Rules for Living Life, A Secular Interlude

The challenge of writing a blog lies in balancing the hubris to think you should put your opinions out there and the humility to write what an audience will read, not simply what you want to say.

I suppose that is not completely true – I could simply continue to write what I feel like writing since this is not a source of income, but there is an inescapable reality that as I write from a more spiritual place rather than a secular place, the page-views and comments I receive dwindle.  

Not that I am writing this for validation, but those metrics are a mechanism to remain self-aware of what I am writing relative to what this audience would like to read.

While I remain committed to completing this series of blogs by outlining all ten of my Rules for Living Life, I do think it is time to take a quick break from the more spiritual side of the rules and let you know how these rules started.  

In case this is the first blog of this series you are reading, this post is part of a series of blogs discussing a set of rules I have I put together for living my life based on merging a set of business rules with my understanding of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  If you missed the previous five blogs, you can start at the beginning of this series here.

As I mentioned in previous posts, these rules originated during a particularly frustrating work meeting that I was obligated to attend. Though the topic of the meeting has been lost to history, the feelings I had at the time are still strong: the meeting was about fixing problems, but there was no fix being generated. It was another out-of-control spiral of blame, deflection, recrimination, self-promotion, and inaction. Those with the answers sat quietly, fearing blame for the cause, while those most impacted flailed around to find someone to help them. And the loudest voices gave the least guidance.

Maybe you have been in meetings like that.

I had a few subordinates at the time, and I resolved that I needed to help them understand this was not how a business worked.  I wanted to find a solution to our internal culture and the ways that it impeded our growth. I opened up a new page of notes on my iPad and pecked out a title:

Solution Matrix

Invigorated, I quickly came up with a list of ten items that I felt would make up my “Solution Matrix”.

1. Be enthusiastic: Enthusiasm is contagious, so is despair.
2. Get your hands dirty: Fix problems, don’t find problems.
3. Build someone up: Assign credit, not blame.
4. Be accountable: Accountability is a key indicator of performance.
5. Communicate effectively: Communication is a drug, when used properly it can improve anything, but it is dangerous when it is abused.
6. Give immediate feedback: Timely feedback is gold, history is just a story.
7. Lead: Leaders must lead.
8. Help the team succeed: Personal success is the fastest way to cause a team to fail.
9. Focus: Focus on the objective and don’t be distracted by the obstacles.
10. Know your objective:  You will never achieve what you don’t set as a goal.

I played with the explanations, I tweaked the rules a little bit over the years. But every time that I did, I always put them back the way they were.  

At their heart, they are a good set of guidelines for conducting yourself in the business world, but I have trouble applying them outside of the office. In a way, I think that stems from how they originated. They were built to solve problems at work, and so they are focused on doing that. And two of them focus on focusing on what you are doing.  Funny how that worked…

But did they work? Candidly, I had very mixed results. I have coworkers who read this blog that can feel free to comment on their effectiveness, but I would say I have been fundamentally ineffective at changing the culture at my workplace.

It was this failure to effectively influence our culture that sent me back to the drawing board to reconsider the entire concept of the matrix. It was this failure that made me realize I was not gifted with all of the answers to the world’s problems, so I had better seek out someone with a better track record. Someone who did such a good job giving guidance on how to live, he literally became a definition of time.

So I went to my Bible and I read. And I went to the bookstore and I read. And I went to histories and I read. And I thought. And I prayed. And I prayed more. And after all that, I think I came up with a better list.  

But I will leave that for you to decide.

Thanks for reading and remember: we’re all walking through a darkened city at night with a penlight. None of us are seeing more than a small piece of the landscape…