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Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
Flatline5150 writes "The New York Times has a good article on why some people thrive under stress while others crack under pressure. Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
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My experience with pressure and pressure-holics, is that they make more mistakes when they are working under a deadline than when they have planned things out. Since many of them believe that they cannot perform well unless they are under some pressure, they either (subconciously) blow it off until the deadline or they sabotage themselves until there is some pressure.
In addition, many of these people cannot distinguish between important and urgent. If you have read First Things First, or The 7 habits of highly successful people then you have seen the 2x2 matrix showing the difference between important and urgent. Draw a box, then divide it in half vertically and half horizontally. Label the left column urgent and the right column not urgent. Lable the top row Important, and the bottom row not important. The pressure-holics cannot see the top right, nor the lower left corners. To them, anything in the left column, belongs in the top left corner. Anything that is in the right column belongs in the bottom right square. A phone call is urgent. If it is a customer, or boss, then it is important (upper left), if it is someone selling carpet cleaning, it is not important (lower left). Doing your taxes is important, but it is not urgent until early April. As important things "ripen" they become more urgent.
The worst bosses are the ones who cannot see the difference between important and urgent. The TPS report might be due on Friday, but if you are working on it on Monday, then you are screwing off, and they will dump some imaginary crisis on you, to stop you from doing what (to them) is goofing off. Or, they will arbitrarily move up deadlines because you aren't sweating enough. You cannot make plans or schedules when these sort of people are around, as they will deliberately mess things up for you.
One of the primary symptoms of ADD is being easily distracted. When you are under the gun, all that energy is focused on the goal. It is when you are less focused on a goal, that he mind tends to wander all over, and reload /. every 5 minutes. :-)
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
I don't think having a keen ability to anticipate potential problems has jack all to do with whether one's personality is optimistic or pessimistic. I'm an optimist by nature, but I have a highly refined ability to anticipate counterarguments (good lawyering) and the myriad ways that users can screw up an app (good programming). I don't expect bad things to happen, which would be pessimistic, I simply anticipate them and deal with it accordingly.
I also try to avoid correlating things that have no substantive connection to one another, like the bad psychoanalysis cited above.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
Optimists make the best hackers. "What can I make this do?" And then they do it.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.