Nasrudin took up golf and quickly fell in love with the game. Every day he and three others met just after lunch and got in 18 holes. He returned home every afternoon, tired and happy.
But one day he returned home quite late, and his wife could see he was in a terrible mood. “Nasrudin, what happened? Didn’t you enjoy your golf game?”
Nasrudin replied: “It was just terrible! Bob teed it up on the first hole, hit a great drive right down the middle of the fairway – and keeled over, dead of a heart attack!”
“Oh, Nasrudin – how awful for you!”
“You bet! It was hit the ball – drag Bob – hit the ball – drag Bob – for 18 holes!”
Commentary: People have an extraordinary capacity to create meaning in their lives and pursue it fanatically. No matter how essentially trivial an activity looks to an outsider – like hitting a little white ball into a cup and then doing it over and over again – a hard-core golfer needs no reason for golf, just an opportunity. And so it is for hard-core programmers, and accountants, and engineers, and managers – we don’t need a reason to pursue our calling fanatically, just an opportunity. Our pursuit can become remarkably single-minded: our goal is to get the stock price up, or get our company onto all social media sites, or get financial controls in place, and nothing else matters. From within the logic of our calling, the impact our actions have on the rest of the organization can seem like irrelevant distractions, like – well, like dragging Bob.
But does dragging Bob look reasonable to a non-golfer? Of course it doesn’t. Is it possible that Nasrudin is warning us that what we count as an irrelevant distraction may, in fact, be far more important than the goal we are pursuing? Is he asking us to step outside the insider logic of our calling to see what we are doing through other’s eyes?
Perhaps. But perhaps Nasrudin is being more metaphorical here. Perhaps “dragging Bob” refers to our only-too-human tendency to hold onto things we are better off without. Someone else gets a promotion or a choice assignment we felt we deserved, and that continues to effect our attitude at work. Someone corrected us publicly, or attacked one of our ideas in a meeting, and we go out of your way to avoid that person. Or we backed a proposal that lost, and still have little enthusiasm for the system that won. Perhaps all of us are “dragging Bob” as we go through our daily work, and “dragging Bob” is keeping us from full and enthusiastic participation.
Contemplation: Are you “dragging Bob?” What “Bob” are you dragging? And what do you want to do about it?
Tony Makes Sense of ... 