Professionalism and Mastering Moods
Master Your MoodsDepressing and bad moods are notorious thieves of time. In a depression or bad mood, many people stop doing anything productive and often do things that are destructive.
Even the most up-beat individuals must occasionally confront a wily time thief called depression. If you can learn how to fight off bad moods and keep them from making off with your day, you will have acuqired an invaluable ability. Here’s how:
Develop your willpower through exercise. The ability to keep going when it’s hard to keep going is the mark of a true pro. Ray Charles, the singer, once described how much he enjoyed performing before a crowd, how there was nothing like the exhilaration of being in front of a big crowd when it’s with you. I asked: “And what do you do when the crowd is small and isn’t with you?” Ray Charles replied: “That’s when you find out whether you’re a pro or not. That’s when you work harder than ever.”
– B. Eugene Griessman, in Time Tactics of Very Successful People (1994).
With this quote, Griessman shows what I think are both the strengths and weaknesses of his book as a possible resource for executives with attention deficit disorder. On the plus side, Griessman demonstrates that even the greatest talents — like Ray Charles, or Mark Twain who is quoted on the next page — obtain some of their success by working very hard when they don’t really feel like it. This is always good advice, perhaps even especially for the ADDexec whose first problem — attention deficit — can immediately derail the very idea of work, much less the actual doing.
At the same time, Griessman seems to oversimplify by putting “bad mood” and “depression” in the same basket, which they’re clearly not. Same goes for clinically evident attention deficit disorder.
In “Master Your Moods”, Griessman offers fourteen different tips ranging from “Yield to temptation” (i.e., take some time off) to “Do low-priority items on your list” (i.e., knock out some easy tasks if you can’t do the hard ones) to “Pick a career that suits your temperaments”. I suspect that an experienced ADD coach or an experienced ADD psychotherapist or psychiatrist would tell any client, “pick and choose carefully from this list.” Some items might be useful. Others entirely counterproductive.
In sum, I think that Time Tactics of Very Successful People offers both useful tips and real-life inspiration to the executive with attention deficit disorder. However, the useful parts are mixed in with much information that’s either oversimplified, incomplete, or inappropriate for an ADDexec. If you happen across this book, give it a skim and make note of any items that look useful to you. But don’t rush out to buy it.
