Hello my readers (all zero of you!) I have been offline for awhile because I couldn’t figure out my password for the longest time. You know when you change your password and then you think you remember it then you actually don’t? And then you just try several times and then give up? That’s what happened here. It was actually pretty easy to reset and get back online.
I’ve been using the WordPress app on my iPhone which is brilliant by the way, to update my blog. I also started another blog called lifeasanenigma.wordpress.com
Please take a look when you have a chance. The goal of that blog is to provide short advice or thoughts that come to my mind. Or things I’ve heard or quotes that I’ve come across that I’d like to share or actually remember. The reason it’s called life as an enigma is because I was called a enigma by my boss when I was working at Linklaters in London. We were having a performance review and he he had an issue with my timeliness. Not with my work product or the value I’ve been adding to his team and to the organization. But rather the time I was getting in to the office and the time I was leaving.
I just asked him if any of my internal stakeholders had mentioned anything or had there been a decline in my work product. And he said no. And then we started to discuss, more like debate or argue if you like, about my timeliness into and out of the office. He then went on to mention that I’m an enigma. To be honest at the time I didn’t know what that meant as I knew the word only as a name of a band. I just nodded and to it as an insult. Definitely not a complement. After looking up the word online, here’s the official definition from google:
enigma
/ɪˈnɪɡmə/
noun
a person or thing that is mysterious or difficult to understand.
I thought to myself, that’s pretty cool. I suppose it’s almost an advantage in my opinion. The art of surprise. Unpredictable.
However, I would say this means inconsistent or incoherent. I would say that if someone is calling someone else an enigma then the person that is trying to understand that other person just doesn’t understand him/her self. Or at least is trying to understand. Given many factors. For example, age, background, skill sets, interests, ethnicity, weaknesses, strengths, etc. As a manager of people, he was poor, very poor. I wish he would just pick up a book and read a bit on management, such as the classic book by Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive. https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Executive-Definitive-Harperbusiness-Essentials/dp/0060833459
He did have one thing going for him though – it’s called white British privilege. I even told him this. That when he and I go to a meeting, he can say the exact same thing I say and all heads will nod yes. I will say the same thing and try my best to imitate his speech and I get questions or ‘what does Steve think?’. It was a very interesting conversation. One that I’m glad I had because he was actually open about this and said he wasn’t aware of this. It actually never dawned on him that he had this to his advantage. Interesting. So I suggested that the way we play this is that I feed him the information and he just says what I think is best to implement for our team. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay long enough to see if this tactic would work. Also, I didn’t want to be in someone’s shadow when I had an opportunity to run my own show.
And now I’m in Hong Kong. You see how this blog entry opened and closed out? Brilliant. I gotta go now. More to come later on.
How often do you send an email and then shortly after (less then 5 seconds) you pick up the phone and call the person? I admit that I will do that sometimes but when I see others doing it, I notice that this is actually an in effective way of communicating. It almost negates your email, as you are essentially trying to clarify what you just wrote – meaning you didn’t think about what you wrote and you just pressed send.
Perhaps the better approach would be to follow up your call with an email to summarize what has just need discussed and the next steps or outcomes of your conversation.
Give it a try next time you plan on writing an email then calling the person.
Just pick up the phone or walk over and talk to the person!
I’m reading this book by Tony Robbins called Unshakeable about mastering financial investments. 4 key simple principles to investing he provides in his book are:
