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The Starchitracter’s Dilemma

by Ruth Ann Harnisch on 04/18/10 at 10:21 am

Day 108

There’s a guy I know who’s a builder. He’s (technically) not an architect, but he designs buildings and gets a “real” architect to sign off on the plans. He’s a contractor, supervising the build on site.  He envisions the landscaping, has a say in the selection of every item associated with the building inside and out.  As befits someone of this prodigious talent, he’s a man who obsesses.  Thinks big. Worries big.

Recently he confessed fears about one of the big projects he’s undertaken.  He doesn’t know the answers to all the questions, and there are a lot of questions.  He is often uneasy because the demand for answers is cascading and he’s the only one who can give the answers.

He doesn’t know if he’ll have the right answers in time, and he is feeling the burden of being a star-architect-contractor-designer.  He doesn’t know if it will all come together.  He doesn’t know if it will work.  He’s not sure he can pull it off.

What this guy hasn’t figured out yet is that almost everybody who’s doing something that’s not rote and routine is going through some version of his dilemma every day.  When I worked in newsrooms, every day a cast of oddballs surfed the chaos of current events, shooting and editing, writing and voicing, typing and going live.  We were pros who knew what we were doing, but the variables were so very variable that every single show every single day was a crapshoot. We’ll get it done, we just don’t know how yet.

I’ve had a close-up view of the money management business for the past two decades.  That’s a business with more questions than answers every day. Nobody invests knowing all the answers to all the questions. Nobody can be sure that the strategy will work. No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how many hours you put in, how carefully you justify your decisions, every day is another day in the casino. Every. Day.

Recently, the government officials who put together the economic rescue confessed that while they were cobbling a plan and selling it to America, they were privately terrified of failure. They were staring into the abyss, fearful that their inability to come up with the right answers in time would mean the collapse of civilization. Every day meant another chance for disasater of historic proportion.

Every day, every day, people in challenging positions go to work wondering if they can hold it together, if they can come up with the right answers in time, if they can figure out how to make it happen.

When a client shares such fears with me, I assure them this seems to be the default state of people who have real responsibilities and who care deeply about performing at a level that prevents something from falling to pieces.

I wonder: is it possible to be driven to make one’s time on the planet useful, to strive for excellence, to take one’s responsibilities very seriously, and still maintain an easygoing state of mind?

I’m striving for a definition of easygoing that includes peace, calm, freedom, openness, amusement, not laziness, not complacency.

This requires considerable reprogramming of my software, for I too default to fret.

Excuse me while I go attempt to install another upgrade.