[compartmentalization] and other tricks of the mind

A few of us today were remembering a colleague whom we knew some years back. Basically, as I recalled, whenever we met, he'd made every error under the sun. Take a simple meeting for a drink:

1. He'd leave up to three mobiles switched on, terrified to miss any business opportunity;

2. Therefore he'd never relax and would be only marginally engaged in the current conversation;

3. He'd do that with even potential partners who didn't like being treated that way and so the opportunities became sparser.

Even worse than that was:

4. He'd carry his problems with this partner or that supplier around with him in his head and couldn't relax, waking in the middle of the night, [so he said], and planning out schemes to solve the problems he'd let himself in for;

5. He'd become crankier and crankier and those under him, in his top-down company, really suffered the sharp end of his tongue, his health went down and the more it did, the more he attended an expensive businessman's gym, in no fit state to do this.

One of us saw him recently and apparently the chap was a mess. Someone had taken him for a ride, he'd lost all but he was still trying to carry on the easy lifestyle, popping into an expensive café restaurant here, picking up a girl there and so on and assuring himself that the big change was around the corner.

Leaving the spiritual side out of it for the moment, it seems clear he needed to make some fundamental changes:

1. The luxurious lifestyle depends on money actually banked, not on what a man aspires to and a potential partner can pick up immediately if the other will do anything to clinch a deal. Our friend had even bought a Subaru for a potential partner, to cajole him along - an easy touch and with a reputation for this.

Message - get a bit more savvy about dodginess, learn to be soft with serious partners but offload timewasters the instant you perceive it in them. Politely say no when necessary and no later than that;

2. Carrying worries like baggage is a no-no and will destroy you.

Message - train yourself to compartmentalize your mind and treat each issue in its own box. Build firewalls between the boxes and stonewall anyone who tries to drag an issue from one timespace into another. Schedule downtime [mine is when I'm on the tram and no one can reach me];

3. If a problem just won't go away and keeps niggling and niggling you, it's going nowhere.

Message - time for wholesale changes. The number of issues with a foreigner and a car in this country were becoming ridiculous for me. Logical solution was to offload the car and deploy the money into something really needed. For example, the laser printer arrived today.

All of this is fine and dandy but it needs enormous willpower and that touch of bloody-mindedness. This last is possible if you can see, as clear as day, that the end result can only be beneficial to all;

4. Hankering after lost loves or lost opportunities is as bad as repeating the words "if only".

Message - be inexorable in your logic. If it didn't work, there was a reason and it might just have been partly due to you. If you can't accept that, you really do have problems. Carry out failure analysis, cut your losses, start over again, next time play to your strengths and recognize your limitations. There's always another love or another potential partner, even if you're convinced there's not at this moment. The expression "this horse won't run" was never truer than today.