Tag: life

Character is a thing you do every day

Posted on August 3, 2024August 3, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

Tim Dowling writing in The Guardian about the passing of his 102 year-old father (my emphasis):

I can’t tell you all the things I learned from my father, over my life and his, but I can tell you a few: that you can always make people happy with a story told against yourself; that self-esteem is great, but possibly overrated; that character is not your reputation, but a thing you do every day; that your only real enemy is fear, unless it’s a fear of heights, which is really just a specific form of common sense. And that as you age, a little caution is no bad thing.

I’m hoping my own dad, who turns 75 this year, will be around for a long time yet. But the reason for sharing the quotation is Dowling’s channelling of Aristotle, who can be translated as saying something like:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

One of the things I’m really appreciating on this holiday is the chance to reflect on my life. While my daily habits are productive and healthy for me personally, and helpful for my family, they’re very much focused on the short-term. I need to think bigger. Life is short.

On the bench

Posted on July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

When I worked in schools as a teacher I absolutely loved it. On multiple occasions I remarked that I would do that kind of work for free. Of course, I was younger, and didn’t have as many responsibilities in my life.

Since that time, I’ve worked at a university, for tech companies, and founded my own consultancy business as well as a co-operative. But nothing has been as fulfilling as teaching.

There’s actually nothing to stop me going back into the classroom. But I’m not sure that looking backwards is the best way to go about planning for the future. As a result, and especially with being under-employed this year, I’ve felt a bit like I’ve been ‘on the bench’.

I’m ready to come on and play my part, and in fact have been adding different facets to ‘my game’ through the MSc I’ve started and keeping up-to-date with various developments — particularly in AI. But I’m not entirely sure what to do next. What’s the second half of my career going to look like?

Perhaps I’m just going through the entirely predictable midlife slump. Perhaps I just need to stop waiting for the right opportunity to present itself and instead go and create it.

Life has no instruction manual

Posted on June 2, 2024June 2, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

I’m currently reading a book entitled Jimmy the Kid, in which hapless criminals decide to kidnap the child of a wealthy man after being inspired by a novel. As you’d imagine, things don’t exactly go to plan.

It’s reminded me of the futility of complaining that things haven’t turned out as you expected, when ‘what you expected’ was your life to replicate someone else’s. Rifling through pages in an attempt to find answers, as the protagonists of the Jimmy the Kid do on a number of occasions, doesn’t work. Nor does it’s modern-day equivalent of scouring social media, videos, and even blog posts like this one.

Even the same person in a similar context is unlikely to replicate the exact steps that previously led to success. As Heraclitus, the Ancient Greek philosopher noted, you can’t step into the same river twice; not only has the river changed, but you have changed. So it’s not possible to uncritically take advice from people who have achieved success and apply it to your own context.

I think this is why I’m finding the work on my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice so useful. It’s not the academic side of it that I’m finding so difficult (and interesting) but the application of it to my professional and personal life. The danger, of course, for any reflective person is in over-thinking everything.

Ultimately, there may well be an optimal strategy and approach for every situation. But identifying and implementing that in the moment is difficult based on the incomplete information we are likely to have on hand, distorted by our biases and previous experiences, and approached through the heuristics we have developed.

The only solution to this is to keep learning. Or, in the words of Alvin Toffler, to “learn, unlearn, and relearn”. Unlearning is difficult, and until I came across this free e-book from Casco Art Institute (a rather hefty PDF) I hadn’t seen many specific exercises for doing so.

So, no, life has no instruction manual. But that’s a fact that can liberate us to create our own futures, together, without being hamstrung by previous ‘best practice’ or ‘what worked last time’.