Workplace Multiplier by Tola Akinsulire

Tuesday Edition: December 17, 2024

Welcome to the Workplace Multiplier newsletter. Published every Tuesday & Friday, we discover something crucial to help us on the way to winning at work and in life.

Don't Measure YOU by ONE Thing

A while back I listened to the late Timothy Keller share a fascinating exchange between J.R Tolkien and a reader.

 J.R. Tolkien’s trilogy had just come out in Britain in the 1950s. One of the first readers, Rhona Beare, wrote him a very unhappy letter.

She knew, of course, it was a fairy tale, but she was still unhappy with the plot. She felt there was a part of the plot that just didn't make much sense.

According to her, here you have this great evil supernatural being, this great dark lord, and he has all this unassailable power. He's got enormous armies, and he's got fortresses, and he has all this supernatural power, but he also has this little ring. And when this ring, this ring of power, is thrown into the fires of Mount Doom, it all melts down.

And that, in her view, does not work, even for a fairy tale. It's too incredible, that his overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of one little object. To her, that part of the plot doesn't work.

Tolkien wrote her back a really great answer, in which he writes, “The ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical ways of treating the placing of one's life or power in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”

Like we used to say growing up in the Sunday evening kids’ show “Tales by Moonlight”, “What’s the moral of the story?”

Well, it’s countdown time to the sounding of the midnight clock on December 31st.

At this point, you are probably taking stock of the year rolling by.

The question is “How will you measure your year?”

It’s interesting when I hear people define their whole year by the achievement or non-achievement of just one goal.

One goal - their ring of Sauron.

What a sad and sorry choice if you choose to write the story of 365 days with just one event or non-event.

All our days should have life in them and because of that, we should always have a bigger story for our year.

Instead of just one event.

One of the things I do with my clients when we want to envision a year or quarter ahead is for them to imagine it as a movie. They define the genre of movie they want their next period to be.

A drama, comedy, adventure, sci-fi, the world is their playground, they decide.

Every movie has subplots that add up to the main plot. The hero’s journey is a culmination of little stories that happen every step of the way.

The small successes or failures are part of the wonders of the hero’s journey.

Failures and successes are lessons wrapped in emotions. Remove the emotions and the lessons unveil themselves.

A year cannot be measured by just one event - a promotion achieved or missed, a project not completed, a transition not negotiated well, a transaction not closed, a big contract signed, and so on.

Success can be deceptive because it masks underlying issues or creates a false sense of security. Don’t let the euphoria of a win blind you to what more you can become.

Failure can be exaggerated because it perpetuates the false narrative that there is no progress. Don’t let the frustration of a loss cloud your view of how you have become more than when you started.

Success and failure are not opposites. They are complementary aspects of the growth and learning process.

Success rewards us with emotions that generate momentum for us to move more confidently into the big dreams we have. Failure rewards us with the clarity to see how we can take the next best steps to create our next big win.

How was your 2024?

What genre was your 2024 movie?

Not one thing….many things defined your year.

May you keep winning at work and in life.

Tola Akinsulire

I am a Workplace Multiplier

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