“Short-Term Sustainability” and the Failed Promises of Oxymoronic Motivators
“When life knocks you down, stay there and take a nap…”
…is probably NOT something Tony Robbins or other motivational speakers would say to fire up an audience.
But sometimes you NEED to be told to take a nap…or to lower the bar…or to give up.
Now, one obviously shouldn't give this advice casually. In fact, suggestions like those should probably come with a “MATURE CONTENT” warning, as they’re inappropriate for many audiences.
That being said, are you sick of the non-stop barrage of conventional leadership posts, quotes, articles, books, webinars, and speakers recycling the same ol’ advice encouraging you to “give it all you’ve got” and “get right back on your feet?"
If so, then listen to this episode of The Energy Detox, where we’ll drill into unconventional leadership and (de-)motivational themes that will help you and your stakeholders withstand the non-stop punches being thrown at today's energy industry.
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Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
00:00
So I could probably count on one hand, the number of people I've encountered in the oil and gas industry who I would call lazy. By and large, most people in oil and gas are hardworking, sometimes to a fault. And sure I've encountered people that are burned out, or that might be frustrated or just turned in their two weeks notice, and maybe their motivation isn't quite there, but in their DNA, they're anything but lazy. And so those people, you people in this audience, I know, can listen to this message today. Because this message is going to be about maybe embracing a little bit of laziness, embracing some unconventional motivational thinking, some unconventional mindsets that might challenge this, this 110% at all times mentality that you might have. And again, this isn't a message that's suitable for everyone.
00:49
Hence, the tongue in cheek disclaimer here that this message is for mature audiences only. This is not a message I would share with my children, for example, who I'm trying to foster hardworking, you know, ethic, and go get it and you know, you want to shoot for your dreams and realize your full potential, you want that in impressionable children, and out of context, hearing someone say, Well, you know, maybe you need to lower the bar, you know, maybe you need to take a break, maybe you need to give up, maybe you need to slow down, obviously out of context, that could be very dangerous. But again, for this audience, for those in oil and gas, who are by and large, hard working individuals, this message hopefully helps you realize that sometimes your approach can be unsustainable, sometimes all of the content that's out there, whether it's books, or LinkedIn posts, or quotes or motivational speeches, or podcasts, or whatever it happens to be, sometimes those things can give you a little boost and move you forward.
01:45
But in many cases, they're not sustainable. In fact, they represent the volatility that we have a new oil and gas industry, they might give you a little bit of hit, but you don't have enough ups and downs, we know full well the toll that those ups and downs can take on individuals on companies, personal lives and professional lives. And if you're doing that, from a leadership standpoint, if you're ingesting this material that just gives you a little bit to lurch forward and you're looking for you know, the next piece Well, again, that's not sustainable. But for many individuals who have heard for their entire lives and who have exercised this unsustainable work ethic, it can be dangerous. So again, with that disclaimer out of the way, I do want to talk through some unconventional thinking, and help you find a sustainable way to introduce the occasional laziness if you will, to lower the bar on occasion to slow down without sacrificing your reputation as being a hard worker as being anything but lazy.
02:59
Hello, and welcome to The Energy Detox, a petroleum based blend of leadership conversations guaranteed to boost your professional and personal output by flushing away the hidden and often toxic barriers to peak performance. I'm your host, Joe Sinnott, a chemical engineer, executive coach and 15 year energy industry veteran helping you tap into the same resources, fueling today's most successful and sustainable leaders.
03:24
And today, we're going to talk about how those successful leaders avoid being overwhelmed by all of the well intentioned material out there to help them be better leaders to help motivate them to help push them and in turn push their teams to achieve their fullest potential, all well meaning things but all of which can be dangerous, if not taken in context, and if not approached consciously. And so today, I invite you if you're watching live in the comments to share some of those pieces of advice that you might find to be somewhat dangerous, if you will, when misapplied, or when a leader is touting them, again, without any context, and doing it unconsciously, such that their stakeholders get burned out, get tired, and don't produce the long term results that you and your organization are looking to produce. Because I've heard on occasion, the idea of short term sustainability, what the hell is short term sustainability, it's nothing, it's stupid. And if you're embracing tools, or people that are giving you short boosts that just get you from A to B, when you should be focused on z to a certain extent. That's what you're getting paid to do. That's what your ultimate goal is. Well, again, you're asking for trouble.
