In This Chapter

A powerful way to avoid succumbing to the onslaught of too much competition for your time and attention, and a good way to stay focused, perpetually, is by seeking completions. As I have alluded to in the previous chapters, “completion thinking” is one of the most fundamental ways to continually get things done despite distractions.

Fortunately, you are already a master of many aspects of completions. When you awake each morning, you have completed sleep for the previous night. When you turn in a big report at work, and you know it’s ready, that is a completion. If you get nothing else from this book but guidance on using completions, then you will have benefited greatly.

The next chapter will help you to become a master of completions. But in this chapter, it is vital and illuminating, as well as potentially revelatory, to understand the nature of what has become our culture of incompletions.

To get things done, especially long-term projects, it’s wise to acknowledge your completions at various milestones. Divide and conquer. Unfortunately, many people unknowingly create a series of incompletions, professionally and personally, task-wise and psychologically.

The unhappiest people among us keep re-thinking what is incomplete instead of simply acknowledging the actual situation and making new choices about what action to take. When you leave tasks or activities incomplete, you have energy vested in them. A lack of completions at work can leave you feeling exhausted and used!

The tendency of people to not complete things, in part, may be traceable to recent sociocultural developments. In many ways, we are living in what I call the age of incompletions. Simply being alive during this age may, in one form or another, impede your ability to get things done, particularly to get one thing done after another. This is heady and takes several pages, but if you’re dedicated to becoming more adept at getting things done, you need to understand this phenomenon.

I’m not sure when this age started, but 1963 was certainly a pivotal year. This may have been before you were born, so I’ll take you back to November of that year. President John F. Kennedy was shot, perhaps by a lone gunman, perhaps as a result of a conspiracy. The case was solved 30 years later in 1993 and presented in Case Closed, by Gerald Posner.

Gerald Posner walks the reader through every conceivable detail of the case. He shows conclusively why, acting alone, it was Lee Harvey Oswald who fired the gun. He explains how the “magic bullets” took the angles that they were supposed to.

I read Case Closed cover to cover and concur. U.S. News & World Report concluded that Posner’s work was so convincing that the magazine would never feature another “who shot JFK?” book review again. Yet, new mythology and conspiracy theories about who killed John F. Kennedy will be concocted and added to the glut of information you can’t use, information which serves no one.

Currently, the “who shot JFK?” industry earns $200 million a year, with the potential to go higher, constantly fed by more TV news magazine “investigations,” authors, books, and tours.

I don’t regard the misinformation surrounding JFK’s death lightly. The nature of society changed as nearly an entire generation suspected that a conspiracy, perhaps a government-led conspiracy, may have brought down the leader of the free world in broad daylight. Who knew what cynicism about government, the press, truth itself, would ensue? And, finally, 30 years later, when Posner assembled the irrefutable evidence about the only assassin it could have been, hardly anyone knows, or worse, actually cares.

As late as 2003, 80 percent of the U.S. population surveyed still believed that President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of some type of conspiracy. The case has long been solved, but there is no sense of national closure.

I submit to you, gentle reader, that the nature of your life changed as a result of the misinformation, unreality, and cultural incompletion that has glutted society’s receptors.

This situation represents more than simply a mystery for the uninformed. This potentially signals the start of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers unwittingly entering the era of incompletions.

How has that impacted our psyches? Aren’t we supposed to be able to get to the root of such events, especially those that shook a generation, a nation, and the world?

What heretofore recognized psychological scars has the incompletion of the JFK assassination mystery stamped into the cerebrum of an otherwise free-thinking, progressive, optimistic generation? When major cases aren’t closed, everyone suffers, even if in small and undistinguishable ways.

Fast-forward 15 years to the death of Elvis Presley of Memphis, Tennessee. Unquestionably he died as a result of a self-induced pharmaceutical drug overdose, which resulted in heart failure. The coroner’s report reveals this as do reputable follow-up inquiries and analysis. Still, many people from that era, and many who come later, think Elvis died as a result of a conspiracy.

Some people believe that Elvis never really died, that he’s alive and well, and showing up in random locations captured by the ever-present photographers of the Enquirer, Globe, or Star.

Regardless of what you think about Elvis and his death, even amidst the jokes, and everything that’s been made about it since then, the culturally pervasive message to all is that no case is ever really solved.

Everything lingers on and on and on. The results of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, with its endless motions filed, court appeals, and legal procedures, has spawned debates, arguments, and accusations that exist to this day and no doubt will linger on for years.

Some people see parallels between Ohio in the 2004 election and Florida in 2000, even though those in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party will not champion this cause. Nevertheless, the political arguments fly to and fro on both sides. No conclusions, no consensus, no closure. Just additional coverage. The media wins, the pundits win, one candidate or another wins, but everyone else loses.

The contemporary turf wars fought in the age of incompletions, particularly in the political arena, now retroactively extend to virtually everything that has ever happened, whether you’re assessing U.S. history, the formation of our nation, world history, the origins of Islam, the origins of Christianity, and so forth.

At one time, it was widely held that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan hastened the end of WWII, saved a minimum of 60,000 U.S. troops who would have been needed to fight a ground war in Japan, and provided the world with the closure it so sorely needed after six years of global destruction.

Since that time, the arguments about the United States being the over-aggressor, the only nation to ever drop an atomic bomb on another, and the inhumanity of it all, have risen to the forefront of many people’s consciousness.

Some people pick up scraps of evidence that point to there having been no need for the United States to have dropped the bomb, as if the casualty rate of invading mainland Japan would have been minimal. Some say Japan was on its last legs (although even after one atom bomb was dropped it still would not surrender!), U.S. intentions were racially motivated (although the bomb was originally designed to use on the now-surrendered Germans), the hawks had their way, and so forth.

