You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!