One example I’ve seen too many times in a workplace is when you stop putting in 100 percent of what you are capable of because you feel underappreciated. The ego grabs your unconscious, throws your long-term goals out the window, and sets you sailing on a path toward destruction.
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The same is true for you. There’s a little bit of you that your organization can never touch, never know, never see, and certainly never feel. And yet it’s this part of you—the loving, feeling part of you—that makes you feel alive at work, able to do things that surprise and delight you, things that are ridiculously good, unexpectedly made, astonishing to your team, and that light you up from the inside.
By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.
Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.
We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.
Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you’ll become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.
I once had a coworker who was also a friend. One day he walked into my office with some news. “I figured out what I’m doing wrong,” he said. "I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.