Being Meta-stable

I grew up believing that money had the potential to cause a lot of problems. Not having enough. Having too much. Always wanting more. Measuring relationships by it. The unstated obligations and ensuing misunderstandings, especially across cultures.

But I couldn’t avoid it. As they say, money makes the world go around. I decided to deal with it as rationally as possible. To earn enough, save enough, spend enough, give enough. And to regularly take a deep look at what ‘enough’ means.

I’ve always had a thing for challenging my preconceived ideas. When I left the academic world, though, I drew the line at working in finance. I settled instead for a job in the nuclear power industry – an industry I had some doubts about but in a company that seemed to be tackling issues responsibly. As I progressed in my career, I avoided taking on jobs that seemed to be explicitly aimed at making profit for the organisation. I tweaked each of my roles, focusing on what made more sense to me: reducing nuclear proliferation, debunking misconceptions about nuclear power, resolving contractual conflicts, building bridges across organisational silos, developing teams.

For someone who had decided to deal with money rationally, I admit that there was a fair amount of irrationality in my aversion to finance. How did I expect the company to keep its factories open and its operations running safely, hiring tens of thousands of people – including myself until recently – without making at least a small profit? And if I thought that its raison d’être, its reason for existing, was on balance beneficial for society, why was I so reluctant to contribute to that?

I’m still exploring how I think and feel about money, in conjunction with the ‘yes and’ of profit and purpose. What I can say for now is this: just as I believe in a world in which each of us earns enough doing work that matters, so do I believe in a world in which every organisation makes enough profit serving society.

How is your relationship with money?

Everything in moderation.

The world isn’t black and white.

No man is an island.

These are just three of the mantras I remember from my mother growing up (leading to plenty of eye-rolling from me and my sister).

All of these, together with finding the right balance, and so many more, reflect a similar concept at their core. That we become better, that the world becomes better, when we embrace the tension of ‘yes and’ instead of succumbing to the comfort of ‘either/or’.

Lightbulbs lit up in my head as I started seeing this everywhere: Independent and Interdependent. Profit and Purpose. Acceptance and Change. Atelic and Telic. But they gradually dimmed as I began putting the concept into practice.

Turns out it’s really, really hard.

At some point during the altMBA last year, after having ruminated about the tension between scarcity and abundance, my mind suddenly leapt to how we model dynamical systems – essentially anything that moves. If we imagine little red balls rolling along the blue curve below, we can see that it would take a lot of energy to get the first red ball out of A, that the second ball between B and C will almost certainly roll down into C, and that a small push is all it would take to get the third ball out of D, over the little hump into E.

In dynamical systems, it’s all about reducing energy. If you drop a ball, it might keep bouncing for a while, but eventually it’ll lose energy and stay still on the ground. The ball at A is in what we call a stable state, a state of least energy. The ball between B and C is unstable – it’s heading downwards. The ball at D, though, isn’t really stable, but it isn’t unstable either. It’s somewhere between the two.

Meta-stable.

And this is how I make sense of why embracing the tension of ‘yes and’ is so difficult. I’m like that little red ball, perpetually being pulled towards the stable states of A or E – the ‘either’ and the ‘or’. Getting out of ‘either/or’ (A or E) takes huge amounts of energy. Finding which version of ‘yes and’ (B, C or D) is the right one for me takes more energy as I go on a mini-rollercoaster of exploration, feeling uncertain and vulnerable in my instability. Even when I finally settle for a version of ‘yes and’, I know that it’s only temporary, that the right metastable state for me will change as I change, as the context which I’m in changes. And all the while, I have to resist gravitating towards the oh-so-comfortable ‘either/or’.

It’s not easy. But I believe that it’s work worth doing.

What metastable states are you exploring?

I decided at some point last month to post every week. Writing – and sharing what I write – is still new for me. Turning it into a habit will likely take a few months. Current behavioural science provides plenty of wisdom to increase the chance of this happening. Piggyback on an existing routine. Make it frictionless to do. And build in a dopamine hit when it’s done.

Despite my routine being disrupted (in the nicest way possible) these past few weeks while I’ve been on the road, I’d set everything up so that I could keep that weekly commitment. I posted on schedule the first week. And then the second. But by the third week, I was feeling uneasy. What’s more important here, I was asking myself. Is it spending the next couple of hours communing with my screen so that I can honour my commitment to myself (me, my, I)? Or is it being fully present with people I love and care about deeply, most of whom I seldom see? Using the language of character strengths, do I need to activate Perseverance, or Love?

This is, of course, like so many things, a false dichotomy. It’s not, and rarely is, a case of either-or. And Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the Buddha’s noble eightfold path, to name just two wisdom traditions, remind us to be weary of dogma, of clinging rigidly to extremes.  

Here, Perseverance was pushing me to maintain a streak. I decided to privilege Love, trusting that Perseverance would get me back on track once I was back at home. On the spectrum ranging from pushing through with my weekly commitment no matter what… to giving up at the first hurdle, I found the right balance. Not for everyone, and not for all situations. Just for me in this precise context.

How do you find the right balance in striving for your goals?

What are these virtues that according to Aristotle make us a good person?

Aristotle and his fellow Greek philosophers are of course not the only ones to have pondered this subject. We tend to notice the differences between our traditions and cultures. But viewed across the span of human history, the work spearheaded by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson in the early 2000s is showing increasingly that it does make sense to talk about “ubiquitous, if not universal” virtues. And here they are:

Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence.

If, like me, you’re interested in the breadth of thought traditions that they researched and the subtleties that lie behind these words, I highly recommend their book, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. They’ve also done a tremendous job making their work accessible to all via a free, online, and – importantly – scientifically validated survey.

Character strengths are the ways in which we manifest these virtues, showing the best of us. They are ways in which we think, feel or behave that benefit ourselves and others. For example, my top three are Honesty, Love and Hope (I’ll share my bottom three another day!). These correspond to the virtues of Courage, Humanity and Transcendence, respectively.

What are your character strengths?

As part of what a friend calls my post-corporate-life rehabilitation, I’ve been exploring the concept of business with purpose. Its raison d’être, or reason for existing, as expressed eloquently by Francophones. And I’ve come across a phrase that seems to pop up more and more frequently:

Business as a force for good.

There’s a lot to unpack in those six words. But let’s start with… good. What does good mean? Good for whom? By whose compass?

I remember telling my sister anxiously when we were growing up that I must be the bad one. There’s one in every family and it had to be me. Compared to the rest of my family, I felt overly self-centred, judgmental, possessive, condescending and uncompassionate.

Reflecting on this recently, I was intrigued that my instinctive sense as a child of what it meant to be good or bad was based essentially on character traits. Studying the works of great thinkers through the ages wasn’t part of my formal education. Discovering Aristotle’s Ethics as an adult, I was fascinated by his conclusion that possessing virtues is what being a good person is all about. And that exercising those virtues is what makes a life worth living.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the questions I asked. What I can say at this point is that the common thread in everything I do is to become a better person, and to use that to more effectively make the world a better place. It is – I am – a work-in-progress.

What does it mean for you to be a good person?