As your phone slips from your hand, your world shifts to slow motion.

You can’t name the intensity, but it’s so overpowering you can almost taste it as you reach for the plummeting device. Everything is more vivid: the colors are louder, the sounds are brighter, your movement, at least for this split second, mimics the grace of a ballerina.

You are completely in the moment, alert, fully aware of the world around you as the gadget nosedives toward its cracked-screen fate.

Then, suddenly, it’s over. You catch the phone at the last possible second, the panic subsides, and your world speeds up again, covering everything with an opaque layer of dullness, thrust into the prison of daily routine. In a meaningful way, you become less aware—less free.

But it’s possible to channel that same level of awareness on demand, isn’t it?

Instead of dropping the phone, we need only pause and intentionally slow down the world around us.

See—not just look at, but truly see—the colors in front of you.
Listen—not just hear, but actually listen—to the sounds around you.
Feel—not just touch, but verily feel—the ground beneath you.
Breathe—not just inhale, but really breathe—the air around you.

When we recapture this level of awareness, that is when we experience real freedom.

There’s a direct correlation between a man’s weakness and his ability to say “I’m sorry”—at least that’s what I used to believe.

In my imagined world of yesteryear, I thought that if wanted to be indomitable—if I wanted to be a real man (whatever that means)—then I should refuse to apologize at all costs because an apology is a sign of fragility.

So I puffed out my chest and held my head high, even when I was dead wrong (especially when I was dead wrong). I refused to acknowledge my faults because I confused flawlessness with fortitude. And since I believed perfection was power, I was afraid to be vulnerable.

How silly.

Think about it.

In the real world…

Apologizing is the epitome of strength: it requires integrity, character, backbone.

An apology isn’t a justification for our negligent actions; it lets others know we hear them, we understand them, and we respect their feelings. An apology is considerate: it shows people we recognize the problem, and it is the most rational step toward a solution because a solution is impossible to find if we pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

Refusing to apologize, on the other hand, ignores the problem, providing it space to fester, to grow, and, eventually, to explode.

So, we can act like a child, we can be weak, we can cower at the thought of apology—or we can act from a position of power and simply say, “I’m sorry.” Your apology won’t fix the past, but it’s the first step toward fixing the future.

Everyone wants that perfect first job: the job that will be your stepping stone to your future; the job your parents can proudly boast about to friends and family.  But the perfect first job is a myth—and a dangerous one at that.  It makes students and young professionals extremely anxious—and, ironically, focused on the exact wrong things. Your task as a young professional isn’t to find the perfect job. It’s to make the most of that imperfect first job you’ll inevitably find yourself in. 

Here are my top three suggestions to take advantage of that very first job—especially if it’s not what you had hoped for coming out of the University which would be more likely during the current pandemic situation.

Build your skills

Even if you don’t love your first job, it can be an amazing opportunity to learn and develop as a professional. So, be a careful and thoughtful observer of what’s around you. Experiment. Step outside your comfort zone. Learn to speak up at meetings; to ask great questions; to receive and give feedback; to stay organized; and to make yourself a valued and helpful resource for solving problems on your team.

And also be thoughtful and reflective about your likes and dislikes about the job. What about the role excites you? And what doesn’t? Early jobs are amazing opportunities for learning and self-reflection. So, instead of thinking of your first job as a litmus test for your career, think of it as a learning laboratory for growth and insight.

Build your brand

Your brand is the impression you create: your reputation; your track record; what people can expect from working with you. And you can start building your brand this right out of the gate—even with very little experience, and even in a job you don’t exactly love. For example, you’ll notice that people will often mention an idea at a meeting—for additional research or data collection, for example – but no one necessarily raises their hand to do the extra work.

You can be that person. You can grab that opportunity to start building a reputation as a hard, reliable worker and key contributor to the team.  You can even perhaps volunteer to report back results at the next meeting, showcasing your intellect and poise in front of a potentially influential set of people.

And none of this is rocket science. You don’t need decades of experience to start building a reputation.  It’s yours for the taking if you’re willing to put in the work. And working on building your brand today will pay dividends in the future when you do find that job you really find appealing.

Build your network

If you’re anything like me, you have an immediate negative visceral reaction to the idea of networking. It feels aggressive and inauthentic to make connections with people for purely instrumental purposes. But networking is really important, especially early on, for seeing what’s out there and what interests you.

So here are a few tips for successful networking at your first job, even if it’s not the ideal one: Create a professional-style profile on LinkedIn that highlights your strengths and experiences, and where people can go to learn more about you—and to connect.  Have lots of lunches, coffee dates, and drinks. Use these opportunities to meet people who interest you – to learn about their jobs and industries; how they got these jobs; and whether what they’re doing seems interesting to you.

And then follow up: connect with them on LinkedIn. Send them a thank you note; ask them if they have other people they might suggest you meet with. You never know what someone might mention in an off-hand conversation that could spark your interest and lead you on the next path in your career journey.

In the end, don’t worry if your first job isn’t that great—or if you feel like you made a mistake by choosing a company or industry you don’t really love. Your task isn’t to love your first job; instead, it’s to gain valuable learning experiences and to develop yourself so you can make the very best of those next exciting opportunities that will inevitably come your way.

Deadlines: We all have them, and we all dread them. Even when we meet them, there’s always another one just around the corner.

