No Parking - Comfort Zone

If I had a dime for every time someone told me that I was in the wrong business, I’d have been able to retire much earlier than I did.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at what I did.  In fact, at the risk of boasting, I’ve been told that I was very good at it.  It’s just that I was never entirely comfortable in the world of finance and I think it showed.  Nonetheless, I was able to apply my talent and skills in a way that allowed me to get real satisfaction from my work while earning a nice living.  Still, there were times when I struggled and complained and then someone would tell me the answer was to “move out of my comfort zone.” I hated hearing that.  When someone said it to me, it almost made me want to punch them in the nose because I thought I was already outside of it and what I really wanted was to spend just a little bit time in it.

What I realize now is that the trick isn’t to get outside of your comfort zone. The trick is to expand your comfort zone to encompass the new and unfamiliar. And, in fact, that’s what I was doing, even if I didn’t realize it. As I moved into new, untried areas, I gained new perspectives and developed new skills that made me comfortable later when faced with similar but new circumstances. 

Expanding comfort zones didn’t just work on the job.  I loved embarking on new adventures without concern or anxiety thinking, “Let’s see what happens.”  It seemed easy to do that once.  It might be a natural function of age, but it feels much harder to do that now.  There’s a distinct inclination – and I’m fighting it -- to want to stay where I’m comfortable, at home near my family and friends and surrounded by “my stuff.”  I’m resisting it with all my might because I watched my parents’ comfort zone shrink around them until they were unwilling to do anything they hadn’t done before.  In recent years, they went to just three restaurants – Gargiulo’s, Joe’s of Avenue U and, improbably, Roll ‘N Roaster,” (where they’ll “put cheese on anything you please.”) and they wouldn’t try any others. When the NYC subway system switched from tokens to MetroCards my dad stopped going into the city, even though I went with him to the B train station at Brighton Beach to show him how to buy and use one.  He never took the subway again after that. My mom's comfort zone shrunk, first to her house and eventually to her living room where she spent the day and slept the night.

I take their experience as a cautionary lesson. I’m determined to keep pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone and do all I can to keep them from closing in on me.  Any advice or guidance would be welcomed.  In the meantime, Pal O’ Mine Mark Yost tells me they’ve added pizza to the menu at Roll ‘N Roaster.   That’s a change!  I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with it, but next time I’m back in Brooklyn, you wanna go for a slice?

"Get a Load of Fatso"

There’s an episode of the “Honeymooners,” called “The Bensonhurst Bomber,” in which Ralph attempts to intimidate a poolroom bully, Harvey, by pretending to knock out an even larger guy, a friend of Norton’s, who would be in on the plan.  To ensure that Ralph recognizes the friend, Norton suggests that he walk up to Ralph and say, “Get a load of fatso.”  In the event, of course, another very large guy gives Ralph the trigger line and Ralph actually decks him for real.   Ralph wonders how the stranger knew to call him “Fatso,” and Norton observes, “Well, if the shoe fits…”

I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the term “Fatso” in quite a long time.  But when I was growing up in Brooklyn, I heard it a lot, and often directed at me, because I was, in fact, a chubby little kid.  While I didn’t particularly like it, I have to say I never felt the impulse to deck someone who used that term. I really didn’t take offense because I knew instinctively that that was precisely what the person using the term wanted me to do.

There is a tremendous amount of emphasis today on how to avoid offending others, even unintentionally.  That’s not a bad thing. The workplace focus on diversity, inclusion and cultural sensitivity has been tremendously positive, and the  training I experienced during my career was quite often eye-opening. But I wonder if some attention also should be devoted to the other side, i.e., teaching people to withhold from others the power to offend them.  That is a power that so many surrender very easily today. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that a lot of people are walking around looking for a reason to be offended and angry.  (Who said, “It’s hard to stop and smell the flowers when you have chip on your shoulder” Oh, wait.  I think I did.)

