A Close Shave
This morning while getting ready
for work and slashing my face with a sharp instrument as I do
most mornings, I realized that I spent about 15 minutes
involved in the shaving process. Assuming I did that five days
per week, thats an hour a week or 50 hours a year after
allowing for a "vacation" from shaving of a couple of weeks
per year.
This conservative estimate of 50
hours per year amounts to more than 2,000 hours of shaving
time during a career of four decades. As any astute HR
director can tell you, thats the equivalent of an entire work
year, averaging about 2,080 hours!
Thoughts immediately turned to
questions such as if I had begun growing a beard at age 16,
could I now retire a year early? While the answer is a
regrettable "no," it is clear that rituals like shaving in the
mornings nibble away at the average lifetime to the point
where we wake up one morning and were dead, if not clean
shaven.
Statistics in the HR Doctors new
book Dont Walk by Something Wrong! include the fact
that the average American spends seven years in the bathroom,
two years on the telephone and six months waiting at traffic
lights and stop signs. When you add in commute time, waiting
in line at banks, post offices, grocery stores, etc., you
begin to understand why people generally discuss how short our
lives really are.
The
statistics did not even include perhaps one of the greatest
devourers of our lives in America Ñ the four hours a day spent
on average watching television. Yes, that was four hours a
day!
One
of the secrets to a successful and happy career, as well as to
a life full of joy and productivity, is to maximize the amount
of time we spend in productive and rewarding activities. The
corollary is to minimize the time we waste on activities, or
in the case of television watching, lack of activities, which
substitute a vegetative state for a state of
accomplishment.
This is not to say that every
waking moment must be spent at work, or seated at the computer
next to an autographed photo of Bill Gates. Quite the
contrary, life is far more than our day jobs. Often relaxation
or meditation may seem stoic or unproductive when it can
really be quite the opposite.
In
the HR Doctors experience, the sooner we each find the ways
to contribute to the happiness of ourselves, our families, our
communities, the better off we are. Contributing to your own
happiness certainly involves working at a job that you find
rewarding.
It
means finding a career, such as HR, or public service in
general, where you are motivated by a sense of accomplishment,
and where you work with colleagues who are respectful,
supportive and have a strong sense of humor. It also means
taking good care of yourself, wearing a seat belt, not smoking
and always handling sharp objects such as razors very
carefully.
Your familys happiness begins
with time spent together and with time spent in continuous
learning and gaining new experiences. It means investing in
the development of your children through helping them achieve
balanced knowledge Ñ a mix of art and music, science and
humanities, politics and history and as many other subjects as
you can reasonably encourage. It means demonstrating as a role
model the importance of civic engagement, and that you
personally walk the same way you talk.
Community engagement means
service to others. At work it may mean being a servant
leader - where much of your energy is spent in the
development of others and in helping enhance the KSAs -
there goes an HR acronym again - the knowledge, skills
and abilities of those around you. It means being involved in
charity work of which there is no shortage.
It
means taking time to visit with your neighbors and keeping in
touch with people you care about even if they are a continent
away. It also means celebrating successes and accomplishments
and being proud of those achievements. However, the pride must
stop when it reaches the boundaries of arrogance or
hubris.
When all of these things are
carefully considered and acted on right away in our fleeting
lives, the result will be a life well spent and a legacy
inside the family and the community which will last far beyond
the roughly 670,000 hours of life lived by the average person
in America. It means productive contentment at work and, when
work is over, time well spent with the family, the community
or with yourself.
We
know that it is impossible to separate personal life and work
life, however, it is also impossible to have a rewarding life
without service to others and joy in what you do.
Next time you look in the mirror
while shaving, putting on make-up, or whatever conversation
occurs between you and the mirror image in front of you, ask
yourself whether all that you could be doing is being done in
your life! If it isnt, perhaps a little less TV watching and
a lot more personal growth might be just the ticket to a life
of greater joy!
The
HR Doctor wishes you a close, and smooth shave!
Phil Rosenberg
The HR
Doctor
http://www.hrdr.net/
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