By Jeff Bell.
In our readings in business leadership, we may overlook the potential impact of fiction on our thoughts and actions. I find multiple connections with every novel that I pick up–to the extent that they make up half of my 40+ discretionary reads each year.
Over the summer break I read a few Stephen Kings, a Sebastian Faulks and Richard Flanagan’s The Long Road to the Deep North. This classic wasawarded the-then Man Booker Prize of 2014. It’s a harrowing tale of ANZAC prisoners of war on the Burma Railway in World War II. Flanagan also gets into the heads of their Japanese captors.
His characters are driven to the extremes of suffering and malnutrition, and like Viktor Frankl, he interrogates the human psyche:
“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”
To me, this is central to our ability to remain optimistic through anything we undertake in life. Especially leadership–when and where our words and deeds have a profound influence on the culture of our business and the lives of those who choose to work with us.
The happy man and woman does not waste their time and energy on the past. In negative terms, this often means:
- Regret. Fretting over what we should or could have done. Over how things have turned out. Sad to have caused hurt to others or having been hurt by others. Disappointed that we did not take the opportunity when it was right before us. Knowing that what we could have said or done for someone who has now passed. If only we had our time over again.
- Blame. Allocating the responsibility for some wrongdoing to another party. Believing that they caused the way that we now feel. Possibly being frozen to inaction because that other party will not correct the perceived wrong, will not apologise and will not give us what we crave and deserve. Casting ourselves as the victims of this persecutor. We want justice, and someone should deliver it to us.
- Resentment. Somone has what we should have received. Moreover, they have probably got it from some unfair means and will not give it up. This is not the first time either and it seems that the world is designed this way. All the spoils go to those who have too much already and we have nothing by comparison. They should give it up–and we should get it.
These are memories; embodying events that cannot now be changed. When we dwell on them, they can only be corrosive. They are illusions that undermine a happy life.
And yes, we do have happy memories and we can use them positively–but they too are illusions. And in resting on our laurels (by definition, the past) we also rob our future self–especially when we launch into the “good old days” and the “things are not what they used to be” modes.
The unhappy man and woman does all these things. He / she finds comfort in the familiar, the things that they think they know. But these events, or at least our recall of them, are unchangeable. They have happened and the more we keep them fresh in our minds, the more they will torture us. It leads to suffering and, worse still, it is self-inflicted and totally destructive.
To give regret, blame and resentment no time or energy is not about denial. It is in the full knowledge that to do so is a waste of our lives. To do so is to rob our present and our future that should instead be nourished by optimism, creativity and generosity that will inevitably lead to a life well lived.
It is also not to say that this positivity will indemnify us from misfortune or further suffering. There is no free pass to an easy life.
Afterall, it’s not the relentlessly shining light that brings happiness, but the dappled hues that prove to be the most interesting and which may bring us opportunity, if not reward.
Flanagan’s central character Dorrigo Evans recalls an associate having said:
“Adversity brings out the best in us. It’s the everyday living that does us in.”