It's Hard To Give Up Control
I'm stubborn, you're stubborn, and we have to come up with way out.
The Teardown
Tuesday :: July 2nd, 2024 :: Approx. 7 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we evolve in concert with the technology that enables our day-to-day lives. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button below.
I.
I was warned, when I first moved to my first house, that one of two bordering neighbors was - in kind words - nice but challenging. The seller shared that he was fined for something innocuous: a pile of leaves in the street.
In the fall season from mid-October through late-December, residents in my town are allowed to leave heaping mounds of leaves on the street. Gigantic tractors with oversized prongs roam the street, scooping up these piles and depositing them in trucks bound for waste dumps elsewhere.
Another waste collection occurs during a longer window. The town handles most yard waste - not just leaves - from April to October. Everything must be neatly organized in barrels or in large compostable paper bags.
There is a four month winterish and seasonally-affected zone between December and April. Only ordinary trash leaves your trash can, bound for a landfill or incinerator. No official collection happens for anything else.
So, as a resident, you either live with a variety of messes occur on your property, or you develop creative ways to dispose of the waste. My tactic, when infrequently necessary, is simply to put things in standard trash bags. Garbage collectors do not perform X-ray surgery on sealed trash bags.
My neighbor, by contrast, continues treating the street as his waste dump, ignoring the rules. And, what rules really exist if they aren’t regularly enforced.
Much of the time, in part because of a very large tree protruding over his property but rooted on mine, the mess he cleans becomes a disorganized sprawl of pinecones, branches, and leaves, blown twice-a-day with a noisy stinky blower toward (sometimes, onto) my property.
The mess grows over the winter months, turning into two-foot-tall sloppy dirty half-solid sludge pile. It is an unpleasant thing to look at. It is an experience - seeing this pile grow, sometimes in real-time - that displeases me.
I don’t make a habit of retaliating as a default life behavior, but I did - four years ago - start reorganizing the sludge. Messy sludge would then return. I would clean it again.
It became obvious that this trend would continue, but I wanted to maintain some level of order and cleanliness. It was remarkable that a disordered mess returned every time the pile finally achieved a “clean” look.
My neighbor and I discussed, more than once. And, I mean we sometimes we talked at conversation volume, and sometimes we talked while drowning in a sea of cortisol. Simple agreements to do or not do things (e.g. make a mess) never materialized. We once engaged in a forty-five minute conversation in his driveway during which, somehow, we seemed to break bread over exhibiting Type-A and OCD behaviors.
We each expressed our views on how our properties should be treated, how respect should be given or received. Yet, it didn’t take long for our long-running battle broadly positioned as his property vs my property to continue as it had. The situation was obviously still out of control. To be clear, more out of my control.
A friend recently asked: could you ever break bread with him over this topic?
My answer: I don’t know.
My neighbor and I don’t agree. We don’t need to speak to each other. I think of him as the rare sort of person that simply does not care to respect anything other than his property and his family, though the latter is pure speculation. I only ever see him mowing his lawn, blowing waste, trimming bushes, washing cars, etc.
In one word we’re both just stubborn. And, we’re both unwilling to give up control over our respective properties and their aesthetics.
II.
Stubborn behavior is everywhere. You see it in the corporate world, in kids, in politics. People develop opinions and arguments and are unwilling to part with those thought patterns. The concept that things go in one ear and out the other seems so on the nose.
Non-partisan cooperative and respectful behavior lies stuck in a temporary grave, stuffed there by inbuilt and nearly immovable ways of doing and thinking about external environments.
One current famous corporate example sits in the executive ranks at Walt Disney. Bob Iger, seventy-three years old, is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) again after ousting his hand-picked successor in 2022.
For context, Bob Iger once retired. It’s something some of us do around the age of sixty-five, living out the remainder of our lives without searching for corporate synergies, dealing with endless emails, travel, and conference calls. You level-set with a book, lounge chair, etc.
A CEO is a unique type of person. They possess (usually) an immense amount of power and control over their organizations. To retire and let go of that control and power is sometimes incongruous with their natural wiring - that classic Type A person - or habitual behavior. They’ve been in the seat in the while. They can still do it. Their way.
Bob Iger wasn’t ready to let go either. For better or worse, his successor Bob Chapel wasn’t doing what Iger expected him to do, and Iger forced the Disney board to fire that sucker and right the ship with a reinstatement.
I think of this event sequence as emblematic of a stubborn refusal to let go. It, to me, didn’t look like a person objectively aligned with the health of the Disney, even if that concept was true in parts. Bob Iger was stubborn. He could do better. He would do better, again. It was obvious. Why would anyone think different?
III.
During first dates, you’re supposed to avoid two polarizing topics: religion, politics. The theory goes that you’ll suck the fun and spontaneity out of a date, replacing it with deep and perhaps unsettling conversation about serious things.
I avoid talking about politics as a general way of life. The reason is multi-faceted; part the expectation of polarization, part the desire to speak about other things, and part my own lack of knowledge about many topics. I can’t converse with you and articulate all of the reasons for and against the Electoral College with any real depth. So, when that topic comes up, I try to show faint but polite interest as a way of halting the topic and moving on.
During the recent presidential debate, I sat in front of my TV in a stupor, like many of you. No, I did not lose control of my brain. But the visual suggestion was that one candidate was incapable of participating at full strength, and another was incapable of complete control of his words and facts.
There was a chronic life problem at work: letting go.
Giving up control. Saying I am not the person, I’m not up for that task, find someone else. Your golf game is probably better and, really, I just don’t care about that at all. Good for you.
The whole debate was an exercise in the fragility of the human mind, but that golf game spat stood out as an unfortunate obvious example. For everyone. It’s easy to lean toward one side but we should really critique both of these dudes.
While I admire that the seventy-eight year-old Trump and eight-one year old Biden think that their golf scores are admirable and handicaps low, the truth probably looks different.
But if we extrapolate beyond those two and suppose a circumstance where some old powerful person brags about their handicap, you probably think something like:
What an asshole
Get the fuck out of here
Ok, that’s where this conversation is going
You laugh. You’re incredulous. The statement is possibly fact but so preposterous that it changes the course of any subsequent conversation.
The debate exhibited that moment. It’s hard to look at that golf game exchange and not think both of those powerful men were idiots. The night was an opportunity for a civil exchange but instead devolved, at times, into a contest hell bent on one-upping the mind, the skills, and the extremities.
It seems, to me, that both of them should have let go some time ago. For Trump, it might have been to let go of his grip on politics and enjoy time with his family post-office. For Biden, it was a chance to pass the baton to someone else - someone younger perhaps.
That this type of behavior is so prevalent in society is troubling. It impedes progress. It causes fights. We spend less time talking and more time digging in. We don’t want to let go of the things we think we control, but when we do, it might be too late. The control slipped a while ago.
And, when I think about my neighbor, or a controlling person in my corporate career, I realize more and more that I often don’t have control.
One piece of advice I’m reminded of: don’t worry about the things you can’t control.