reward

Lesson 15. Stop Trying To Hack Everything. Learn, Practice and Do It.

#LifeHack

You see this hashtag appearing more and more. All the great ways you can ‘hack’ difficult tasks in life. Sometimes, they can be helpful like ‘How to repair a puncture with a piece of chewing gum’ or ‘using vinegar to repel mosquitoes’. But increasingly (and somewhat despairingly), I’m finding they’re becoming ways to avoid learning how to actually do important things.

My 7 year old son recently told me that he could #LifeHack his shoes, tucking the untied laces under his foot – rather than doing the laces. I told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be able to tuck the laces under forever and that at some point, he’d need to put in the effort and learn how to tie his bloody shoe laces! I mean, what happens when he needs to tie the cord on his swimming trunks? He won’t be able to tuck that under anything and he won’t want them floating off in the swimming pool!

I know modern life is frantic, busy, and we all need to try and claw back as much time as possible. But for some things, there are just no life hacks – you need to learn, practice and just do it.

Lesson 4. When You Feel Like You Can’t Do Right For Doing Wrong… Do The Right Thing.

A few weeks ago, I went through a phase of trying to do nice things for people and then making a complete hash of it. Not on purpose, just in focussing on trying to be kind, I hadn’t considered a full 360-degree view of what I was doing.

For example, part of my job is working with an online florist and every time I get my wife flowers from there, she jokes that I got them free or cheap and so, on Valentine’s Day this year, I decided not to get her flowers and face the wrath of doing so. Instead, I got her something else. That said, I did decide to surprise my team who had worked really hard on a great marketing campaign for the site with a bunch of flowers each. Long story short, my wife got the delivery notifications, one after the next saying that flowers had been delivered to x, y and z… yet hers never arrived… on… Valentine’s… Day. All I was trying to do was a nice thing for my team, but it backfired on me spectacularly.

Then, on International Women’s Day, I thought it would be nice to send an inspirational quote to a friend who was a vocal feminist, showing that I was in support. A quick flick through quote memes on the train into work yielded one that looked perfect so I sent it.. off it went.. … … two blue WhatsApp ticks, great, job done. The reply came… “Is this means too be a joke?” Turns out I’d misread the quote and it was actually quite insulting.

Then, this week I got on the train to come home from work, sat down as usual and became ensconced in my phone. When I looked up, the train was busy and as I turned my head into the aisle, there was a pregnant lady with her bump right in my eye line. Of course, I sprang up and offered her my seat, but she refused, looking embarrassed and flustered. Sitting back down I realised that perhaps, I had over-estimated the size of her bump and that perhaps, she was just a bit bloated.

All these examples came from a good place, filled with love for the people I care about and trying to be kind… but ended up with me having egg on my face. And so, the point I’m trying to make is, that even though I’ve ended up on the wrong side each time, that outcome wasn’t always guaranteed. My team were thrilled with their flowers, a nice quote would have been appreciated (had I read it properly first) and IF that lady was pregnant, I’m sure she would have appreciated my seat.

I think my first reaction is always to try and do something nice and maybe I need to slow down and consider my actions a bit more first, but I will never stop trying to do the right thing because if your intentions are good you WILL get it right eventually and people will appreciate your efforts… even if sometimes you don’t get it quite right.