04:39
That's not the way to sustain a career and it's not the way to sustain a personal life. And in this episode, we're going to weave in my own personal life and hopefully some elements of yours because in fact, this episode was inspired in large part by the advice or maybe lack of advice that my wife and I got when our twins showed up just about three years ago. And at the time we had two older children. And what we found in all the various parenting advice and books, which we were somewhat well versed in having had other children is that most of the advice was impractical for us, having two year old twins and still managing to other kids. And some of the best advice we ultimately got, not from a book, not from a podcast, but from individuals was lower your bar, lower your standards. Your goal is long term, not short term. And if your kids need to watch little extra TV, or have pizza, or macaroni and cheese for the fifth day in a row, so be it if it allows you as a parent to maintain some level of sanity so that you're actually around in three, four or five years, let alone 20 years, and you're not completely burned out. So again, with that being said, I do encourage you to share any comments you have. I also encourage you if you wish to go to despair, calm and check out some other D motivators. There's a link here in the comments already for this post that brings you to some humorous takes some alternate takes some unconventional takes on those motivational posters that you may have seen at offices or, or perhaps you even have one hanging up in your in your home. So if that's the case, I don't want to insult you. But I do encourage you to go there.
06:12
And if there's any that that strike you as humorous, feel free to share them in the comments. And towards the end of this year, I'd be happy to try and weave some of those into the conversation. And along those lines. And And one final point here on the introduction is I want to thank john Stansbury of international snubbing solutions, who commented before this broadcast, if you will. And he brought up an analogy that I thought was perfectly captured what we're going to be talking about today. And that comes from the world of music, where you have symphonies, with multiple instruments that are all brought together to form some sort of beautiful piece of music. Whereas you have companies on the other hand, which is the opposite, you have lots of disparate noises, if you will, some of them might sound like music individually, some of them might sound halfways, pleasant, individually one, but when all brought together, it's it's overwhelming. Again, sounds like our house once in a while, and when all the kids are screaming, and when it comes to all these leadership messages, all of the motivational tactics that are out there, and again, books and seminars and quotes and whatever else you use, it can be like a cacophony, it can be overwhelming. Individually, some of those things might be good. But as they all start floating around in your brain, they make anything but beautiful music. And so we want to avoid that today, we want to help you enjoy the symphony, if you will. And we want to point out again, all of the dangers that can come when you over embrace some of these things again, hence the mature audiences warning here that we have on this episode, because again, this message is not for everyone. And it might not be for you at all times. But sometimes it is. And that's
07:54
what it's all about being a conscious leader is recognizing those times when maybe you need some, some unconventional messages. So thank you for john, for thank you to john for kicking off the conversation. And without further ado, we'll jump into the first quote, if you will, that I think summarizes what some people are afraid to say. And that is efficiency is organized laziness. And I don't know who David Dunham is. In fact, I didn't know who he was 20 years ago, when I actually decided to choose this as my yearbook quote, in high school. So senior year, for whatever reason. This is the quote I chose efficiency is organized laziness. And why? Well, I think like a lot of high school kids, I made sure I had plenty of fun and plenty shenanigans and all that but yet I was still able to achieve decent results. And well how do you do that? Well, it's it's being resourceful to a certain degree. It's, it's being efficient. And efficiency sometimes can make it look like you're doing things easy, or it might look like you're you're condensing the things you need to do. And still having lots of fun, whatever the case is, and wherever I chose that quote, the reality is, it's still pressing today, for a lot of people like you who are afraid to work extra hard, who aren't afraid to put in 110%, or again, whatever trade expression you want to say. But the reality is that a lot of what you have done throughout your career is summed up by another again, I don't know who David Donovan is, but Wayne Dyer is someone who was well known in the leadership world and motivational world and one of the things he said was, don't pull vault over mouse turds. In other words, you know, don't spend all of your time on things that don't really make a difference. And sure, you might come across as lazy because you're not burning the midnight oil every single night. And there's a time and a place to burn the candle at both ends, burn the midnight oil, whatever the heck you're going to do. But the reality is if you're pole vaulting over mouse turns when you don't need to be it's not sustainable. And moving into the energy world. I think this this quote this idea of efficiency was summed up in an episode of The crew life Morning Show, which if you don't listen to the crew life, I recommend you do because last week, they had an interview with Steve Hines and Steve has been around and, and Steve pines on lots of energy related things. But one of the things I heard him say on that podcast just last week was how efficiency can be a source of new energy. Now, obviously, in this energy transition, we talk about how we're going to have new sources of energy, green energy, whatever it is hydrogen, all kinds of fancy things that we could probably can't even imagine now. And those are going to provide new energy.
