Here’s a powerful lesson for anyone who works their socks off day in, day out and wonders if there’s a lighter way to approach their job without sacrificing their success:
(spoiler alert: there is)
On 13th April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13 while it was halfway to the moon.
Three astronauts found themselves in the less than ideal situation of failing power systems, rising carbon dioxide levels, navigation tools which were on the blink and rapidly decreasing temperatures. All while hurtling through
space 200,000 miles from Earth in a glorified baked bean can.
So what did the astronauts do?
Well, they didn’t waste their time and energy filing a complaint with the engineers, starting a barney about whose fault the
explosion was or trying to negotiate less hostile conditions with outer space.
Instead, they stripped the mission down to its bare bones and worked the problems one by one.
So they rerouted the power, rationed their
resources and rewrote the emergency procedures on the fly. As more problems came up, they dealt with them one by one too.
Which brings me to the nub of the matter and how these heroes managed to pull off one of the most extraordinary escapes of all time while finding themselves in a literal life or death scenario:
Yes, they focused on their external conditions. But at the same time they didn’t let the outside emergency create an emergency in their heads.
That was the real battle.
See, the same situation looks & feels wildly different with access to judgement, clarity and resourcefulness rather than teeth-gnashing, finger-pointing and panic. In fact, I'd bet a pint of Timothy Taylor's that with the latter, those three astronauts would never have made it home.
And guess what?
It’s not just the cruel, cold and hostile reaches of outer space where this holds true.
Getting your internal bureaucracy under control is worth its weight in gold in the cruel,
cold and hostile reaches of office life too. And it's certainly a far bigger leverage point than trying to influence the external bureaucracy will ever be.
I should know.
I spent the best part of a decade getting myself
all het up about the six approvals I needed for a two line email or wondering why I was updating a tracker that was tracking a bunch of other trackers.
But once you start looking inwards rather than outwards, something interesting happens. The same work becomes lighter, the same challenges become easier to navigate and the same external nonsense stops having
quite so much power over you.
Of course, I’m not saying don’t try to make your workplace more user-friendly if you want to.
All I’m saying is when it comes to your performance, it’s your state of mind, your clarity and
your thinking that really shifts the needle.
So that's the place to start.
If you'd like some help making work feel lighter without sacrificing your performance, you might like this:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
To fulfilment,
Tom