Do you have (or endorse) things like ping pong and foosball tables at the office?

Of course we all know the benefit of exercise, the need for an occasional break from the desk, the usefulness of fun bonding with colleagues at every level above or below our own, and even (especially?) the joy of finding in-the-moment focus and flow during sport.

But do you or your staff really need one more thing to distract you from, um, “work”?

Ping pong and foosball tables mushroomed into the workplace in the late-90s tech boom. ( In fact, I lost my subleased office when the primary leaseholder decided they needed my office for their ping pong table.)  I understand that companies needed every possible lure to get people to come draw a salary off their VC funds.

But I also remember what my friend Tom Pincince (then CEO of Brix Networks) once said about work at a startup: “When someone’s spouse calls the office looking for a husband or wife who has been working 80 hours a week and is never home for dinner or around for the kids’ soccer game, I don’t want to tell them, ‘Just a moment — I think he’s playing ping pong.’”

One day a man approached Ikkyu and asked: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the higheset wisdom?”

Ikkyu took his brush and wrote: “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man.

Ikkyu then wrote: “Attention.  Attention.”

“Well,” said the man, “I don’t really see much depth in what you have written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three timets: “Attention.  Attention.  Attention.”

Half-angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean, anyway?”

Ikkyu gently responded, “Attention means attention.”

– Zen Story quoted in The Little Zen Companion

David Schiller’s The Little Zen Companion is a fine little collection of Zen or Zen-related sayings and stories, nearly 400 in all.  At least a half-zen are directly related to attention, and I will quote a few of them here in later posts.

Three quotes:

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

- Walter Bagehot, British Businessman and Writer (1826-1877)

There’s Nothing as Dangerous as an Idea When It’s the Only One You Have.

– from Do One Thing Different and other uncommonly sensible solutions to life’s persistent problems, Bill O’Hanlon (1999)

I have long-respected this book for its focus on action, and for several of O’Hanlon’s eye-opening observations that very potent but also deceptively simple.   I’ll quote more of his book later but wanted to offer this quote for today.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When Richard Pryor hosted, NBC wanted a five-second delay because Richard might say something filthy. We ended up with a three-second delay, I think. But it was a new negotiation every week.”

–Bernie Brillstein, quoted in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller

I can’t imagine how much stress I could have prevented or how much time I could have saved if I had a three-second delay on my mouth. How many times did I say “yes” to something — a colleague’s request for help I didn’t have time to give, an invitation to a meeting I didn’t need to attend, or even the urge to offer an unnecessary and perhaps incorrect or inappropriate comment — that didn’t deserve it, but that cost me time, money, or something else? Or how many times did I ask or tell someone to do something for me that was later proven a waste of time?

Impulsivity. The hyper speed to speak or decide or do. A hallmark of people with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Where is NBC when I need it?!

Steve Allen is best known as a comic and as creator of the Tonight Show, but he’s also an intellectual and teacher whose books include Dumbth — The Lost Art of Thinking.  In Dumbth, he offers “101 Ways to Reason Better & Improve  Your Mind.”

Here is one in particular for the executive with attention deficit disorder:

Rule No. 22.  Know that reason need not be the enemy of emotion.

When some people hear reason being endorsed they assume that, if the amount of rationality in the world is increased, it must inevitably follow that certain increments of sensation and emotion will decrease.

Entirely false, of course.  Reason helps us know which plans and ideas are truly strong or even great.  Knowing that, we are encouraged and at liberty to pursue them with gusto, excitement, delight.  Fully and without nagging doubts born out of uncertainty.  That sounds like a nice emotional mix to me.  If ADDexecs enjoy excitement perhaps even more than regular people, then it makes all the more sense that we should pursue it.  When it makes sense.

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Bonus: Steve Allen also suggests Rule 99.  “Be humble when consulting your memory.”  No explanation needed on that, right?