
but recruiters faced with uniform qualifications
among graduates are becoming increasingly interested
in so-called "life" achievements often
gained during gap years.
Does this mean that bungee jumping
and bee-keeping should go on the CV? I would argue
that they should be there if these are activities
that help to define you as an individual.
The great thing about life lists
is that working your way through them produces
new ideas for extending your experiences and means
that you will need to make plans and give priority
to items on the list.
It is true that such a list won't
improve on the things you do badly but it will
give you confidence to discover there are things
you can do well and point the way in your career.
As Yogi Berra once said: "You've
got to be very careful if you don't know where
you're going, because you might not get there."
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