CHAPTER 2
Building Your Oasis
Remember the two stories I began with? Let’s return to them to hear how they turned out. The envelope, please!
Businesscraft: Part Two
The young business owner was slumped in his chair, defeated by a natural 20 roll by his business coach wielding the +1 sword of truth.
“You’re going to make me stop playing Warcraft aren’t you?” he muttered in defeat.
“No, I’m not going to tell you to stop.” I then asked, “Is it necessary for you to play these games? Does taking a break to jump into the game help you have a clear mind for work?”
“Yeah, it does, actually.” “Then I’m not going to tell you to stop. I’m going to tell you to schedule it.”
After much discussion and some debate, we settled on five hours a week being a far more appropriate amount of time. This schedule allowed him to play in a focused way, slicing and dicing warlocks with ease. He scheduled one hour at the end of each day, before he went home. These virtual battles gave him the ability to clear his mind of the day’s real-life business battles. He could then focus his attention on enjoying his time with his family.
Overall, he dropped his work hours from eighty to fifty-five, including World of Warcraft time, and became far more productive on a weekly basis. He was more relaxed at work because he knew his outlet awaited him at the end of the day, and his relationship with his family improved.
Power Couple: Part Two
The couple pleaded for guidance. They were desperately trying to pull themselves out of their business-first marriage.
“What’s something you both really enjoy?” I asked them. “What’s something you could do together that would pull your attention away from work, even if it’s just for an hour or so?”
Without speaking, they looked at each other as if to say, You tell him. No, you tell him!
Finally, the wife volunteered, “Well, we both like Survivor.”
“The reality show?”
“Yes,” she muttered.
Energized, I replied, “Great! Let’s create an appointment for the two of you to make sure you watch Survivor together.”
To you, that may seem meaningless, but to them, it was everything. Not only did the couple enjoy a group of fake castaways navigating physical challenges and sabotaging each other all in the name of staying on a TV show for another week, but the show gave them something to talk about other than the day-to-day chaos of running a business.
This simple act of having fun — mutually agreed upon and mutually scheduled — quite literally turned their marriage around.
The Culture of WIN
The Culture of WISH teaches you that hard work, at any cost, is the pathway to success. By making our efforts “worth it someday, hopefully,” our society is becoming dragged down, burned out, and bummed out. Some of us have reached a constant state of pathos. This may be one reason for the proliferation in recent years of books about happiness.
Thankfully, there is a surprisingly simple yet effective antidote to the Culture of WISH. We must make your effort worth it now. Not just sometime this week or later today, but right now.
This is the Culture of WIN:
WORTH
IT
NOW
Don’t worry. I won’t be in acronym mode for the rest of this book.* But this simple construct provides the antidote to “someday, hopefully.” When you transition to the Culture of WIN, you are creating not just a career but a life that is “worth it” — so to speak — right now. Today. Not just at the end.
Return with me to our metaphorical desert for just a moment. As rough and dry and nasty as a journey like this can be, imagine stumbling upon a beautiful oasis. Dehydrated, exhausted, sunburned, and pushed to the edge of sanity, you are met by a sudden yet welcome vision of a sparkling blue pool, palm trees shading a soft cabana, and fruit juice and ceviche by the truckload. Best of all, it is not a mirage. It is real. Such an experience would refresh your soul, would it not?
When you’re stranded in an endless desert, an oasis becomes a powerful ally. There’s a reason why they have historically been epicenters of trade, essential pathways to weary travelers, and battlegrounds for regional control.
Some people stumble across their oasis from time to time. A party bus in Ibiza here, an ice cream social there, a brief trip to YouTube-land. Sometimes, people try to furtively sneak these moments in between this email and that call.
How do many people feel when they have innocent fun? Guilty! The Culture of WISH tells us we don’t deserve such moments. It whips us out of our temporary paradise and back to crawling beneath the blistering sun.
Deserve is an undermining word because it implies good behavior earns you a reward. The Culture of WISH uses it to keep us under its grimy thumb. You don’t deserve a break yet because you didn’t complete that project. You don’t deserve to have a little fun because everyone else is working. You don’t deserve it because of the psychological baggage of your past.
The Culture of WISH is lying to you.
Pop quiz: If you’re wandering through the desert, is water something you deserve . . . or is it something you need?
Unlike the WISHy-washy culture, the Culture of WIN recognizes that these moments of refreshment are an essential part of the journey. Just as you require water to make it across the desert, so also does your day require meaningful, refreshing, and fun breaks.
