the weight of 30000

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“We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Charles Bukowski

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“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

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We make about 30,000 decisions a day. Every single one of us. That said. The weight of those 30000 decisions varies from person to person. This isn’t to suggest 30000 decisions is EVER weightless, just that the weight will vary by person and by situation and by role.  For example. If you are a single mother with a minimum wage job or a president of a company with 400 employees almost every single decision, all 30000, tend to be scrutinized and weighed daily. And, yes, I just put those two side by side to make a point. That said. While I do believe far too many of us get chewed up by trivialities, it is also true that context, your situation, can make the trivial seem overly, well, not trivial. And, in fact, a context can make the trivial actually quite non-trivial. Deciding between a brand bread and a generic bread to save 10 cents, do you approve a trip or do you not approve a trip, all seem trivial amongst the 30000 decisions in the day and, yet, they demand some attention and demand some energy and they certainly demand inevitable consequences.
Which leads me to business and the burden of 30,000.

The reality is the majority of us suck in establishing a vision for the future and, yet, businesses will constantly point to something on the horizon – whether it is real or not. And regardless of whether they are being truthful or not, it is actually helpful. Helpful because we make 30,000 decisions on a daily basis and even a shitty vision of the future is better than nuthin’. This is where I do believe there is a difference between people who are in a leadership position and people who are not. While I’ve always argued that anybody in any given situation can lead, the reality is throughout a day some people do make more leadership type decisions than others. Therein lies the thought behind my first X and Y Axis. Some people feel the decisions more than others.

What I mean by that is that if you are in a nontraditional leadership position many of the decisions that you make are just simply by rote. You have some specific responsibilities, you have some specific skills, and there are some specific rules or guidelines within which you take action. At the end of the day, despite the fact that you have made 30,000 decisions, for the most part there is a weight limit. You may be tired, you may question some of the decisions, you may stress out over some of the decisions, but for the most part you made 30,000 decisions that did not look significantly different than the 30000,decisions you made the day before and the 30,000 decisions you will make in the future. And then there are people in leadership positions. They will feel their 30,000 decisions differently. Some if not many of those decisions just simply carry more weight and by weight, I mean consequences. At the end of their day the weight of their 30,000 decisions is heavy. But more consequentially on any given day the weight of those 30,000 decisions does not really have a ceiling. On any given day the weight of any,one individual decision or even a group of decisions within the 30,000 will weigh so heavily upon a person, or maybe even a small group of persons, that it almost becomes suffocating if not too much of a burden to carry. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, seeing as I began with a single mother with a minimum wage job, on any given day a person, in some context, will feel a similar burden and weight. But this is about business today. My only point here is that while we all may make 30,000 decisions a day, the weight of those 30,000 decisions on a daily basis can vary significantly.

A respected business friend sent me a message after I had posted a podcast that I had been on and he said “I wake up on Monday morning feeling like Rembrandt, usually by Friday evening I’m more of a Jackson Pollack.”

This is where I will point out that sometimes there is a reverse relationship in weight. Possibilities simply weigh less than pragmatism. I believe hope always weighs less than reality. But the point he was making is valid. Every day you begin with a Rembrandt, a beautifully constructed piece of art where the layers of the paint shape the narrative pleasant to the eye, and by the end of each day 30,000 decisions later and 30,000 decisions times 400 (if you have that many employees) that Rembrandt has become a Jackson Pollock. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out both are extremely valuable and have value, they just look very different. I won’t argue whether a Rembrandt is more beautiful or more valuable than a Jackson Pollock, but one certainly has a different design than the other. I would suggest in that metaphor that the weight of 30,000 decisions is often like gravity. Rarely did the 30,000 decisions drive you higher than the possibilities you begin with on a daily basis. All they really can do is either maintain or bring your Rembrandt somewhat closer to a Jackson Pollock.

In the end. We all make decisions,. We all make lots of decisions. We all carry a different weight from those decisions. Ponder.