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One of the challenges when aspiring to excel at anything is focussing so much on your skills and abilities that you forget about your audience.
We expect others to change for us, to adapt to us and to meet our expectations instead of the other way around.
In the 1980’s Torvill and Dean turned ice dancing on its head when they began to combine excellent skating with vivid story-telling in their routines that people immediately responded to and instantly loved.
There were other skaters who probably had more technical ability, but people couldn’t relate to them and they had no audience.
Photo by Thomas Hawk via Flickr
Most of us have been there.
You have a disagreement or there’s something that you really want at work, home or church.
You do anything to get your way.
Name calling, manipulation, pulling rank, bringing up the past, yelling, threatening, even intimidation.
And then you win…
…but have you really won?
Brain surgeons are allowed (in my opinion at least) to be scumbags. They have my permission (for what it’s worth) to act how they want, say what they want, have a terrible attitude, a haughty sense of entitlement and complain about everything and everyone.
Why?
I have two reasons.
Firstly, they are really hard to replace. It takes a lot of intelligence, discipline, skill and training to become a brain surgeon. I know that I couldn’t become one, and I’m guessing that you couldn’t either. I don’t want to limit your potential, but I’m probably right. Brain surgeons don’t grow on trees, so I’m OK for them to act like scumbags because we don’t get a lot of choice about whether we get the nice brain surgeon or the surly one.
Secondly, brain surgeons save people’s lives. They do pretty amazing and complex work that significantly benefits our society, so they are allowed to balance this out with a terrible attitude.
We don’t have that option.