How essential are they? We’ll cover a variety of evidence in this book, and here is a taste to wet your whistle. A study by the Harvard Business Review and the Energy Project found that when a supervisor encouraged team members to take regular breaks, employees were 81 percent more likely to stay with the company and had a 78 percent increase in their sense of healthiness and well-being. Additionally, those who took breaks at least every ninety minutes reported a 40 percent increase in creative thinking and a 28 percent improvement in focus. Who doesn’t need that?
The Culture of WIN is about you taking control of your workday. You must claim the benefits of having little moments of fun not because you deserve them but because you know your performance will improve because of them.
The Oasis Strategy
The Culture of WIN, then, is about scheduling these refreshing moments first and making our enjoyment a top priority. Everything else must flow around them.
Think of this strategy as planning the entire desert journey, start to finish, and knowing ahead of time that you will need to discover small oases along the way. Every few miles or so, you can refresh yourself, replenish your reserves, and gain greater strength to continue onward to your final destination.
In this book, I’m going to regularly refer to creating your Oasis or Oases.*
An Oasis represents a moment that you create. It is not something the self-proclaimed conference experts nor a ruggedly handsome, superbly charismatic author-speaker- business coach tells you to create. No. You will create the minutes that make all your effort worth it today.
An Oasis sums up whatever you define as a meaningful break. It’s an analog I had to create in place of a word that doesn’t exist in the English language. Think of it as a moment of fun, play, enjoyment, reward, fulfillment, refreshment, recharging, and chillaxing all rolled into one tasty tidbit.
Your Oasis is a powerful tool — not just to give you happiness, but for getting more done in your day. Believe it or not, my clients who establish fun moments for an Oasis become more productive and more successful because they feel that the work is worth it now.
The more work you intend to do, the more valuable and vital the Oasis is. The type of Oasis you choose is up to you, yet you must take these breaks to achieve your best performance. Make the Oasis a part of your routine, and your work today will be not only more enjoyable but more effective.
Our goal is to preschedule and predetermine specific times of the day, week, month, and year when you enjoy these Oases.
To be done first. Up front. In advance.
Not when you have time in your schedule or if you get your work done, but because you have the time scheduled, just as you would an appointment with a VIP. Which is, in fact, true because the VIP just happens to be you.
To give you a picture of how this works, let’s imagine a person stuck in the desert of retirement. The Culture of WISH would tell that person that this is what a proper career path should look like:
The Culture of Win
The philosophy? One big payout at the end — retirement — interspersed with a few well-deserved vacations. Yes, there’s that “deserve” word again.
The Culture of WIN, on the other hand, would say that a career should be a steady flow of joyful moments:
The Culture of Win
In this way, Oases become an essential part of how this person lives every day, week, month, and year. They become the top priority in daily and weekly planning. They are a requirement.
Regardless of the desert you find yourself in, the itinerary of your Oasis-filled journey should look like this: work hard for a short period of time and then take a small, refreshing Oasis. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
You take these Oases not because you are exhausted but because they are vital to your happiness and well-being. When you come back, you’ll have enough in the tank for even more success. These Oases become one of the most — if not the most — important moments of the day.
Allow me to clarify a bit more. What are these Oases all about? What does — and doesn’t — constitute an Oasis?
AN OASIS IS A TOP PRIORITY
To start, an Oasis isn’t what happens at the end of the day. It’s a critical part of the day. Your success is as dependent on taking this little break as it is for you to meet deadlines and respond to emails. Perhaps more so. As we dive into the concept of permission, you’ll discover a little science behind the importance of having fun.
As you read further, I’m going to make the case for how businesses should create policies that allow employees to take these brief, inexpensive, and frequent Oases in the middle of the workday. If these breaks become an integral part of how people work, we will achieve greater performance as a result.
AN OASIS IS SCHEDULED
An Oasis doesn’t happen out of the blue or whenever you need it. It is a scheduled daily occurrence. An Oasis is not a rescue inhaler that you use at the first sign of possible life congestion.
Let’s be honest: when do we have time for anything, anyway? Ever tell yourself you’re going to do something “when you have a moment?” How does that work out for you? Probably the same as for everyone else: a pile of actions left undone.
