Analyzing Appreciation
This is roundabout, but here goes: There is a poem by Quincy Lehr called, “If God Is Good,” at everseradio.com. It’s a lovely piece in both language and sentiment, and it’s the latter I’d like to focus on. Essentially, the poem is a collection of hypothetical questions leading to the final question that is basically, “If everything I wanted happened, would I notice how good I had it?”
So there’s your question to ponder. When we—as individuals or as institutions—make mistakes, the impulse to analyze, to prevent it from ever happening again, is overwhelming. Often, we end up saying, wrongly, that we’ll never do whatever-that-was again (but that’s a topic for another post). My question is whether we do that kind of analysis when things are going well—when we’re humming along the way we want to be? I’m not talking about the equivalent of an iPad launch, I’m just talking about those times when the profit margin is healthy, the work is challenging but not overwhelming, the team is basically happy with each other, and you are sleeping well at night.
Do we put the same kind of analytical effort into figuring out those moments as we do analyzing the extremes?
