Weather matters
Work with the wind to understand the impact other currents have on your life,
Iwas having supper with my two sons and a friend last Monday evening. Two of them had just “survived” (“We thought we were going to die!”“People were screaming!”) a harrowing experience, flying through a typical (might I say, wonderful, delicious) highveld storm. We were eating pizza. Everything was okay. They had indeed survived, and they had a story to tell.
Flying through turbulence is scary, no matter who you are. Your life flashes before you, and there are times when you actually do think you’re going to die (or at least spill the wine). The boys had experienced that binary uncertainty any number of times on their flights from the coast – alternatively floating up, or dropping down, seemingly out of control, but not actually.
After they landed, the storm was still in full swing and they spent a full hour in the traffic getting home. That part of the trip didn’t seem to frighten them at all.
I was quick to point out that the risk of dying in a plane crash was about 100 times lower than the risk of being killed in a car crash. There are any number of reasons for that, perhaps the most important being the skill, experience and discipline required to be a pilot, particularly when taken together with the technology that specifically goes into airplanes to cope with such conditions. Airplanes are built fit for purpose. Planes can’t stop, mid-air, and wait for the storm to pass (like cars can), so you just have to get through it as best you can.
Life’s a bit like that.
There’s not much you can do about the weather in most walks of life other than prepare for it (depending on how accurate your weather forecast is). So, the basic message is this: If it’s raining, put on a raincoat, get on with your life, stop whingeing.
You can either deal with it, or run away from it (not really). The best approach, though, is to embrace it. Sometimes the weather is just perfect for getting into bed with a good book, or someone who’s recently read one.
Weather matters in everything, but it’s not the deciding factor. When I analyse investment opportunities my first step is to distill the essence of the economic model – to see whether it solves a problem (that’s how you make money) and then to figure out whether it’ll get through the storms bound to cross its path. Pass those two tests and it’s worth a shot.
I group things into “weather” (exogenous factors that you can’t do a lot about), and then leadership, productivity, finance … things the CEO must do a lot about.
We are the CEOs of our own lives. I have become increasingly convinced that a weather-or-not-weather approach can be useful in plotting your course through life.
If a particular impact on your life is just weather (everyone in your space is subject to it), then for goodness sake don’t blame (or praise) yourself for the direction it takes you. You can compensate for wind, but you can’t change its direction. Work with the wind; understand the impact other currents have on your life. You’ll find you get on with yourself a whole lot better than if you don’t.
After we’ve sorted out what’s just weather, our challenge as people with independent minds is to focus on who we are, and can be, relative to everyone else in the same system. It’s your choices that took you to where you find yourself. Take it on.
We aren’t always going to make the right calls; we aren’t always going to be the best we can be. So what?
The challenge is to live with the mix that is you, through the right and wrong choices you’ve made; striving not only to be right (whatever that is) but to build character foundations that you like and respect enough to stay true to, rain or shine.
You’d better get to like yourself. No matter who’s in the room, we’re always alone in our minds. That’s where we must find peace. If you are actually being who you really are, taking your total mix on board and being fully responsible for those parts that aren’t weather, then you’ll certainly end up in the company of like-minded people, your allweather friends. They’ll back you when you’re on the minus side of the line of life because they’ve been there — we all have — and they may just know the shortcuts back into the sunshine.
There are a lot of storms about nowadays, here and everywhere else. We have to dodge potholes, and there’s the prospect (however remote) of nuclear war. It’s not a time to be overwhelmed by these things, to wither on the vine, or to be cast into the breeze.
It’s time to stand up, to take account of yourself, to push ahead with integrity and resolve towards the person you want to be. Get on with it. FFS.