Being OK with Being OK

This old saying has cost me a ton of stress:  "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well."  This sounds like basic good values, nothing more than having high standards.  But when I have far more commitments than time to get things done, it's a recipe for stress and exhaustion.  Better advice is, "If a thing is worth doing, ask yourself if this is something you are passionate about doing, something that lines up with your skills, interests, and values.  If it does, do it with excellence.  If it doesn't, it's OK to just do an OK job."

As an example, I'm about to take on, in my spare time, a leadership role in a volunteer organization.  The organization has done lots of different kinds of work over the last 50+ years, and the new Board that starts in January will be mostly new people, busy people who are wary about committing to too much volunteer work.

As I've been preparing for the "Kickoff Meeting" in two weeks, I originally defaulted to my usual pattern of thinking we will need to do EVERYTHING with excellence.  But how?  Do we have the skills?  Do the volunteers have the time?  Will we find someone who cares deeply about every committee and every role?  The thought of trying to get the organization to do everything with excellence has been overwhelming and stressful for me.

I finally had a Eureka moment this morning.  During the kickoff, we will discuss everything that MUST be done, all the roles that we MUST play based on our by-laws, all the Committees and Roles without whom we cannot function.  And for each role, Committee, and task, we will define the MINIMUM requirements. What does it take to just be OK at the job?

Then we will explore what we want to excel at based on the skills, interests, and passion of the people we have.  If we have people with great computer skills, we might choose to dramatically improve our website and electronic networking and communication.  If we have people with a passion for enhancing the business district, this might be our "signature strength".  Maybe we'll pick 2 or even 3 priorities, but in other areas we'll  just do whatever we need to get by.

This reminds me of one of the things I read about in the classic business study, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don't, by Jim Collins.  One of the primary differences between the successful and unsuccessful companies is that the great ones put all their energy into practicing whatever they were most passionate about and avoided spending time elsewhere.

Sound Sleep

My last blog post described some of the weird things about sleep that I learned by reading the book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, by David Randall.  But let's get practical.  We all know sleep is good for you in countless ways:  immune function, creativity, emotions, longevity, and so on.  But what can we do to get a good night's sleep, at least according to this book?

• Ban booze before bedtime.  If I'd known the author would slip in this tidbit in the next to last chapter, I wouldn't have read the book!!  Darn it!!  But I read it, and now I can't pretend I didn't.  Apparently, alcohol can make a person fall asleep sooner, but in the latter part of the night, a person tends to wake up frequently until the blood alcohol level returns to zero.  So, even if statistics show that 1-2 drinks a night is associated with a longer life, it's probably best to have the last drink an hour or two before bedtime.
• Ban blue light.  This author is no fun at all!  No booze and no blue light before bed.  In the natural world, as the sun sets and light decreases, our bodies start to release melatonin to make us sleep.  But this doesn't happen if we fool our bodies with bright artificial light, especially the bluer wavelengths of light that come from our televisions, computers, and iPads.  I've started to try to dim lights throughout the house in the evening, and avoid the iPad and the computer in the last hour or two before bed.  This is a tough habit to break because I find these activities so relaxing, but I do want to sleep better, and "Dreamland" suggests that, as far as going to sleep, the negatives of blue light greatly outweigh the benefits of relaxing with my iPad.  My wife and I still watch TV at the end of the night, but I'm shutting off lights everywhere if she's OK with that and I plan to switch the TV settings to a dimmer display.
• Body temperature.  We sleep best when the temperature of the core or our bodies can drop.  A simpler approach is to be careful about pajamas, socks, and blankets.  According to the book, depending on what you choose to wear and to cover yourself with, most people can handle room temperatures ranging from 60 degrees F to 90 degrees F.  Above all, we need to keep the feet and hands cool.  When sleeping, body heat shifts from the body's core to the hands and feet, and we tend to wake up if these extremities get too warm.  So we might sleep better with bare feet.
• Exercise.  We don't need to exercise until we collapse from exhaustion, but exercise helps immensely.  (Finally!  The author has some good news).
• Familiar firmness. Will I sleep better on a hard mattress?  A soft mattress?  Something in between? Apparently the clear winner is to sleep on a surface that has the SAME firmness that we're used to, regardless of whether that is hard or soft.  There is no firmness that is "naturally" better for people.
• Letting go.  It's time for bed.  It helps to give yourself permission to solve problems and issues later, to say that "now is not the time".  The mind can otherwise be free to jump from topic to topic because trying to control thought just leads to insomnia.  The only control worth applying at this time is to say "now is not the time" to fix things at work or at home, to solve problems, to change anything.  With this letting go of "doing", sleep will come.

