#108. Frustration

I have been trying to force a lot of writing these past few weeks. I think of the most appropriate topic, think in depth about it, and then put my fingers on keyboards to chomp out 800 or so words to convey my point. Sometimes the words flow easily, other times they don’t. However, this time around, words are going to flow effortlessly for me, and soon you will understand why.

“Don’t put your frustrations and expectations on people.”
― Brother Pedro

I am usually not one to consider technology work taxing, solely because I know that there are a lot more exhausting lines of work in the world. That being said, the past few weeks have been fully booked for me. I have been reading email after email, jumping from meeting to meeting without so much as a breath between the two.

In one of those meetings with one of my customers, we recommended something to them with the intention of a more streamlined project workflow. Like good soldiers, we documented it in an email, looping in every one of the senior technology leaders on the customer’s end. All of this, however, was for naught.

In a couple of days time, we received an support request from the same customer, requesting assistance with something we had explicitly recommended them not to do. As a team, we were all caught off guard. A barrage of questions started dropping every where around us.

Why would they do it, when we explicitly told them not to do it?

What could be a comprehensible reason for them ignoring every thing we said to them?

While we have everything documented, what else can we do to help our customer in this situation?

One of my directors and I were having a conversation filled with questions in the same vein. After a point in time, she said, “Vibhu, at one point, we have to let them make mistakes, and all we can do it document it to safeguard ourselves from any danger”.

And then it struck me, we have all been in situations with friends, family and loved ones. We tell them what your intentions were, we explain to them the potential downside of their decisions, we even warn them with the harshest words. And yet, somehow, some way, we are involved in a situation we were hoping and praying we would never end up in.

Resultantly, we are left with just one question: Why?

In many of our previous articles, we have talked about how change is the only constant, and a lot of the time, we are on the struggling end of changes that have been dumped on to us externally. However, this is a situation, where we desire, even request change, and again end up on the struggling end due to things not changing according to our requirements.

This might be one of the most frustrating situations we could end up in. And yet another frustrating component of this equation is that the sources of this frustration occurring are limitless. It is almost like we are bound to spend our lives cleaning up messes that either others made, or were caused because your recommendations were tossed aside like spoiled milk which spent time in the refrigerator.

I have been passionately consumed by these thoughts for a few weeks, with my brain having very little time to relax and process a response to the obvious question.

Is there a solution to this problem? As social animals, are we to spend our lives frustrated due to other members of our clans ignoring the solutions to problems that don’t exist yet, and as a matter of fact can be avoided altogether?

After careful consideration and rigorous brainstorming, I have come to the following conclusion: there isn’t any solution to this problem. Reason being, till the time people who think differently from us exist, there is no way whatsoever that our words or actions can change someone’s perception towards something, no matter how much we try.

So, am I to spend my life being constantly frustrated due to what others do?

Well, there is the good news. Not if you choose differently.

We might not be able to change other people’s choices, but we could change our own. As good friends, family members, professionals, it is our responsibility to inform the people in our lives our opinions (when asked for) on the best possible approach. However, that is where our responsibility ends, especially if we are looking to maintain our own peace of mind.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-control to know where our jurisdiction ends.

We can tell people what is best for them, but we cannot follow our own recommendations to understand that burning ourselves by following someone into the fire is not best for us.

At some point, all we can do is tell them what our intentions are, what we believe they should do and then leave it to fate to manifest the best possible outcome.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