10:33
But he made a very great point, which was efficiency during the things that we already are tasked with doing better, and more efficiently is in and of itself, a new source of energy. And in oil and gas, certainly, we've become much more efficient in our operating styles. And what does that lead to? Well, it's it's led to more bang for your buck, if you will. And so to and your personal life, before you try to transform yourself, before you sign up for some new class or program or coach or whatever it happens to be, take a step back and make sure that you're not trying to reinvent yourself. Sometimes that's necessary. Sometimes you need transformation. But sometimes, you need to extract the resources that you already have under your feet. That's the quickest way to make an impact. And it's the most surefire way to avoid an unsustainable approach that can leave you burned out, or can leave you over invested in some some new endeavor that doesn't actually make a difference.
11:35
So again, avoid those huge swings. Avoid the need to go on sabbatical every so often, or, or take a two week vacation. As great as that is, if you find yourself so burned out that you need those long periods of time. Maybe something's amiss. And ask yourself that. Are you pole vaulting over mouse turds? Or do you recognize that a proper view of efficiency is, you know, something that might have you looking lazy because you get to leave the office at 2pm once in a while. But in reality, you're getting the job done that needs to get done and preserving your energy so that you can sustain a long, healthy, happy, productive career. Moving on to the next theme, if you will play like a runner up today. Yes, if you're familiar with Notre Dame, then you may have seen this sign here play like a champion today. But today we're talking about play like a runner up today.
12:37
Andyes, in fairness, Notre Dame, my alma mater, hasn't won a football national championship and three decades. And nobody really wants to be a runner up, let alone a perennial runner up like the Buffalo Bills of the early 90s or more, I'd say the Pittsburgh Pirates, they haven't been a runner up in about three decades as well. They've been far less than that. But typically, from a sports standpoint, you want to win championships, right? That's why you're in it to to win and in business, so to hear all about winning, and that's great. But there are times when a short term victory could be detrimental to long term success. And there are times when just trying to win might have you lose sight of what your ultimate objective is. And again, a good parallel to this was two years ago when Chevron lost if you will, was the runner up to occidental. When oxy got Anadarko. oxy outbid Chevron one Anadarko, Chevron had a chance to come back and they said, No thanks. In fact, at the time, some analysts said, you know, Chevron, you know, they, they had won this reputation for being fiscally responsible. You know, they they have a hard fought victory, if you will, and they didn't want to lose that. And in fact, as being the runner up, Chevron walked away with a billion dollars, not a bad runner up prize, they reserve preserve some sort of, maybe integrity is not the word, but they they preserve their consistency and they preserve some reputation with investors. And they, you know, moved on and oxy got Anadarko. And we all know how that played out over the last two years. And again, whether would have made sense for Chevron to outbid and pay a couple billion dollars more, I don't know, but in that particular case, being a runner up wasn't such a bad idea. So that's a question that doesn't just apply to large corporations but to individuals within corporations, perhaps to you. And one of the best examples of this is people who strive to be CEO.
14:33
I remember when I first started with Schlumberger, the first day of work there and our you know, first orientation session, people were going around and I think they were asked what their long term career goals or something along those lines I remember one guy saying I want to be CEO Schlumberger think all right, hey, you know, good for him company of whatever it was at the time 100,000 people and he wants to be CEO great. And I don't know if anybody actually asked him why. But as I work with leaders, that's a big question whether it's whether you want to be CEO or aspire to some particular position, you need to know why is being champion of a company, if you will, for lack of a better term, your ultimate goal? Or is it something else is it to, again, be productive is it to make a good enough living that you can still pay the bills and do so comfortably and, you know, go have multiple houses, and whatever that case might be, while also preserving what's important to you outside of work. And again, I'm not going to talk about work life balance, that's a topic that again, you can get no shortage of books and podcasts on, but particularly for those who are interested in being a CEO. Is that really what you want? Are you willing to make those sacrifices? Do you understand what that entails, you understand that for many people, it is lonely at the top, if you will, there are trade offs. And if you don't realize that, then you know what, maybe coming in second place, if you will, coming on a rung or two below CEO is your sweet spot, and that's okay. But you need to recognize that and you need people around you to recognize that you need people around you who might say you have the most potential possible to be CEO, and they are there they build up your head and they build up your confidence or whatever it is, you find yourself down that path when you don't want to be on that path.