Weird Things About Sleep

I just finished reading Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, by David Randall.  Here are some of the weirdest things I learned:

• First Sleep, Second Sleep.  Before Thomas Edison and his bright, cheap, artificial light, people tended to go to sleep early, at dusk, then wake up for a couple of hours, then go back to sleep until dawn.  The length of time from dusk to dawn was just too long to sleep in just one uninterrupted block of time as we are accustomed to doing today.  References to "first sleep", "second sleep" and the time between the two sleeps were found across centuries and geographies.  In more recent sleep research, subjects who were kept away from artificial light at night consistently start to develop a similar first sleep, second sleep pattern.
• Death from insomnia.  There is a rare disease that strikes some people in their 40's that gradually takes away all ability to sleep.  The disease is always fatal.
• Separate beds.  If quality of sleep was all that mattered to them, most all couples would sleep apart. The ideal would be to be together for romance and then, like couples in the 1950's, go off to separate beds.  
• Bad and ordinary dreams.  Calvin Hall at Case Western Reserve University collected over 50,000 dream reports from people of all ages and nationalities for over 30 years and sorted these reports into categories.  Bottom line:  most dreams are pretty much like ordinary reality--they don't defy physics.  Also, they are usually at least somewhat unpleasant.  Some researchers think this is because your mind is trying to work through some kind of problem.  A different book I read once suggests that your mind works through issues when you are dreaming because you are more likely to be using both sides of your brain (the logical side and the intuitive side) when you are dreaming because the Rapid Eye Movements from right to left and back that occur when dreaming engags both sides of the brain.  You might, then move toward solutions or perspectives when you are dreaming that would escape you when you are wide awake and dominated by logic.
• Problem solving and sleep.   It may or may not be due to dreams, but a variety of experiments show that people working on a problem will make huge gains in their effort after sleeping, as if they were continuing to make progress on the problems while they slept. 
• Pugs and people.  The only animals that get Sleep Apnea are pugs and people.  Dogs with pushed in faces--pugs, bulldogs, etc.--have their tongues deeper into their throats than other dogs or any other animals except human beings.  Human tongues are this way because it is part of the arrangement needed to enable speech.
• Bet on the West.  When teams from the West Coast play teams from the East Coast, the West Coast usually wins.  This is true for most professional teams in the United States.  Why?  Our bodies are the most awake from 9am-2pm and from 6pm-10pm.  To get television viewers, most sporting events will take place between 1pm-7pm or 9pm-11:30pm Eastern Standard Time.  The body clocks of the athletes from the East will tend to be "off peak" for most of the game.  But the Western athletes will be playing with their body clocks somewhere in the range of 10am-4pm and 6-8:30pm.  Mostly peak time.
• Teenagers, Baby Boomers, and the Elderly on Guard.  These three age groups tend to sleep at different times of the night, and it may be so that somebody is always on guard.  The elderly go to sleep early, then middle aged adults, and last to go to sleep are the teenagers.  By the time the teenagers are asleep, the elderly are starting to stir, then the younger adults, and finally the teenagers wake up.  Some speculate that this pattern developed as a way to protect human groups sleeping together in the wild because someone was always awake, or at least sleeping very lightly, all night long to alert the others if a Saber Toothed Tiger approached.