I’m a few minutes into an evening talk at a golf club when every screen in the room changes channel.
My slides are up on the TVs around the walls. Someone in the room next door has just changed the channel on their TV. It’s changed every screen I’m presenting on too. One second it’s my slides. The next it’s a big sporting event, live, and every head in the room turns to watch it.
The organiser is already on his feet. “No, no, I can get your slides back on.”
I lean in and whisper in his ear. “Everyone’s getting too into this sport. Just turn the TVs off. I can manage without.”
So he does. I walk over to a flip chart, pick up a marker pen and carry on.
Without slides to take me from point to point, it all had to come out of my head and onto the paper. People could see I really understood the topic, because there was nothing else for me to lean on. It turned into an incredibly successful event, and it may well have worked better than the slides would have.
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.
Epictetus, The Enchiridion, VIII, translated by George Long
A tranquil flow of life. That’s what I got that evening, the moment I stopped trying to get the slides back. Epictetus is talking about dropping the fight with what’s already happened, so your energy can go on what you can do next.
Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up
When some people hear “accept it”, they hear “give up”. That’s not what I mean.
Don’t accept things that should be unacceptable. Some things need you to stand up and deal with them, and that takes bravery and courage. Accepting those would be the wrong call.
A lot of what we fight every day isn’t like that, though. Either it doesn’t matter that much, or no matter what you do, you can’t force a change. That’s where acceptance makes life easier.
I put it this way in my book, Done Beats Perfect: “It is nearly always us using grit and determination to fight against things we cannot change.” Grit is a great thing to have. It’s just wasted on a fight you can’t win.
So when something goes off plan, ask yourself two things. Does this really matter? And can I actually change it? If it matters and you can change it, find the courage and deal with it. If it doesn’t matter much, or you can’t change it however hard you push, let it be. Get on with the next thing.
You are someone else’s traffic
Think about the next time you’re stuck in traffic, and remember this. For somebody else, you are their traffic.
You can’t make the cars in front disappear. What you can do is accept that the drive is different now, and that you’ll arrive a bit later, or maybe a lot later. Once you’ve done that, you can still enjoy what you were doing before the brake lights came on. The music. A podcast. A conversation with whoever’s in the car with you. You get to be present for it, instead of sat there angry about a delay you can’t do anything about.
What are you fighting right now that you could let be?
Epictetus has another way of looking at the things that happen to us, and I wrote about it in Which Handle Are You Holding?
As for that night at the golf club, the TVs stayed off and the flip chart did the job.