16:16
And I had a client last year, who was the you could say he would, he would have been a prototypical CEO, he checked all the boxes, super intelligent, diverse experience, well spoken, could present better than anyone else. I know. All of these things, have him well positioned to be CEO, and maybe he will be someday. But in working with him, we took somewhat of an unconventional approach. And he wound up taking an unconventional path that removes him from anything you would think or most people would have pushed him to do. Why? Because being CEO wasn't his end goal, that wasn't an end in and of itself. It was far more than that. But having someone around to sort through all the noise, and to help you avoid taking many, many steps down that path, when you don't want to be down that path is important. So ask yourself, do you want to be a champion, and whatever you're doing were you content with being runner up and getting paid a billion dollars in the case of Chevron, if you will.
17:20
And again, one final note on this, of course, is, you know, in, in working with lots of technical people, of course, there is there's a strong desire to win, whether you're you're working on a new program or a code, you know, you want to be the best. But again, in many of the people that I've worked with, what they find is, is that the found the building blocks that they've they've put in place and the things they've done, in many cases have set them up for long term success, and you know, not the short term victory. So again, slight divergence there. But when it comes to many of the technical people that I've worked with, this is a very important message whether or not they have aspirations of being CEO. But whatever it is that they want to build, whatever company they want to build or program whatever idea they have, you know, there is a sweet spot there of being second best being under the radar being the best kept secret. That's not the right business approach for everybody. But when you're building something new, you want to know where you want to play, you might want to play in that that middle space. And again, that applies in all other industries. But it's something I hear more and more especially with a lot of people coming out of oil and gas who have this entrepreneurial spirit and we're in the data world and you know, they want to build the best XYZ Well, sometimes do conversations building the best XYZ or being known as the best XYZ as again, as counterintuitive as it might sound might not provide the most sustainable results. Moving on to the next idea item here. Strive for mediocrity.
18:59
So talked about my my high school mindset if you will, as far as the idea of efficiency, essentially just being intelligent laziness or organized laziness. We moved on to college years where despite not witnessing any championships, Notre Dame still proudly displays their play like a championship sign and now moving away from college and to my time with Schlumberger strive for mediocrity. That was what I was told when I asked my mentor shortly onto my into my time at Schlumberger, for some advice to Hey, you know, I'm starting off my career, you know, what advice do you have? We're sitting on the first rig, I was out on jack up the High Island for the Gulf of Mexico and, and he says, strive for mediocrity. That was his advice, strive for mediocrity. Now, again, you're talking about a dangerous message to share with someone. Now again, in his mind, the idea was, yeah, you want to be under the radar. You know, you don't want to rock the Bo, and I get it. But again, going back to the mature audiences warning for this episode out of context, that could be somewhat dangerous. That's not exactly the type of thing you want to share with certain audiences. And no, I think I took that with a grain of salt. I think I recognized at the time that you know, that's, that's probably not something that I want to take the heart and take the heart and print out t shirts about. But as I've gone through my career, I'm trying to be mindful of those times where I might be unwittingly coming across as telling someone to strive for mediocrity. In fact, last year was giving a talk to a group of high school students, I was asked to talk about my career in oil and gas and executive coaching and weaving all that stuff together. And I started talking about how, you know, in college, I didn't have, you know, the best grades and my internships weren't great. And, you know, I, you know, maybe I didn't push myself as hard as I could have, and my technical classes and all these things, I kind of like, you know, not not the type of things you exactly want to beat your chest about, but ultimately how it all worked out.
