Aristotle argued that an individual cannot achieve happiness without self-direction. If we believe that a just society is one in which people have the opportunity and freedom to become their best selves, then we shouldnāt tolerate the soft tyranny that millions of employees face each day at workāwhat oral historian Studs Terkel called āa Monday through Friday kind of dying.
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How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work canāt requisition a $300 office chair without a managerās approval? If we thought about it for a minute, weād realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individualās freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.
Zhang finds another beacon in the writings of Immanuel Kant, the nineteenth-century German philosopher whose ācategorical imperativeā holds that we must never regard human beings as mere tools. In a long-ago meeting with the authors, Zhang echoed this belief when he laid out his aspirations for Haier: āWe want to encourage employees to become entrepreneurs because people are not a means to an end but an end in themselves. Our goal is to let everyone become their own CEO.
The so-called Golden Rule is as old as civilisation itself. In its positive form, it calls for right action, that is, treating others as one would hope to be treated oneself. In its negative form, it calls for right inaction, or, not doing to others what one would not have done for oneself. Both iterations call for imaginative acts of deep empathy and, for this, one could do worse than look to the great world teachers for instruction.
People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally ābeing lived.ā They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society. We are responsible for our own effectiveness, for our own happiness, and ultimately, I would say, for most of our circumstances. Samuel Johnson observed: āThe fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.ā Knowing that we are responsibleāāresponse-ableāāis fundamental to effectiveness and to every other habit of effectiveness we will discuss.
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control. And some things are not.
Epictetus, Discourses