REEL LIFE WISDOM - MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

There is no spoon...

  

SCENE 3: “Matrix Revolutions”

One of my favourite movie franchises is the Matrix series. Why do I love it so much? Is it because it was created by the Wachowskis, a couple of brothers from Polish descent (and the whole Polish thing with Auntie Jay)? Nope. I think it’s because it is a modern day allegory of Christianity, but with kick-ass graphics? It’s also because it has some great lines like, “there is no spoon,” and “sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” And I guess I kinda like Keanu Reaves, a Toronto boy like me who has Hawaiian blood. But mostly …. well, mostly it’s because the entire storyline is about one thing … learning to free your mind, as is captured on one of the posters for the original movie.

Unlike the last two weeks where I’m only borrowing the title, this time I’m actually stealing from the storyline theme about what we need to do to free the mind. Therefore, the best of the three titles for this week is actually from the final installment, “Matrix Revolutions,” because what I want to share today is about a matrix (yes, an actual matrix) that revolutionized my life and helped me free my mind.

I first made reference to this in March when I wrote about Pete XR2.2, and said that the new me is “free to put my time into what is important and not just what is urgent.” In that I want to build on what I talked about last week … about putting your energy into what is important.

To do this I’m going to be economical with my time and borrow significantly from what I have already written in my personal/business BLOG back on March 16.

The Matrix

U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower once said something along the lines, “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” It’s reported that from this, he created the simple 2X2 matrix that you see here and used it to decide how he would spend his time.

The science/math guy in me loves this matrix because it creates a valid 2-dimensional function space with truly orthogonal (independent) variables. Application, in plain English?  It helps us keep two things separate which we find almost impossible to separate, especially in the battle conditions we call real life.

Whether Eisenhower was correct in his statement is less important than this fact; important and urgent are two independent things. Something can be both, either or neither of these, but they mean two very different things.

IMPORTANT – these are things which are:
1. Important to you, although not necessarily to anyone else.
2. Important to you (in an absolute sense), even if you didn’t know it.

URGENT – these are things which cannot be done at your discretion … there is a timeliness about them that is not under your control; this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be done immediately, but they also cannot be postponed just because you don’t have the time to do them.

Think about it. Which are you more likely to respond to (or react to) … something that is urgent, or something that is important? (this is not rhetorical … answer this to yourself). If you are at all like the other 7 billion people on this planet, then you are governed, more or less, by what Charles Hummel called, “the tyranny of the urgent.”

You want a real-life example of how you might respond to urgent even when it is not important (or worse, how you might respond to an urgency even though you know that your response is contrary to what you have declared to be important, leading you to behave incongruently with your beliefs or principles)? Let me give you three:

1. One day you will have a child and he will ask for something, screaming in rage when he doesn’t get it. You give in to whatever he wants, even though you know you are creating a dangerous habit and are training him that all he needs to do to get his own way is to scream. But you do it so that he will stop screaming NOW, even if it is just for 5 minutes. Correcting him takes time and effort (energy) and the rage will not stop immediately … so acquiescence is just easier (though not better).

2. You have a significant report to write and your manager needs it in one week. You know it will take a full day to do it but it involves a lot of mind-numbing data-mining that makes your eyes glaze over, so you defer it to the weekend. You have the time now but the thought of getting started NOW is simply overwhelming. The weekend seems like a better option even though it means you’ll need your spouse (whoever that might be - <wink wink>) to keep the kids busy while you get it done, and your promise of spending the weekend with the family just got broken … but they’ll get over it … they always do. After all … you did.

3. You are really hungry (famished actually) and get home just in time to smell the most incredible dinner on the stove. You wonder what deliciousness your mom has prepared, but instead discover your twin brother stirring a pot of lentil stew. You can’t imagine why it smells so amazing, but all you know is that you haven’t eaten for a day or two, so you demand a bowl. Your brother says, “sure, just sign over your share of the inheritance from Mom and Dad’s estate.” Whaaaaa? Is he insane? For a bowl of stew? Funny thing is you find yourself saying yes before you can stop yourself. All you know is that you are hungry NOW … who cares about anything later … it’s all about NOW!

Would you give up your inheritance for this?

Who would do these things?  Well I watch #1 happening all around me … #2 was a story about me from my younger years … and #3 is actually a guy named Esau (and the brother who took advantage of him?  His name was Israel … as in the guy after whom the nation was named … do you remember this story).

Everyone responds to urgent more than important every day … many times a day. When I teach this topic in workshops or coaching I actually refer to the matrix as the Eisenhower-Covey time matrix, simply because Stephen Covey is the one who really popularized it in his 1989 best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (did you guys ever read that book or is it on a shelf or in a box somewhere?).  

Here is how Covey characterized the people who spend the majority of their time in each quadrant:

My point for today’s post? I just want to get you into the mode of thinking about how you respond to urgency in your life, rather than responding to things just because they are important. It is our over-dependence on urgency that revs us up on the inside and leads us to making poor choices.

Over time we train ourselves that the urgency-paradigm is normal and we even convince ourselves that it’s a healthy way of living. Such distortion can lead to things like procrastination, something not intuitively linked to the urgency-paradigm. See if this describes you; you believe that the pressure of a later, more imminent deadline will focus your thinking and energy and you have convinced yourself that, “I will put this off until the last minute because I work better under pressure.” In reality, all you have done is to confuse the good stress of doing what is important to you, with the bad stress of working under an artificial time-constraint. In the end, you sabotage yourself by seeking out that which is self-limiting and potentially self-destructive. You don’t actually function better ... you simply respond as you’ve trained yourself.

Urgency helps us create artificial emergencies which, in turn, help us to produce adrenalin on-demand. Most people have become adrenalin junkies and believe that this is the best way to live. Adrenalin is a wonderful hormone that gives us instant power to deal with a stressor via fight or flight. That’s it! But, re-arranging our life to create artificial survival conditions is akin to having an IV-bag strung over our shoulder with a permanent adrenalin drip. Sounds great you might say. Nope. Not good. Continual presence of adrenalin in the system causes the vital organs to break down. But long before that happens, the addiction has already delivered exactly what all addictions deliver: increasing craving with decreasing enjoyment/benefit. Oh, and I forgot to mention that a long-term presence of adrenalin in the system also creates chronic fatigue and sickness. What started as a sensational rush has now become a necessity for functioning … with diminished capacity as the legacy.

So I learned about this matrix and it changed me, but only marginally. The real transformation inside … the real REVOLUTION of how I spend my time … didn’t take place until I had an epiphany about the connection between “The Curve” and “The Matrix.” 

This image below shows where we are on the stress-curve in each quadrant, if that quadrant dominates.
Q1 – high-curve stress from having too much urgency
Q2 – middle-curve stress from having purpose (doing what’s important)
Q3 – high-curve stress from having too much urgency PLUS low-curve stress from having no purpose for doing anything
Q4 – low-curve stress from having no purpose for doing anything

Now think about everything I have written so far. Connect the dots. If you could put on a pair of magical glasses to look inside a person under these different stress conditions, what might their inner “gas tank” gauge look like?  (Hey – if you can wear magical glasses than it’s not a stretch to have an imaginary inner gas tank)

Ponder this and come back on Tuesday where I will post the answer … which I hope will shock and awe you as it did me 8 years ago when I first put it all together.

I love you guys.

Dad