21:00
Because had I had better grades I, I probably wouldn't have gotten a job with Schlumberger, I might have actually had a, quote, real chemical engineering job that I, you know, would have assumed I would have had years before just, you know, when I chose chemical engineering, and so I'm telling these high school students this and of course, at some point, it clicks like, Okay, well, this, you should still strive for the best grades possible, you should still want the best GPA, you should still want great internships, because, you know, that gives you plenty of opportunities. But the point of my message was, ultimately, you know, I still had some sort of end goal in place. And a lot of it was built on, you know, building relationships, and maybe even having fun. And again, a dangerous message to the wrong audience. But there are times where just following the book, and, you know, eating everything is is not the best course of action when we hear all the anecdotes right about, you know, the typical CEO or, you know, the the all these great historical leaders or C students. I don't know quite how the data, you know, bears out on that, but, but, you know, the reality is, there is some truth for striving for mediocrity, because,
22:04
as I see it's short term, mediocrity can lead to long term, extraordinary indeed extraordinary pneus extraordinary ness is it's a word I looked up I promise. It's actually real extraordinary, extraordinary Enos. Okay. Anyway, this is the beauty of going live, right. So anyway, find some time to be mediocre, find some time, when you might be gogogo on things that don't really matter. And understand how that might lead to better long term results. Again, working with lots of hard working people find times where good enough is all you need, even if that's not your ultimate objective. Moving on to another item here, playing off of Nikes famed slogan, just do it. so familiar with the Nike swoosh here, I have half a swoosh and half a Nike logo here to represent the idea of just doing it halfway. Just have to it doesn't sound very motivational, right? You're like if Larry, the cable guy and his famous motivational slogan, get her done, you know, what if you said Get her half done, doesn't have quite the same ring to it, right. But there are circumstances where that might make sense. And fortunately, with this embrace of agile methodology and minimally viable products, people and companies have gotten to the point where again, they'll throw something together, that's half done, just to see if it makes sense. And go back to the drawing board, if it doesn't, or maybe even just scrapped the project.
23:39
And, again, I think that's great that there's there's things that I apply in my personal life, same thing and can you probably do so too. And before you hang a picture on the wall and put a nail that you hold it up, right, or you move it around, you don't you don't put it all in place, and you know, call yourself done, and then revisit and a week. Now you kind of play around half job, you see how it goes. If you're building a large boat, if you will make a build the bottom part and see if it floats before you build everything else. Why? Because you couldn't invest a whole bunch of time a whole bunch of energy, a whole bunch of money in something that ultimately doesn't make sense. And one of the parallels to this is in the oil and gas industry when it comes to ducks drilled and drilled, uncompleted wells. So what's the deal with ducks? Well, investors always want to know about how many ducks a company has, because that represents some investment that the company made in wells that they've started to drill or finished drilling, but have yet to complete. And from a capital standpoint, you could argue that those are even less than half done because typically, you know, maybe your your 20 30% invested in terms of the location that you've built and the amount that you've spent on drilling thus far, and the completion is going to make up far more than that. But for all intents and purposes, you could say that those wells are half done, and is it a bad thing to have a lot Have ducks? Well, potentially, if you're if you're strapped for capital, and you've got all this money sitting out there, yeah, that might not be efficient. But at the same time, what does it do, it gives you flexibility by doing things halfway.
25:11
And having all of these drilled uncompleted wells, you've done a lot of the hard work, you've gotten your permits, you've drilled a little kit, you've built the location, you've, you've drilled the wells, you've gotten past a lot of the points where anti collision issues could be a concern. And you've gotten to the point now where, whether or not you drill the horizontal, you can more quickly turn these wells online, you can bring in your completion crews, and you can get them online, you can look at prices, you can look at service cost, whatever it happens to be, those ducks give you flexibility, they're half done. So they're not all bad. Now, again, this is the same type of message, I'm not telling you as a company to go out and have, you know, as many ducks as possible. But we need to recognize that there's value in that flexibility. And again, when I'm working with people, it's sometimes painstaking for me to to just extract whatever they've done so far, whether it's a resume or a cover letter for career folks, or whether people are working on some new project at work, or in their personal lives, or they're building a business, just send me what you have.
26:11
That's a simple request. And it's so difficult for people to do sometimes because they want to do something that's more polished. But the reality is, it's inefficient. Send me what you have. And I can take a look, I can ask questions, I don't care, I know you're not done. But people, and hopefully you're not one of them, are just too afraid sometimes to do that. And so I implore you, just half do it. Just half do it. See what those results are, share it with people get feedback. And forget your ego, forget the fact that you're far from being done. Take advantage of that flexibility, just like an oil and gas company taking advantage of the flexibility of having drilled uncompleted wells that they can go ahead and complete at a moment's notice.