But there are ways to stop drowning in deadlines–to stop seeing them as something negative and start embracing them. And making deadlines work for you instead of the other way around is the first step toward managing stress and improving your productivity.

Deadlines can be stressful because we only set one: the date when all work for a project will be complete. A single, end-date deadline for a huge project can lead to procrastination, either because we underestimate how long the project will take to complete or because we’re too overwhelmed by the size of the project to get started.

While there’s not much you can do to combat the stress of unrealistic deadlines set by someone else (aside from pushing back on the deadline by showing why it’s unreasonable), most of the ways that deadlines stress us out can be avoided.

And if you learn how to avoid unnecessarily stressful deadlines, you can start using deadlines to motivate yourself and increase your productivity. If you’re struggling with stress caused by self-imposed deadlines or procrastination, try these techniques that I observe based on my learnings to set deadlines that motivate me.

SET MULTIPLE DEADLINES INSTEAD OF JUST ONE

I happen to read an interesting study conducted by researchers Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch about deadlines and their effectiveness by assigning three proofreading tasks to three distinct test groups:

The first group was assigned a deadline each week for each proofreading task.
The second group was assigned one final deadline for all three tasks.
The third group chose their own deadlines.

The group that was assigned weekly deadlines performed significantly better than the other two groups: They made fewer errors and missed fewer deadlines.

Based on this research, one better way to create less stressful and more realistic deadlines is to break large projects into smaller tasks, setting deadlines for each task instead of just one final deadline.

To use an example from project assignment, “Project submission by May 3” sounds like a monumental task that can freeze you up. But “Collect relevant data/source by April 7; do a pilot testing by April 15; build a rough prototype by April 30” is much more approachable because you have specific and concrete tasks you can tackle.

Once you can clearly see the smaller tasks within the larger project, you’ll have a better chance of organizing your time in a way that makes getting to the finish line simpler and less stressful.

FIND YOUR IDEAL STRESS LEVEL

Here’s a bit of good news: Not all stress is bad. In moderation, stress can motivate us rather than deter us from finishing a project on time.

Developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson in 1908, the Yerkes-Dodson law states that the more mental arousal there is, the more efficient a person becomes. But after you hit a certain threshold, your performance begins to decrease.

So what are those “perfect” stress levels that can help us not only complete a project on time, but also do so to the best of our ability? Well, it depends on the type of project.

Easier tasks yield the best results when there’s a higher level of stress. By contrast, complex projects don’t benefit from high arousal and suffer the opposite effect. Performance is higher for difficult tasks when the level of arousal is low or moderate.

The next time you set a deadline, try setting a rush deadline for easier tasks and set your deadline far out for more difficult projects. Controlling our levels of stress this way can help us get the best stress levels, and, ultimately, the best results.

TURN MEETING YOUR DEADLINES INTO A GAME

In a TED talk, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses “flow.” In order to find your flow state–when you’re so focused that you don’t even notice time passing–you have to be engaged in a task that’s just challenging enough that you find it rewarding, but not so difficult that it diminishes your motivation.

When we’re in the flow state, otherwise known as maximum cognitive efficiency, our brain activity changes. There’s an increase in the oxygenated hemoglobin concentration in our prefrontal cortex. When we’re bored, this decreases.

This relationship means that it’s naturally harder for us to concentrate on a task, pursue a goal, or measure progress on a project when we’re bored because our prefrontal cortex is not cooperating as well as it would when we’re in the flow state.

To combat this, we can apply the gamification principle to tasks we find particularly unattractive. This means that we basically turn a task into a game to make it more fun and motivating. Because deadlines don’t always work when we’re not emotionally involved with the task at hand, finding ways to make it fun can motivate us to complete assignments on time.

It is not the deadline that stresses us, it is our reaction to it.

Take a look around: everyone is multitasking. We’re doing more than we’ve ever done, attempting to fill every interstitial zone with more work.

We live in a busy world, one in which our value is often measured in productivity, efficiency, work rate, output, yield, GTD—the rat race.

Indians are well know for working more hours, but we are actually earning less. Busy has become the new norm. And if you’re not busy, especially in today’s workplace, you’re often thought of as lazy, unproductive, inefficient—a waste of space.

There is a vast difference between being busy and being focused. The former involves the typical tropes of productivity: anything to keep our hands moving, to keep going, to keep the conveyer belt in motion. It is no coincidence we refer to mundane tasks as “busywork.” Busywork works well for factories, robots, and fascism, but not so great for anyone who’s attempting to do something meaningful with their waking hours.

Being focused, on the other hand, involves attention, awareness, and intentionality. People sometimes mistake my focused time for busyness because complete focus apes many of the same surface characteristics as busy: namely, the majority of my time is occupied.

The difference, then, is I don’t commit to a lot of things, but the tasks and people I commit to receive my full attention. Being focused doesn’t allow me to get as much accomplished as being busy; thus, the total number of tasks I complete has gone down over the years, although the significance of each undertaking has gone up—way up.

Sure, sometimes I slip; sometimes I fall back into the busy trap that engulfs our culture. When I do, I make an effort to notice my slip-up, and then I course correct until I’m once again focused on the worthwhile aspects of life. It’s a constant battle, but it’s one worth fighting.