I believe we’ve come to this perpetually grumpy state in part because we are now a media-addicted society and the much of the media’s focus is on comments, activities and events that are, let’s face it, intended to be offensive. But I believe that the power to offend us depends entirely on our willingness to allow ourselves to be offended. To withhold that power, we need only remember that “offensive” comments, activities and events reflect only on the individuals responsible for them and not on us or on anyone else.  So, if someone calls someone “Fatso” or uses any other pejorative term, whether it starts with F, C, N or any other letter of the alphabet, intentionally or not, the target of that remark has the option of stopping to consider what harm was actually done and perhaps just letting it slide.  I don’t say it’s easy all the time, but with practice it is entirely possible to live an offense-free life.

The ability to withhold the power to offend was extraordinarily important to me very often during my career when dealing with what others might have considered an affront or insult.  In fact, I think my ability to survive successfully for 40 years in what was for me a very unnatural environment was due in no small part to remembering another childhood adage: “Sticks and stone might break my bones, but names can never hurt me.”  You might be surprised how a distinctly positive response to a slight can actually enhance your standing with those who really matter.  And it’s amazing how stopping the quest for offense can provide a new perspective on others, (even on @$$holes!)

Looking back, though, I do recall considering another option as a kid. To avoid being called “Fatso,” there was a place I dreamed of going where my weight would have been significantly less than what it was back in Brooklyn.  “To the moon!”

Strategic Plans

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Strategic plans, we have a few

But still we don’t know what to do.

Define success and set some goals

Perhaps some surveys or some polls.

Start committees, focus groups.

Step up engagement, rally troops!

List our values and our missions.

Anything but make decisions.

Call in McKinsey, summon Booz

They’re both the same. You get to choose.

They’ve been in here a lot before

To show us what our work is for.

We sought their counsel and advice

Of course, it came at quite a price.

We paid them well, we wrote big checks.

And in return, we got big decks.

So many charts and graphs and notes

A ton of data down our throats.

Yet once again it’s still unclear

The path to which we should adhere.

Push ahead, expand, acquire.

And then one day perhaps retire.

In the meantime, take the pay.

Enjoy the good old corporate way.

-Tony Mattera, Richmond, VA 2016

Retirement, I think I Got Something to Say to You

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There's a lyric in Rod Stewart’s 1971 classic “Maggie May” that goes, “It’s late September and I really should be back at school.” When the song first came out, that particular line always triggered a tiny bit of anxiety in me whenever I heard it. I’m pretty sure it was because I was a guy who found comfort in the structure of a schedule and worried about violating some rule or missing something important if I wasn’t in class when I was supposed to be. So, the notion that it was late September and someone wasn’t back in school when they were supposed to be sort of touched a nerve. 

Years passed, of course, and I thought that I had gotten past finding comfort in structure. And I had, to a large extent. But now, in my second week of retirement, I realize that the feeling is still there, lurking in the background and occasionally popping up to let me know. For example, I was out working in the yard last week and had a moment of mild panic -- a feeling that I needed to dial in to a call or perhaps check in with my colleagues to stay in the loop. It subsided pretty quickly when I reminded myself that I don’t have to do that anymore.

I’ve taken pride in never having defined myself by my work. And I really haven’t. But looking back on the last 40 years at work, it’s pretty clear now that if I didn’t rely on my company or my job to define me, I did rely on them to provide a degree of structure that made me comfortable. (By the way, the paycheck and benefits also helped a lot.)

I’m starting to see now that among the challenges of retirement are to become comfortable without the structure of a schedule or to develop the discipline to create my own structure. Or both. This blog is part of how I plan to do that. Though I’ve never been what the job ads call a “self-starter,” I've had some nice inquiries asking if I plan to free-lance or “consult” (whatever that means) so I might do that once I play a little more. I want to become more fit so I’ll plan to devote a certain number of hours to swimming laps and working out. There’s the garden, of course, and cooking. (Let's not forget cooking!)  And finally, there are some courses I’d be interested in taking through our county system or at local community colleges.  So I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school.