26:57
So with that, moving on to the fifth and final item that I had here for today, and of course is procrastination, and you can go on the internet, and you can find no shortage of procrastination quotes. The one I have here is, I'm not a procrastinator, I'm just extremely productive at unimportant things. And what I'll say to this is, if you're gonna procrastinate, do it, do it well. Just be conscious of it, be aware of what you're doing, make a decision to procrastinate. And if you're doing something that brings you some some pleasure, or maybe you're going for a walk and actually brings you some some health, you get some sunshine, some vitamin D, instead of working on whatever project you're supposed to work on, do it, just be conscious of it. And after the fact, stop kicking yourself, because one of the biggest things I see with people and I've talked about this a lot is individuals who who are afraid to make decisions or after they make a decision, they kick themselves. Well guess what, if you're conscious about procrastinating, if you're conscious about taking a nap when you know you've got to get something done later on in the day, and there's a deadline.
28:04
If you're conscious about sitting down and vegging out and watching a TV show, that might not be a bad thing. And this is especially true again, for those of you who might be in transition of some sort, where you're faced with these false choices, where you either have to wake up every day. And if you're looking for a job, that is your job, right? I mean, it's it's so cliche, and it's so true. But people who do that sometimes forget to take vacations, they forget to procrastinate. And if you're conscious about it, that's okay. If you're spending two hours a day watching TV, when you could be contacting people and sending out resumes and then picking up the phone, whatever it happens to be not so good. But again, if you're conscious about it, it can lead to long term sustainable results, instead of just following some sort of motivational speech blindly. So, with all that being said, again, I welcome any comments, any feedback that you might have, and be happy to weave in any of those disparate comm items that you might have. And along those lines, I will start with one that, again, john Stansberry shared beforehand, and it's one on change. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change history, usually, by rewriting it. And you can see here from despair calm, there's the there's the poster there. And you know, john shared this my first thought from this, again, humorous despair.com poster, which is not a sponsor, you can go ahead and purchase them if you will, I, I happen to have received two of them as, as gifts myself. So I can I can recommend them as a satisfied customer slash recipient of them. But anyway, what this made me think of was companies that are in transition. In this age of constant mergers and acquisitions, one of the things that you may find when The acquiring company takes over, of course, is a slight revision of history. And this tendency to, to look at the previous company, as you know, either good or bad and, or most extreme cases to almost dismiss everything they did is bad. And we're going to take their resources, and we're going to do things right.
30:17
Or maybe if it's a true merger, this false idea of, you know, picking and choosing, you know, everything was either good or bad, and not necessarily meeting in the middle, no matter how much they'll talk about best of breed and, and all of those types of things. Inevitably, what people do is they oversimplify things, they rewrite history, they assume that one of the companies had to be doing something poorly, when in reality, they may have both been doing something poorly, or they may have both been doing something halfway decent. And, you know, so I expand upon this in a podcast episode I did was the last episode of season one back in November, a couple weeks after the election, where I talk about transitions of power and talk about how you don't always want a peaceful transition of power.
31:00
In fact, sometimes you want to rock the boat, you want to choose something other than option A or B and, and meet in the middle. Now, obviously, again, talking about a message that is not for all audiences and can be completely taken out of context, especially in light of the January 6, issues at the Capitol. Talking about not always wanting a peaceful transition of power can be dangerous. But again, the point is, sometimes we we rewrite history, a new team comes in a new administration, if you will, a new leadership team comes in, and they completely undo everything that was done before and bring in all of their own people. And they bring in all their own ideas, which, again, can be a complete destruction of intellectual capital, it can be destruction of money, it certainly can be a destruction of morale and time and energy. And I talked about that more in that podcast. But I think this quote here about, you know, change.
31:51
And the fact that, you know, sometimes some leaders will happily rewrite history is very important, especially in today's oil and gas industry, where new leaders are constantly coming in and, and leading organizations that are newly merged, and for organizations that are going through an identity crisis of some sort, this can be a catastrophic, but it could be catastrophic, when you automatically start dismissing the ideas of remaining employees from from an acquired company. So be mindful of that and be mindful of that in your personal life. And, you know, I guess one final note to expand upon this, this particular despair.com poster is that, and keeping with the election theme, if you will, is that yesterday, here in Pennsylvania, we had our primary and of course, in a off cycle election year with with not much on the ballot, you don't get a ton of turnout. And in fact, half the ballot was was, you know, empty positions. And you know, if you want to write in the candidate, you could have done so. But what that reminds me of is the fact that sometimes you want to write in a candidate, sometimes you don't want to just dismiss option B because because you won, right.
