George Bernard Shaw said, “I want to throughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.
I cracked up last week as I was trying to wade through how to get all the things done on my Monday since this Monday was a holiday. Labor day to be exact. Is that a day we celebrate laboring by not working? Gosh I’m confused.
Nonetheless, I’m really happy for the day -no matter what day it is. Maybe that happens when you pass 50. You just become grateful for every day.
Lately I’ve become very interested in all the conversation surrounding working and work ethic. It’s funny to me that we, “the people in my age group,” talk about “kids nowadays.” They just don’t have the same work ethic we did. Are you kidding? And by the way, our parents said the same thing about us.
Young people work different than we do or did in our day. The world is different. I think they value their own time more than we do. We, maybe I should just say I, think that working 10, 12, or 14 hours a day makes me more worthy. I think young people may believe that just makes me crazy. Why can’t WE get it done in 8 hours?
It’s different for all of us. We all work hard on the things we want to work on. For instance, if you love basketball I suspect you spend a lot of time shooting hoops. That doesn’t seem like work at all-unless you are Dirk! (Go Mavs!)
I’m reading a great book called The Talent Code. It’s a tremendous read regarding performance. A friend of mind recommended it to me with the thought that practice doesn’t make perfect but rather practice makes permanent. The Talent Code focuses on deep practice which is the art of trying, making a mistake, correcting, trying again, goofing, trying again…and then getting it right. I’m really over simplifying. Read the book.
Anyway, with this deep practice thought in mind, I can’t help thinking about how much time we may or may not spend with employees. Maybe it’s not their work ethic that challenges performance. After all we want them to be great performers right? If The Talent Code is correct and the skills we are looking for need development through practice, I’m not sure we are giving our employees much opportunity to succeed because we give them so little time to practice. We gotta’ watch those “payroll dollars”.
I think we hire, give an overview of the job, and magically hope we found a superstar! No real practice happens before they are on the job. And God forbid they make a mistake. According to The Talent Code they can’t even get to greatness without goofing it up, correcting, and then maybe getting it right. Do you have a place where people can practice and goof up before they have to do the real job? We call it training at TrainerTainment! AND we happen to think that it requires a lot of on-going effort.
Think about it, with the NFL just starting up, I bet they continue to practice throughout the season. The intensity of the pre-season work out may have been greater than practice will be during the season, but I believe they will practice every week.
In our work, I think we only play. It’s game day every day. We just get in the game and have very little practice time. What do you think?
