Increasing Self-Power by Changing Environment

seanessay.com Headnote: I’m in London. Last night a talk-radio show reported that if you leave a light on for an extra four hours per day, then at the end of the year your bill will only increase by… $1.75. (in pounds) The story went on to say there are a lot of unnecessary family rows over lights.… 

I was a boy, listening to visiting parents talk at our kitchen table: Turns out a son had, like sons everywhere, been using too much hot water in the kettle. But, the story went, soon after he moved out on his own he poured in precisely one cup of water before heating the kettle to make tea. The parents said, “Ha!”

As for electrical power, strange to think of all those fathers, storming around their houses, “Don’t waste so much electricity!” And muttering as they turned off light switches that others had left on. President Lyndon B Johnson was known to turn off lights in the White House.

I was a young man, trailing behind me a horrible history at high school, where I had often “tried hard but failed,” yet now I was passing college! And marvelling to fellow students at how, in these new adult semesters, “I can handle it!” Pretty women answered, “Perhaps you weren’t motivated before” and yes, they had a good view on things. At that time, in my exciting new shared bungalow, I suddenly found it easy to get up early in the quiet dawn to shovel the soft snow of the night before. And take out the garbage.

Living at my father’s house, where we always had a coffee pot going dawn to dusk, I distinctly remember, as a teenager, using two and a quarter tea spoons of sugar per cup. Or at least, I remember that spoon count my first year out on my own. I had the youthful metabolism to gulp lots of sugar, but found myself swiftly cutting back to only a quarter teaspoon. Within that first year. I filed the memory away, but I didn’t think, later on, to make a mental note when I went to zero sugar: with ample cow—of cream, not milk. …That long ago “zero” decision has paid off: No diabetes, and I’ve kept my boyish figure.

I was early middle aged when a friend pointed out that farmers our age, their youth long behind them, could outwork the kids. “Git ‘er done!” Partly from a seasoned body, partly from a hard work ethic, and, to be sure, partly from having motivation.

Leaving the farm for the city, one finds things are no different. Consider: “The old man,” like Gates or Elron, grows a company under him, and then the employees just “don’t seem to work as hard as he does.” If he hires some salespersons, he finds that, to work as well as he, they need what he doesn’t need: a sales quota.

As for large companies, in shiny glowing office towers: The surest way to raise the productivity and vision of the whole outfit is to raise the productivity and vision of the managers. For there will always be a gap, permanent and ongoing, between leaders and led. Call this management 101—or would it ever be in a college textbook? Call it street smarts, or whatever—I sure wish I had known this reality back when I was young, despairing, and falling short of what I thought my father and big successful managers could do. “What,” I wretchedly wondered “is my problem?”

Strange to think how every year across the land all those sons and daughters would figuratively sit down in a dark booth and say, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned again.”

I was a senior citizen when I realized, at last, that my complaining father at the light switch had surely understood me all along.

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Sean Crawford

Central London

January 

In the new year of 2024