32:56
Sometimes you don't want to dismiss everything the previous administration done sometimes don't want to dismiss everything a previous company did, or they're talented. Sometimes you want to meet in the middle, and you want to write in the candidate. And sometimes, when you do a figurative write in ballot, it can lead to some positive or at least interesting results. And again, this happened about six years ago for me when I decided to jokingly write my name, my wife's name in for a position for a municipal position that nobody runs for that nobody actually holds. There's three open auditor positions in our Township, and I decided, hey, let's have some fun, you know, wait 60 seconds of my time and write her name. And well, lo and behold, a couple weeks later, we get some formal documentation in the mail from the county elections division addressed to her declaring her the winner with all these instructions on what she needs to do to get things certified and this and that, and, you know, more long story short, the moral story is, sometimes you write in results, even though you think that it's a foregone conclusion that A or B are going to be the only options and it can lead to results. And in that particular case, it wasn't necessarily positive because she wound up having to spend her time calling around to the county and our township to find out what the story was and to understand that these are positions that are actually just filled by third parties.
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So even though it's officially on the ballot, nobody needs to hold it but she was Welcome to call herself the auditor for the next six years of she's so pleased so all that being said, don't be afraid to write in a new idea, meet in the middle and definitely don't cross off somebody else's name or somebody else's idea just because you happen to emerge victorious. Moving on to any other comments here. Less is more from a LinkedIn user. Yeah, less is more is is definitely one of those overused phrases. CEO here. Toby Reiss EQ t he was interviewed a couple months ago in a magazine and and I think it was the heart energy interview where he says that you know, that's you could be bigger and better And I thought that was very astute. Right, you know, bigger isn't necessarily worse, you know, more isn't necessarily more challenging. And again, I don't know if the context for this this comment is that, you know, less really is more in light of some of the things we talked about. But it is definitely an overused phrase. Sometimes were when it comes to talking in the length of this podcast, whoever, however long it's getting here and however long I'm rambling on, yeah, less is more, I understand that. But there's times were more can be more for the right audience, which, which I guess, you know, all comes back to the initial disclaimer here.
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Everything we talked about today is not for every audience. Not everyone should be hearing these types of comments. Not everyone should be told that there's a time and a place to be lazy. And maybe you need to lower the bar, maybe you need to take a nap. But the reality is sometimes bigger can be better if you're more efficient, if you do things the right way. And you need to be conscious about whether that's the case, or to help make you more conscious, you need to have the right resources around you, instead of this cacophony of leadership and motivational things that can very quickly and very easily steer you astray.
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So with all that being said, Remember that you don't always need a motivational speaker, you certainly don't always need a cheerleader to help get you to your ultimate destination. In fact, there are times where motivational speakers and cheerleaders and everything you're scrolling through on LinkedIn, the books and tips and tricks and everything can be unsustainable, they may lead to short term success. But there's no such thing as short term sustainability that is an oxymoron. And if you're listening to oxymoronic motivational speakers, are leaders who are just tossing out phrases, you could be in trouble. So don't do it.
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Lean on resources that can help you along mean on coaches that could help survey the surroundings and help you make better decisions and cut through all of the noise and tell you what they're seeing. And help you see the same thing so that you can make a more sound decision. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, what's the goal? Well, for me and for the people I work with, it's threefold. It's to grow, protect, and sustain. You want to continue growing, you want to protect what matters most, you don't want to protect everything. And of course, you want to sustain momentum. But if you're listening to the wrong resources, you're over emphasizing the wrong resources. Or you have to look up some motivational quote of the day each and every day, even though it slips out of your head. By the time you're done drinking your first cup of coffee, that's not gonna do any good. You want to be focused on continually growing, protecting the things that make sense and sustaining momentum. throughout the rest of your career, no matter how much success success you've had, you want to continue sustaining momentum.
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And so with all that being said, ask yourself today, "how is my embrace of all the conventional motivational leadership stuff out there, unwittingly damaging my ability to lead my team, lead my company and lead my family?"
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And as you ponder that, please allow me Joe Sinnott, thank you for subjecting yourself to today's content. And for more unconventional content, even if some of it might come across as demotivational for the wrong audience, please go ahead and visit theenergydetox.com.
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And until next time, please remember that the long term sustainability for you for your career for your family for whatever it is you're most focused on is far more important than short term victories. Thanks again.