On Thanksgiving Eve, I will take the gift of 20,000+ followers here (originally written for LinkedIn) to say one thing and make one plea.
My one thing to say is thank you. You took the time to encourage and inspire me just by deciding to click on the word that read "follow". It's like you are saying, "Hey Timm, of all the things being thrown my way to buy, read, watch, whatever… I will give you a slice of the most valuable things I have: my time, and I am trusting that you will make it worthwhile." Time and attention is an incredible gift to give anyone, let alone a stranger on the internet. There is not a single day that is lost on me. It's part of what gets me up before the sun seven days a week, and other than my wife's support, that gift you give me is the only reason I keep making content as a "side hustle," so to speak, and posting it wherever. I can never thank you enough for your trust and your time. You have changed my life, so in turn, I promise to continue to do everything I can to help rally the well-intentioned to do great things while being kind and considerate along the way.
My one plea is for kindness and calm in one of the very few places we can control it outside of our homes, which is at work.
We spend something in the ballpark of 2000 hours a year at work or WFH. That number could go up and down, but ballpark math with basic vacation assumptions comes out to approximately 2000 hours. That's about a third of our hours being awake in a year.
Mental health is a real thing, and work puts a disproportionate strain on how healthy our minds may be relative to the broader importance of our jobs in the grand scheme of life.
Especially to those in any leadership or managerial position, I would like to double down on the plea for kindness and calm at work.
Yes, the business problems we try to solve are real, and the external headwinds can be crippling at times, making day-to-day incredibly stressful. Also, in many cases, we need big, intimidating business problems to tackle to have jobs.
But none of that is a reason or excuse to be a shitty person to anyone at any time. It is far too often taken for granted that because it's "work," "the boss said this, "or the marketplace said that," we then permit ourselves to be short, snarky, rude, whatever, to each other.
In 2017/18, I was at a low point mentally due to work stress and was determined to fight the good fight out of that situation. On the homepage of the New York Times app one morning, there was a picture of a man in Syria who looked about my age running for his life with a baby in his arms with nothing but dust, rubble, and chaos around him. I distinctly remember that image making me feel incredibly thankful for how fortunate I was despite any challenges at work. But it also made me that much more frustrated that we were choosing to allow cliche corporate bad behavior that was impacting a lot of people's mental health negatively.
It felt like appreciation for how good we have it in the grand scheme of life was lost, and how we treated each other in some cases was at a stress level like we were running from rockets or bombs with a child in our arms.
If you are reading this, then you probably have what could be defined as a desk job. And you are likely not going to be running from a bomb, rocket, mortar, grenade, troop, or terrorist today. That is not the case for everyone on this planet. Terrible things happen to good people daily, and a lot of those terrible things are part of some new normal that has taken over parts of the world.
With that in mind, may we never take for granted the opportunity in every meeting and touchpoint at work to be as kind and calm as we can to each other. This is good for not only those around us but for ourselves, too. We spend far too much time working together to fill any of it with a grownup, passive-aggressive bullying intentionally. Kind tones, self-awareness, taking the high road, and sincere appreciation are everyday opportunities to reverse the trend of negative sentiment toward work in corporate America.
When you try to lead calmly and kindly, you may initially feel like it is not being reciprocated. And yes, that makes it super hard to keep the best attitude about yourself on any given day. But as I believe Seth Godin once said, "Attitude is a skill."
Our attitudes towards each other at work impact our mental health. Our mental health affects our work. It can be a glorious or vicious cycle.
My plea is for kindness and calm at work.
And my one thing to say is thank you.
PS - A special thank you to three kind friends from three very different parts of the world that read this for me ahead of posting it to help me ensure the appropriate tone and approach with respect to those actually stuck in conflict somewhere on the planet at the moment.
This is a screen recording of the instagram story I posted that day after seeing this and now keep in my story feed for perspective forever.