I don’t want to sound all woo woo but I’m telling you every single time I choose a topic to write about, something comes along to reinforce the underlying message.
I was having a chat with a friend this morning and we were talking about situations people find themselves in, situations that they don’t have the power to change. Still, they keep putting themselves through so much stress by complaining when they can either remove themselves from it or accept that “it’s what it is” for that particular situation.
In the middle of the chat, I excitedly told her this is exactly what I’m writing about today. So, the universe right?
I first read about the term gravity problems a few years ago while reading the book; Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
The phrase was derived from gravity as the name implies. Because of these types of problems like gravity no matter what you do you can’t change the force of gravity or the existence of gravity it’s what it is.
According to them these “gravity problems” are not even problems.(which implies you can solve them the way you could solve a math problem or an “I don’t know what to wear today” problem) We may perceive them as such, but each one is “a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.” It is the reality of things and when we argue or try to fight it, reality always wins. “You can’t outsmart it. You can’t trick it. You can’t bend it to your will. Not now. Not ever.”
They gave some examples of what gravity problems look like;
The company I work for has been family-owned for five generations. There is no way that, as an outsider, I will ever be an executive. What do I do about it?” (Gravity problem because you can’t do anything about the fact that if you are not a family member you will never hold an executive role)
“I’ve been out of work for five years. It’s going to be much harder for me to get a job and that is not fair. What do I do about it?”(You can’t change the way recruiters see years out of work)
“I want to go back to school and become a doctor, but it will take me at least ten years, and I don’t want to invest that much time at this stage of my life. What do I do about it? ( You can't change the duration of time it takes to be a doctor)
So what happens when you are faced with a “non-problem” like this? Give up? They say the only way to make any headway with situations like this is to accept and then reframe the situation. This frees you up to figure out how to work around it.
Excerpt from the book on how they responded how to deal with and reframe the 3 gravity problems examples
“The Family Firm Outsider: So, for the last 132 years, no one whose last name wasn’t Fiddleslurp has held an executive role in the company, but you think the time has finally come, and you’re going be the one to break through. If you just do a great job and bide your time, in three to five years that VP title will be yours. Okay—you can invest those three to five years, but, please, do so realizing that there is no evidence whatever that your goal will be attained. It’s your call, but you might be better off buying a lottery ticket. You have other options. You can go down the road, to a firm that’s not family-run. But you love the town, and the kids are happy in school where you are. Okay—then embrace the good things that come from just accepting it. Reframe the company’s family legacy as being your source of job security, with a decent income, in a dependable firm. Knowing you won’t have to take on increased responsibilities in adjusting to endless promotions, you’ll be able to learn the job so well you can do it in thirty-five hours a week, resulting in a great work-life balance (and time to write more poetry!). Or maybe you look for greater value instead of greater authority. You find a new function or offering that can grow the company or increase profits, and become the expert—the go-to person—for running that part of the business. You will always be a manager and never a VP, but, as the person responsible for so much value, you could become the highest-paid manager in the place. Who needs a title if you’re getting paid what you want?
Five-Year Unemployed Job Seeker: The statistics are unmistakable on this one. If you’ve been unemployed a long time, you have a harder task to get re-employed. Research using identical résumés with no difference but the duration of unemployment made clear that most employers avoid the long-term unemployed—apparently, groundlessly concluding that whoever else didn’t hire you over that time must have had a good reason. That’s a gravity problem. You can’t change employers’ perceptions. Instead of changing how they think, how about working on changing how you appear to them? You can take volunteer roles and list significant professional results (without having to get into how little you were paid until much later in the conversation). You can identify roles in industries where there is less ageism. (Dave is so grateful that he got into teaching later in life; now his age is seen as a source of wisdom, and he’s not still trying to pass himself off as a marketing expert to clients half his age who know he’s no digital native and doesn’t actually “get it” anymore.) Even in the face of daunting realities, you always have some freedom you can exercise. Find it and take action there, instead of against gravity.”
Ten Years to the M.D: Again, this is a real gravity problem—unless you’d like to start your life design project by reforming medical school education (which, by the way, is pretty tough to do if you don’t already have an M.D.). No—we wouldn’t sign up for that one, either. What you can do is change your thinking and remember that in only your second year of med school, you get to start treating patients and “doing medicine.” Most of the doctoring done in hospitals is done by the residents—the trainees who have finished four years of medical school and gotten their M.D.s and are now walking the wards and apprenticing. If you can’t change your life (because of gravity), you can just change your thinking. Or you can decide to take a different route—be a physician’s assistant and do a lot of what doctors do but at a fraction of the training time and cost. Or enter the wellness field, running prevention programs for a progressive insurance company and thereby making a dent on health without being on the clinical-care side of things.”
The moral of all this is to not get stuck in something that you do not have a real chance of changing. I guess this is essentially another spin on The Serenity Prayer; “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”
So next time you find yourself having a boxing match against gravity, remember 2 things; Accept and Reframe.
Keep going,
Ije
Well said, "learn to accept things you can't change or move, you aren't a tree" ...LoL. it's easier said that done though.