What had been regarded by many people as closure to the most terrible event the earth had ever encountered in which 44,500,000 perished, is now the subject of endless debate in some circles. Not that such debate isn’t healthy; quite the contrary, especially for an action of such magnitude.

When every inch of political terrain is contested everywhere around the clock, and when all public discourse is subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and revision, and essentially nothing is final, it begins to wear on humanity and notably trickles down to the level of the individual.

All this occurs on a macro level, but the age of incompletions leaves its mark on the individual. You, an otherwise confident professional seeking to get things done, have reached adulthood in an era and in a culture where incompletion more often than not is the norm.

When I worked for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. in the mid 1980s, one of my co-workers was ex-military. He told me that often, when he received complicated directives, he didn’t get shook up about it. If he just bided his time, something else would replace them. In the workaday world, this mentality shows up all the time, but in different forms.

Don’t like your boss? Sweat it out for a little while; he or she will be transferred anyway. Prefer to not use the new software routine? If there are several others who feel the same way, it will be abandoned soon enough. The danger to the otherwise competent individual is the daily, pervasive notion that some goals and objectives, entirely worth pursing, on second thought, can be put off, circumvented, or modified so as to make their accomplishment far easier.

The socially pervasive de facto acceptance of incompletions, which is in the air and swirls around all around us, has a distinct impact.

The neat beginning and closing to the day that was once plainly evident in everyone’s lives has dissipated. Television programming is on all hours of the day and night, and there are hundreds of shows, anytime you want. Add in radio, the Internet, headline news, and there simply is no end. Stores are open 24/7. Traffic is always on the road.

For some, there is simply no day and no night, just dimly lit fluorescent lighting bathing otherwise grey mundane offices. These same offices with indoor temperature control, as well as our homes, diminish the effect of the seasons. Some people even regard heat or cold upon going outside as a bother, as if nature is supposed to conform with the turn of a thermostat dial.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner have given way to this era of no designated meal times. We eat what we want, when we want. Actually, food of all types is available at all times. It’s not just the mixing of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods with one another; there’s no sense of seasonal foods. Summer squash, winter tomatoes—we want everything available all the time.

We are impacted by our surroundings, peers, cultural norms, and that which we readily observe. If you’re seeking to lose weight and you live in a culture in which being overweight and obesity have become a norm, how much easier is it for you to simply stay where you are or, at best, lose a few pounds, but not nearly what you had originally intended?

The “broken window” phenomenon in sociology holds that if an abandoned building in a neighborhood has a broken window that remains unrepaired, in time, more windows will be broken, until finally all windows will be broken. What’s more, the windows of adjoining buildings will be broken. Then, it’s not long before the whole neighborhood runs down.

In communities where abandoned buildings are fenced off or, miraculously, re-modeled for new industry, street cleaners keep curbs clean, and abandoned vehicles are not permitted on front lawns, everyone in that community tends to conform to the standard.

We are impacted by our environment to a degree that we are not always aware of on a conscious level. I was waiting in the airport lounge at LaGuardia Airport in New York to board a plane to Los Angeles. You know this scene, right? Bedazzled, razzled, frazzled.

This particular section of the airport was under construction. The passengers waited in a make-shift lounge. I found the atmosphere to be unduly noisy. People looked upset, anxious, and not the type of group I wanted to fly with.

A miraculous thing happened when we boarded the plane. It was apparently a newer jet. The seat cushions were firm and soft. The rug was clean. The place seemed light and airy, and even cheery! Everything in the interior of the plane helped to muffle noise. As the passengers filed in and took their seats, an unmistakable change came over the entire group.

No longer the unruly, boisterous crowd waiting in the airport lounge, these were people heading to California. They seemed serene. They were certainly less anxious. They even looked better. There and then, I understood the supreme importance of one’s environment.

As a dedicated career professional who seeks to get things done, to become known for one’s accomplishments, and perhaps be regarded as a high achiever, it is vitally important to take control of your environment, associate with other get-it-done types, and embrace the notion of “completion thinking.” As you look around your office, what strikes you as having been left incomplete? Are piles building up in corners around the room? Are Post-it pads serving as proxy to-do list items adorning your desk and PC monitor? Do you have stacks of unopened mail? Is your message light blinking?

You can extend these same types of observations to your home as well as many other aspects of your life. When you’re entirely honest with yourself, chances are you will find that there are visible signs of incompletions all around you.

It’s not mandatory to be in total control of your work space, but it helps. (For the nitty-gritty of making your desk work for you, see Chapter 6.)

Considering the larger picture, what is incomplete in your career? Are there key instructions, an agenda, a road map, a blueprint, or an action map of some sort that you know is valid and appropriate on which you have yet to take action? Are there vital courses that you need to be taking? Are there key contacts within your industry that you haven’t made? Are there other initiatives you have in mind that you have let sit for years?

Of course there are! Each item represents an incompletion. Fortunately, the path to completions, big and small, is to keep acknowledging yourself whenever you do indeed complete something. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, your brain can’t tell the difference between something as small as sending out a letter versus completing a major training session.

By acknowledging yourself for the smaller completions, you actually pave the way for greater and grander completions. The brain appreciates closure.

Completions represent a nice, neat ending to what you’ve just accomplished and a great beginning for whatever is next. Giving yourself a completion for some minor task actually opens the door and sets the stage, if you will, for tackling something much larger. Go ahead, give yourself a completion, and make your day!

The Least You Need to Know