Category: Work

Do You Feel Heard?

Everyone likes to feel that others are sincerely listening to their ideas, fears, and concerns. Do you feel heard?

It is all too easy to imagine that you are invisible. At work, your boss might be oblivious to your ideas. At home, your partner is focused on their own needs. Friends don’t return calls or texts. You have so much to say, but it seems that no one is listening.

That feeling can be demoralizing. Why continue to make an effort if no one notices?

To avoid feeling this way, it is important that we feel heard. Whether it is in the office, at home, or from our elected leaders, having someone acknowledge you can make all the difference.

Of course, no one can have every idea be meaningful or important. There are, after all, other people, with their own motivations and thoughts and ideas. But having someone listen, really listen to you, can make you feel better even if nothing else results from it.

Are there areas of your life where you feel heard? Did you do anything to make that happen? Alternately, do you ever feel ignored or trivialized by someone important to you? How can you respond in a productive way?

Related questions: Who hears your voice? What is your voice? How can we become better listeners? 

How Are You Ambitious?

Some people want to climb the social ladder; some want to finish first in their fantasy football league. How are you ambitious?

Share why if you wish.

What Can I Do?

When events are chaotic, or things change very rapidly, oftentimes people ask the question: “What can I do?”

It is only natural to want to take control of a situation that feels out of control. In order to do that, we want to take action, even if it is not clear what that action should be.

Take a moment to consider what action is appropriate. It may also help to consider what is possible. Where those two things overlap, meaningful steps can be taken.

For example, let’s consider someone who is having trouble at work. Feeling it necessary to do something, they might, say, perform a deep clean of their home. Cleaning feels like progress, and while having a clean home is a good thing, it doesn’t have any impact on the actual problem. The action is possible, but not appropriate.

A lot of people are feeling helpless or powerless right now. In reality, each person has more power and more control than they realize.

So how do you tap into that? What can I do in order to make a difference? How can we overcome the despair that tells us the situation is out of our hands?

Related questions: How much power does an individual have? How can you help? How can we turn ideas into actions? How can we turn sadness into constructive action?

What Does The Government Do That Wouldn’t Be Done Otherwise?

Governments can be slow, inefficient, and wasteful. Despite this, are there things that only a government can accomplish?

The government of a country behaves differently than an individual or a for-profit company. As a result, there are things that a government can do that would be too expensive, take too long, or otherwise be problematic for someone else.

Private companies are subject to different motivations. A company has an incentive to offer a product or a service at the highest quality and lowest price that it can. Otherwise, a competitor might steal away customers.

However, there are no competitors for a government. The incentives are different, and that might mean proliferation of waste or fraud, which many people are concerned about. There have been many efforts over the years to reduce fraud and abuse, with varying levels of success.

Still, there are some things that a government can do that private enterprise cannot or will not. One of the more common examples is the postal system. To send a letter via the postal service, cost might be around a dollar or so. You could send that same letter via a commercial shipping company (like UPS or FedEx), but it would be much more expensive.

In part, that’s because the goal of the two is different. The company’s goal is to make a profit. The government’s goal is to deliver the public’s mail — even if it is done at a loss.

Can you think of other examples of projects that have to be done by a government, or they would be more expensive or wouldn’t get done at all?

Related questions: What role should the government play in our lives? What are our responsibilities to others? How much power does an individual have? Where does authority come from?

What Is Efficiency?

The word “efficiency” has seen an increase in use lately. But what exactly is it, and is it always a good thing?

While the term efficiency has been in the news recently, it is hardly a new phenomenon. When you were a student, you may have been encouraged to study more efficiently. At work, you may have been praised for being efficient as an employee.

The general idea is that you should get from point A to point B in as few steps as possible. If you can do it in, say, three steps, then doing in five steps is less desirable. Steps 4 and 5, then, are wasteful and unnecessary. Three steps is optimal, the most efficient route.

Of course, this is an overly simplified example, and real life tends to be more more complicated.

For example, let’s pretend that the project can be done in three steps, but you are more likely to make mistakes than if you were to do it in five. If you need to do the entire project over again regularly, then is three steps really more efficient than five?

Some endeavors are independent from the normal rules of efficiency. Let’s consider creative or artistic expressions. Is it possible or even desirable to write a poem more efficiently? Can creativity be regulated in some way? When brainstorming, might it not be more helpful to think in unconventional ways, even if they happen to be conventionally inefficient?

In other cases, a certain amount of inefficiency is fundamental to the process. In science, it is regularly impossible to predict how an experiment will unfold. A scientist might have to try dozens or even hundreds of approaches to problem solving before finding the right one. Each invalid attempt is not a waste, as it may very well illuminate a rule or behavior that was previously unknown, which obviously has value.

Doing things quickly is the right thing to do in some cases. But not all. Can you think of examples from your life where being inefficient was better? And if so, isn’t that approach more efficient after all?

Related questions: What is the value of inefficiency? How can we be more productive? What is waste?