Part 2

Something that I noticed recently bothered me. A person who did not get the job that he had applied for let everyone know that he did not get it. He was angry about it, and proceeded to let everyone know that he was angry about it. I heard talk about going to a different company, I heard complaints about management, I heard just a general sense of selfishness and anger. I no longer wanted to interact with this person. What was I supposed to say? There was just a very strong sense of anger, disappointment, and an extremely bad attitude about the whole situation. I wasn't bothered because he didn't get the job, I was bothered because the way that he reacted was going to negatively affect his prospects when the next job came around. I think that that this story directly relates to the story of narratives that I am telling. I think it reinforced the idea that we have to take control of our own actions, and control only what we can.

You see, the narrative that he was telling himself was that he was a personal victim, that he deserved something, and that somehow, someone, had taken that from him. He did not see that maybe this same attitude that he was showing now was the reason that he didn’t get the promotion. Nobody wants to work with difficult people.

In most people’s personal narratives, they are the victim. When someone else gets promoted, they must know someone. They must just be getting it because of the race or gender that they are. We all look outward into the world and the people around us for the answer to why something happened. Why we didn’t get the promotion instead. We rarely, and almost never publicly, look to ourselves for why something negative happened in our lives. Nobody wants to take responsibility for failure.

We are never the problem. The fact that we don’t work well with others, don’t react well to bad or stressful news, could not have possibly played a role in why something bad happened in our professional lives. It couldn’t be that we do nothing to earn that promotion, that we “get out job done and go home”. The fact that the person who did get a job is as qualified as you, and has built relationships with people in the company doesn’t matter. We don’t even consider their qualifications, or abilities. That job should have been mine.

I want to make something clear at this point. I don’t mean to say that there are no discriminatory actions that take place in the work place. Sometimes people get promoted when they don’t deserve it, and someone else does. I am not saying those things don’t happen, I just want to say that the way we react to those things is just as important as what happens.

The problem that you, I, we, face in our professionally lives is not what other people do. There are always going to hard working, successful people. There are always going to be people that get things they don’t deserve. How we react to these scenarios will define our professional lives. It is how we react to the world around us. Not what happens to us, but rather, what we do when things do or do not happen.

Stephen R. Covey in 7 Habits of highly Effective People wrote this 

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.”

That statement is at the core of what I think. Not that I don’t believe that what happens around us doesn’t affect our lives. If we must ere on one side of the other, we should ere on the side of personal responsibly. Injustice exists, some events are truly out of our control, but this isn’t about finding some perfect, quotable rule. It is the idea that pervades the statement. They say to ere is human, but if I must ere, I choose to ere on the side of what I can control. Let us ere by believing that we can, thru whatever means necessary, change our circumstances.

If you adopt this philosophy of thought, you will succeed. Who will be able to stop you? Nobody.

This won’t happen because life will become more fair, not people other people will want you to succeed, not because someone will give you anything, but because they won’t be able to say no. you won’t leave that as an option. If you put in more effort than everyone around you, you will succeed. Go above and beyond to be successful.

To quote another great thinker.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” - Karl Marx

To bring this back to narratives, to come full circle. The narratives that you tell yourself will impact how you react to the world around you. If you are the person that cannot, will not, be stopped, you will be successful. If you are the person that complains and gets angry but does nothing, you will be the person that leaves their fate in the hands of another human being.

These stories influence how we see the world around us. The “truths” that we see in the world.

Next I will attempt to examine how the stories that we tell ourselves effect society, and in turn effect other people around us. I will attempt to discern and explain how we have lost the ability to perceive truths, or how we willingly ignore truth, in favor of our personal, and societal, story. I will attempt to explain what is truly horrifying about this, and that the inconsistencies between our stories and reality effect how we relate to one another, how society reacts as a whole.