We can’t afford to treat our Oases that way. In the twenty-first century, we never have enough time. Because that’s the world we live in, it is important that we schedule time in advance to take these Oases in our day. We must make them a regular, recurring part of our schedule. That will make it much easier for us to stick to them.
AN OASIS IS A PRE-WARD
An Oasis isn’t a reward. It is a pre-ward. See what I did there?
An Oasis is not a Milk-Bone offered as a reward for rolling over, playing dead, and being a good dog. Oases are necessary motivators to help you move forward. By pre-establishing and pre-scheduling these motivators in your day, you will feel a desire to work harder because you know something good is going to happen.
This serves as an alternative to working hard in the hope that some supervisor might step down from the clouds of Olympus to bestow a gift upon you. This is not a gift that someone else gives you. It’s something that you give yourself up front.
AN OASIS IS A WANT-TO
An Oasis is not a “have to” type of activity; it is a “want to” type of activity. Sometimes, people get confused when I introduce the concept of Oases, immediately thinking that they should be activities akin to running a marathon or eating whole-grain sprout sandwiches. Look, if those are things that you get excited about and look forward to in your day, they very well can be Oases. Kudos to you, you wonderful freak of nature.*
For the rest of us mortals, Oases are far more tangible and immediately gratifying. I find it more common for people to be excited about watching a show on Netflix, listening to a favorite song, or just walking in the park with their dog. We’ll get into the details of creating Oases a little bit later. For the moment, understand that these are actions that you love to do, not need to do.
AN OASIS IS AFFORDABLE
Oases are not expensive. They are free to cheap.
Occasionally, people throw up a defensive wall around the Oasis concept because they feel as though I’m asking them to hurt their chances at that which truly is “worth it in the end.” Right? “Dave’s telling me to go on exotic vacations and travel six months of the year while other people do all the work for me. But that will kill my retirement plans.” That’s a different book, sold by someone with quite a different philosophy.
In reality, with the system I will teach you, you are going to be spending very little money. Instead, you’ll make careful choices about Oases that are free or very inexpensive that give you pockets of joy. As we explore the process together, you may be surprised at how many joyful things there are that cost absolutely no money.
AN OASIS IS OFTEN BRIEF
An Oasis needn’t be time-consuming. It can be brief. When I talk about setting up a daily win, a client will occasionally say, “Dave, I’ve got a department to run. I have responsibilities to fulfill and deadlines to meet. Time is money, and money doesn’t grow on trees.” They rattle off these business clichés as a defense mechanism, thinking I’m asking them to sacrifice time. No, that’s the way of the Culture of WISH.
Little do they know how little time commitment is truly needed. It takes only a few minutes scheduled into your day to give you a breather and a moment of fun.
AN OASIS IS DOABLE
Oases are not goals. They are activities. When someone sets a goal, they’re usually looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Something distant.
For an Oasis to be worth it, it must also be a do it. Enjoying an Oasis is a matter of action. In most cases, Oases will take little effort.
Now, these Oases may improve, get more interesting, get more challenging, get a little weirder, or, heck, become downright goofy sometimes. What, where, and how you take your Oases is up to you. What is important is that you are doing them and doing them starting today.
AN OASIS IS FULFILLING
Oases are not self-indulgent; rather, they are self-fulfilling.
True confession? I was extremely hesitant about using the word fun in the title of this book because people occasionally equate fun with activities that are self-destructive. If you’ve ever been forced to watch My Strange Addiction, you know that certain behaviors offer a moment of pleasure but have a long-term negative impact. Heaven knows I don’t want to show up at your intervention having to tell you how sorry I am for turning you into an online shopaholic.
So, here’s clarification about the kind of fun that truly gives you power. This flavor of fun — these Oases — are things that help you feel happy and help you feel joy and fulfillment, but never in a way that creates a negative impact on you or the people around you.
An Oasis is constructive, not destructive. Sometimes this is a matter of degree. A client once told me she wanted to enjoy a little chocolate each day for her Oasis. That worked for her. However, if food as a reward has possible negative consequences in your life, you won’t want to use it as an Oasis. This applies not just to food but to any other kind of activity that has a potentially negative, destructive side effect in your life. Choose options that build you up and make you a better person.
Now that we’re on the same page with what an Oasis is and isn’t, let’s take a bird’s-eye view of where you’re at, right now, in terms of having fun.
* After all, I’m not Gary Busey.
* Weird plural, isn’t it? You’ll get used to it, though. Promise.
* Secretly, I’m jealous of you.